“HIGHER EDUCATION”

by J. Bauer

     As a kid, I never predicted that when I was twenty-six I would travel around the country in a van. The life track that I was groomed for all my growing up years said that in my mid-twenties I'd be working some high-end corporate job, one that would give me slack if I took four days off in a row. Instead, here I was on a road trip, not for four days, but for four weeks, traveling the lower forty-eight with my husband and dog in a Chevy van.

     I had toyed around with the idea of traveling the country for a long time. I had always enjoyed road trips, even as a kid. No "are we there yet?" laments from me. The open road had a certain appeal to me. As a kid, I lived by a highway. Along the service road, there was a large undeveloped hill that was used for kids getting drunk on the weekends and dirtbike derbies. It climbed several feet in the air, which for a kid like me, seemed like a huge mountain. You could see past the highway and the hills beyond, and it seemed like forever. I would climb on that mountain and watch the traffic go by, wondering where they were going, and imagining the destiny they were heading to. Then they would disappear from sight. It seemed like such a cool thing, to drive so far that you couldn't be reached. I always like the road from then on.

     As an adult, I began testing the boundaries. I drove to Philadelphia from Long Island by myself, and spent most of my college days driving around in my car for the heck of it. One time on a lark, I drove to Montauk with a friend from western Long Island at midnight. We crashed for the night and then drove back the very next morning after breakfast. And then there was the time that I needed a good drive to get away from things, so I drove from the Island to Vermont for dinner and then drove right back. When I got married, my husband and I would drive to Florida to see his family. I loved staying in hotels and eating at the different restaurants, seeing how other people in the country lived.

     But even with all of this traveling , I still had never been west of Tennessee. Though I had certainly gotten my fill of the Atlantic Ocean, I had never seen the Pacific, except in movies. I really got excited at the idea of going to see the whole country, but I didn't really have the nerve to do so. I didn't know anyone who had done it, and I didn't know how to go about it. The closest I had come to a cross-country road trip was when I told people I wanted to go to Montana when I was in college. But it remained an idea more than a real goal. So, no Montana, no Pacific Ocean. Besides, I had to focus on my career and my future, so I didn't have time to waste on road trips like I was some silly kid in high school. That all changed in my mid-twenties. My father had died when I was twenty-four, just before I graduated college. Somehow the high-flying career just didn't seem as important to me. Instead, I married the right man at an age that was much younger than the career girl's socially sanctioned thirty, admitted I didn't want kids, and took any low-paying job available that would support my budding writing habit. With this carpe diem attitude, it wasn't all that surprising that my dream of hitting the road came up full blast. And synchronicity seemed to have its hand in playing with the dream as well: it was at one of these low-paying jobs that I met people who had done what I wanted to do. One of the people was a woman who took a year off from college and lived in a van for eight months, living in national park campgrounds. Another was a sister of one of the managers; when she got married, neither she nor her husband had regular jobs yet, so they rented a camper and traveled around the country for six weeks. Hearing these stories really got my travel juices going. I'd never been one for tourist traps while traveling, and the idea of hopping from national park to national park was salivating. I knew it would only be a matter of time before I would be taking my road trip as well.

     When I finally embarked on my national road trip in May of 1997, it almost happened spontaneously. My husband and I were thinking of going to Florida again, but thought maybe we needed a change of scenery, a road trip that didn't include in-laws. He suggested somewhere West, and I immediately sold him on my idea of going to the national parks; the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Yellowstone were coming to me. Now this dream was becoming a reality, and it consumed me from that moment until we actually drove away.

     Talking about a dream and actually doing it was two different things. It felt like one of those dares that sorority sisters do to haze initiates. I felt like saying to the girls, no thanks, and then beg off the whole thing, pleading a Tuesday night laundry bash or something else that was banally secure. What the heck was I thinking, coming up with a grand scheme like taking off life for a month and galavanting around the country? What if we broke down in the middle of nowhere and the nearest gas station was fifty miles away and the only people around were hitchhikers looking to start their lives over in Las Vegas?

