Eventually, it dawns on me that, for the first time since hitting the road, I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home—an aching that becomes a kind of chant in my head as I drive. But home where? Without a job, a family of my own, or a mortgage awaiting me, the concept feels tinny, weightless, as it floats around in my head. I need to be in New York City around Day 100 to return the car to my friend and see my medical team—but beyond that nothing is certain. I feel a heightened need to use these final miles wisely, to find answers among the people I meet and the places I go.
* * *
—
Down into Texas I go, driving through lonely border patrol checkpoints and past puffs of sagebrush until I reach Marfa, a dusty, one-stoplight town in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, made famous in the last few decades as a destination for lovers of art and, more recently, Instagram. Marfa is meant to be a pit stop, but I am intrigued by this bizarre place and its residents, a mix of ranchers and writers and painters, and I end up staying for a bit. Over the next three days, I befriend all kinds of characters—a Texan heiress who offers to let me stay in the spare bedroom of her bungalow, a troop of high school drama club students whose play I go to one night, and two combat-boot-wearing antique dealers I meet during a museum tour who invite me back to their trailer for a lethal mescal cocktail. As a woman traveling alone, I feel like what Gloria Steinem described as a “celestial bartender”: Strangers welcome me into their homes, share secrets with me that they wouldn’t disclose to a therapist, invite me to partake in their family traditions, and send me off with homemade pies.
On my last morning in Marfa, outside the public library, I meet a couple around my age who pique my curiosity. “We call her Sunshine,” they tell me, introducing their 1976 Volkswagen camper van before they introduce themselves. Despite being nearly half a century old, Sunshine looks as youthful and free-spirited as her owners. She’s tangerine orange with windows adorned with curtains sewn from a groovy flower fabric and a dashboard decorated with feathers. She has two beds, hidden compartments for storage, and a makeshift kitchen.
“Are you brewing kombucha?” I ask, pointing to a giant jug of fizzy amber liquid wedged between the front seats.
“I can teach you how. It’s so easy and so good for you,” says the young woman, who calls herself Kit. With intense blue eyes and wildflowers woven through her blond curls, she has an elfin charm. Her boyfriend, JR, who is tinkering with Sunshine’s engine, has a ponytail and the broad shoulders of a linebacker. The two of them are deeply tan and turn-and-stare gorgeous. They tell me they’ve spent the last three years living out of the van.
I am instantly smitten with Sunshine and her inhabitants. I want to know everything about their lives. Where they’ve traveled. The things they’ve seen and the people they’ve met. What they do to make a living. How in the world they came to call this orange bus home.
“It was love at first gear,” Kit and JR tell me. The van had been sitting for some months in a parking lot across the street from Appalachian State University in the North Carolina mountains where Kit was a student. After graduation, the couple, who had been dating since high school, bought the van for five thousand dollars, moved into a cramped studio apartment in Venice Beach, and got jobs—she as a waitress in a wine bar and he as a videographer for a surfing website. Suffocated by city life and unfulfilled by the long hours they spent working, they made an impulsive decision: They quit their jobs, gave up their apartment, and decided to try living on the road. Sunshine became not merely a traveling abode but a lifestyle, an ideology. Freed from the tyranny of nine-to-five, they started exploring the most remote corners of the country.
“We travel with the agricultural seasons,” JR tells me when I ask how they can afford to keep their gas tank full. “We live on very little and whenever we need cash, we work as farmhands and migrant laborers for a month or two. Fruit harvesting, dairy farming, haying horses, digging ditches—you name it, we done it.”
Instead of paying rent, Kit and JR set up camp in national parks and forests, redwood groves and deserts. They bathe in rivers and hot springs, cook every meal from scratch, and eat foods foraged from the earth. When they’re not milking goats, harvesting peaches, or scaling mountains, they spend their days working on various creative projects. JR takes photographs and keeps his hands busy with woodworking. Given Sunshine’s age, he’s also become something of an amateur mechanic. Kit spends her days cooking, bird-watching, and studying metaphysics. She loves to write and to draw cartoons, and the two of them collaborate on little zines about their adventures.
I’m taken by the fact that JR and Kit have figured out how to make this transience a permanent way of life. Against the conventional benchmarks of success and societal expectations, they seem to have found a purpose in the endless promise of the open road. They strike me as proof that home doesn’t need to be a place or a profession, that I might find it wherever I go.
JR slices up a loaf of farm bread, a block of cheddar, and some apples on a wooden cutting board while Kit refills our jars of kombucha. As we sit down for a snack in the back of Sunshine, we are joined by a smiling surfer with hair like straw named Mikey, who is traveling with them for the week. “We’re headed to Big Bend National Park,” they say as we eat. “Why don’t you come with us and we can join camps for a night?”
I do a quick mental calculation. I’ve already spent longer in Marfa than planned. I’m supposed to be driving to Austin today. Big Bend is out of the way, a hundred miles south, and it will mean spending an intimidating number of hours behind the wheel over the next few days.
“Hell yes,” I say.
