Mother-Son Cross-Country Trip
On November 20, I flew out to Medford, OR. My eldest son, Win, picked me up well past midnight from the tiny airport and after a few hours of sleep and several more loading his 1990 Toyota pick up truck, we hit the road. We were heading east all the way back to the Hudson Valley where he grew up and I still make my home.
We had one agenda: to take our time. I had one goal: to see parts of the country I’ve never experienced with the best tour guide in the world, and a proven travel companion. (We spent a happy month in Italy a few years ago.)
We traveled through Oregon and into Idaho and Wyoming, swung down into Colorado, and then across Kansas and into Missouri, then to Cincinnati, OH to visit with my sister before the final leg.
We ate our first celebratory “on the road” meal at the Ka-Mo-Ya Casino in Chiloquin, OR, talked truck with a GM at a car dealership in Burns, OR, slept 50 feet from the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River at the Angler’s Lodge in Island Park, ID, and crossed the soaring Teton Pass into Jackson, WY.
During our trip, we ate at dive bars, gas stations, local eateries, and food trucks. We stumbled upon a museum of indigenous art that was also the last gas station standing within a 100 mile radius. We screeched to a halt on a Wyoming road to watch a herd of bison jogging with purpose 100 yards away.
Perhaps the winner of the Most Unexpected and Serendipitously Magical Event was when Win pulled the truck over to the side of the road on an endless stretch through the high desert valleys of eastern Oregon. It was drizzling and he wanted me to smell his favorite smell in the world—sage brush, which stretched to the horizon and whose gloriously earthy, spicy aroma is a thousand times amplified when caught by rain.
In the middle of our three weeks we spent five peaceful days in Golden, CO in the home of a friend who let us stay there while she was out of the country.
While resting there, we cooked Thanksgiving dinner together—chicken, potatoes, and Brussels Sprouts (all roasted). We let ourselves be “trapped” in the house on a snowy day, spent 30 minutes communing with a herd of elk right behind the house, and hiked around Red Rocks.
On our trip I read to Win. A few chapters from a book I’m writing as we traversed the Great Basin, and an entire novel—Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead—as we meandered across Kansas towards St. Louis, MO, which for the record is where we ate our two best meals of the trip. We talked endlessly about many things, like ideas, personal epiphanies, people we love, stories from the past, what we’re grateful for, what we’re afraid of, wild brainstorms about possibilities for the future. I can’t remember everything. We listened to podcasts, namely Malcolm Gladwell (Revisionist History) and Michael Lewis (Against the Rules). We drank lots of coffee and bought lots of gas. Oh, and Win drank lots of cucumber lime Gatorade.
Every moment was perfect. Moments spent in the truck and in the wacky array of motels, or finding the most interesting meals, walking through towns and neighborhoods or driving across endless plains, through mountain passes, around and through cities, past rivers and lakes. The time was exactly how I wanted it to be, or how I might have wanted it to be if I had considered making such a plan. But my son and I had not planned it, beyond being comfortable letting it unfold naturally. Win and I never seemed to disagree about when to drive, or stop, or talk, or eat, or sleep, or explore, or watch, smell, and listen.
We had little structure and completely open days—though on most days we did need to traverse some miles before stopping again to explore and expand into the time we had. The feeling of expansiveness and peace, common cause and comfortable companionship, was grounding.
Win is, not surprisingly, one of my favorite people in the universe. Spending time with him filled my heart. The intellectual stimulation we always manage to spark in one another gave me extra juice that helped me on my return home as I re-focused on the joyful work I do with clients.
Road trips are a lot like writing. It’s not so much which road you travel as how you do it. And it’s not about which story you tell as how you tell it. I'm back to telling the stories that will open hearts and eyes to my clients’ messaging. A road worth traveling.
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