11,000 Miles of Territory vs. Map

Old-school map where I tried to track my route; x’s marking overnight stays. Some bits are more accurate than others. I still have no idea how I routed out of New Mexico through Colorado to Kansas; I’m pretty sure some of those roads were imaginary.

11,000 car miles (17,700 km).

15,722 airline miles.

21 states.

3 countries.

I lost count of crossings of the Continental Divide, which meanders as much as I do.

These numbers are easy to come up with. The feeling-sense attenuates over time, though it sometimes returns unexpectedly. I headed into town the other day for the most mundane of chores; Liesl burst out the door to come along, and we headed out in Thirsty with music playing and a familiar but unreasonable sense of joy. After the ecstasy, the laundry indeed (*). 

Sometimes microsecond vignettes come back: the astonishment of realizing I was looking at a wolf. The surge of tenderness for a bear eating wildflowers. The smell of bison. The feel of Liesl pressed against my leg in solidarity against the storm. The wink of a rascal in a laundromat. Emerging in the morning to a brilliant rainbow. The soft velvet of horse noses. The quick shudder of a car being pushed sideways by the wind.

I had started to write of all the ways the trip didn’t go as planned, what I would do differently, what I learned about travel, how that will shape what I do in the future. It all became very tedious and I couldn’t bear to foist it upon you.

Yet some sort of accounting is necessary.

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• 3.3 metric tons of CO2 emissions for car travel

• 3.6 metric tons of CO2 emissions for flights

• 6.9 metric tons CO2 emissions combined

• My estimated carbon footprint for this year: 17.27 metric tons

• The average footprint for a single person in United States: 15.24 metric tons

• The average for the European Union: 6.8 metric tons

• The average for Ghana: 0.51 metric tons

• The worldwide target to combat climate change: 0 metric tons

I thought I would return with some sort of plan to move somewhere I would feel less anxiety about climate change. That may happen in the future, but not right now. Some have asked me where I would go. Of course, there’s no escaping the hardships we’ve brought upon ourselves, but if you are able to move, you can at least pick your poison to avoid. For me, that’s heat/drought (with a succotash of infrastructure/culture). For those who asked, my thinking didn’t change on this trip: the ideal is somewhere within 5-10 miles of the Pacific coast but out of Cascadia tsunami zones, between Sonoma County and Coos Bay, OR—with some important exceptions. 

More appealing to me now, though, is the idea of giving in more to my nomadic yearnings.

What I saw did confirm that we are already within the climate apocalypse. Most obvious are huge swaths of dead and burnt trees in this country. I found myself exasperated that we continue to talk about stopping it in some way, as if discussing how to stop a landslide as it starts to come down. I pondered pipe dreams of assisting plants and animals to resettle in areas becoming more favorable to their native range. I realized that it might work in flatland, but on a round planet, the variations in sunlight over the year are just one of many factors within Gaia’s complexity. These mental experiments are good for getting humility.

Then I began to fear the geo-engineering other actions that will become inevitable when a handful of gazillionaires decide they are going to “fix” this with the power of their oh-so-enormous brains.

Sorry. I’ve been trying not to go there. Me going there, too, seems inevitable.

I can’t do much about the gazillionaires, the bark beetles, the fires. But somehow I’ve got to come to terms with my own role in this slow disaster, especially as someone whose internal compass is directing her heart toward more overland travel. This sort of dilemma is a recurring topic in therapy, and not just in my own. That’s where it belongs, for now.

In my dreams, a red goat is sacrificed with loving kindness, and its context is such that I come to understand that I need to sacrifice my own sense of moral virtue. I don’t know exactly how one does that without abdicating responsibility—it’s part of my peculiar makeup that makes this my own quandary. Already, I feel some of my rigid opinions and beliefs begin to soften. It’s messy. And messy—when it comes to beliefs and opinions—is usually better.

I can only hope to keep moving forward on the journey to learn more.

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There are ways to avoid loneliness on a solo road trip. One is to take a rat-wiener dog along. Another is to give names to the things in your life; your car, your tent—soon you begin to feel like Dorothy along the yellow brick road. And one of the best ways is to write, so there is a sense of readers coming along. 

I feel enormous, inexpressible gratitude for those readers. 

That’s it for “summer 2022 travels”. I have enjoyed writing again (when I’m not vexed by it) and sharing it, so I may post here from time to time going forward. I trust you to use the unsubscribe button when you’re ready.

Thank you again for sharing this trip.