Away We Go: Your Speed Five

The sun is rising red.

Smoke drifts through layers of clouds and they mingle, the natural and the intruder. This is the way of the American West in summertime. I am the only soul on this National Park road this morning, despite what the news has reported recently about their popularity. Granted, this one’s not on the way to anywhere and the temperature will reach one hundred today. But at six in the morning, I am accompanied only by fields of night-cooled lava and the sound of my pounding feet.

I'm doing sprints so I'm constantly at different pace: all out as fast as I can, walking and heaving to catch my breath, and slow jog as I ready myself for the next interval. It's during one of the latter that I pass by one of those speed limit signs with a radar attached and a screen that tells you your speed. Fifteen is the limit; an inconceivable pace on my two feet. Irritatingly slow on four wheels. To my surprise - so incongruous on a lunar lava flow in the dawn quiet - it flashes at me.

Your Speed: 5

I chuckle a little. Yep, that’s about right. I’ve never been very fast, as this sign has so accurately assessed. But there’s a little something deeper that crops up as I pass by.

We are nearing the end of the longest trip we've done. Summer is closing and the world has largely returned to normal after a year of upside-down (whether or not it should is the subject of another discussion). Masks are not as universal as they once were, gatherings have resumed and there’s much discussion of plane flights and the newest restaurants. The back-to-school section of the store is being arranged at this very moment.

But we won't be doing that. We will continue at five miles an hour while everyone else accelerates to fifteen.

It's an unbelievable privilege to be able to travel and work and educate so freely. Yet, even though I was the one that made the decision to continue for another year, I feel a little out of the loop. It’s a stone I’ve been carrying while complaining that my arm is tired. The thing my loves-to-be-busy mind keeps turning back to. Should we be doing this? What are we missing? Would it be easier at home? Questions made more pointed when the boys make their daily list about why they don’t like trips (for more on that, see https://www.bethdowning.com/blog/away-we-go-arguments-for-home).

There's a left-behind hole somewhere under my ribcage. A pang of jealousy for the mothers that will get to drop off their children at school and have a few moments of alone time. For the playdates and sports teams that my boys are not experiencing. I'm missing things, which is not a typical state when you decelerate. I’m not just in the slow lane, I'm not even on the highway. Which is ironic given the number of highways we have actually traveled.

Even though I’m certain that our Away We Go adventures are the right thing to have done, I've carried this stone from the beginning. It's the thing that prevented me from doing when it occurred to me years ago. First it was the excuse of the business, then infants, then just general inertia: there was far too much laundry to embark on a multi-month road trip. But then when the world stopped there were no more excuses. The rock got a little lighter. We weren't leaving classrooms or offices behind because of my singular choice. None of those things were happening anyway, no FOMO to be found. The slide was greased.

It's my choice but I feel guilty when a bad day comes along. Most of the time I can access the reasons why living on the road, in a tiny trailer, being with my family 24/7, driving all over creation, dealing with bugs and weird weather and dirty hands and two weeks without a shower is better than dropping the boys off at school and picking them up on the afternoon, ferrying them to sports practices and playing with friends. How being outside is an addendum to the day not a state of being. There are parts of the daily grind that I don’t miss in the slightest.

There’s an illusion of certainty at home that is both freeing and false. I didn’t want things to stay the same so I came out here. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss the comfort of sameness every now and then. And that I don’t feel the inherent separateness that comes along with it.

The flipside is this. Watching a red sun rise over a lava field farther than I can see.

We will continue. We will meet new people and often say goodbye to them within the hour. We’ll see marmots and deer and crabs and chipmunks. We will also miss our people. We will crave our alone time. We will be frustrated by the constant movement, unfavorable weather, and other uncertainties of living on the road. We will wonder what we’re missing. We will be sad for the ways that we used to be minutes instead of hours away from the people we care about. We will have days that we just don’t feel like it.

The challenge is letting myself be all these things at once.

Making peace with going five or fifteen. Or anything in between.

This story inspired by events at Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho.