It’s a soft pastel early evening somewhere in the Midwest and the sky is still smudged with thinning clouds that are waning after the rain has passed. The weather is cool and forgiving this time of year, a welcome relief before the humidity sets in and turns the air thick and syrupy. A light breeze is drifting through the window screen as I’m leaning back in my office chair swiveled away from my desk so that my feet can rest on the bed, and I’m staring out the windows of the back room in my mother’s house as I ruminate on how I found myself living here for the second time in as many years.
To my left is a large window that frames the effortless tranquility naturally harboring Lake of the Ozarks, which my mother’s house sits directly on. The window is open, and I can hear all manner of differing bird species hollering to each other as they openly transmit their springtime desires. During this time of year, small fisher boats chug down the waterway at slow speeds, dragging for spoonbill in the short duration that the county allows for them to be fished. I can hear the sailors laughing and drinking beer and singing their country songs to each other as the wind carries their frivolity from the water up through my window. When the sun sets each evening, white or red or green LEDs from the boats flick on, and the waterfront lights up like a summer carnival with an army of fireflies and an orchestra of frogs and crickets, all of them singing and twinkling in unison just for me.
On the opposite side of the lake is a lush, recently-bloomed tree line that stretches for miles in a rolling verdant sea of green gradient. The leaves of the trees haven’t quite filled out yet, and silhouettes of big black dots supported by branches across the forest can be spotted as nests belonging to the herons, vultures, or eagles, all of whom traffic the sky above the water. It’s a photogenically stunning scene, a place unlike any of the other six states I’ve lived in, and it also looks very wrong and unnatural to me; a person who has perpetually had the grace of a horizon obscured by one kind of mountain formation or another for most of their life.
Directly in front of me is another large window that sits in stark contrast to the picturesque waterfront view at my left. It opens up onto the property of an abandoned house on the lot next door, one where debris and detritus that once belonged to the house litter the yard. A stack of white plastic chairs has been toppled over, covered in dirt and lichen seemingly for years. Another singular woven chair in remarkably sound condition sits alone on the porch, which has entirely caved in, the wood rotting under the decaying force of both time and weather. The paint is chipped and peeling on wood and brick alike, exposing shades untarnished by dye and tinted instead by mud and moss. Much of the roof is missing, no doubt as a result of the many tornado seasons it has lived through, and now sits among the clutter strewn across the lot. Surprisingly, the windows are unscathed and appear to still hold strong, but the entire back door to the porch is missing; now an open threshold that lends the structure to be used as a temporary residence for black vultures to take respite from the great Midwest storms. Sometimes I catch the vultures in pairs on the derelict porch hopping around and playing games together or resting and stretching their colossal wings, and in those moments I can feel my heart briefly grow a size or two larger.
By all accounts, this offensive dwelling should be ugly and repulsive for anyone to behold. That would make sense to a reasonable person. However, each time I look up from my screen to see the dilapidated, crumbling old home with the dirty upside-down chairs, caved-in porch, and partially missing roof, I find myself charmed by it for some reason. I love looking at it. There’s character here, and there’s a personal history in it somewhere; probably several histories. I often find myself wondering who lived there, what their story is, and where they went to next.
Since my arrival as a stranger in this strange part of the country, several lifetimes have passed in quick succession for me, as lifetimes often do. Inevitably, I have found myself contemplating those lifetimes with all of the many places I’ve lived before, what my own story is, and where I’m going to next. What I’ve thought about most recently, though, are the precise circumstances in which I appeared on my mother’s doorstep after a grueling two-thousand-mile odyssey of cosmic misfortune, with bags in hand and exhaustion in my bones.
PARADISE LEFT (0 Miles – Portland, Oregon)
In his only non-fiction book, Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, Chuck Palahniuk writes, “Everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives us the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits.” In the decades since his book was published, the city has heartbreakingly outgrown its reputation for being cheap, but the rest of Palahniuk’s sentiment still holds. The eight years I spent in Portland afforded me a magical experience in the Pacific Northwest unlike anything I could have ever dreamed for myself, and I fell deeply in love with the city and everything it had to offer a wide-eyed girl born and raised under the strict religious regime of Provo, Utah.
Oregon was the fifth state I had lived in, and eventually the time came for me to depart to the Midwest where the rest of my family was moving, each for our own reasons. Moving up and down the Western states throughout my years had burdened me with a spoiled dissatisfaction for life whenever I stayed somewhere for too long, and though I desperately did not want to leave, eight years felt too long for me to stay anywhere. Now I was headed for a new life in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a brief summer stint at my mother’s house on a lake in middle Missouri while I waited for an apartment to come available.
The morning I intended to leave arrived on a Wednesday at the tail end of April, and I awoke in my bed with the man I’d been seeing for the last six months. He was several years older than me and resembled a more handsome but less famed doppelgänger of Guy Pierce. He was a good kisser, and his eyes sparkled whenever mine met his. He laughed and smiled with genuine mirth in his demeanor as he told the same stories over and over, which I listened to completely charmed even though I’d heard most of them before. It was our second time on the horse together with a year and a half of dating in total, and I was walking away from him to move across the country to another state that was more flat and less interesting, but hey, the price of gas was 63 cents cheaper. Even though he needed to leave for work, we stayed in bed for too long that morning with the sun shining down on us through my curtains until I eventually got up to make us cups of slow-drip coffee.
