R and J in the USA

Written by Julie

When we first crossed into Pennsylvania and left the tight twist and curves of Appalachia behind us, there was an almost instantaneous moment of recognition of the terrain, especially for me.

Actually, in that moment, there was a crystallization of a feeling that one might be tempted to call magic, if one were prone to such characterizations…which I am. It wasn’t a magical feeling in the sense of seeming supernatural or inexplicable, but magic in the sense that it had a quality of something that sparkles. Magic in the sense that it is something that you hope might be able to be concocted, but you can never be absolutely sure that it can. All you can do is try and hope that your efforts will give that hope a fighting chance to become realized. 

It is like the ingredients in a recipe chosen with care that you put together specifically for the purpose of making something delicious, but still, when the aroma begins to formulate and fill your kitchen with realized hopes, it still takes your senses by storm and floods you with a feeling of surprise – even though you expected it, you hoped for it, you planned for it. No matter how good a recipe and no matter how well you follow it, the hoped for results are never a guarantee and it still somehow seems like magic when the forces that be do as they have always done, and cook something that once wasn’t into something that now is. And if that thing that comes into being was as delicious as you’d hoped, even though you know exactly how you took the steps to bring it into being, the delicious feel of melted chocolate inside a freshly baked cookie can still feel a little big like magic.

That is how I felt when we crossed the border into Pennsylvania.

There were many reasons why I wanted to be on this trip in one fell swoop and non-stop, without any visits home. Each of those reasons was an ingredient in a different recipe that I was hoping to create out of this 50 States adventure. And one of those reasons bore fruit when we crossed the state line into Pennsylvania. 

Ryan came on this trip in order to share in the adventure and the experience of a lifetime with his wife. That, in and of itself, is more than enough reason to do this trip and has been absolutely remarkable from start to finish. But, for him, that reason was very much enough and was satisfied simply by coming along for the ride. But, for him, he also knew he didn’t want to be away from his mother, especially in her ever more shiny golden years, for a full 10 or 11 months. He would go home every 4-6 weeks throughout the trip for a visit. He traveled home to be filled up by the warmth and the joy of family traditions and togetherness of the holidays on Thanksgiving and Christmas. But I did not come along. I stayed on the trip and was committed, from day one, to staying on the trip for the duration. The only visit I had to home in what will be the 11 months of the trip by the time we finish, was a very quick pass through between our 10th state of Vermont and our 11th state of Ohio after dropping Ryan off for one of his visits and then carrying straight on. That was 8 months ago now.

There is a decent sized list of reasons for this choice, but one of the reasons was one of the recipes I was hoping to cook up over the course of the trip – like a new cookie recipe that one hopes will turn out just so, and you only know if it is when you catch those salivation-inducing aromas wafting from the oven into the kitchen telling you that the way you combined those ingredients is making something marvelous.

And when we crossed over into Pennsylvania for the first time, that is exactly what happened for me, the aromas of one of the many things I had hoped for when we shoved off for our maiden miles of the trip was realized – and in the most authentic, unexpected and magical rush of feelings kind of way. It worked, what I had hoped for – it worked.

Part of what had made it work so beautifully is that, though the pursuit of this goal was baked into the choices and strategy of the trip, it wasn’t top of my mind in the moment we crossed the state line and into the Pennsylvania countryside. As a matter of fact, it took me almost completely by surprise. It wasn’t that I had forgotten, per se, just that it wasn’t something I was focused on.  So when this experience came over me, this experience that I had intended and hoped for when all of the foundational trip choices were being made, it took me by surprise in the most wonderful of ways. Another layer of magic came when the memory flooded back of how much this specific experience was exactly something I had hoped and planned for from the very inception of the idea of the trip, as much as any can plan for an unexpected surge of emotion and discovery.

It was a very neat moment for me.

You may have noticed that I haven’t even said, yet, what, specifically it was that washed over me in that moment that was a hope and a dream fulfilled. 

Of the many hopes and dreams I had for this trip, one of them was for the chance to discover the particular beauty of the place I knew as home – to be able to see it purely in the foreground of my mind, and not just as the backdrop. And that is exactly what was happening. And it was breathtaking. And the second I realized that is what was happening, it blew me away with a surge of something I don’t have words for, but was exactly what I had hoped for.

It is a difficult thing to do with anything you have grown up with and in, to see it naked and apart from any context or associations you naturally bring to it from your own personal relationship to it. It is not that I wanted to be separate from it, I simply wanted to be able to see it more purely as it is. It is hard, even now once it has happened, to put it into words, but when we crossed into Pennsylvania, it burst inside of me and was a thing of beauty. As it surged, I realized that the forces of familiarity are strong and I may or may not be able to hold onto this sense of pure view, but I was elated to have touched it.

There are so many wonderful things about a place being home. Of the many things this trip is and has been about for me is doing my best to be able to see all the different parts of the country through the lense of what it might feel like for that to be what someone calls home. It is inevitable that we can only touch that so deeply, as each place we move through, no matter what our intentions might be, in fact, we are tourists – sincere and curious tourists at best – but tourists nonetheless. We do our best to see enough of a place and to try and put ourselves in the mindset of the people living their lives on a daily basis in each place, but, we can only do so to a certain degree. 

