I think back on it now as the pivotal journey of my life. Thirty-six years ago I loaded my earthly possessions into a 1975 Pontiac Catalina, a great, big car with eight cylinders bought used for $900, and drove West. Out West I would almost immediately find my wife and a new friend, Steve, who would lead us to Alaska a year later, all of us then drifting laterally through wild Western scenery for years to come.
I had just turned 27. I was scared on the road that summer of 1979. I didn't yet know how it would turn out, or turn out for the good. I left home, Fremont, Ohio, on June 10, saying I was going to Denver. On the road I veered toward Portland, thought about Phoenix, drove south again to Denver and then hauled it all the way West to California. On June 29, I drove into Fresno, of all places, ate a big breakfast at International House of Pancakes on North Blackstone Avenue, and here I was, a first-day Californian.
The crossing lasted 19 days. I have the journal entries to tell me that. What they don't tell is the separation anxiety, the sense of leaving home and family with no stated goals, the insecurity of staring into a blank canvass of the future while absolutely lacking a plan. There were times before leaving that I felt the thrill of being different and going for adventure. But on the road, across stretches of Iowa, then the river canyons of the Rockies on Interstate 70, I felt small and lost and even foolish. I appeared so glum in Wyoming on I-25 that a young hitchhiker whom I picked up asked why I was so unhappy. I didn't take him far beyond that. I was depressed enough.
There were times, indeed, during that drive - remembering back to international flights in 1976 which took me to West Africa with the Peace Corps, and considering the history of mental illness in our family tree - I thought I might be traveling toward the landscape of my nervous breakdown.
But they weren't. Both were, in fact, great journeys of liberation, of becoming someone not defined by Northwest Ohio or Midwestern America. Eventually, I would become more than just my father's son, though bless him, he would tell friends about my travels, remarking how I always found work. Now, when I come home to that ground upon which I was raised I enjoy the idea of settling back into it. I drive my old streets, feel the storms in August, visit small-town cemeteries filled with relatives and realize the most important thing is family. Yet family can wrap you in comfortable rituals of birthday parties for nieces, nephews and college roommates, and you cannot find some other part of yourself and hurtle it into the fire for tempering.
All these years later now, safe in a career, my son raised into his own adulthood and living in a pleasant neighborhood with my wife, I recall the sights and sensations: a terrible, dark thunderstorm in Nebraska, the runaway truck ramps of Colorado, floating in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. I remember unending curves of two-lane highways through the Sierra Nevada, rising and falling, an inexperienced mountain driver not taking advantage of turnouts and holding back traffic behind my big boat of a Catalina. There was the weird beauty of Mono Lake, the way the east side of the Sierra rose straight up from Highway 395. The great Utah desert I had crossed by night to avoid overheating. Stars filled the sky. The politics of the Carter era filled the AM car radio and kept me company.
It took a week from Denver to Fresno. When I look today at a map of the West I remember so little: Where I slept, what I ate or how I showered. I called home almost three weeks after leaving to tell my family I was in Utah and driving to California. I remember their relief, fearing I had been killed. It had not occurred to me how I had frightened them. In Africa, where we wrote letters, I had not called home in two years. Few in the Peace Corps did.
It was strange, this trip. Leaving for the Peace Corps in 1976 conveyed a sense of mission, a cause, a nobility in leaving my family and home. Driving West, calling from Utah, conveyed none of this high ground. I looked as purposeless as I was. I was driving toward nothing. I could not tell you what I planned to do short of being a writer.
Yes, what I really hoped to do was find my voice as a writer. Not this time as a newspaper journalist, rushed, shallow and maybe not very respectable, but a James Michener type, roaming the world, studying the cattle ranges and oil fields and writing about that. In my dreams I would be a magazine guy and eventually a book writer.
In the end, while running out of money with no book in sight, I drifted back to journalism. But this time it was in California and Alaska, living on a ranch in wine country, driving LA freeways, touring the Asia-facing Port of Oakland, reporting from and working in a state Capitol inhabited by Jerry Brown and helping to drive the most progressive ideas on earth.
California. I am gently, sweetly, home.
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