Flying Solo
People think it’s a little weird when I hit the road by myself.
“How can you do that?” they ask. “I could never do something like that,” they’ll tell me. Or their grim look of shock will give away their apprehension. “Weird-o,” they’re thinking, I’m sure.
The other one I hear a lot is, “I would love to do something like that.” And it’s hard to tell which category of people needs a solitary road trip: the scared, or the desperate.
When you’re scared and desperate, hitting the road can be the best medicine. Being stuck in the car for eight straight hours of high-powered maneuvering down back desert roads is therapeutic – but maybe therapists are supposed to say that.
No – I’ve found it’s awfully true. Sometimes alarmingly true. And it’s not easy, being stuck with yourself all that time. You get lonely.
The thing about cross-country road trips, however, is that you’re never truly alone. I met a nice guy from Seattle who was down taking pictures of the Grand Canyon and was headed to Zion after we had breakfast together at the Jacob Lake Inn. He wanted to hit the canyon by sunrise to take pictures, but he never made it. Instead, he had French Toast at 7 a.m. with me, just as I was getting ready to leave the place. He was a traveler, like me, so we shared stories of Sitgraves Pass and the wather in the Pacific Northwest.
We never traded names. I didn’t get the name of the nice couple from Winslow, Arizona either, but we talked for most of the evening after my first visit to the canyon. They were headed to Zion, too, and just drove in from Bryce Canyon. He was from Kentucky, an Air Force retiree, and she was a life-long Winslow resident. Her dad used to take her to First Mesa and pick rasberries in the canyons. Amazing, I thought, that such growth was possible in the Navajo desert.
Mrs. Winslow felt we were on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius. Didn’t I think everything was weird now? And didn’t I get the feeling that things were going to change?
“You keep doing what you’re doing, sweetie,” she told me outside our rooms at the Inn. “You’ll be ready when this awful world starts to get better. It’s due.”
There was the single dad in Springdale, Utah, raising two kids on his own. The girl was 2, the boy was 9 or 10, and the dad had salt and pepper hair. They had the boy’s friend along, too, and the four of them ate and made a bunch of ruckus in the pool room of the Bit & Spur while I watched Oregon dismantle Tennessee.
“You thought you were going to watch football in peace?” he said, grinning.
After his daughter grabbed the pool stick and started waving it around like one of the drunk locals, he had to beat it out of the bar. Life was probably going to be like that for him – for many years to come.
There was the couple from Grand Junction, Colorado, retired teachers marching all over the Southwest on a hiking tour. They were pros, too, with their walking sticks and binoculars. It took me a minute to remember where I recognized Grand Junction. Then it hit me: I slept there on my way home from the Route 66 trip, not realizing how beautiful the place was because I arrived in the middle of the night.
That started our conversation about travel, and I realized it was the one thing I had in common with all these people: we liked going places. Even though most of them were either Baby Boomers or retirement age, we could talk comfortably. It didn’t take me long to recognize that both foreigners and retirees were the ones that frequented this part of the country. There were a few young couples, yes, but they were rare compared to the man and wife in their mid-50s or 60s who said Zion or the canyon wasn’t their first stop.
The older couple from Houston shared similar destinations: Zion, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Monument Valley. Tourists didn’t stop at just one; they made a point of seeing them all.
So it was with me, all by myself, but again – not really. There were long stretches (in the car, in my room, hiking) when I had plenty of time to myself. The solitude was what I was out here for, but gosh, it’s not like I’m totally alone.
Really, it’s a sort of confidence booster. Fellow travelers seem proud that I’m out here, in the middle of nowhere, seeing the world while I’m “still able.” You can almost sense a whiff of envy, like they wish they could’ve made similar trips when they were younger. Old or young, it doesn’t matter – as long as you get out and see the world sometime, right?