“Year after year in a good life, you realize your family is the journey.”

                – Ron Carlson 

                  “A Kind of Flying”

 

  

  

  

 There’s a quote that keeps echoing in my mind from a story I teach. It’s one I’ve written about before and seems to apply to this trip more than ever. When you travel with just your own family and only see friends at intervals, you develop a closeness that’s different than the day to day closeness you’ve come to know. This is a closeness that comes when you stretch a rubber band too tight, so tight you know it’s going to come back and sting you, but you stretch it anyway because, hey, you’ve only got this one rubber band.

In this analogy, we are the hand holding the rubber band. And each twist and turn of our journey might test our patience, test our character, and test our love for one another is the stretch to the rubber band. Sometimes it feels like it can never break. And sometimes it feels like a firm, thick, wee little band. One that won’t give a bit.

Confession: I’ve made some major snafus in planning along the way. I am not auditioning for Queen of the Road Trip anytime soon. Clearly a city girl, I have taken advantage of ever available cell service and GPS navigation. I rely on a store on every corner. I am ever optimistic that, “well, we’ll figure it out.”

And we do. Eventually. But our record in three of the six national parks we’ve seen is not too good. And since I don’t really know what I don’t know– sometimes I am uber confident , maybe a little wise guy about it and soon we are passing the continental divide twice in a half hour and burning the heck out of our breaks. And that’s where I cry a little bit. Okay, maybe more than a little bit. 

And I break the rubber band.

Michael says to the kids that mistakes are only okay if you learn from them. Since I have successfully gotten us lost in three national parks in a 36 foot RV that can’t make U-turns, I would say I’m not learning from all my mistakes. But, in taking the bad with the good, I guess it’s just part of what happens when you play with rubber bands. 

This summer has had its tense moments. Mechanical related, poop related, water related, ant related, bicycle tire related and stolen laptop related. There’s been some snaps of the rubber band. It’s stung once or twice. 

We’ve set out to explore. But sometimes, I don’t feel like exploring. I want to binge watch Real Housewives and eat food from a takeout place from home. I want to call a girlfriend to come over for a late night chat on my porch. I want to be whatever the opposite of an explorer is. For a day.

And then the feeling passes and I find myself planning routes and reservations and things to do. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of what we do is last minute and unplanned: like a trip to the Potato Museum in Idaho or a stop in Cody, Wyoming, the home of Buffalo Bill. We are good at flying by the seat of our pants. We are definitely good at that. Kind of like we’ve been flung by a sligshot (rubber band analogy too much?) into the world of travel. 

As we round out the last three weeks (and we still have to make it from Wyoming to New York), I keep wondering how I will ever summarize this summer in a conversation in passing come this Fall. The rubber band metaphor seems a little verbose. Splendid? Superb? Amazing is much too overused. Sweet? Too quaint. Awesome? Too non-descript. 

And then I think again of this quote from my favorite Ron Carlson story. When the character is asked what marriage is like, he answers:

“Well, I said, it’s not life on a cake. It’s a bird taking your head in his beak and you walk the sky. It’s marriage. Sometimes it pinches like a bird’s mouth but it’s definitely flying, it’s definitely a kind of flying.”