We were jovial and had a pleasant morning together, acting as though we would still be seeing each other again later in the week like we normally would. There was a lot left unsaid, but, to my relief, no crying. He owned a beautiful vintage silver coupe that sounded like a boat but looked like a Chevy Nova, and I watched from the sidewalk as he fired the watercraft engine to life and backed out from my parking spot. We waved and blew kisses to each other as he pulled away, both of us laden with the unspoken awareness that we would never be back here ever again. I watched the Nova’s tail lights turn and disappear around the corner, standing there until I could no longer hear the thundering quake of the motor as it turned onto the main road and faded into the bustle of the city.
As I ambled back up the two flights of stairs to begin the herculean task of emptying out my apartment, I wondered if I was making the right decision. Years later, I still don’t know the answer to that question. He and I would only see each other once more after that day when I returned a month later for a friend’s wedding, in which we attended together and haven’t spoken since. Sometimes people come into your life for the sliver of time that you need each other in, and nothing more. After parting ways, what you are left with is a poignant gift you’ll think about in quiet moments when you’re alone on a long drive, or in a waiting room somewhere years down the line.
It is ruinously expensive to move across the country. A notepad file in my phone had been filled over the last few months with a list of costs and numbers that made me sick to look at—two moving trucks (one to move my things into storage now, one for my sister and I to split together later), storage fees, a lease break fee, boxes, tape, bubble wrap, gas, motels, fare and supplies for both myself and my pets. As the list grew larger, so did the ulcer that I was certain had formed in my stomach. And because of both the list and the ulcer, I did not feel like I was in a position to afford movers; something I was woefully regretting more and more with every step I took that morning.
Why I insensibly turned away every offer for help on moving day, I’ll never know. Pride probably had something to do with it, and likely so did guilt. I don’t know if I needed to prove something to myself, if I felt like I needed to be alone on my last day in Portland, if I really didn’t think it would be as much work as it ended up being, or some other delusional rationalization that was flimsy at best and harmful at probably. I should have hired movers. I should have accepted help from those who offered. Instead, quite insanely, I dragged everything I owned down two flights of stairs several dozen times in a self-punishing personal quest that broke me physically. By the end of it all, I had moved over fifty boxes, logged over 18,000 steps in my Garmin app, hatched several eggs in Pokémon Go, and reduced my legs to nothing more than completely useless boiled noodles.
In addition to loading the truck, I made countless runs to the dumpster – which was conveniently located on the opposite side of the property – to both dispose of items and abandon belongings for my neighbors to consider rehoming. (It should be noted here that I had been getting rid of things for weeks up until this point, and had already made multiple donation drop-offs at Goodwill and rid myself of several pieces of furniture on Facebook Marketplace – an earnest effort was made.) Because I am disastrously attached to my physical possessions, I felt a part of myself dying with each new item that I laid next to the dumpster for someone else to claim. I left a beautiful white and gold table that I just couldn’t make fit into the truck after too many attempts, a swath of plants I had raised from babies, miscellaneous furniture that it hurt for me to part with but that I either had no use or no room for, art that I couldn’t justify keeping. On one of my dumpster runs, the apartment manager stepped outside of his office and thanked me for the table and some of the plants he had claimed. I accepted his gratitude with a smile, and then promptly turned away so as to not cry in front of him.
By the time the truck was loaded, evening had arrived, and I knew in my heart that I would not make it. I called my sister Amanda and begged her to please help me unload everything into my storage unit, which she did graciously. Though she protested, I paid her for it as my ulcer expanded in size. As I dropped off the moving truck, I resolved in defeat that I could not leave at this hour and would have to stay another night in Portland. The problem now was that my bedding was inaccessibly locked in a secured facility across town, and I certainly couldn’t sleep there without an assured visit from the police. Amanda agreed to let me stay on her couch, so I loaded my dog into my car and headed to her house where a man on the street was using a leaf blower in his yard under the blanket of total darkness at 9:06PM. We chittered away together while shoveling spoonfuls of caramel ribbon ice cream from Salt & Straw into our mouths, and my eyes grew heavier and heavier as The Princess Bride flickered on an impressively small television in front of the fireplace.
Later as we settled in for bed, something began to rise deep inside my chest that quickened my pulse and stung the corners of my eyes. Once the lights were out and the house was quiet, I sank into a wistful mourning for each of the different lives I had lived over the eight years I had taken refuge in this irreplaceable sanctuary for freaks and squares alike. As my heart swelled from an overload of sentiment, I found myself suspended in an existential limbo of grief for what I was leaving behind in the Pacific Northwest, and hope for whatever it was that waited patiently for me somewhere in the middle of the country. Eventually, my tears dried and my heart settled, and I drifted into a deep sleep for the last time in Portland on a timeworn futon that felt like a king’s mattress for my weary, enervated body.
ONCE MORE, WITH FEELING (220 Miles – Pendleton, Oregon)
Amanda and I rose the next morning to get coffee and head back to my apartment where I needed help affixing a giant rooftop bag onto my tiny Ford Fiesta hatchback. I had tried to finagle this deed by myself the day before, only to end up utterly humiliated by a series of plastic and clips and rubber. It was simply too large of a thing for me to manage by myself, and yet again I required the assistance of my sister, who is an Amazonian beast standing six full inches taller than me and therefore able to see over the roof of my vehicle. She pointedly ridiculed me for this in the way that siblings do with each other as we said our goodbyes, and then it was time for me to load my dainty car with the things I would take with me on my voyage.
