Big Nomadic Summer

The open road, a little dog, and a whole lot of curiosity

I thought I’d be leaving this morning on my nomadic summer, but instead I am flattened...mostly from a second COVID booster, but I suspect also from all of the intense lead-up in trip preparation. I will put off my departure, perhaps for a day or perhaps until just this afternoon.

I am not the kind of person who just gets in the car and takes off, though I would like to be (at least I think this every time I find myself exhausted by preparation). And it’s an ambitious trip.

The short version is that I’ll be driving and (mostly) car camping with Liesl, taking a southerly route to Ohio. I’ll stay with my sister’s family for about a month, then fly to Zurich and visit my friend there—she was an exchange student in my senior high school class 40 years ago. After three nights there, I’ll return to Ghana for almost three weeks. Then back to Ohio, to reunite with Liesl, and take a wandering path back, probably along a northern route. I don’t expect to return until August, but having been a remote worker for over a decade, I am free to indulge my wanderlust as much as I care to, as long as I keep within good internet range on work days.

I’ll mostly decide where to go when I’m out there.

There are places I’m hoping to spend time or visit in along the way:

• Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, a place that’s long been on my want-to-visit list, and also a chance to visit with some pyrotechnic friends.

• Western New Mexico, something like Truth or Consequences to Magdelena. Truth or Consequences is the home of Holy Scrap Hot Springs, which may or may not be a destination anymore. Magdelena has held my fascination ever since reading Stephen Bodio’s book, Querencia—a love story between people but also for a landscape. I’d like to experience that landscape. (And someday, I’d like to see the Lightning Field…but not this trip.)

• Santa Fe area, where I want to visit a friend’s daughter who keeps mustangs on her ranch

• Up through the Taos area, someplace I’ve been but would like to see more of. The earthships are north of there and that would be an interesting stop.

• Lawrence, KS. You know all those quizzes you can take online, about “Find the best place for you to live!”? I’ve enjoyed those for years—even before online with a “Best Places” book that collected weather, economic, housing, and political data for each city, one per page. In those explorations, Lawrence, KS has come up as a suggestion to me. I figure I may as well take the opportunity to see it in person. As they say, the map is not the territory. But it’s history, with Witchita, of being a Beat hotbed interests me; my beloved zen teacher, Joko, was a part of that.

• A stop in Iowa to visit friends, if I have made good enough time during the rest of the journey. If not, I’ll see them on the return trip.

Switzerland will be a chance to reconnect, without plans for anything but that. Ghana will be a saga onto itself; I will stay mostly in Accra, at a sober BnB with Recovery Africa, but plan for a few days to visit Kabile. Grateful to be taking vacation time when in Ghana, so I can be fully immersed. (Of course, the big question is whether Switzerland and Ghana is going to let us COVID-riddled Americans in their borders at all.)

The second part of the road trip will probably be from Ohio to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan...and decide the route from there. I’d like to see more of Wyoming, Montana...maybe Yellowstone. Northern Washington, then down the coast. Assuming something else doesn’t catch my interest along the way.

I’m very curious to see what America looks like, “out there”. Does the refugee crisis we have here in California (a better description, to my mind, than “homelessness” or “unhoused people”) extend across other parts of the country? Are people really as polarized as they seem online? What does the future feel like, intermingled with the past and present and the extraordinary real landscape of this country?

Mostly, I feel a strong sense of urgency to move—to get out there and see what there is to see—now. I haven’t decided if that’s also an urge to “move along” in a relocation sense, but after several fire seasons and more heat and drought, increasingly miserable traffic in the Bay Area, and the attendant bureaucracy that comes from living in nice places, it’s easy to imagine there might be a happier place to live. That said—there will be no escaping what we will need to face as a collective people. I have felt the sense to move on before, and ended up with a re-kindled appreciation for where I am now. It wouldn’t surprise me to land right back on this as the perfect place, again.

If you’d like to follow along on this journey, you can subscribe here and I’ll post updates as I go.

Maybe I’ll leave today. Maybe I’ll leave tomorrow. I’m not in charge of this fiasco.