* * *
—
We chug along all day in a caravan of two, with Sunshine at the front and my mud-splattered Subaru close behind. My new friends don’t use GPS, and on account of Sunshine only going a maximum of fifty-five miles per hour, we avoid the highway. Instead, we stick to the small country roads that squiggle out into nowhere, leading to territories that feel untouched by civilization. As travelers, they are remarkably inefficient and whenever something catches their curiosity, they pull over to explore. If they like their surroundings, they’ll stay for a while, entire days, sometimes weeks.
After a few hours, the Rio Grande appears, the winding emerald-hued ribbon that separates Texas from Mexico. We turn off the main road and bounce along a dirt path, grinding to a stop on a promontory overlooking the river valley. Cracked copper earth, unending blue sky, a jagged ravine that drops down to a sea of rippling gold grass—all of it feels like it belongs to us this afternoon as we scramble down rocks and hike through the heat until we reach the water’s edge. Other than a couple of roadrunners and a little family of javelinas snuffling through the brush, it’s been hours since we’ve seen another soul. My new friends ditch their clothes and jump into the water. I hesitate for a moment, then follow suit; it’s too hot out here to be self-conscious about unsightly scars and unwieldy curves. As I wade in, the river is cool and viscous, its color and consistency turning into that of chocolate milk as the four of us shriek and splash around, kicking up silt. Even Oscar, who has never been much of a swimmer until now, barrels in snoutfirst.
As the sun descends, we drive a little farther, continuing off-road until we reach a secluded clearing at the base of a mountain with striated red cliff faces. While JR and Mikey are out gathering wood for a fire, I help Kit prepare dinner over their two-burner Coleman stove. Digging through one of the storage compartments, she pulls out a dusty bottle of wine they’ve been saving for a special occasion. Dusk falls like soot over our little camp as we gather for dinner, crammed together on the backseats with Oscar tuckered out at our feet. With the van’s side doors flung open onto a crackling fire, we balance bowls on our knees, dunking chunks of bread into a savory stew, discussing everything from the optimal frequency of washing one’s hair to idle theory—their philosophy that our lives
should be less busy, more filled with leisure, with days just like this.
* * *
—
Around midnight, I say good night to my new pals. Sleepy and sun-whipped, I trip through the darkness toward my car. I’m too tired to set up my tent so I haul all of my gear into the front seats and fold the back ones down flat. In the empty cargo space, I layer blankets and a sleeping bag over a foam camping mat. I’m pleased to discover that my improvised bed is actually quite comfortable and that there’s just enough room for me to stretch out my legs. With all of the windows rolled down and the hatchback popped open, a warm breeze washes over me. All is quiet except for the trembling of juniper trees and the occasional yips and howls of coyotes in the distance. The night sky is powdered with more stars than I’ve ever seen in my life.
Gazing up at the Milky Way, I remember when all I wanted is what I have in this moment. Sitting on the kitchen floor of my old apartment, sicker than I’d ever felt, my heart fractured into ten thousand tiny pieces, I needed to believe that there was a truer, more expansive and fulfilling version of my life out there. I had no interest in existing as a martyr, forever defined by the worst things that had happened to me. I needed to believe that when your life has become a cage, you can loosen the bars and reclaim your freedom. I told myself again and again, until I believed my own words: It is possible for me to alter the course of my becoming.
I scoot around in my sleeping bag with my toes pointing toward the steering wheel and my head resting on the back bumper so that I have an unobstructed view of the Big Dipper blinking down at me. Within seconds, I spot a shooting star. Then another. Soon, I see so many that I lose count. As I watch the sky sizzle and spark, a warm, euphoric sensation seeps through my bones that can only be described as joy. I am alive and as well as I could ever hope to be. I have been entrusted with a life that I am making into my own. Tonight, this feeling is the closest I’ve felt to being at home within myself.
But as soon as I close my eyes, I lose sight of the shooting stars and my vision turns inward. I’m back to replaying the same old scenes in my head. The last time Will and I saw each other. A claustrophobically hot summer night, a few weeks before I left on my road trip. I remember hoping that enough time had passed for us to reach some sort of peace agreement. The conversation had started off cordially enough, but a couple of hours later, we’d ended up on the sidewalk in front of a bar in the East Village hurling accusations. Before parting ways, we came to an agreement on one thing, and one thing only: It was best if we didn’t speak to or see each other again.
My chest constricts tighter and tighter. I want to be released from what won’t let me go. I want uncomplicated joy. But I see now that, without realizing it, I’ve been waiting for permission—from Melissa, from Will, from all the people who have disappeared from my life before a sense of closure could be reached. I want their blessings to fall in love again, to dream a new future, to move forward. I keep waiting for some kind of sign, or reassurance that it’s okay to go entire days without thinking of them—that it’s necessary to forget a little if I am going to live. No matter how many apologies, acts of contrition, or sacrifices I offer up, I’m realizing I need to accept that things may never feel fully resolved—with the living or the dead.