The rooftop bag was firmly packed to the gills with what I needed on hand for my three-month stay at my mother’s before I relocated to Tulsa – clothes and shoes, many, many toiletries and products found in women’s bathrooms, exercise equipment, books, baking things, and probably things I didn’t need but wanted. The hatchback trunk was filled with my forty (40) houseplants, along with my emergency roadside bag. Behind the seats, I had forced all of my expensive items and electronics I needed nearby at all times: a personal laptop and work laptop, camera and lenses, PS5, iPad, hard drives, my gun, important irreplaceable paperwork, an even more irreplaceable box of special items I have collected throughout my life. In every other available crevice, I shoved dog food, cat food, cat litter, and a travel litter pan. In the passenger seat, my kitties sat in a puppy carseat, otherwise defined as a shallow fabric box from which they could easily liberate themselves. And finally, when all else was ready, Tallulah filed into her doggy hammock in the back, which I had layered with a couple of blankets to keep her comfortable.
I had done it. We were ready.
Almost.
It was 1,937 miles to my mother’s house on Lake of the Ozarks, and I had planned for various stops in several states between now and my final destination. Normally, if I were alone, I could easily drive for a span of 6-12 hours per day; however, it immediately became clear to me that with my pets, my drive time each day would have to be cut much shorter. If my two cats are in their carriers, they are shrieking like their legs are being removed, which is unacceptable to sit through days of travel with. Knowing this, once in the car, I let them out of their carriers and nestled them into their seat beside me underneath a blanket. The problem then is that Finn specifically wants to be everywhere except her designated spot. The other problem is that every time Fern is forced into a carrier, she pisses on herself. Thus, I had to deal with the Fern piss situation before we could fully get on the road, knowing that I had this to look forward to each time we got in and out of the car for the next several days. Whatever unpleasantness one could imagine about this situation, I can promise that it was so much worse.
As I had been optimistically planning my trek to the Midwest, I valiantly concluded that I did not want to eat like a drunken raccoon on the road as I had done on every single other road trip I had taken throughout the entirety of my life. The idea of traveling two thousand miles with three rowdy, screeching animals, getting shit sleep in cheap motels, and also shoveling garbage down my throat sounded like a perfect recipe for mortal and gastronomical hell. To combat this, I had purchased a skillet, cutting boards, utensils, and groceries in a deliberately sanguine effort to make healthier meals in my motel rooms at the end of a long drive or to pull from a little cooler bag on the road.
The trouble was that after loading up my car with everything else, the skillet, kitchen utensils, and groceries would not fit. As many times as I had tried to pack and re-pack my car over and over – wasting time that I could be on the road – not even one more inch of room was available for this final bag, which represented good choices, nutritional hope, and a new start. My vehicular tetristic powers had failed. The skillet, utensils, and groceries were left behind beside a Burgerville dumpster for someone else to claim as their own. I cried once more as I set it down, and climbed back into my car as The District Sleeps Alone Tonight by The Postal Service blared from my speakers to drown out my pathetic, wretched sobs, which were absurdly disproportionate in response to the situation I had created for myself. Despite my best efforts, there was now a 100% forecast of garbage for dinner in my immediate future.
And with the sacrifice of the uncooperative grocery bag and everything it stood for, we were on the road. The key to my old apartment had been locked inside and rested alone on the kitchen counter in a place that was now somewhere that I used to live. There was no turning back, even if I wanted to. I was committed to leaving the West behind, even though the thought terrified me.
Every single day of this journey, Finn tried for hours to get into my lap to sit on me. Eventually, she wore me down and I let her, because it was either that or else she would make a run for the pedals at my feet in what seemed like a legitimate threat on our lives. Fern was constantly trying to acrobat her way into the back to pester Tallulah, or goblin-crawl into the things I had packed at the foot of the passenger seat. Once or twice she made it down there and subsequently screamed until I had to pull over and repack her back into her carseat. Tallulah is normally fine on car rides unless she becomes stressed and then she will whine and pant directly into my ear for the entire drive, imprisoning me in a canid Tell-Tale Heart situation. This is exactly what she did for the fullness of our two-thousand-mile journey together.
There was no way on god’s green earth that we were going to be able to make the seven-hour drive to Boise that night like I had planned. Everyone was miserable and whining and unsettled and fidgeting around, and in what felt like yet another failure, I canceled my reservation for the Boise Motel 6 and instead booked one for Pendleton, which was only a ridiculous three and a half hours away; barely a dent in our trip. However, even though my ambitious driving schedule was now crumbling under the weight of our collective discontent, at least we were on the road, and that was not nothing.
Somehow after a few hours of comical misery, we arrived in Pendleton. At the motel, I carefully unloaded each of the animals into the room, scooping the cats into their respective carriers and bringing Tallulah inside. It took me about nine trips to get everything from my car to the room, including the pets, their food and litter, each of my electronics, my travel bags, and whatever other nonsense I needed. Even though it had only been a three-and-a-half hour drive, I was still exhausted from the day before, bone-tired and irritable from the circus that had gone on in the car from the pets, and still unable to process everything I was feeling from my departure of Portland. The closest place to eat at was a Denny’s – which I have since discovered has been deservedly shut down – that sat about 100 feet away across a parking lot from the Pendleton Motel 6 West, where I ordered a turkey sandwich and fries that punitively upset my stomach several hours later and kept me awake in digestive distress.
Denny’s consequences notwithstanding, the night we spent in Pendleton was a catastrophe. Despite taking two sleep aids, both of the cats keep me awake through the entirety of the night. I was not allowed even one wink of sleep. One of Finn’s favorite things is to do exactly what she is not supposed to do. One of the things she is not supposed to do is open drawers and doors and cabinets and get into places where cats should not be. Namely, inside of six-drawer dressers at fleabag motels. I had stacked my array of luggage in front of the drawers as a purposeful attempt to combat this behavior from her; however, against all odds, at 5:30AM Finn found herself stuck in the drawers of this dresser somehow. Once inside, she began screaming. Screaming and howling and hollering, her yowls were now ludicrously amplified and echoed inside the wood of the fixture for what felt like an hour. Finally, deciding that I was more frustrated than I was exhausted, I overdramatically groaned and launched the covers off of me to get up, completely naked, to deal with the humiliating situation I had found myself in.
