But I kept going. “No, seriously. I think she’d be okay if we had the photos of Bruce, at least. She was so proud….She wanted pictures of him all over the country. And jeesh…she probably took a thousand. Honestly, it would have been a pretty fun album.” I sighed. “So many other people took photos too. I wish we had some way to get them.”
Travis looked at me. “Well, now…,” he started; then he trailed off.
“What?”
“It’s probably nothing,” he said finally. His mega-smile, which had started to light up, dimmed again.
“What?” I asked again.
“Well, I was thinking about the other photos out there. The ones other people took. We might be able to find ’em. But even if we did, what’s the point? I mean, we can’t print them out or give them to her. I guess you could once you get home, but who knows if she’ll even care by then. Maybe it’d just make her sad all over again.”
“Well, if we had the photos, we could make a photo book online, and pick it up in San Francisco. That’s pretty easy to do, actually.” I looked at him. “What? Haven’t you ever done that? I’ve made tons of them. We made one for Laurel when she went to college, and another for Vi when her dog died. It’s pretty simple.” I waved a hand at him. “But what’s the point? We don’t have any photos! That’s the whole problem.”
The mega-smile came back. “Oh, I don’t know if that’s a problem,” Travis said, sounding excited.
I stared. “How are you going to find them? I mean, I know Mimi has a few emails for people she was going to contact for her book, but other than that…?”
Travis jumped up. “Auntie, keep Rae…Sara here company for a minute! I’ll be right back!” He took off down the car, running so light and fast between the seats that he looked like he was dancing.
I stared after him.
Miss Ruby snorted, then coughed a little. “Fool is going to crash into the wall, running like that while we’re moving.” But her voice sounded like she was complimenting him.
“Do you know what he’s doing?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine she did, but what the heck did I know? Maybe he had a cape and magic wand hidden in his roomette.
She waved a hand impatiently. “No idea, but I’ll bet you a jar of nickels that it’s got to do with a computer. That boy thinks he can get to the moon and back just by pressing a few buttons. And the darnedest thing is that he usually can. Sits in his fuzzy slippers at the kitchen table and chats away with Russia, Egypt, Australia…you name it.”
Sure enough, before she’d even finished, Travis was rushing back, his computer under his arm.
“The other photos!” he burst out once he sat down. He opened the laptop and started typing like mad, fingers flying faster than I could follow. “There are a couple of different ways we can search for them…reverse image lookup, travel blogs, hashtags, rail travel chat rooms…” His voice trailed off as he focused on whatever he was doing.
I shot Miss Ruby a look. She was gathering her bag and mug, starting to stand up. “I’m too old and this is too boring. You young people tap all night on that thing. I’m going to bed.” Her hand rested on Travis’s head for a second.
Travis looked up immediately. “I’ll walk you back. Train’s going around all kinds of curves, and—”
She slapped his head. “Don’t you dare. I don’t need help walking down a train hallway, for crying out loud. I’m not dead yet, Travis Alexander.”
He nodded, full-bright grin turned on. “Yes, ma’am; duly noted,” he said, and leaned up to kiss her. “Sleep tight. Tell Dad I may be a while.”
Miss Ruby gave me a look. “ ‘Be a while’ is his code for ‘up all night.’ You may want to get a cup of coffee.”
Once she left, we were the only ones in the observation car. It was fully dark out now, and for a few minutes I just watched Travis’s hands typing madly.
“Check it!” he said finally, pulling the computer back so that I could see the screen. On it were tons of—literally a hundred or more—photos of Bruce!
“What?? How?? Where??” I was apparently stuck in the land of one-word questions. “How did you find these?” I finally sputtered.
“The Internet is not a private place. Believe me, if you put something out there, even just to a few friends or on a social media site, it’s pretty easy to find it.” He raised one eyebrow, which, by the way, is something I’ve been trying to do since I was five. “Keep that in mind when you’re partying with your friends and thinking about posting those photos.”
I blushed a little, which was stupid, because it’s not like I’m doing anything that would be embarrassing to post, but still. “Whatever. So you…what? Hacked into people’s Instagram and Facebook accounts? Nice work.”
