The Forty-Eight States
Spring–Fall 1995
I went straight southwest. San Diego first, then across the border into Tijuana, and further south into Baja, camping along the coast. The early spring weather was better down there — warm and dry while Wisconsin was still gray. It was easy to cross the border back then, almost casual. I’d been to Mexico several times in high school for mission trips and still had some Spanish in me. Enough to buy food and ask for directions. Enough to not be afraid.
I’d visited my great-grandparents in Arizona as a kid, during those winter trips, so I revisited the old places — Tucson, Sedona, Tombstone — seeing them now through my own eyes instead of from the back seat. I hiked the Grand Canyon. New Mexico was equally stunning. I thought about trying to get into CalArts when I was in Southern California, which means the art thing must have been stirring in me even then, though I was thinking more traditional — painting, drawing — not design. Nothing came of it. I kept driving.
Along the southern border of the US, state by state. I never got too deep into Texas — just crossed the northern edge. But I spent real time in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. I’d been to Florida a couple times as a kid to fish in Key West with Steve, so I revisited those spots. Spent time in the Everglades, that slow green maze of water and mangroves and silence. The Everglades are one of those places that rewire how you think about land — it’s not solid, not liquid, just something in between that’s been figuring itself out for ten thousand years.
Up to Tennessee to visit the Borlees. We’d visited them a couple times as kids after they moved away, and staying with them now felt like closing a loop — same family, same warmth, but I was different. I was twenty and alone and driving across the country with no plan, and they fed me and let me sleep in a real bed and sent me off with leftovers.
The eastern seaboard was small towns and big ones. The big cities were hard because my main form of lodging was camping, and you can’t pitch a tent in Manhattan. A hostel in New York was expensive by my standards — every dollar I spent in a city was three nights in a national forest. The Adirondacks fit me better. I liked nature at that point in my life more than I liked crowds. Maine was the gem. I stopped to visit my mom’s old friend — the family we’d visited three times in my childhood after they’d moved away. I spent a couple weeks touring the coast. Hiked Acadia. The Maine coast in summer is as beautiful as anything I saw on the whole trip — the granite and the pines and the cold Atlantic crashing in.
I came home through Canada. It was warmer by then, the weather perfect. I toured around the north shore of Lake Superior — that big, cold, ancient lake that’s always felt more like an ocean to me. Down through Minnesota, stopping at the Gunflint Trail and paddling the Boundary Waters as I had many times as a kid with Dad. The BWCA was the one place on the whole trip that felt like returning rather than discovering. Same portages, same lakes, same loons calling at dusk. I was different, but the water wasn’t.
Then back home for the winter.
It was an amazing trip. I think I’d have to work hard to remember all the little stories — the people I met while camping, the conversations at diners, the wrong turns that led somewhere better. I was twenty years old and I’d seen the country the slow way, from the driver’s seat of a hatchback, sleeping in a tent, eating cheap, watching the landscape change mile by mile. I didn’t find myself, exactly. But I found out how big the world was, and how small my corner of it had been, and that was enough to come home with.