I threw my bags to the side of the dresser and manically began yanking the drawers open, blindly reaching around for the biblical scourge that was screaming inside. She evaded me. I tried to pull the drawers entirely out of the chest; they would not part with it. I pushed the dresser – which was enormously cumbersome and also had a large, heavy television resting on it – away from the wall in an attempt to reach her there. The entire back of the dresser was solid wood, and the drawers could not be reached from it. In a fit of rage, I pushed it back to the wall and again started opening each of the drawers, painfully twisting my arm around in an attempt to fish her out. I couldn’t get her out, and by now she was howling somehow even louder, and I was deliriously exhausted from moving, driving, and being kept awake all night from both cats and intestinal issues as a repercussion for my dining choices. I sat down on the cold tile floor, still naked, and began to cry once more.
At that moment, Tallulah started whining to go out, so I threw on my robe and took her, resisting my urge to slam the door in frustration. It was now dawn outside and the sun had begun rising, and I hadn’t slept for even a moment. By the time Tallulah and I were back inside, Finn had magically Houdini-ed herself free from the dresser and was blankly staring at me as she sat peacefully in my spot on the bed with a calm composure, as if the past hour had simply not happened.
The cats then allowed me to sleep from 6:30AM-9AM, which is when I irritably pulled myself from bed to brush my teeth and began collecting our belongings for the nine trips back and forth to the car to re-load everything. I gathered everybody inside the car, cleaned up Fern’s travel piss once more, and unloaded Finn from her carrier. She comfortably made her way into a purring ball on my lap and looked up at me lovingly, in complete ignorance of the fact that she had just given me the worst night of my entire life.
IN WHICH SHIT HITS THE FAN (567 Miles – Twin Falls, Idaho)
As we departed Pendleton, we stopped for coffee and I found myself in a familiar chaos where I exasperatedly tried to keep Finn from attempting to narrowly escape the car into the window of the café. The baristas marveled back at us, cooing about how cute she was and how they’d never seen a cat in a car before as I desperately tried to wrangle her with one hand and accept my breakfast order with the other. We pulled onto I-84 East once more, and I realized that this could be my last time in the Inland Northwest; a thought that settled hard in my chest. I sipped my iced coffee, made room for Finn in my lap, and put the thought out of my head to focus on the trek that would finally take us across state lines.
When we arrived at the Motel 6 in Twin Falls, Idaho five hours later, I parked in front of the office where I could see the car and left it running with the AC on for the animals. To my extreme displeasure, I was informed that I was assigned a room on the second floor across the property in the farthest back corner of the lot. I was still bone-weary exhausted, still irritable and weak, and now stairs were being introduced into my nine-trip offloading and loading routine. I was annoyed but polite to the girl at the front counter; it wasn’t her fault, but that didn’t mean that I had to like what was happening.
When I returned to the car, I opened the door to find what could only charitably be described as a fecal apocalypse. Tallulah was standing and shivering in confusion because seemingly, she had shit herself all over the entire back seat. And I do mean the entire back seat. This was a shocking first for her; she is a very good and well-behaved dog, and we had stopped several times along the road for her to go out during our drive. I didn’t know the exact nature of her digestional crisis, but I suspected that it had something to do with the stress from the drive, or perhaps the Taco Bell I stopped at in Boise for lunch.
Instinctually retching as I slid back into my now shit-filled car, I drove us around the back of the motel as quickly as possible while the cats screamed and Tallulah whined so that I could offload the pets into the room and try to remedy the new humiliating situation I found myself in. The windows could only be slightly cracked because Finn was still attempting to escape the car at every possible moment, and Tallulah was rummaging around in the back, trying to not step in her own feces, wobbling dangerously each time I took a turn around the lot as I raced to the room. The short drive across the property suffocated the car in a miasma of stench that left me hiding my nose under my shirt and clawing at my throat like a gas chamber victim.
Thankfully, after a thorough check, Tallulah didn’t seem to have any fecal matter on her paws or anywhere else, and I let her into the room and made the next trips to grab the cats. A painting crew was scattered around the back of the motel, and they were spraying cream-colored sludge at the walls of the building with long thin instruments attached to loud intrusive motors that echoed across the lot. One of the painters approached me and told me that I needed to move my car because they were painting. He wasn’t very nice about it, and because of this, I gave him attitude and huffed as I got back into my shit-filled car, moving it over a few spots away from the active paint scene. I made another run up the flight of stairs to my room to unload some of my valuables and electronics, my legs rubbering like jelly and wanting to buckle.
When I returned to the car, the painter approached me once more and told me that I hadn’t moved my car far enough and that I would need to move it again. At this point, I was certain he was fucking with me, and I was left in a position of having to either obey him or risk him maybe purposefully painting my car. I openly threw a fit at this, and relocated my still-shit-filled vehicle for the second time to the back fence of the lot, as far from any paint risk as it was from the stairs. By now, I was both exhausted and furious, and continued making the necessary trips to bring my valuables up to the room before I could deal with the shit situation. Once everything was finally in the room and the pets had their food, water, and litter set up, I returned to the car and forcefully threw each of the four doors open to air it out. Then, while erratically loitering in the sweltering parking lot with my hands on my hips and agitation in my heart, I wondered aloud about what the fuck I was going to do about this mortifying development.
