One of the things I love about road trips is the way it shuts out so much of the noise of daily life. There is a clear and simple objective, to travel safely to the destination. Everything else waits until we arrive. Even when we’re posting to social media or checking in on email, there is a distance between me and my usual online existence. Road trips force a focus on the needs of the moment, they ground me in Now. So I was surprised when driving south on I-15 that I was constantly bouncing through fragments of memory. It is a road that I frequently traveled in other eras of my life, and apparently in those past trips I’d seeded memory along the road to be re-discovered on this one.
I found myself thinking of the many trips I’d taken to and from Cedar City while one of my kids went to college there. The stops I made at local attractions during those years where I learned local history. The times one of my other kids rode with me because long drives pulled him out of depression and we were able to talk. The time I parked on this road in stalled traffic on a snowy Thanksgiving weekend while the plows tried to clear the road ahead. The events are fragmentary and most of them don’t have a fixed location I can name. I just have “This stretch of road looks like that one time when…”
Memory comes with emotion. Somehow the hard emotions are stickier than the happy ones. Even when I don’t have a concrete memory to recall, some stretches of road had layers of feeling for me to discover.
Howard was my companion on this trip and he was untroubled by the landscape of memory which I encountered. I did my best to not fill the air with musings about the fragments of feeling and memory I encountered. Sometimes I shared if there was a specific story to tell. Mostly there wasn’t much point in pulling Howard out of his pleasant road trip to express a vague memory of stress associated with a particular curve in the road.
As we traveled I wondered why the hard memories lingered. I know that many of the trips along the road were joyful. I sometimes wrote stories or blog posts in my head while in transit. I enjoyed learning local history. We traveled this road once to see an Annular Eclipse, a fun day trip. Perhaps I held the happy moments close and carried them home with me instead of leaving them scattered by the roadside like litter.
Driving through, did seem to do some sort of clean up, because on the return trip I did not spend so much time haunted by memories. Of course the return trip was its own adventure. It is harder to be contemplative about the past when confronted with current events that need action.
So now I have a midnight blown tire complete with overnight hotel and finding a tire store the next morning as part of my experience of the road. All things considered we had the most convenient possible roadside emergency. We were right by an exit with a well-lit gas station and a hotel with a vacancy.
Part of me wants to travel the road again for the specific purpose of collecting and exploring all of those memories. I’d like to Walk the Spiral again. But at this moment in time wandering through memory is going to be set aside in favor of moving forward. I have so many things I want to do, and I need to focus my attention on those.
The trip was good. We traveled to Los Angeles for the Writing Excuses recording camp. We returned safely having safely traveled 1300 miles of road and memory. Time for me to put away road trip thoughts and be at home.