* * *
—
The next morning I eat breakfast with the van dwellers and we part ways, promising to keep in touch. In the days that follow, I pass ghost towns, forests of prickly pear cacti, and enormous roadside billboards that say things like Where BBQ lovers meat up. I drive through Austin, then hike around a swimming hole where the water is so aquamarine-clean it looks chlorinated. On I go, east across Texas, following interminable highways until they all begin to melt together. It’s early evening when I pull into the parking lot of the Best Western on Highway 59 in Livingston, a depressing stretch of fast-food restaurants and chain stores near the Louisiana border. The receptionist, a woman in a candy-cane sweater with pink acrylic nails, hands me a room key. “Enjoy your stay, sweetheart,” she says.
I chose the Best Western because it is the cheapest hotel I could find and because it is a ten-minute drive from the prison. Tomorrow morning, I am scheduled to visit Lil’ GQ, the inmate who was one of the first strangers to write to me. Typically, inmates are only allowed a two-hour visit each week, but I’d been granted what’s called a “special visit,” which consists of two four-hour visits spread over two days and is usually reserved for close friends and family. Now that I’m here, the idea of spending eight hours with Lil’ GQ makes me gnaw my cuticles. Eight hours feels like a very long time to commit to talking to anyone, let alone a stranger, let alone a stranger who has spent the last fourteen years on death row.
In my room on the second floor of the Best Western, I read the first letter Lil’ GQ ever sent to me, reliving the bewilderment I’d felt in my hospital bed as I tried to imagine him in a prison cell halfway across the country. During those long, maddening stays in the Bubble, I’d thought about him often. I wanted to know what he did to pass the time in solitary. I wanted to ask: How do you continue on when your life, as you know it, is over? How do you confront the ghosts of your past? How do you live in the present when what lies ahead is terrifyingly unknown?
My room overlooks the parking lot. I can see my car from the window, coated in a thick film of dust and so muddy that it looks like it’s been in a fight. It’s getting late and I still need to grab a couple of things from the trunk before bed. I pull on my boots, head outside, and as I’m walking across the parking lot, I notice a group of men standing by a couple of pickup trucks. Something about the men gives me pause, a tug in my gut that tells me to turn around and to go back inside. It’s the same instinctual uneasiness I felt during my first week on the road, at the campground in Massachusetts, when I’d spotted my tarp-dragging neighbor, Jeff, and his dog emerging from the woods—except, of course, Jeff had turned out to be not only harmless but a pretty nice guy. With him in mind, and all the other times I’ve fretted for nothing and then felt silly, I ignore the warning bells in my head.
I’m rooting through the hatchback in search of a tube of toothpaste and some kibble for Oscar when I hear a wolf whistle, low and throaty, slicing through the dark. “Come on over here and talk to us for a minute,” one of the men calls out. I ignore him and his friends. I tell myself they’re just messing around. “You alone?” he continues, and the others laugh, a too-loud laugh that tells me they’ve been drinking. I keep my head down, grabbing the rest of my stuff and locking the trunk. As I stride toward the side entrance of the hotel, the one closest to my car, the man breaks away from the group and swaggers toward me. I quicken my pace, the warning bells in my head clanging louder. Almost there, I tell myself, but when I reach the entrance, the door won’t budge. As I jiggle the handle I realize it’s one of those doors with a magnetic lock that you have to swipe your room key across to open. I can hear the sound of the man’s footsteps approaching, and when I look up his bloated, beery face twists into a sneer.
“Hey baby,” he coos, openly appraising my body. “Don’t be scared.” Panic overtakes me and makes my movements clumsy as I root through my bag, accidentally spilling some of its contents onto the pavement. As I crouch to the ground, scrambling to find my key, an elderly couple appears on the other side of the door. When they push it open, the man steps back, receding into the shadows of the parking lot. I grab my bag and duck into the corridor, the hair on my arms bristling.
Back in the safety of my room, with the door locked and dead-bolted behind me, my heart banging hard against my chest, I tell myself to get a grip. I try to remember why it is I’ve come to this godforsaken place, reminding myself that Lil’ GQ had been at the top of my list of people I wanted to visit. To contact him, I’d had to create an online account through a company that allows you to buy digital stamps and to send letters electronically to inmates anywhere in the country. At the time, I didn�
�t know if Lil’ GQ would remember me, or if he was still on death row. Each day in the weeks leading up to my departure, I remember eagerly checking my email, hoping for a response. After two weeks of radio silence, I sent a follow-up note through the company’s website, but received no reply. I had pretty much given up on hearing from him when it dawned on me: I had failed to include a return address, ignorantly assuming that because I could send Lil’ GQ electronic messages, he could send them back, which of course he couldn’t, since he wasn’t allowed access to a computer.
When I wrote a third time, explaining to Lil’ GQ how to reach me, he mailed me a letter right away, saying he was thrilled to learn that I’d survived, and thrilled at the prospect of meeting in person. To say that I was surprised to hear from you is a true understatement. To be honest with you, I had forgotten about that letter that I wrote to you because I just figured you read it and threw it away. Lil’ GQ asked if we could continue to correspond leading up to our visit so that we might better get to know each other. Since I was making up much of my itinerary on the fly, we had to get creative to keep in touch. I asked him to mail all letters to my parents’ address in Saratoga. My parents, in turn, scanned his letters and sent them to me by email. It wasn’t the most efficient system, but it worked. By the time I arrived in Livingston, we’d managed to exchange more than a dozen letters.
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