The shit had mostly exploded all over the blanket Tallulah had been primarily resting on during our trip, which was a giant cheaply-made throw emblazoned with an outrageous fantastical unicorn design that my friend Tiffany and I had secured on our trip to the Midwest earlier that year. The blanket had been sourced at a giant miraculous truck stop in Joplin, Missouri while on our way from visiting Tulsa to see my mom at her new house on the lake for the first time. The Joplin 44 Petro was an enormous fueling station the size of a small shopping mall and had close to a dozen franchise names displayed in neon on the outside of it – DQ, Orange Julius, Caribou Coffee, and Pizza Hut to name a few, along with signs advertising barber services and shower facilities. Initially, I had stayed in the car as Tiffany ran inside, but when she texted me saying, “I found a unicorn blanket” I responded “I’M COMING IN” and leaped out of the driver’s seat.
The blanket she found was a thing of horse girl dreams that called to my heart with the excited pining of my eight-year-old self. A pearl-colored, golden-horned quadruped sprinted under the radiance of a lunar-lit ocean against the backdrop of a comically much-too-large full moon, queen-sized and packaged neatly into a flimsy plastic rectangle. I paid the fifty dollars for the blanket (quality-wise, it was not worth even a fraction of this) and hugged it tenderly while Tiffany in turn paid for her own ironic American Chopper blanket. The blanket required me to painstakingly pack it into my already-too-full suitcase on the way from Tulsa back to Portland, and a few months later it laid in the backseat for Tallulah to rest on during our journey to the Midwest, which is how it now came to be covered in her excrement.
In addition to the unicorn blanket adding itself to Taco Bell’s scores of casualties across the nation, I had also layered one of my now-deceased grandmother’s woven yarn blankets in the back for more padding for Tallulah. This one also didn’t escape enemy fire, and Tallulah’s dog hammock had been compromised as well, but neither got it as bad as the unicorn blanket. In another surprise, as I was pulling the bedding out of the car I discovered that some of the shit had also found its way onto the side of the door. I winced in disgust and separated my grandmother’s woven blanket and the hammock from the unicorn blanket on the ground and groaned in anguish about what to do. I was certain that my grandmother would be unhappy with what had happened to the handmade heirloom she had gifted me, but was relieved that she would never have to know about it on account of her being dead.
In that moment, I made the difficult choice to leave the unrecoverable unicorn blanket there. No, not in the dumpster. No, not in my room. No, not considerately contained in a plastic bag somewhere. I laid it out on the rock landscaping at the back of the hotel, and there I left it, untouched and baking in the sun. I didn’t carry it across the lot to a trash can. I didn’t walk to the front office to ask for something to put it in. I didn’t take it to a local laundromat to try to salvage it. I simply decided that this biohazard conduit was not my problem anymore, and I let it go. It’s possible that my shit-covered unicorn blanket may still be in the back of the lot at the Twin Falls Motel 6 even now. I do feel bad about this, because littering is one of the few crimes that I think people should be jailed for. But if I lived in Twin Falls, Idaho and stumbled across a shit-stained blanket of a unicorn lit by celestial moonbeams as it dashed across a sparkling sapphire sea, it would probably be the most interesting thing that happened to me that day, which was a thought that helped me feel less bad about what I had done.
I carefully dragged my grandmother’s blanket and Tallulah’s hammock past the painters as I scowled at them and up the stairs where I realized with a sinking despair that it was as hot as the devil’s asshole inside my room. Unlike every other Motel 6 I’ve ever stayed at, there seemed to be no air conditioning in this one. I called the front desk to ask if there was AC, to which they responded that no, there was no AC, but I could open a window if I wanted.
As I stood there drenched in sweat on the phone with the person from the Motel 6 front desk while glowering out of my shut window and seeing silhouettes of the painters passing back and forth with the roar of their evil painting motors only slightly obscured by my waifish aluminum door, any patience or understanding that I might have otherwise harbored at that moment were gone. It took everything in my power to not dig for my gun out of my bags and use it on myself right then and there. At a volume that was only slightly softer than yelling, I informed the person at the end of the line that I can’t open a window because it was being painted because there are painters here. Did they know that there are painters here? Because there are painters here, all over the property, and, more specifically, directly outside my window, which is why I cannot open it. The voice on the phone told me to come get a box fan at the front desk, and I will admit here that troublingly, I pulled a Karen card and demanded that they bring one to me instead. (Years later, I feel bad about this as well; if only slightly less so than the blanket transgression.)
While I waited for the fan to be delivered, I brought my grandmother’s blanket and the dog hammock into the bathroom, where I scrubbed them within an inch of their lives until I was certain that the fibers would fall apart from my vicious efforts. The bathroom filled with a scorching steam that boiled my already-too-hot chambers, and I hung the soaking fabrics over the tiny shower bar in desperate optimism that they would dry by morning. Then, sidestepping the many puddles that now flooded the bathroom floor, I left once more to clean the shit off of the interior of my car.
Thirty minutes later I received a knock at my door, and when I opened it there was a large box fan, which was bizarrely grape purple in color and better than nothing. I placed an order for pickup from a nearby Thai restaurant out of fear that I would not be able to have Thai anytime soon in Missouri (a regrettably accurate foretelling on my part), and when I arrived at the restaurant, they were puzzlingly unable to locate my order. The person at the counter asked if I had indeed ordered from them, to which I responded yes and showed them my order number, and when they asked, “Are you sure?” I once more wondered if I should use my gun when I got back to my room. Miraculously, they found my order fifteen minutes later, which is about how long I would imagine it takes to make a new order of pad see ew. I returned to the motel and ravenously wolfed down my meal, even though it was indisputably the worst Thai food I had ever eaten; a fact that remains true to this day.
