Watered-down wanderlust, Part 1

When the healthiest thing may be more of the same, just someplace else and with a small, forced shifting of priorities

I’m writing this from a low-budget motel room in Billings, Montana, where a step outside into a misty, 45-degree afternoon and a glance at the noncommittal sky evokes thoughts of late March rather than Mother’s Day even for someone raised in New England. From what I can gather mostly from citizen chatter at the gas pumps—and there are not many electric cars, or for that matter MINI Coopers, in this part of the country—this is not atypical for what there is of a Montana spring.

I decided on Tuesday afternoon to put Rosie and a few other things in the car and embark on a road trip toward, if not through or really even into, the Pacific Northwest. I hadn’t left Boulder for more than a couple of days since the fall of 2019, and was doing nothing at home that I couldn’t do elsewhere at an expense that was both manageable and worth the payoff of experiencing a new environment for a while. My mom is coming to Colorado for the first time next weekend, and I realized that I had time to sweep through as many as three of the five “lower 48” U.S. states I’d never been to—Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota and Arkansas—but not enough time to get really lost and decide along the way to just keep meandering around and running and renting rooms indefinitely in pet-friendly places where the majority of guests seem to be either escaping from or embarking on fresh domestic tumult.

I have a curious relationship with solo road trips, the only kind I take anymore. I am probably always going to be leery of changing my physical location in response to feelings of unease or unrest, because for a long time—intermittently for a period of over a dozen years, and with increasing fervor—this kind of behavior usually meant fleeing in response to some kind of real turmoil, like a destructive and prolonged drinking binge. Those binges ended years ago, yet my subconscious mind still associates the idea of getting away for a week or two, especially in response to irritation and swirling malevolent thoughts, with both recent and imminent personal collapse.

While this entrenched self-image and associated blasé lifestyle has helped me sock away enough money to be a relative screw-off for a bit, it has also kept me in an optional prison of sorts, as it reflects a general tendency to take practically no emotional risks in life. This tendency in turn has fostered a commensurate sense of disdain for my own resignation to shuffling through a low-stress, largely passion-free life. Despite the payoff—experiencing few operative personal failures or letdowns—it just doesn’t feel like the real me. As interesting as I find grotesque societal shifts, and as much spastic pleasure I might take in ripping into a freshly laid journalistic dung-heap or unconscious social-media self-immolation, I’m more about building new things and making repairs with whatever materials are available than I am into watching increasingly distant institutions fall apart, no matter how macabre and grandiose the stupidity driving a given episode of outrage may be.

In any case, as a result or hard experiences, it is something of a miracle that I can even trust myself to stay in hotel rooms by myself—or at least without a speech-capable companion—without a liquor bottle within constant reach. I did the opposite of this many, many times, and most of the last bout of my drinking in 2016 involved spending about five grand in various Denver-area hotel rooms deciding what moonless night would be best to run in front of a freight truck on the freeway. The reasons I have been able to get to the point I’m at now are really pretty basic, yet don’t feel amenable to explaining in written language, at least not to the personally uninitiated.

Regardless, despite my continued abstinence, a lot of the same paralyzing bouts of apathy I’ve always experienced even in relative prosperity remain, and it’s become impossible for me to tell the difference between the sense of impending doom created by a long string of alcohol-inspired doomsdays and a sense of impending inadequacy driven simply by who I am. Even on road trips, I continually confront the idea that I’m only doing enough and just enough to get by and refuse to allow myself the luxury of a minor adventure I earned myself and my pooch without scrutinizing every step of it for potential illegitimacies.

Example: If I run for 40 minutes in the rain, as I did today, I did it just to tell myself I did it and get the dog some rabbit-coveting time, and therefore didn’t make a pleasing, healthful choice; I merely fulfilled a low-level compulsion and an obligation. If I skip the run, nothing really changes and I don’t have a bunch of wet clothes to isolate in the car somewhere tomorrow, but then why take a road trip at all? Why even get out of bed? And so on. I’m continually in charge of making sure the boundaries of my comfort zone are too wide and applying pincers to the outsides of those boundaries. Mostly I’m just bored and anticipating a far busier summer, and am the typing epitome of a First World middle-aged problem.

Anyway, some of these thoughts over the next week or so on the road will be indistinguishable from those I could have offered from my home in Boulder, but they’re all pertinent somehow, even when none of it ties together.