     Yet at the same time, I poured over national atlases, looking at some random place, and wondering if I was going to be there, far away from what was my cilvization. I looked at my guide for national parks, wondering how many I would hit. It was as though there were two people in me, the pragmatist and the adventurer. One voice was telling me to get a real job with a real life. Bo--ring, said the adventurer. Any good parks in Missouri?

     What finally cured my indifference was my own life. I was on the verge of quitting another job, realizing that it wasn't what I wanted for my life. It had been the first real office job I had, working for a non-profit organization as a sort of office manager. Really, it had been my first stab at thinking seriously about my career. And the whole experience was disappointing to me. It was a reassessment time: do I want to spend my life fulfilling the expectations of others, or do I want to follow my own chart? My life seemed to crisscross between following my own heart and acting grown up, emphasize acting. The acting was really getting to me. I needed to get away, far away. And this botched experience made me take this dream that seemed so whimsical more seriously: how would I feel if at the end of my life I turned down an opportunity to do what I really wanted, just so I could appear serious about my life to people who probably didn't care anyway? It was time to down the shoulds and turn my life into deeds. I was the only one who was stopping me. Once I realized that, I started packing.

     Getting in the van and taking off was a turning point for me. When you in a high-pressured area that sends all their kids to private college and state universities are on par with expletives, it's easy to think that your way only way to live, the only way to define success. That success that I was indoctrinated with made it seem like anything less than constant competition for material gain and social prestige was a life that failed. Since my own life wasn't falling into line with the dominant ethos, I was wondering if following my heart was leading into a botched life pattern. It seemed like the only way to rectify it was to accept the "truth" that others were telling me-- you need to make a lot of money, buy a house that is worth at minimum half a million, have kids that make the National Honor Society and are involved in fifteen other activities, and have a husband who is at minimum a lawyer so you could spend all his money as well as yours keeping up with the weekly clothing fashion trends. None of this stuff made any sense as far as my life went, but when you hear something long enough, no matter how subjective it is on the surface, it begins to make sense. But once I took off in the van, this carefully constructed belief that was trying to sink its tentacles into my psyche was blown to bits.

     One of the most interesting things about road travel is that you see how other people live. Air travel to some exotic location doesn't quite have the same effect; what you see is determined by the tourist industry. There was the time that I went to Grenada as part of a cruise itenirary, and the spectacle that was presented to me was one of happy natives drinking rum and performing limbo dances for all the white tourists. It was only as the ship pulled away that we saw a military helicopter flying low over the island, a reminder of the political climate that the happy natives lived through on a daily basis. But then the ship left, and all we knew was that we were going to another happy place where we could make merry. A road trip would have done more to right the imbalance this carpe diem perception, although being stopped by guards with Uzzis isn't necessarily my idea of fun.

     Traveling around the country, the world that is the United States moved slowly past my eyes. From our house in Long Island we headed through the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee to San Diego, stopping in Texas where they have the famous free 72 ounce steak if you eat the whole thing in an hour. From there we headed up to Seattle, and from there through Montana to Yellowstone, and then we headed home through Missouri and southern Illinois. We drove through twenty states in total, sleeping in our van more than hotels. Spending the days trekking through national parks such as Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, the granduer expanded my focus past such petty concerns such as The Importance Of My Career. I finally saw the Pacific Ocean, and swam in its waters. I met people who spent their days camping around, and ate in the same restaurants with the truck drivers responsible for delivering goods so I could maintain my middle-class lifestyle. I saw the WASP side of America that was called Main Street USA, instead of confining my vision of the United States to a big ethnic Catholic and Jewish metropolis. You could see how conservatives could protest that business hadn't hurt the environment, because so much of the land was vast, open, seeming untouched space. You could also see why liberals lamented the death of the environment, because where there was civilization, the crowding and the pollution that went along with it seemed to go on forever.

     The one thing I had learned by embarking on this trip was that truth and success were relative. The complexity of the world in its variations of inhabitants and landscapes gave color to these virtues that had previously been presented to me in black or white. Truth came from the ethos that was in my heart, and success was choosing to live by it. But I would have never learned this lesson if I had not taken the risk and put the keys in the ignition. I'm glad that I took the risk to drive down that highway and disappear from recognition.