Roads traveled, stories unraveled
For the next week or so, each day I'll recount some element of my October trip to and from the 2010 Society of Environmental Journalists conference. I'll combine my recollection of what I saw, experienced or learned, tweets I made at the time, photographs and links to some of the cool things I learned. Check back each day for new reflections, tales and reports. At the end of my updates I'll post a link to read the story as one narrative (and post a complete photo album as well). Be prepared. This series will include a mix of storytelling styles -- don't expect straight journalism, or complete creativity. In fact, don't expect anything but a journey.
"The only way out is through," I thought, pulling my scarf tightly around my neck as I burrowed into my sleeping bag. Admittedly, I didn't realize when I mumbled this that I was (not quite precisely) quoting Robert Frost. For a week or so, for a variety of reasons, a dear friend and I had been throwing this phrase around. Never was it more true to me than this moment.
Likely resembling little more than a lump of a polypropylene undershirt, two sweaters, a down vest, a pair of long underwear, waterproof gloves, fleece socks and a knit hat, I burrowed deeper into my bag as temperatures outside my tent dropped below freezing. I'd already felt the tickles of a cold coming on before I arrived after dark to Wallowa Lake State Park. Did I really want to push getting sick before the SEJ conference after working so hard to get there?
I'd already paid $16 for the site, after all, a whopping $16. The closest motel was 5 miles back in Joseph and another $70. If I wanted to actually see the lake, I'd have to return once more the next morning.
No, I could do it. Adventurers did this and far, far more everyday, right ? Besides, I had a car with a heater, seat warmers and a reclining seat. I wasn't exactly isolated (really, it's pretty ridiculous I even thought the word "adventurer").
It's now a few days before Christmas and I'm packing for a holiday trip to my mother's house. I grab a dop kit and find some cold medicine inside. The discovery reminds me how long I've been taking to tell this story. Holding the medicine in my hand, I remember my trip's first day.
Sixty miles east of Portland, after a brief stop in Hood River for coffee and a bagel, I felt the first hint of a scratch in my throat. Ten miles later, my throat burned. As I progressed further eastward, my eyes watered. My face burned. Each mile closer to Missoula seemed to bring new aches. Pain coursed behind my eyes, but, no, I wasn't going to succumb. I would battle through. I was far too excited about the conference, about the people I'd meet and the places I'd go and the ideas I'd generate. As the week progressed and after I arrived at the conference, each day I did what I could to set the cold aside as late into the night as possible. Back where I was staying for the event, at the Hutchins Hostel, I'd return to the bottom of a bunk bed in a room I shared with other conference-goers and try, desperately – and unsuccessfully -- to muffle hacks and coughs, stringing sleepless night upon sleepless night throughout the length of an event that I'd been looking forward to for months.
Tweeting the road: Bagels, coffee, homemade cookies, i am well stocked for the road. Ps it is a glorious day in Hood River. - Oct. 11
Still holding the cold medicine as I walk to my suitcase to finish packing for my holiday trip, I see dark lines stretching across the United States. Rather, I notice lines across a map of the country tacked to a wall in my apartment.
Each line traces a route I've driven at some point in my life. The record tells a story as comprehensive and accurate as I can attempt. Much of my memory stretches across this map. In the nine years I've been tracking my journeys in this way, I've had to buy at least one new map, and I've done my best to stretch my recollection as far back into my youth and my memory as I can accurately recall.
The map only documents roads I've driven, or ridden along, and it's at such a scale that the nuances of my trips get lost. I've had to guess at routes taken during a few trips because they took place on stretches not charted by this map, or so long ago that I can't recall their exact path. Nevertheless, each time I return from a journey I look forward to tracing my trips on the map. Doing so is the only reason I keep pencils around my house.
More than two months after I've returned from one journey, though, I've yet to trace its path. I still haven't traced my trip from Portland to Missoula and back, and I can't quite express why not. Perhaps I don't feel like the trip's over, like I've truly returned. Perhaps I can't record it until I've described it, until I've wrapped the journey in words and pictures and recollections that I realize are fading with each day.
Some of you might not be interested in such ponderings.
“Get to the point,” you'll say. “Tell me about the conference. Tell me what you learned, what you saw along the way, what the latest news is. I only have so much time. Don't you know attention spans are ever so slight? Haven't you ever heard of an editor?"
Indeed I do, and I have. As I've noted elsewhere, as so many have noted before, though, to truly travel you can't simply move from Point A to Point B. You can't experience this world's multiplicity of dimensions through a straight line.
The truth is, of course, I did wait to write this down. I let the story fester. I let it fall away and apart. Like anyone might, I've been making excuses for months now for not chronicling my trip. My terrible cold on the road. Assignments due just upon my return. Job applications. Novel Writing. Story development. Other conferences to attend as a reporter. Holidays. I could think of any number of reasons why you're reading this now, today, this very second, and only now, but this is the moment, this is when these words take shape.
I've also, I'm coming to realize and admit, been utterly incapacitated for months by writer's block - really the worst I've known - despite having felt so inspired, so driven by the conference (and, despite having completed the rough draft of my first serious stab at fiction during NaNoWriMo, which, it should be said, was the only thing to really begin to loosen this writer's block).
But somewhere in the middle of the first sleepless night of my journey, in that jury rigged tent, as the cold descended -- both in the form of my illness and the weather -- I wrote clumsily, with gloved hands, in an irregularly kept journal, beginning with the following fragment: 10/11/2010
Sometimes I ponder the choices I make, or my difficulty making them. I end up here, in what promises to be a beautiful setting, but aching. I ache with the impact of pride, of love, of adventure.
The first day never quite goes right. Surprises for both the better and worse arise and you're left not quite certain how to process them.
I'm fighting a cold I refuse to catch, but hearing creeks splash from what seems like all sides. My tent is jury-rigged together – I'm missing a stake so I put a rock in the corner to hold one side down – but outside the stars pepper the sky in such a way that clichés actually serve them well.
Nobody knows where I am (how near or how far). Were I not ill, I'm not sure whether I'd really want them to.
Sneak preview! expect to learn more about grizzly bear behavior through absolutely adorable videos from a study in Glacier National Park)