Despite the heat, that night in Twin Falls was much better than the night before in Pendleton. There were no gastrointestinal issues from either Tallulah or myself, no egregious dresser drawer antics. The kitties allowed me to get some sleep, though not as much as I wanted. Even though there were two full-sized beds, the animals all decided that they needed to be on the same one that I had claimed for myself. Fern woke me up several times to remind me that she was there beside me and needed attention, and once I was awake, she hollered to have her chin scratched until I gave in for a few moments before nodding off again.
I drifted in and out of darkness as the purple box fan hummed from the corner of the room and Rick and Morty murmured from the television. My last thought before losing consciousness entirely was noting how unusually quiet Finn had been, and how for once, the chaos wasn’t taking from me, but instead allowing me to rest.
ROCK BOTTOM (929 Miles – Rock Springs, Wyoming)
In the morning I roused from bed just a little bit later than I planned. Even though my body still felt broken, I had finally had what could be considered a decent night’s sleep on a bed that I had to share with three animals and didn’t want to tear myself away from underneath the covers.
Begrudgingly, I finally dressed and brushed my teeth, and then began the nine-trip routine of loading my things into my car, which I was able to pull up beside the stairs now that the painters were thankfully nowhere to be seen. It was getting nearer and nearer to 11AM, the universal time in which you are expected to check out of rented rooms, and I was rushing to get everything loaded as quickly as I could. Finally, I had assembled everything into the car except Fern in her carrier, which was the last piece of luggage. As I trudged back up the stairs for my last trip to the room, the clock struck 11:00, and the lock flashed red as I scanned my keycard onto it.
Like the unteachable idiot that I am, I tried scanning the card several more times, certain that it would work with each new attempt. The same thing happened – red flash, red flash, red flash. I stood there stupidly with my mouth open, gaping like a fish with incredulity at the insubordinate lock. There was only one more thing I needed to get from the room, and it was my fucking cat. It wasn’t a fucking phone charger; I couldn’t just leave her, though with every passing second that I wondered how I found myself in the most ridiculous of situations, the thought crossed my mind that maybe I could.
As someone who frequently checked out late from hotel rooms throughout their life, never before had I encountered a motel that had a timelock like this, nor did I expect such a thing from a Motel 6 in Twin Falls, Idaho, population 55,000. I called the front desk and asked them to please grant my keycard access so I could get one last thing out of my room. The person at the end of the line unhelpfully advised to me in a garbled voice that they couldn’t reactivate my card, and that I would need to come to the office to get a new one. To this, I repeated their request a little too loudly in petulant disbelief, asking if they were telling me that I needed to come all the way across the property to the front desk to get a new card as I was trying to leave. As I did this, I once again wondered where my gun was so I could use it on myself, but it occurred to me that leaving a headless body in addition to a shit-covered unicorn blanket in their parking lot might be too much, even for a soulless hospitality enterprise.
The person in the office must have taken pity on the frustration that was palpable in my voice – that, or they didn’t want to deal with me any longer – and offered for someone to bring me a new keycard. After several minutes, they did, and I thanked them genuinely for it. This new card scanned with a green flash and I was granted access into the room to retrieve Fern, who was screeching wildly, and loaded her into the car. My grandmother’s woven blanket and Tallulah’s hammock had both dried in the heat of the night and, to my despair, I firmly resolved that there would be no more Taco Bell for the rest of the trip.
There were two possible routes for us to take to our next destination: one that went south through Utah, and one that went straight on through Idaho. I opted for the route through Idaho because I was certain that if we went through Utah, I would be tempted to stop and stay the night or several, extending my trip and subsequent madness for much longer than I had originally planned. Who knows, I might even stay forever, returning to my homeland as the prodigal’s daughter and a walking cautionary tale. Thus, in an attempt to stick to the plan, we departed from I-84 onto I-86 in betrayal to my birthplace and kept on the road east toward Wyoming. And although the trip had been one absurd disaster after another, once we were deep in the heart of Idaho, my spirit began to settle a bit. There were fewer and fewer cars on the road traveling with us, and suddenly we came upon a coat of frost that stretched as far as the eye could see.
My friends in Utah had been reporting an unusual cold front this late in the year, which, to my delight, seemed to be traveling down from the north. As we crossed into Wyoming, snow dabbed here and there as if put there with a paintbrush across the high desert badlands, and I found myself transfixed on the vast architectural landscape that was laid out before us. I had never seen anything like it in my entire life, unfamiliar and majestic as it was. High pillars of rock formations and natural sculptures penetrated from the earth like monolithic skyscrapers towering here and there. Lakes we passed were frozen solid with a crisp layer of white dashed across them. Misshapen embellishments of gradient sandstone blended into a changing ombre of color from the older rock having been compressed from eons before. The frost dusted both the terrain and the weathered stone giants that appeared to lumber around us, giving the barren highlands we traveled through an ethereal, otherworldly ambiance of being sprinkled in powdered sugar. I was in love with where I was at that moment, and as we drove, I romanticized another life for myself here in which I owned a property stretching out across the high tundra with cows grazing, sheep migrating, and horses loping in the distance as the skies darkened and lightning struck the Sawtooth mountains to the west.
Since departing from Arizona over a decade ago, I had come to overtly loathe the desert landscape and aesthetic, but the badlands felt different and new. I was the furthest east I’d ever driven, in wholly unfamiliar territory, and I didn’t hate it. On the contrary, I was completely mesmerized. I had only visited Wyoming once before as a child, when my grandparents kidnapped my mom and her four daughters in a life-changing visit to Yellowstone National Park. With every hundred miles or so that passed, I wondered to myself, “Could I live here?” after however long my spell in Tulsa might last.
