The First Trip
Spring–Fall 1994
I had maybe eight thousand dollars. For someone who’d never had money, it burned a hole in my pocket. Dad was obsessed with work. Helen was just starting college. Mom’s lifelong horse, Troy, had just died at thirty years old. The farm was over. There was nothing holding me to anything.
So I packed some things in Dad’s Ford Escort one spring and drove.
The first trip was just Wisconsin and the neighboring states — a test of the waters. I’d been listening to NPR already, and during the WPR call-in shows I’d hear people phone in from places I’d never heard of. Richland Center? Verona? Where were these towns? Wisconsin suddenly felt like a country I’d only seen the corner of. So I used that time to explore my own state, the way you explore a room you’ve been sleeping in but never looked at closely.
I mostly camped. I discovered you could stealth camp in the National Forest for free, which was a revelation for someone watching every dollar. Though the campsites the National Forest set up on lakes were the best — cheap, quiet, mine. I could hike and swim and just sit in my own thoughts. About my childhood. High school. My dog. The factory and the school I’d just walked away from. Mom. I had no idea what I’d do when I came back. That was the point.
I went to every Wisconsin State Park I could find that spring and summer. Crossed state lines into Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan, Indiana. A few national parks. I paddled the Apostle Islands. There are a lot of stories from that trip — people I met, campsites I stumbled into, roads I took because they looked interesting on the map. Hardly any photos. If I took any, I don’t know where to find them. The trip lives in my body more than in any archive.
I came back home lonely and renewed. That fall was a lot of bonfires with friends, the kind of long fires where you talk about nothing and everything and the sparks rise into the dark. I worked at a lawn care company for a while. Then I moved up to Door County and lived in a camper and worked at an art studio, even though the art bug hadn’t quite bitten me yet. I’d always been a sketcher and an artist as a kid, but I didn’t know that was something you could be. That winter I went back to the gas station. I hadn’t spent nearly all my savings, and I saved even more pumping gas and sliding credit cards through the carbon-copy machine.
By spring, I was restless again. I’d seen Wisconsin. I’d seen the edges of the neighboring states. But the map was so much bigger than that, and I had money in the bank and no obligations and a white Ford Escort with a manual transmission and a tape deck.
I left again, determined this time to see all forty-eight lower states.