A life on the road less traveled
Finding my path, writing my stories, driving my car
It was probably the 6th or 7th car I had looked at. And it was perfect. I was leaving the city of Boston, where cars are more of an inconvenience than a luxury, and I was moving out to the small island of Martha’s Vineyard in a few weeks. The time had come. I was going to get my first car. I spent that fall driving all around New England in my parents borrowed wheels responding to craigslist ads, on the hunt for the one that would check all the boxes and fit into my budget.
I was not ready to leave the city of Boston at all. It held me through difficult transitions, its most intimidating features becoming friendly over the 4 years I’d lived there, it kept me company with its street noise streaming in through my open windows, filling my tiny studio apartment with the world out there. It was the stage on which I made one of my first departures from the road well traveled, going left when everyone else was going right. It felt like home, but maybe that’s also why I was completely ready to leave, to see what else was out there, to move out and move on like most of my friends were, as they began graduating from the college that I had left behind after only a year and a half.
I scoured the classifieds and looked at old Jeeps and older Volvos, nearly fell for an extremely beat up but charming wood paneled Wagoneer, but nothing really felt right until I came across the ad for the used ‘00 Pathfinder for sale in New Hampshire, several hours away. It was love at first sight. It was in great shape and had all the important things: leather (heated!) seats, a CD player, a sunroof, and I guess the other important stuff too: good mileage, healthy systems and engine and whatever. It was perfect, it was mine.
I was 21 years old and the world stretched out before me like an open road, an infinite array of possibilities around any and every corner, and now I had a way to get there, to arrive to wherever my future would take me. In January I drove my car onto a ferry that transported me off the coast of Massachusetts and out to Martha’s Vineyard, where the leather in the backseat got torn from my Scottish friend’s new puppy and where the driver’s side floor was always sandy and where I blew out my rear shocks by taking the speed bumps on my road too fast and where the air-conditioning officially broke but it didn’t matter because the wind felt so good in my hair and then in the following autumn, I packed it up again, but this time I was going somewhere I had never been before.
It sang my playlist while it shuttled my terror and tears and excitement and grief and longing and anticipation out of the congested Northeast and through the Appalachians and into the open rolling hills and farmlands and across the flattest expanses of golden land you’ve ever seen dotted with stark black cows, until it met the foothills and crawled its way up into the steep and spectacular Rocky Mountains, delivering me safely into a new life in a little town called Vail.
We met in my car. I was driving to a bar with my roommate who had become a fast and close friend, and she had been texting with a new boy — can he come tonight, too? Can he bring his roommate, too? Sure, why not. We stopped at their house to pick them up, the backdoors opened with a gust of sharp winter air and the magic of chance, and we exchanged hellos and nice to meet you’s in the dark with the two warm strangers as I reversed out of the driveway, making fleeting eye contact in the rearview mirror with my future husband and partner of 15 years, sitting in the backseat.
I took care of the car as best I could, scraping together pennies for oil changes here and brake pads there, but I was hard on her too. Accelerating too fast, asking her to haul me to countless new homes over the years in Lake Tahoe California, then back to Vail when that didn’t work out, then back to the shores of east coast, then to upstate New York. We stood around our kitchen in Rochester that summer and said out loud what we had both been thinking: we missed the wide open expanses of the west, the space, the possibility, the grandeur of nature. We picked a place on a map, thought Seattle sounded good, and packed her up again to drive to the Pacific Northwest.
She crossed the continent half a dozen times, moved me to new apartments over 18 times, the act of packing the trunk with my life’s possessions a familiar pastime. She piled on the miles, but she always kept going. She got new fan belts and flushed transmissions and and new shocks and new tires twice around and had become the ship of Theseus— was she really even the same car, with all her pieces and parts being replaced over the years?
I was taking care of myself the best way I knew how too, the best way anyone knows how when they’re in their twenties and finding their way, but I was hard on myself, too. Smoking too many cigarettes, drinking too much, too many late nights and meals from drive-thrus. I watched my friends get “real jobs” as I continued waiting tables and going to bars and starting over, wondering in between in it all how I’d afford next month’s bills, what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go next, who I wanted to be. There was too much that I wanted to understand, explore, experience, and the practical or rational options seemed like a door shutting on the big, beautiful world.
They say that if you can see the road laid out ahead of you, then you’re probably on somebody else’s. I never saw the road, but I never really looked for it either. I didn’t want Their Road, I wanted mine. I went wherever my impulses and decisions took me, and my Pathfinder delivered me to the next place, the next step, the next chapter, as it was taking shape in front of me. It was my steadfast companion amid a ceaselessly changing backdrop of climates, landscapes, faces, interests and priorities, the thing I could count on to deliver me safely into the unknown. It held breakdowns and pep talks, it held a rotating collection of my favorite people on the planet, it held my dreams and my rage, it held the moments in which I have felt the most scared and the most free in my entire life.