“No hacking needed. I just searched for an image match. These are all set to public viewing! That’s my point…there’s no privacy! But for our purposes now, that’s a good thing, right?”
I looked over his shoulder. There were photos of Bruce in Atlanta, with the dogs at the inn in Eutaw, even on the High Line in New York almost a month ago! There were a bunch of him on the train with different passengers—including Darrell, our first sleeping cabin attendant, who had apparently posted the photo on the National Rail travel blog.
I smacked Travis on the shoulder. Miss Ruby was rubbing off on me. “Are you kidding me! Who wants privacy? We can totally make a book from these! Here…open another window and I’ll start designing the book.”
Travis was still clicking around. “Didn’t you say your mama has the emails of some of the folks you met? Why don’t you go get them? Maybe we can get a few more pictures. I’m going to download these into an album, so it’ll take a bit.” He glanced at the time on the corner of the screen. “Yeah. It’s going to take quite a bit. How about we play cards until it finishes?” He jumped up, doing his arm-shaking-neck-cracking thing. “It’s going to be a late night.”
Travis crept off to the café car to see if there’s any candy around. We’ve only gotten halfway through the photos, and people keep emailing us new ones. On the plus side, the book is starting to look awesome.
If I put enough sugar and milk in it, I can drink coffee. So that’s good, I guess.
We uploaded the Bruce the Magnificent photo book. It should be done by the time we get to San Francisco tomorrow night. Or tonight. I’m losing track of time. Even Travis’s megawatt mega-energy burned out around an hour ago. But he kept at it, helping me pull photos from emails and the web until I was able to mostly re-create our journey. There aren’t a ton of photos of Ladybug and the rest of our family. (Though there is the one that the nice German woman took back in Atlanta….Apparently she has a well-regarded travel blog called Gute Fahrt. I am not even making this up….It means “Have a good drive” or something. How do the Germans not fall down laughing, I wonder?)
Anyway, there are more pictures of random strangers, and we’ve managed to include fun facts, memories, and even—this was Travis’s idea—some quotes that Bruce himself might have said while sightseeing. The best one? Someone at the hotel in Santa Fe had posted a photo of Bruce, Elvis, Ladybug, Miss Ruby, and Miss Georgia. Miss Georgia is laughing so hard, her face is kind of blurred. But she’s there. She’s laughing and she’s there.
My eyes are so tired that I can’t stop rubbing them, and my mouth tastes like something died in it around five hours ago. But I’m too excited to sleep. And Ladybug’s worth it. Seeing her smiling again will make it all worth it.
It’s our last night on the Southwest Chief, and of sleeping on a train—tomorrow we’ll take the Coast Starlight to San Francisco, and that’ll be it. It’ll be over, or almost. A few days seeing friends of Mom’s from law school, and then we fly home. I NEVER would have thought it at the beginning, but I’m actually going to miss the train, with its rumbling and chugging and constant movement. There’s something about us all being together, so cozy and snug, knowing that Mom and Mimi are right there, that Laurel’s only a few feet away, that we’re
all in one place, safe. It reminds me of camping trips, the way it felt when we all went to sleep in the tent. But even cozier, in a way, because the train rattles and swings, and outside in the corridor there are occasional footsteps or the quiet voice of the car attendant. (Of course, it also feels cozier than camping because we never—and I mean never—managed a camping trip where it didn’t rain. It was like a jinx.) Anyway, I’m not sure I can give Mimi the satisfaction and tell her, but truth is, I love it.
Who am I kidding? I’m not a total monster….Of course I’ll tell Mimi how amazing this was. I haven’t heard her say anything about her writing in a while. She was writing a lot with Gavin before the whole Miss Georgia thing, and since then she’s been typing away, but she hasn’t talked about it in ages.
It’s weird. At the beginning of the trip the two most important things were making it through my Reinvention Project and keeping Mimi from writing anything embarrassing about me. But now neither of them seems like that big a deal. I wonder if I should tell Mimi I don’t really care that much anymore. Who knows…maybe it would be fun to be in a book. Even if it is embarrassing, it’s kind of cool. It’s a way for this trip to be around forever.