But my romantic idealization of Wyoming would not be allowed to prevail for long. An hour away from the next motel, I was pulled over in the town of Kemmerer, Wyoming for doing eight miles over the speed limit. I navigated over to the side of the road, which was still lightly snow-dusted where we were, and was openly shaking as I watched the cop approach my vehicle from the rearview mirror.
Like the good Mormon girl I was raised to be, I have a deep abyssal fear of drawing the attention of authority and getting into trouble for it. Was it illegal to drive with cats sitting in your lap? Could that be considered distracted driving? My license did not have my updated address. My gun was on the back floor of the car. I worried that a civil servant might preoccupy themselves with the plants in my trunk, either from a marijuana perspective (Wyoming having some of the strictest laws in the country against it), or some other kind of illegal “intent to sell” agenda. Even if they were legitimate houseplants, could I get in trouble for carrying species considered to be harmful to the native ecosystem over the border? I began trembling even harder. The officer arrived at my window and began speaking to me, not unkindly, remarking on how nervous I seemed, and it was then that a thread decided to unravel in my brain.
As he spoke to me from my window, my eyes were drawn to an utterly ridiculous forearm tattoo of a man’s silhouette casting a fishing pole with text that extended from the line of the pole reading, “Gone Fishin'”, and in that moment decided that this man had much larger problems to worry about than me politely arguing with him about this fine that I was going to incur one way or another. I began cry again as he took my license back to his car; not in an attempt to get out of an infraction, but because by then, I was so thoroughly overwhelmed with everything I had been through up until that point in time; the emotion and despair that rose in me as I left the West and the life I had always known, and all the lives I had imagined for myself therein. I chose in that moment to violently submit myself to a quiet existential meltdown that had been ping-ponging around inside my psyche for weeks; perhaps even months or years. Sitting there waiting for the cop to return for fifteen minutes, I hushedly sobbed into my sweatshirt, and then patiently listened as he handed me a ticket in the amount of $25 with the arm that was etched with the unfortunate fishing tattoo. I thanked him (why?), and held my breath on the side of the road until his cruiser pulled in front of me and disappeared down the frosted highway in front of us.
I sat there in my car and continued to choke on the wet ache in my throat for an unknown amount of time. Eventually, my sobs had all emptied out of my chest, and I blinked the water away from my eyes while taking deep, exaggerated breaths. Steadying myself, I loosened my grip on the steering wheel that I had been preposterously white-knuckling for no clear reason. By this time, someone had painted the sky grey and it looked like it might rain, which would undoubtedly wipe the snow-crested illusory Wyoming life that I had imagined for myself into nothingness.
After gathering my composure, I clicked on my left blinker and pulled back onto the highway after surveying the road for fellow travelers behind me. Not sixty seconds later, my check engine light blinked on from the dashboard, and there was nothing more I could do but turn up the volume on the radio and laugh as tears returned to my eyes.
We arrived at the Motel 6 in Rock Springs, Wyoming just shy of 90 minutes later, where I performed my unloading routine and fell into a deep sleep as soon as I hit the bed.
NO COUNTRY FOR BROKEN WOMEN (1,334 Miles – Big Springs, Nebraska)
Big Springs, Nebraska is a town that boasts a population of 479 people and dances above the exact furthest right corner of the state of Colorado. In my initial planning of the trip, I had sought to go down through Denver, a city that I achingly wanted to explore but had lost my opportunity to do so. Instead, I was left with the wide, vast stretch of corn that tumbled through one of the flattest states in the country. I felt a sharp unease as I drove, unable to spot even a single upland slope anywhere in front of me. A small rolling hillside would have done it for me at that point. It felt as if I had disturbingly crash-landed on an alien planet. Surely this couldn’t be right. Surely there could be no actual place that existed like this in the world, much less my own country. Having been born and raised at the feet of the Rocky Mountains, I had never felt more spiritually agitated than when I couldn’t spot even a large boulder in the distance.
The motel could be seen from the highway, but getting there was a navigable mystery. We turned off the road and were forced to maneuver through a large deteriorating Flying J parking lot with a Max’s Diner that was attached to it. Both were calamitously under construction and due to the tattered state of facilities, I wondered if a tornado had in fact found its way through there recently. Each of the pumps had bags on them, forbidding use from patrons, and construction debris littered the lot. There were also large holes scattered like marbles across the pavement that I had to snake around in fear of losing a tire over. Once clear of the perilous traffic hazards, we reached a craggy, unpaved dirt road that was somehow safer than what we had just driven through. It winded around for what felt like miles and eventually dumped us at the front of the motel, where we parked and unloaded for the night.
After settling, I filled my little pink watering can and made several trips outside to pop the Fiesta’s hatchback and hydrate my plants. I had never before dragged houseplants in a car across the country, but was pleased to find that they were all doing alright and seemed as happy as a batch of clams in the trunk. The sun was setting as I finished watering, and I leaned up against the side of my car to take it in. The clouds that pocked the sky only served to enhance the luminously vibrant streaks of rose and peach and lavender that stretched across the horizon for as far as I could see. Never in my life had I seen a sunset like that before, the fullness of the earth’s atmosphere unobscured by mountainous rock formations or skyscrapers that jagged upward together in urban clusters of teeth, and suddenly, I marveled at the tradeoff between the Rockies and the Heartlands. The little voice in my ear that had been whispering throughout the trip wondering if I was making the right choice quieted in reverence as I observed the warm technicolor heavens, seemingly soothed for now.