It was the promise of adventure, of the unknown, of the road less traveled, of possibility, in heated leather seats and a sunroof that offered a perpetual view of the wide open sky. It was a vehicle of my own evolution, my own unfolding, my own independence, my own path. It transported me through all my stories and selves: from an insecure and unsure 21 year old into a 33 year old who spoke to crowds and guided others, from a college dropout to the owner of my own business, from a child to a childlike full on Grown Up who was married and owned a home and finally knew how to truly take care of herself.
I drove that car for twelve years, and to this day it is the only car I’ve ever owned. In the fall of 2018 as I pulled off the exit ramp of I-5 in Seattle, like she knew to wait until I was in a safe place to let go, there was a loud bang followed by loss of steerage. My heart raced as I slowed to a stop, and got out to see the entire front tires entirely unhinged, no longer connected to the body of the car. The ball joints and tie rods had failed. She got towed to the shop, where she was then towed to a salvage yard where I donated her pieces and parts, after it became clear that the repairs required to get this and all her other various, slowly accumulating ailments cured was far, far more than the 18 year old car was even worth. Reason and rationality won out over nostalgia and sentiment.
Saying goodbye was harder than I thought it would be. Silly, I knew. But oh, the places I had gone, and the worlds I had seen, the people I had met, the lives I had lived, all through this one vehicle. It contained my entire twenties, a countless collection of stories and paths.
We find this absolute connectedness hard to grasp. We often prefer to forget it. We often push back against it. But it is there, real as sunlight, behind everything we do. Since it is too big for us to swallow whole, we approach it through metaphor. We tell stories about monsters and magic and elemental gods, but really we are finding a way to understand. Really we are talking about us, all of us together. Some of the old stories don’t work anymore. We are finding them harder and harder to understand. But that doesn’t mean we abandon them. Instead, we need to double down on the storytelling, and find new ways to tell out our meanings. Perhaps that is what we’re meant to do: remake our stories until we finally find the one that fits.
-Katherine May
When Mike and I bought our little trailer sailor sailboat, we named her Pathfinder in homage to not only the place we first met, but the air of adventure and novelty and happenstance and excitement that she inherently carried. Saying goodbye to the car and all it represented to us was in many ways what shook us awake to the ways in which our newfound comfort and stability in life had become too much comfort and stability.
Without even noticing, all of a sudden we had a mortgage and were each in solid positions of fulfilling employment, we didn’t worry about how bills would be paid each month, we didn’t worry about what will break next, we didn’t worry about where we’d be going at the end of the season, we didn’t dream about the possibilities. We had left the open road — and we needed to for a time, the stability felt necessary after so many wandering years, and we count ourselves extremely lucky to have been able to find it at all. But in some ways we drifted asleep at the wheel here, and woke up on the straight and narrow. For the first time ever, I could see the road laid out in front of us, and it was smooth, too smooth.
I longed for speed bumps that I could take too fast and sand accumulating around my feet and the wind blowing my hair in all directions and scary new roads leading who knows where and the feeling you get when you press your foot on the gas a little too hard. I missed asking where we’d go next and wondering how we’ll make it happen and staring in confusion and imagination at the map. I craved seeing the world and all it offers in the giant, expansive and entirely scary way that it all seems when you’re 21 and on the brink of nothing and everything.
I missed how the physical act of moving can be a ceremonious rebirth of sorts, I wanted to get back in touch with the journey itself, the electric way everything feels when you’re in-between two positions in time and space, when you’ve left but haven’t yet arrived, not who you once were but not quite who you will soon be. I needed a new story, a vehicle for the regular invitation to move and shift and wander, I pined for the frequent contact with coincidence and magic and chance, where rationality and reason take a back seat.
My years with my Pathfinder on the open road helped me to establish the feeling of “home” somewhere deep within myself, that I realized I could carry with me anywhere. I wanted to be a student again, a beginner seeing it all for the first time, paying attention to the details and scenery in the way that only a newcomer can. I remembered that the path wasn’t to be found, it was to be made. It was time to head back out into unfamiliar terrain, to renegotiate everything, to piece my self together through stories written in wild environments under the wide open sky, asking what might I find, who could I be?
xo,
T
As a now-travel nurse and business owner who used to be too practical and stayed too still - this article brought me to tears. Thank you.