a travel memoir
SAVE FOR FIREFLIES
Home on the Roads Across America
* an older man at the Stirling House Diner in Stirling, New Jersey stopping, before leaving, to say it had been a pleasure dining with us
* the newborn daughter of old friends
But it was at the Lake Erie beach that I stopped to discover my holes to China had long been refilled and nothing there had ceased to exist. It dismantled and relieved me. This water, those trees and this sand never needed me. I would continue with that which still might.
Things Found in My Pocket Toward the End
* three rainbow barettes
* a dimming flashlight
* tissues used to wipe my younger daughter's nose
* a pamphlet about bear attacks
* much less money
* scavenged pebbles I'd been asked to hold onto
* a tick-removal key
* a map to a campground in Oregon called Farewell Bend
"Papa, tomorrow," my older daughter asked before closing her eyes on a hotel bed on the last day after more than I thought possible on the road, "we are doing what?"
"What do you think?"
"Maybe we can keep looking."
a U.S. road map at a local agence like someone who needed to get his bearings.
Where I'd Belonged
* a bassinet in Southern California
* a Lake Erie beach digging holes to China
* Pennsylvania with the fireflies and the porch
* San Francisco
* where guidebooks suggested
* whatever town would take us
Our rental campervan was fit to sleep and feed the four of us. We were never more at home than when the wheels were turning, carrying us clockwise aroud the nation. I gradually relinquished myself as a tourist.
Strangers
* Mary from Jackson, Mississippi living full-time in her RV
* Kent from Bovina, Texas and his bucket of walleyes
* a vacationing French teenager who wanted to move to Las Vegas after school
* the voice of the 38-foot tall Paul Bunyan statue in the California Redwoods
* a biker and her husband heading to the South Dakota Sturgis rally
* the 2008 Iowa State Fair Queen Ashley Quade
I'd been away years. I fell for and followed someone, back to her native France where we started a family that set in motion a kind of antique-carousel whirl of pink booties, puréed carrots and easy tears turning to the sound of a foreign language I was adopting nearly by mistake. I lay awake at night wondering how I ended up ici, of all places, where I assumed searching was behind me.
Things Then Missed
* free refills
* loudmouths
* the wilderness
* humor as an extension of sincerity and trust
* roomy interiors
* hysterics
* fireflies spotted from a back porch
* periodic leveling with one another
* doggie bags
My daughters, meanwhile, cleaned their plates with baguette bread while unconsciously conjugating French verbs in the subjunctive. This led me to drastic measures. I'd start with the wilderness. I convinced everyone to take an over-
reaching, flame-rekindling return trip. I purchased