But, one of my hopes was to also accomplish the reverse when it comes to the place that is my own home – to be able to see it through the eyes of someone that doesn’t know it as home – someone that is discovering it anew. Someone that sees it as one of the many shapes and pallets of how Mother Nature comes together in a new set of combinations to make a particular place with all its particular qualities and characteristics. 

When you grow up somewhere, it is so easy to simply feel like this is the way the world looks, and every place else is the deviation. But, in fact, there is no absolute to the way the world looks. It looks a million different ways all at once. All of the different colors and temperatures and smells and textures and landscapes of the world are living and breathing and pulsating in one big planet of life all at once, every day. The winds on the top of Everest are blowing at the same moment as the sun is beating down on the salt flats of Death Valley. The tropics are growing cacao trees at the very same time as Western New York is being covered in a fresh new blanket of snow. The waves of the seas are crashing up and down every coast in the world at the same time that sagebrush is rolling across a road in Idaho. There is no one environment or ecosystem or horizon that is simply the way things are and the way things look as the zero point on a spectrum reaching out from it in all directions. 

Perhaps people who have traveled a lot during their upbringing or lived in more than one place already know this and feel this in their bones. But, I knew, there is one place that feels, to me, like the way life looks, and from which every other place is a deviation.  Even though I’ve been to plenty of different places, and lived in a handful of them for a year or two here or there, like many travelers, any place that was different from what was normal to me simply took on that quality – different, exotic – with the unspoken assumption that it was always in comparison to what was not different, to what was the way things are at the baseline of home. 

I wanted to be able to see beyond that. I wanted to see the rolling green hills of New York, and its mountains and lakes and ponds, and its glowing green forests and plants and its bounding woodland creatures as what they actually are, another page in the stunningly amazing book of nature’s creations. 

But the well worn pathways of familiarity and the comforts of home are hard to break free of. And that’s not a bad thing. It is a good thing. There is no place like home, and that, in itself, is a treasure. But, still, I wanted to be able to see out the window and be able to see past the limitations of the wall of familiarity.

Tomorrow we will cross over the state line for our climactic (to us anyways) arrival in our 50th state. That is how we will do our best to see it, as a climactic arrival to our 50th state, rather than a return to our home state. We will finish our trip in our nation’s capital and THEN we will drive to New York State with the attitude of a return to home. Tomorrow, we aim to cross the finish line as an arrival in state number 50 on our 50 states tour of the United States of America – one more interesting, unique and layered state in the union.

And, when doing so, I do hope that this recipe of elements that I threw in the pot of this trip will produce those aromas. But, whether we will be able to see the state from a place of discovery or whether we will simply fall into the grooves of familiarity from decades of knowing a place as home is yet to be seen.

And it is also not the most important thing. There are many other dreams being pursued and realized on this trip. This is simply one of them. One that has a particular and unique kind of shimmer and magic and surprise to it. So, tomorrow, we will enter state 50 and see how it all shakes out – and no matter how it does – it’ll be an adventure and a discovery of something.

And, whether it happens or not in the way I hope when we enter state 50, it already happened when we rolled into state 49. I saw all the beauty in shapes and colors that my eyes had seen a million times before and it filled me from head to toe with a hoped for, but still unexpected sensation of pure discovery. I saw it with new eyes. I saw it with eyes that had spent 10.5 uninterrupted months seeing the open prairies where buffalo once roamed, the crashing waves on rainy shores and sunny shores across thousands of miles of coastline, the rugged rocks of orange and brown that make canyons and shoot up alongside them, the mountainscapes covered in snow and foliage, the wrinkles in the earth of the badlands and the collisions of tectonic plates that shoot mountains up with their layers of time visible in their profiles of layered rock, the swamps and gators and bayous and the brown tannin rich waters that flow through and by pine lands and on and on – I saw it as one more page in a chapter of an amazing book written in grand style by Mother Nature and her intersection with human culture and history. 

And it made my heart feel free – free from the bonds of taking something for granted, free from the shackles of only seeing life through one’s own small lense, free from any silly illusion of not being part of something big and alive all of the time – something that is living and breathing and always changing and always the same.

It is never that I felt wholly prisoner to these things in any kind of tormenting way, but simply that I suspected there to be a new kind of freedom worth striving for that was always sitting there as an invisible treasure that comfort and familiarity can easily convince is not there to reach for at all.

And, at least for my own experience, I was right. That treasure was there. And it was worth reaching for. And it is a moment in time and a surge of something special that I intend to remember and hold onto for the rest of my life. 

It is not the only thing that matters. It is not the only freedom to strive for. I wouldn’t even say it is the most important one to strive for or grasp, by any measure. But it has made the world and my view of it expand in new dimensions. It has made my experience swell with a special kind of richness. And, for me, that is worth a lot.

I looks forward to the freedoms that a feeling of home brings as well, but, for having had this glimpse beyond its walls, all of the warmth and comfort home can offer can now take on a new glow itself.

We shall see what tomorrow’s discovery of state #50 will bring, but, for me, one of the many dreams I had for this trip – one of the ones that seemed the most theoretical and the most likely to require a little bit of magic – has already come true.