I’m not sure I’m going to sleep. I think I’ll wait to watch the sun rise. Funny to think we’ve gone all the way across the country. No sunrise over the ocean here….It’s West Coast all the way.
Fun Fact!
Founded in 1781, Los Angeles was originally known as El Pueblo Sobre el Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles del Río de Porciúncula. (Again, imagine writing that as your return address. Short and simple, people. Short and simple is the way to go.)
Fun Fact!
Los Angeles is home to people from more than 180 countries speaking over 140 languages.
Not-So-Fun Fact!
Apparently homelessness has risen sharply in Los Angeles, and on any given night some 82,000 people are homeless. It seems like most of them live at the train station.
We’re in Los Angeles, City of Angels, the place where we say goodbye to Travis and Miss Ruby and Gavin and get on our last train north to San Francisco. Outside it’s all palm trees and strip malls and highways and cars as far as I can see.
Meanwhile I feel like someone smacked me over the head with a frying pan. Seriously, there should be little stars and tweety birds around my skull, like in the old cartoons. I guess not sleeping gives you a headache? I wish I had known that yesterday. Still, I’m pretty excited. If all goes well, there will be a most amazing photo book waiting for us when we get to San Francisco this afternoon. I only wish Travis could be there to see it too.
Okay. Ten minutes of yoga (three sun salutations, some warrior one and two, and cobra and child pose to round it out), then…breakfast. With coffee! If nothing else I can claim that this trip’s a success on that front.
LIFE IN THE GREEN LANE
The American Road Trip is a tradition so famous, it’s almost a cliché: from Mark Twain to Jack Kerouac, it’s a story that’s been told dozens of different ways. But there’s a lot of cool discovery still to be found on this road trip, or rail trip, really, since we’re crisscrossing the country not in the lonely solo vibe of a car, but in the community of a train full of strangers. Things that surprised me:
• How friendly people are, how willing they are to talk and tell their stories, and ask me mine.
• How easy it was for me to judge people based on where they live and what they wear, and to be proven wrong again and again.
• How hard it is to say goodbye to people we’ve just met and landscapes I’ve only just seen but that have started to feel like home.
We’re close to the end of our journey, and man, I’m struggling with the end of this particular road. Confession time, Reader-Friends. I was sure of a whole lot of things when we started out. Sure of what’s right and what’s wrong, and where I belong, and how the rest of the world should fall in line. And now, less than a month later, I’ve learned I don’t know nearly as much as I thought I did. I had a plan, and the plan, man, was a good one. I was going to BE THE CHANGE. I was going to MAKE LOVE NOT WAR. I was going to DO THE WORK.
And these are all good plans.
But you know what? There are a ton of ways to fight for what matters. And if I’m going to fight, I need to arm myself—not with weapons—but with knowledge. Another thing I realized I don’t know? I don’t know nearly enough about successful and low-cost environmental alternatives to help our planet. So before I rip up my hands tearing down the old world, I think I’ll spend some time learning how to build a new one.
But here’s one thing I am sure of: my family is the most amazing, wacky, beautiful group of people in the world. And the hardest goodbye of all will be saying goodbye to them, my sisters and my moms, because a month of togetherness…well, that’s a gift that might not come around again real soon.
Perspectives.
This trip has offered some good ones, not only on the country we live in, but on those people I thought I knew best.
Happy trails, readers. Here’s to you all discovering a road trip of your own. Who knows where it might lead you.
Peace, Laurel
UGH. We had to say goodbye to Travis and his family. His mom, who seriously looks like she could be a movie star, was waiting on the platform when we pulled up. We were all together, mushed in near the doors with all our bags and stuff, Ladybug in Root’s arms because he was the only one willing to hold her after she spilled a big cup of pineapple-orange juice all over herself. Root’s honestly kinder than anyone else I’ve ever met. I don’t even mind his poncho anymore.