When I set out, I had thoughts of driving a few hundred miles a day and getting as far as the Cascades. I knew after one day that this wouldn’t happen. I wound up stopping after about 140 miles on Tuesday in Laramie, where I spent a little time last summer while helping someone count plants and prairie-dog holes on a vast, soon-to-be wind-turbine operation in the Shirley Basin an hour north. There I spent two nights, lingering mainly because Rosie discovered a stretch of creek-side greenway especially rich in squirrels and rabbits. It is amazing how much joy a few minutes of that seems to bring a dog for the next bunch of hours, and if I am deluded in that and similar analyses, I’ll happily remain so.

On Thursday afternoon, we drove through the Shirley Basin and its growing array of whirling blades and found ourselves in Casper. If you have been to Boulder, imagine a city about half that size and culturally inverted in almost every manner possible. Everyone drives the speed limit even on four-lane roads. Apart from my fellow hotel guests, a number of whom are clearly usually homeless, most of the few people I have encountered seem less troubled by life than those back home.

Because I stay in dog-friendly, crappy motels, which are normally found in clusters near interstate ramps in less-lustrous parts their parent towns, I usually have to drive to go running if I want the run to be worthwhile. But in Casper, I wound up close to a nice, rolling greenway along the North Platte River and on some interpretive trails north of town. I interpreted being out of breath on the climb to the top of some mesa, as Rosie and other four-legged runners seem less challenged by upgrades as a function of fitness than humans do. (Like I can really tell, but when you stare at the same runner’s ass every day for 30 to 60 minutes, you start to wonder what she really thinks about the whole experience and the running subculture in general.) I saw one or two other runners and no other people of any age wearing short split shorts, with or without the bright and inviting Colorado flag emblazoned on what little material they include.

It’s plain why, despite the scenery, very few people have settled in this general part of the country. If you work in the energy industry, you’re probably doing well. If you don’t, there appears to be little else to do because there just aren’t many people to serve. And, although this is based on a limited sampling of days, even in the summer, it seems to be windy throughout the entire state of Wyoming. Really windy, the kind that always promises the sting of sand if you don’t shield your skin. It’s easy to see why a stray bullet from a Wyoming hunter’s rifle might wind up in his buddy’s face by accident.

But the grand, endless emptiness is a reminder of just how huge the U.S. is. I thought it was possible to get badly lost in the woods of New Hampshire as a kid, but there, in even in a daze, if you keep moving in a mostly straight line, you’ll hit blacktop of some kind within a couple of hours no matter where you start.

Here, it’s just long, long ribbons of asphalt connecting foci, or nodes, of inhabited places, whose placements seem no more advantageous than any of the surrounding lands. The rivers up here are hardly shipping lanes, and genuine forests, at least along I-25 and much I-80, are nonexistent. I suppose the first people who came here in any numbers had to stop and live somewhere. And it wasn’t all that long ago that Americans were first rampaging their way toward ownership of all this lakeless dust and scrub-grass and the black gold that lay beneath. The United States itself is a fledgling nation, but people live in houses in Concord today that date back to the 1880s and before.

On Saturday, I actually enjoyed the experience driving with a dog sitting up and breathing in my face periodically, even though part of the drive was in the rain. Perhaps it was knowing I was about to “bag” a state, which means something. So I drove through Sheridan and into the state of Montana for the first time. Billings seemed as good a spot as any to stop.

And this seems a reasonable place to stop this travel narrative for now. Maybe I can find a way to spice things up on the back nine of the journey, but I am not the sort of guy to wander into exciting bursts of mayhem, Jack Reacher-style, when traveling though small towns. So these writings will probably be just more of me getting around to saying how grateful I am that I can sit here next to a sleeping dog and wonder what’s next, and taking more pictures on my runs.

I have been following little of the outside world since I left. As it was, I hadn’t been checking major news sites in months, and now I haven’t been keeping tabs on what running pundits have been producing. I have some high-school action, my ongoing linchpin to the sport, to report on from places further from those meets than most of you are, but that seems like material for tomorrow, after I get to—probably—Idaho.

The biggest difference between my indoor life here and my usual one is having no sound-generating keyboard. I thought of bringing my more portable one with me, and wisely realized that I would get no writing done and would explore the outside less if I permitted myself that distraction for this week-plus away from Boulder.

One last thing: They have rogue flavors of Gardetto’s snack mix in huge bags out here. No one ever disclosed this to me, and this circumstance has me soberly rethinking the low population density of the Northern Rockies.