This motel had exactly one washer on site for guests to use, which I decided to claim for myself in an effort to properly wash my grandmother’s blanket and the doggy hammock, along with some clothes that would fit in the load as well. I gathered the laundry and realized that I would need soap. Upon checking the washer, I also discovered that it exclusively accepted quarters, of which I had none. I went to the front desk to ask if they had quarters. They did not. They mentioned that the gas station down the road should have laundry soap and that they might have quarters, so I went there to check. Due to the heinous construction, their entire system was down, and they could not facilitate a quarter exchange for me. That, and they did not have laundry soap. Also, their ATM was offline. The cashier pointed through an open threshold that should have been a window to a Maverick that could be spotted across the highway and told me to try my luck there.
At the Maverick, I found my quarters and my laundry soap. It was then that I realized how desperately famished I was, and I spun around looking for anything even remotely sustainable to eat. There was nowhere in sight that could provide a proper dinner for me; Max’s Diner attached to the Flying J appeared to be either defunct or closed on account of the construction in the yard. The Flying J was obviously off-limits due to their electric troubles. There seemed to be no other operational business for probably miles from us. Thus, I reluctantly accepted the fate of my pathetic meal that night: one bag of Doritos, and one bag of teriyaki beef jerky.
As I meandered back to my room, the sun had now fully disappeared from the skyline, and I found myself longing for the skillet and bag of groceries that I had abandoned in Portland as my stomach twitched and rumbled with regret. Leaving that stupid little bag behind had felt like such a failure at the time, but it was slowly developing into something so much worse than that; an annoyingly cogent metaphor that was gift-wrapped in irony and too much tape. I pictured it sitting there in the parking lot, untouched and useless, now being circled by raccoons. The bag served as a final offering to the life that I had left behind, one where I always thought I’d be much more prepared than I actually was. It was the recurring Sisyphean theme of my entire life. A sick little poem jeeringly rendered from the void.
In other words, it was one big fucking cosmic joke that I just had to laugh at.
THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE OF THE MIDWEST (1,626 Miles – Lincoln, Nebraska)
I have no memory of anything that happened by the time I reached Lincoln, Nebraska. And perhaps that’s for the best.
ALL MY EXITS ARE EMERGENCIES (1937 Miles – Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri)
The final stretch of the trip passed in a daze. As mile after mile slipped by, I wondered if this was how it felt to be a new lobotomy patient: upright, technically alive, and staring blankly into the light of a reality I couldn’t be sure I had actually agreed to. Unable to comprehend the road ahead, with no real sense of what lies behind, or why it might matter. There were less than five hours for us to go, and every minute seemed to crawl by at a maddening glacial pace. Part of me wanted to be present enough to appreciate the gravity of the change I was making for myself, but mostly, I just wanted to sleep until death took me.
Our route took us through a tiny sliver of Iowa and then dipped south down through Kansas City, a place that I would later return to in about six weeks to have my life ruined by a perpetually broke, cheating, porn-obsessed sex addict for almost two years thereafter. But that hadn’t happened yet; that lifetime was for another girl in another future. For now, I was homebound to a handmade meal and a fresh set of sheets, and at that moment, nothing in the world sounded better.
Somehow, after 1,937 miles, the Great Midwest Hysterical Failure Tour ended and we finally arrived at Lake of the Ozarks on a Tuesday evening in early May. The sun was setting into one of the glorious atmospheric displays that I have come to cherish so deeply as my tiny Fiesta rumbled slowly down the gravel backwoods road, kicking up dust all around. My mom and step-dad excitedly emerged from the house and helped me unload my things, and I was so immensely grateful for the love and foundation that they immediately offered to me without asking for anything in return. Once I had settled the pets and eaten my dinner, I stepped outside onto the back porch to take in the radiance of the lake and the watercolor skies and the rolling trees and the singing birds and harping crickets, all of them earnestly welcoming me to my new home. In truth, it didn’t feel like home then, and it still doesn’t now two years later, but from time to time I’m okay being in a place that isn’t home while I daydream about a place that one day will be.
In her book The Mountain is You, Brianna Wiest insightfully writes, “Your new life is going to cost you your old one.” This is a sentiment I have found to be so profoundly true that it stings sometimes when I think about it too much. In an attempt to rid myself of my past lives, I had given up so much more than I ever expected in order to be where I am today. Perhaps naively, I didn’t understand what such a thing would cost until I was already losing my mind on a foolhardy journey halfway across the country. Some of what I left behind was done so intentionally; some of it was torn from my bleeding hands as I desperately tried to hold onto it while kicking and screaming. All of it belonged to the lives that I’ve already shed, and I’ve since come to realize that holding onto too much from them can hold you back more than it can drive you forward.
Two years later, I still don’t know if coming here was the right choice for me to make. I don’t know why I was brought to this place, or what I’m meant to find here before I leave from it. In my many travels, I have found that some places are meant to be carried with us, and others are simply meant to be passed through. And even though I am only passing through here, there’s something about this part of the country that slows my heartbeat and settles my spirit, and it’s then that I know I could find myself in much worse places from which there is no exit.
I miss the West terribly, and every day my heart aches when I remember that I’ve left it behind. I do my best to trust the past version of myself who dragged her entire life across the country in search of something she didn’t know she was looking for, but goddamn it am I mad at her some days. When I catch myself feeling ungrateful in those difficult moments, instead I try to focus on the beauty of the lake that’s right outside my window and ground myself in the slow, delicate work of untangling who I am, what my story is, and where I’m going to next.
If spending the next year in a house on a shimmering, tranquil lake doesn’t help me answer some of those questions, then I honestly don’t know that anything ever will. What I do know is that I’ve got miles to go before I sleep, and another place to go to from here once I’m ready to shed this life like I’ve done with all the others that came before it. There’s nothing in the world that I look forward to more than when that day arrives.