Anyway, Travis was peering out the window as we pulled in, and there were a ton of people all crowded around and I couldn’t see anything, but as soon as the door opened, he half jumped, half fell out and bellowed “HEY THERE, MAMA!!” at the top of his lungs. And this gorgeous woman with big sunglasses and a fancy-but-casual wraparound dress came charging toward us like a linebacker, pushing people out of her way. When she got to Travis, she hugged him so hard, his arms were pinned to his sides, and he stood there and took it. Then Gavin and Miss Ruby got off and hugged her too, and she hugged them back until Miss Ruby shoved everyone, saying, “We’re making a spectacle, and blocking the door, to boot. Now get a hold of yourselves.” But she was wiping her eyes.
Finally we all got ourselves off (Root’s sandal strap caught in the gap by the door, and he nearly went flying into three very old Japanese men, who looked seriously startled and bowed as they scampered out of his way). By then, Travis and his family had moved over to by the station and were waiting for us. I felt a little shy, suddenly. I’m still wearing the now pretty nasty T-shirt I wore for our all-night photo project, and my hair…well, it’s so short that there’s really no taming it after an all-nighter and minimal sleep. Compared to Travis’s glamorous mom, we all looked pretty bad. But she swooped in and hugged me like she had hugged him, so tight, I couldn’t move.
“You people!” she said when she’d finished hugging us all. “You people must be some kind of special. I’ve heard from Gavin and Travis all through this trip, and mostly what I heard was about these lovely folks who made everything so much more fun. How they celebrated Auntie G, how they took Travis in as one of their own, how they were just…salt of the earth.” She wiped her eyes and swooped over to look at Ladybug. “And this one! I talked to my Georgie one day before she passed, and you know what she told me? She said, ‘I’m sure glad I met that little girl. She knows how to find joy in everything, so she brings joy to everybody. She has a gift.’ That’s what she said. What do you think about that?” She looked at Ladybug.
Ladybug stared back for a second, then buried her face in Root’s shoulder. “But Bruce is gone. I loved him, and he’s gone. And all my pictures are gone too!” Her voice was muffled, but I could hear her start to cry.
Travis’s mom shook her head slowly. “I know, baby. I know. And you miss him. Of course you do. But you had this trip with him, right
? You had this magical, marvelous trip, and—photos or no photos—you’re not going to forget that anytime soon, are you?”
Ladybug sniffled.
“Well? Are you?” she asked again, and this time we all stared at Ladybug, who took her head out of Root’s shoulder and stared back.
“No,” she whispered, finally. Then: “NO!” she said, much louder. “I will NOT forget. I will never forget him!”
Travis’s mom nodded emphatically. “That’s right! NO you won’t! Now,” she said, turning to the rest of us. “I want to buy you people some lunch. It’s time to celebrate new friends!”
“And to say goodbye,” Mom added. “Our train leaves in a few hours.”
“And to say goodbye,” Travis’s mom agreed. “But first we celebrate!”
And we did. Even though Miss Georgia wasn’t there, even though we didn’t have Elvis or Bruce, it reminded me of our dinners together at the beginning, when everyone around us would stare. But instead of being embarrassed, I was kind of proud. We looked like we were having way more fun than anyone else, and I bet everyone who saw us secretly wished they were sitting with us…wished they were in on the story.
Saying goodbye to Travis and the rest of them—that part wasn’t so good. Ladybug cried (of course—she’s constantly damp these days, like a little mini-swamp). And I admit I was kind of teary myself. It wasn’t just saying goodbye to them, it was also the end of the trip, and knowing that I may never see any of them again.
Travis held out his hand, all formal-like, but I grabbed him and hugged him instead. Who cares if he’s a boy and I probably smelled like the salsa Ladybug spilled on me at lunch? He hugged me back, hard. He’s still shorter than me of course, but he gives good hugs.
“You take care of yourself, you hear?” he said. “I haven’t known you long, but girl, you’re downright dangerous—burning your hair right off your head, dying yourself blue, writing who-knows-what in that darn secret book of yours.”
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