There are parts of America I know only because I had somewhere else to be.
There’s a stretch of I-70 West, somewhere past Green River, where the road carves straight through the San Rafael Swell. The eastern edge of it, the San Rafael Reef, rises out of the desert in fins of red Navajo sandstone, layered with cream and rust and bone, and the morning sun coming up behind you lights it one ridge at a time. The interstate threads between Black Dragon Canyon and Devil’s Canyon like somebody dared it.
It’s kind of fucking magnificent.
I was doing seventy-five through it. I’d woken up in Grand Junction not entirely sure where I was going. The only fixed thing on the day was dropping the RV in Vegas before five. Everything after that was open. I drove west and started reaching: Facebook post asking if anyone in Vegas or LA could host me for sixteen hours, text to McCall about the photo shoot we’ve been circling for VoyageLA, text to my brother. The plans get made in the car. They get unmade in the car. Most of them never become plans.
Nobody locked in. McCall was at a ceremony a hundred miles from LAX. My brother had a play to see and would be a maybe at best. Nobody was failing me. Nothing was wrong. This is just what happens when you ask the world for time on a holiday weekend with a few hours’ notice. By the time I dropped the RV at Blue Compass, I’d booked a flight home through LA. Tomorrow, Monday, Tuesday — maybe my own bed. A four-hour layover at LAX in the middle of it, where maybe somebody would show, maybe nobody would.
That’s not a complaint. It’s a description.
I want to be honest about something before this essay goes anywhere else. The way I move is fast and unpredictable, and that produces isolation as a byproduct. Not as a wound. Not as anybody’s fault. Not even, exactly, as a problem. Just as a fact of the geometry. If you live like this, certain shapes of relationship become hard to keep. Certain offerings arrive on a clock that doesn’t match the offer. Certain people stay close in ways that look from the outside like they shouldn’t be possible, and certain people drift in ways nobody really chose.
I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel bad for me. I’m telling you this because I’ve been driving long enough to see the pattern, and I think it’s worth naming.
The last time I had real time in LA, it was a nine-hour layover. A friend in the afternoon. Dinner with my daughter that evening. The rental back at LAX before my flight.
Dinner was good. It was also shorter than I would’ve made it if I’d been the one writing the schedule. I left when the math said leave. I dropped the rental. I cleared security.
And then my flight got delayed.
I sat in that terminal for hours I could’ve spent across from my kid. That happens. Not as injustice. Just as the kind of thing that happens when you live in the gaps.
A friend of mine in Miami had a car accident earlier this year and needed a rental for two weeks. I picked up a car in Orlando and drove it down to her: Florida’s Turnpike to I-95, through the long flat green stretch where the cypress thickens and the sky gets bigger than the land, into Miami where the palms multiply and the air starts holding water. I dropped the car. I saw her for a little while. I had to be somewhere else.
That was March. I haven’t been back. I text her to make sure she’s good. She always says she is. I miss her.
You can love somebody and still only see them on the way to somewhere else. Driving fifteen hundred miles to deliver a car to a friend in a hard moment is, in this life, a long visit. It was also not enough. Both things are true and neither one is anybody’s failure.
There’s a woman near Creve Coeur, outside St. Louis, I used to see all the time. Whatever we had felt like it was building. Then she ghosted me. No fight. No reason given. Just a closed door and silence on the other side of it.
When I’m headed west — toward Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, OKC, Tulsa, Laughlin, anywhere that direction — I cut south of the city on I-270 to pick up I-44. That route passes her exit every single time. I have never once detoured. She closed the door. My job is to respect that it stays closed.
The schedule didn’t take her from me. She left. But the geography still belongs to her. Every time I-270 carries me past her exit, I think about her. The road remembers what I’m trying to put down.
Yesterday I got sick somewhere in transit and pulled off in Grand Junction for the night. I called a friend. We talked for a while. I told her LA might be possible the next day — not promised, not booked, just floated as a maybe.
This afternoon, while I was sitting at Blue Compass with my Pelican case and my Tumi backpack on top of it waiting for an Uber, her message came in. Her mom was having a barbecue tomorrow. Come over.
By that point I had already booked the flight home.
I told her my layover was four hours. I told her I hadn’t had home-cooked food in so long.
That’s not somebody failing somebody. That’s not even bad timing in the usual sense. That’s just what the geometry produces. I move the way I move. She lives the life she lives. Our clocks pass each other most of the time. Occasionally they intersect long enough to send a text that means more than the text says.
I said I hadn’t had home-cooked food in so long because that was true. The flight was already paid for either way.
This is what life between the layovers actually means. I thought it meant airports. It doesn’t.
It means feeding a friend on a forty-minute stop. It means meeting up with Billy for what was supposed to be a long catch-up and turns out to be one drink and a hug in a parking lot. It means McCall and a photo shoot that may or may not happen, depending on whose day breaks loose first. It means my daughter across a table from me with a clock I’m pretending not to look at. It means a friend in Miami who knows I love her by the fact that I keep showing up, however briefly, however far apart. It means a woman near Creve Coeur who I will never see again whether I drive past her exit or not. It means a barbecue offered honestly, arriving at a time when the answer was already decided.
