This morning, I realize I'm ready.
Forty-five minutes ago, I was awoken by thunder (no, seriously...), and found I could not get back to sleep. I got up, brewed some coffee, set to making my usual on-line rounds with a cup just as the more ambitious birds began to herald the approaching day. Since then, the sky has started to lighten - a dull gray substance seeping through the branches of the tree outside my window - and the thin twitter of birdsong has become a chorus.
I'm restless this morning. So much so, I can taste it. The usual rounds are not cutting it. The usual anything seems to pale in comparison to every other option or possible outcome. My head spins; my feet dance and squirm a little underneath my desk. I assume it's the coffee. It usually is.
But not this time.
Part of my restlessness comes from a strong urge to run. Old friends and lovers are with me this morning. People who were part of my life once but since vanished are sitting in this office with me, waiting, I suspect, for something I can no longer give. My parents are here too. They look well; but looks can be deceiving. I know this is not their most current representation. They are living their golden years these days, still in good health but on borrowed time. No matter how well they take care of themselves from here out, no matter how upbeat they stay, how busy they remain, time will run out. I can no longer delude myself otherwise.
And neither can they.
My disquiet is also an equally strong urge to chase - to pursue, to capture something that has gotten away, or always eluded me; I'm not quite sure. The commotion of the thunderstorm that awoke me made sure of that. It has lit a fire under me; like an argument in the next room I feel compelled to eavesdrop on. I want to know what's going on. I need to know what is happening.
The time of year doesn't help; always makes me restless. I love June. Its connection to weddings is not hard to figure out. June breathes deeply, like a young, happy woman. New fragrance. New warmth. New life. Everything possible. In June, long hours of daylight slowly, almost grudgingly, cede to nighttime hours. And where I come from, the dusk hangs around long after the sun has set, lingering well past 10 p.m., and that glimmer of pale light peeking out from behind the dark silhouettes of wind-swept clouds in the west is a last call; a final invitation. There's still time, it tells me, to get somewhere. You've still got the whole summer ahead of you. Don't go to sleep. You can sleep when you're dead. Go and see something. Something new. Go, go!
June is the perfect time to go.
As it is true that everything is worth knowing, it's equally true that everywhere is worth going. I've been restless since I was 13, spellbound by the thought of rambling about in this sundry world, dreaming these many years of the ultimate road trip I was sure I would take one day, but haven't yet.
I never planned the details of my road trip, never thought of a particular destination. There wasn't one, really, and it didn't matter. The loneliest little town with nothing to offer would suffice, just as long as I had never walked its streets before and for ever more could say that I had. I was not going to be a conventional tourist in need of an RV park, a family fun center, a strip mall full of familiarity and convenience. I was going to be a drifter. Throughout my youth and young adulthood, I have been in love with the thought of creeping through other people's worlds, stopping just a little while, mostly unseen, imprinting it in my mind, then moving on. In my youth it was a wholly romantic, and unrealistic, scenario, spurred on by rock classics about hitting the highway from the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Meatloaf and Bob Seger. Time and maturity have put it into perspective, forced running to share center stage and top billing with chasing, but not quelled it. There have been many mornings like this, where I could picture myself going, and wished desperately that I were.
But I never have. I've never dared step out of my safe zone. I've been lots of places, done my share of traveling, but always with an itinerary. I've never taken the 'road trip', never allowed myself to slip into the horizon and slip back out of it at will. Responsibilities, mostly, have kept it from happening...or the time was never right. Or maybe I was simply never ready.
This morning, I realize I'm ready. It's June, after all. June is a great time to go. June may breathe like a woman, but it fights like a man, egging me on, calling me a chickenshit.
Last night, authorities were searching for a 16-year-old California girl somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. She'd set sail in January, attempting to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe by herself, non-stop. Yesterday her emergency beacon started going off, 40 hours away from anywhere.
I went to bed hoping she was all right. This morning, it looks like she is. She ran into some technical trouble that may have ended her sojourn, but she is alive. Alive and well, the headlines read this morning.
Well, indeed. Maybe it's that story that has me pacing around in my mind. Sixteen years old, sailing around the world! How do you raise a kid like that? This isn't a complaint about my own. I love my boys, am proud of the men they've become. But they are not going to be braving 30 foot seas, rogue waves and high winds alone anytime soon.
Though neither was I at sixteen. It's probably something that gets handed down.
It's June. What have I handed down to my sons?
Sailing itself holds no particular allure for me, but it does encompass part of what has intrigued me about achieving that lovely drift. For me the proverbial road trip is as much about overcoming personal demons as it is seeing new places; it's a personal triumph over the inherent loneliness I've felt my entire life. I've always had a hunch the way to defeat this loneliness is to face it head on. And there is probably no more isolated, lonely place to be than 2000 miles from land, a 360 degree muddle of sky and water eclipsed only by 30 foot seas bent on swallowing you whole. Forget the physical and mental fortitude required to sail around the world, any teenager (anyone, but especially one so young) who can handle the super-concentrated loneliness and anxiety at sea has my undying respect.
Honestly, I don't know that I could do it. Even if I possessed the technical know-how, I don't think I could endure a life alone at sea for any extended period of time. The water would close in on me; the big sky would collapse, become the water. The boat in my soul would sink before the boat beneath my feet.
The road itself is lonely enough, I imagine; the stretch between unfamiliar towns might get to me, even with the comfort of solid ground. But I'm willing to give that a try. Willing to keep the planet beneath me and forsake 30 foot seas, for the chance to battle the 30 foot seas of my mind.
I've been willing for a long time. Now, for the first time in my life, standing on the precipice of middle age, I think I'm ready too. Ready to run and chase. So I have begun planning the trip. I've always dreamed of it. Now, I'm planning it, thinking about drifting here and there one day; the time, as Robert Frost once wrote, truly being neither wrong nor right.
It's June, after all. I've still got the whole summer. And this is as long as the days will ever be.
