DEAR ROAD
a memoir in vignettes about leaving and being found
With no job and no money, but also no strings tying me to any one place, I set out to live on the road in 2019, tent-camping across America. From Pittsburgh to coastal North Carolina, through the desert and up to the San Juan Islands and beyond, I lived a life distilled, one moment at a time. I fell in love with Northern New Mexico and chose to stay there for the winter rather than returning to the East Coast—but winter brought the pandemic, and “winter” turned into four solo years in the desert, until something beyond my control once again signaled for me to take another dose of road medicine.
DEAR ROAD is finished and on its way into the world.
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FROM DEAR ROAD
There was a distinct moment when I realized I was no longer relating to domestic life and all its conveniences. There was no more apprehension about living out of my car or being out in the world, miles away from everything and everyone familiar. It was as if one day I found myself suddenly relating more to the road, and I had found a sort of peace in its transience. A kinship, even. Every day, there it was, waiting for me. No matter where I went, another option, another stretch of highway connecting me to the next piece of experience. And any time, day or night, at any moment, I could jump on its back and go. Or I could stay.
My time on the road had changed me in such quiet shifts, week by week, I hadn’t even noticed until I’d reached a tipping point, and then it hit me: I’d become a nomad. A drifter.
The road became the only constant, the thing that connected me to everything else. That steady highway line among changing scenery and skies became my home, my anchor, and my center in all things.
And everything about that came into focus—how I’d grown accustomed to wearing the most practical clothes and thinking nothing of washing them in streams and using the same biodegradable soap for washing them and my dishes and my hair. How I would cut my toenails in a parking lot and make food at a rest stop or wherever I happened to be when I got hungry.
Movement became steady, home was wherever I was, and everyone else seemed to be standing still.
It was like I was on a different clock than the rest of America, and the clock was inside me.