The people I love know me in fragments. Not because they want to. Not because I want that for them. Because the shape of how I move makes fragments the available unit.
I have seen my own kid the way I’ve seen Glenwood Canyon. In passing. On the way to somewhere.
And there’s another I have not seen in much longer than that — a daughter in the same city, where things are harder for reasons that aren’t hers. The relationship still exists. It just barely happens. We are trying to build something out of what time did not protect.
Those are the sentences I have been afraid to write.
And then there are the women you only meet because both of you are between flights.
Three, maybe four times in a life, you sit down at a bar between flights and the woman one seat over is also sitting down at a bar between flights. You start talking. The clock is right there above the gate board. You can both see it. There’s no point pretending. You order another round. You tell her things you don’t tell people who get to keep you. She tells you things back. You fall in love for four hours and you both know that’s exactly how long it gets to last, and somehow knowing that is what lets the thing happen at all.
You hug at the gate. Maybe you trade numbers and maybe you don’t, and if you do, you both know what that means. Then you go where you were going, and so does she, and you carry her around in you for a few days like a song you only half remember.
I call them airport girlfriends because I don’t know what else to call them. It is a kind of love. And it only happens to people who live the way I live.
I have seen this country in fragments and I have seen the people I love in fragments and I don’t always know how to tell the two apart.
I know the Virgin River Gorge because I needed to be on the other side of it: twenty-nine miles of I-15 where Arizona reaches up between Nevada and Utah, walls of red and gray sandstone, the river running underneath you the whole way through.
I know the Pennsylvania Turnpike tunnels on I-76 because somebody needed a truck delivered east. Blue Mountain, Kittatinny, Tuscarora, Alleghen. Four long holes punched clean through the Appalachians. There’s a particular quiet inside those tunnels that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the road.
I know Glenwood Canyon in Colorado because I-70 has no other way through. Twelve miles of viaducts hung above the Colorado River where the canyon walls climb thirteen hundred feet straight up. I know Vail Pass at ten thousand feet, the moment the road tops out and the whole spine of the Rockies opens up like the country is showing you its hand.
I know the Pigeon River Gorge on I-40 between Tennessee and North Carolina because I used to run brake parts down to Myrtle Beach and that same road would carry me back through the Smokies. The Smokies don’t announce themselves the way the Rockies do. They breathe. That blue haze is real, sitting on the ridges like the mountains are exhaling. Pigeon Forge glows in the foothills like a carnival pitched against the dark of the range. The Appalachians are older than the Rockies. You can feel it. They’ve already done their settling.
I know the In-Ko-Pah Gorge on I-8, where the road drops three thousand feet in eleven miles coming out of the Cuyamacas, down through a boulder field that looks like God spilled marbles the size of houses, on the way to Yuma.
I know Lookout Pass on I-90, where Montana hands you off to Idaho high up in the Bitterroots. Wide. Cold. The kind of place where you can feel the curvature of the country.
I know I-270 around St. Louis and I-44 west through the Ozarks because some roads keep dragging you past the same ghosts.
I know what Florida looks like at three in the afternoon when you’ve been driving since dawn. The way I-95 going south stops being a road and starts being a slow descent into a different climate. The pines give way to palms. The sky takes more of the frame. The light gets heavier. By the time you hit Miami the air is wet enough to wear.
And I know Donner Pass, seven thousand feet over the Sierra Nevada on I-80, the mountain everybody hates. Green and beautiful. The most hated mountain in America and one of the prettiest I’ve ever crossed.
These are not places I visited. These are places I passed through on the way to somewhere I had to be.
I did not pay for these views. They were charged to whatever this life is costing me in another currency.
Back to today.
St. George shower happened. RV got dropped at Blue Compass. The Uber’s coming. Vegas in a couple hours. LA after that. The shoot probably won’t happen. The hang is a maybe. Most of today is a maybe. None of that is anybody’s fault, including mine. It’s just what asking the world for time on short notice on a holiday weekend produces.
Chicago at twelve-thirty in the morning. I’ll sleep on the plane the way I always sleep on planes: badly, sideways, with my mouth open. I’ll land. There will be another vehicle. There will be another road. There will be another sunrise on another piece of country I had no business seeing for free.
People ask me how I do it and the honest answer is: I don’t, not really. There is no rhythm to it I have figured out. There is only the next deadline and the willingness to keep moving toward it.
But here is what I’ve started to understand.
The math is not the love. The math is just the math.
The love is in the showing up at all. The forty-minute stop with a friend. The drink with Billy. The dinner with my daughter — perfect even when it’s short, perfect because I drove and flew and showered and rushed to be there. The rental delivered to a friend in Miami because that’s what was needed and that’s what I could do. Even the four hours at the airport bar with a stranger who became, briefly, somebody. Even the woman near Creve Coeur whose silence I am still respecting. Even the daughter I am still trying to find a way back toward. Even a barbecue offered, declined by circumstance, received anyway.
My peace has wheels under it. So does most of my love.
I cannot always stay.
But I keep coming back through.