My love letter to the road

(For Traci, on the day before her own epic road trip)

I've always believed that people who consistently choose the shortest distance between two places miss the essence of travel. Flying is convenient, to be sure, especially if the destination, rather than the journey, is the point of a trip. But I hate flying. During my high school and college years it held a certain novelty for me, and I still admit to feeling a little thrill in my stomach when the plane takes to the air. I also deeply appreciate the perspective and occasionally the peace that comes from seeing the world from the sky, but those moments are usually fleeting for an airline passenger -- soon the plane rises above the clouds and there's not all that much to see. Instead, one's attention turns to the beverage cart jostling down the narrow aisle, to seats leaning too close to one's knees, and the unsettling proximity of unidentifiable odors.

I actually enjoy airports, espcially when I have the luxury of enjoying some good coffee or a glass of wine while I watch the travelers bustle through, heels clicking, luggage rolling, eyes fixed ahead. Brisk, efficient movements. But now that I have a three-year-old and a baby on the way, that leisurely people-watching is -- at least for now -- a luxurious memory. Flying itself fills me with more and more anxiety as I grow older -- no need to tell me dismissively just how irrational that is, please. It is what it is. (And the truth of the matter is that, for me, flying with small children can be challenging, the exact opposite of relaxing. If you've done it, you probably understand, and if you haven't, kindly refrain from sharing your opinions on what parents should be doing to shut their kids up, and be grateful that at least you can plug in your music and ignore it.)

But I don't love road trips simply because I don't enjoy the alternative. I love them because I completely believe the cheesy bumper stickers and inspirational posters proclaiming that "Life is a journey, not a destination!" Memories are made on the road.

Sometimes I think my relationship with my husband began as a road trip. In August of 2000, following what I had briefly imagined would be a European summer fling, Matt rode a Greyhound bus for twenty-five hours, traveling between Minneapolis and Bozeman, Montana. Almost immediately we filled my car with camping gear and drove five hours to Glacier National Park for our first camping trip. We took day trips to Yellowstone and the Lewis and Clark Caverns. We spent weekends during my senior year at Concordia driving back and forth between Moorhead and Minneapolis.

But the real magic began after both of us moved to Washington state, a move which meant we'd be seeing a lot of I-90 and I-94. We flew to Minneapolis at least once or twice a year before we became parents, since it isn't exactly practical to drive over 1500 miles one way for a long weekend. But we drive to Bozeman a few times a year, and we've taken a few extended vacations that allowed us to drive from the Pacific Northwest to the Midwest. These trips carry me across every landscape I've ever loved, all the landscapes of my youth: my life's history written in prairie grasses and mountain passes. I breathe best in open spaces. (In 2005 I wrote, There really is no sky like the Montana sky, even in other wide-open states. I can't explain it. The drive between Chester and Fort Benton is like breathing deeply for the first time -- your lungs expand and fill with air you didn't know you could hold.

"Wow," Matt kept saying. "This is just...huge." But it's really a struggle to find a word to attach to it. The evening sun lit the fields against the distant Highwood Mountains. We braked for pheasants, for a new spotted fawn. I lost track of time, my age, of what car I was even driving. I just kept breathing, clinging to the thought that at least some things never really change.)

We're building our memories on the road. I know where to find the best coffee, the cleanest bathrooms, and the most reliable food between Seattle and Minneapolis, as well as all over Montana. I've learned to be present and aware driving through golden fields lit against a backdrop of purple, snow-capped mountains, to notice the Yellowstone river running lazily parallel to the interstate and the storm clouds gathering above the mountain ranges, the Painted Canyon in North Dakota, the hills and rock and sagebrush. But the treasures are also found in the most ordinary moments:

Eating the world's creamiest tomato soup at a truckstop 4B's in Missoula (which, sadly, is no longer -- a fact we mourn each time we pass exit 99). Heading north to Great Falls in August, my bare feet on the dash, reading poetry to my husband and telling him, "I'm going to find a poem that knocks your socks off." Lowering our fourteen-month-old toddler into one of the bucket seats on a swingset in the park in Miles City, Montana, and nursing her later on a park bench amidst the sounds of laughter from the community swimming hole and the buzzing of the overhead power lines. The heavy, humid air in Fargo, so thick it was almost tangible, like I could have pulled it down out of the sky with my fingers. Clothes flapping on lines near the road, old cars, and grain elevators along Highway 2. My daughter's first carousel ride in Riverfront Park. Ordering homemade egg salad sandwiches and drinking fresh-squeezed lemonade in a tiny small-town diner with flowered tablecloths, and being the youngest people there by about forty years.

Separately, these are just moments, of course. It's impossible to write about any one of them as a reason my heart belongs to the highway, but together, they form a beautiful mosaic -- snapshots of the sweetest, most untroubled moments of our lives.