Five Weeks Into The Void

Riding the Greenway in Statesville, North Carolina

I lit out for Winfield, Kansas on September 13th and expected to travel about halfway before finding a Walmart Resort and setting up camp. A simple and buoyant peace settled in as the cities fell away on either side of the highway and were replaced by rolling hills of green, waving and lush, cheerful and calming. After growing up in Los Angeles and then transplanting to Orlando, I can claim to know the city experience intimately, and it’s fun, always interesting, exciting and overwhelming. Kinda over the city. Kinda ready to move to the country.

So, touring always offers up that alternative when you’re in a RV. You can camp by a corn field on the side of the road and that’s a helluva lot more peaceful than my neighborhood on any given night. In between the scheduled stops, there’s properly allowed-for moments where I just get off the grid and disappear into the deep faraway, way off the interstate.

Let’s say, a string of moments, all tied together in an ever-wandering storyline through the lakesides and meadows, bayous and brook views, state parks and rest stops along the way.

Moments meant to be savored. Moments to truly give pause.

The smell of freshly rained-upon pine needles in the breaking morning sunlight. The cobalt blue of a building that disappeared into the sky. A fiery, multi-hued sunset partially obscured by the curling smoke of a barbecue grill. The sounds of terrified screams, turning to laughter in unison, spilling out of a passing roller coaster train. The smile of an old man playing the glockenspiel for the first time at an Oktoberfest in the Dutch country of Pennsylvania.

For the most part, it was a rise and fall, whisper to a scream selection of my own creation. I had curated a playlist that was equal parts “go chill by a river” and “challenge accepted”, which was a rich way of maintaining some sort of balance. If I left perpetual chaos now, left it for the deep, dense cushion of the Big Wide Out There, I might short circuit. A slow retrieval is probably gonna be my best approach.

In any case, the quiet times are the ones that are doing the most positively restorative work, not that screaming my head off on a coaster isn’t totally constructive and a great de-compression hack.