EPILOGUE: HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER

July 14, 2011:  Parma, ID

We’ve been on the road for almost a month now, and we just crossed the border from Oregon into Idaho.  It was a big milestone for Aaron, and I think it’s really boosted his morale — he  feels like he’s actually making progress.

Speaking of progress: The monster hunting got me thinking.  For a little while now, I’ve been playing with the idea of actually trying to consciously create a monster.  I’ve been toying with some  half-baked theories — based only on the few things that I know about the nature of monsters.  And yesterday, for some reason, the tiny town of Parma seemed like just the place to try it.  I don’t really know what gave me that idea.  Maybe that the town sits on the border between two states?

Anyway, last night, I tried making a monster.  Of course, I really had no idea what I was doing, and was operating mostly on instinct.  Still, there seemed no good reason not to try.

I decided that it would take all night, so I told Aaron not to set up the tent, because I didn’t want an easy out.  My half-baked theory also told me that it was necessary to take the camera.  “Mad manifest” (sic) was the phrase that kept running through my head, and it appears several times in my journal–which I took with me, making notes as I went.  Actually, “notes” is a euphemism.  I can’t really read the writing, and what I can read reminds me of those thoughts that you have when you’re hovering in that borderland between “asleep” and “awake” and in the moment it feels like you’re a genius, but when you wake up, it’s all gobbledygook.  Anyway, the results of my experiment are documented as follows:

Eye

…if monsters are born out of the remnants of aborted dreams…

…because nature abhors a vacuum it will fill it in with something…

…would I eat a hamburger now, or not?…

Heart

…this one must be all about sound, because it works from the inside out…

…is that guy stealing fertilizer?…

…and therefore righteously causing pain and suffering…

Mind

 

 

 

 

 

…I’m going to have the bruises to show for it…

It was a long night, and I’m not really sure what came of it.

I felt powerful and stupid at the same time:  like the kid who knows enough to light the firecracker, but not enough to not hold it in his hand.  I think it’s going to take a couple of days to shake the icky feeling of having been infiltrated to the core.  Was it worth it?  Who knows.

Will I try again?  Maybe.

Because last night, walking through the town at 3 am, I saw a lot of lights on inside the houses.

AUGUST 18, 2012: THE END OF THE BEGINNING

A lot has happened in the year since the Run Across the U.S. came to an end.

A year ago, when Aaron spent the night alone out in the Nowhere of the old Oregon Trail, and the next day discovered that the town on his map did not actually exist, he realized how dangerous what he was doing really was.  While I, spending sleepless nights thinking about how he could break his leg out there, and the earliest I would know about it was three days later (if we both had cell phone reception), was coming to the same conclusion. Together, and separately, we reached the point where the whole venture suddenly Stopped Being Worth It.  That is not the conclusion you’re supposed to come to, with undertakings like this one.  It’s not the romantically heroic point of view, where you’re supposed to be able to tough it out and eat your own foot to survive, if you have to.  But sometimes, it’s just the truth.  It’s an important skill to learn—whether monster-hunting, and just living in general: being able to discern which things are worth the risk of pursuing, and which are not.

The physical danger was real enough, but when you wake up in the morning realizing that you have put your best friend in that really bad and dangerous position because you just can’t pull yourself together enough to stop fighting, then far more than your body is at risk.

So, it was with a sense of a drunk waking up from a long binge that we reunited, left the long road behind us, headed out on a quest to find our new place to live.  We took two vacation-like weeks and toured several cities in the southwest.  We were about to sign the lease on an apartment in Tucson, when at the very last minute Aaron said, “So, how do you feel about Santa Fe?”  We’ve been here ever since.

The last year has been a process.  The Run Across the U.S. dredged up a lot of icky sediment lying at the bottom of our psychological wells—stuff that could not simply be re-buried.  It had to be filtered out and disposed of, a messy process that sometimes has not seemed worth it at all.  Except that we were desperate to hang on to our friendship.  So, in order to save the friendship that has been our saving grace so many times in our lives, we decided to go our separate ways.

And then, on December 16, 2011, we got married.

Two days ago, on August 16, 2012, we were sealed together in the AlbuquerqueTemple, for time and all eternity.

I honestly didn’t realize at the time we picked the date, that it had been almost exactly a year to the day since the Run had ended.  We picked the day only because it was when his family could be here.  It was only when I was reading my journal in preparation for writing the last blog entries that I realized the significance.

I think it’s not a coincidence.  I won’t romanticize the whole thing by saying that we would never have gotten married, if not for the trip, or that our marriage would not be as strong.  It could easily have gone the other way, and almost did.  What it did, more than anything, was humble us.

We had a lot of great and some almost unbelievable memories of people that we met and things we experienced.  But I believe that any of the progress we have made in our lives would not have been possible without the real humility that was forced on us by the Rough Road.  Aaron and I are not by nature very humble at all.  We can be prideful, and stubborn, and arrogant.  Habits—by the way—that are gradually falling into the category of Things That Are Just Not Worth It.  Of all the monsters I have seen, the Pride Monster is the worst.  It sticks to the skin like glue, never quite out of sight or mind, and has to be defeated over and over and over again, probably until the day you die.

But the effort is most definitely Worth Every Second. It’s impossible to see the monster standing in front of me, until I let go of your pride and admit that there are things about this world, about the people I love, that are beyond my control.  With humility comes understanding, and in my opinion, that’s a prize that’s hard to beat.

Aaron is now a student at St. John’s College here in Santa Fe, and I work in the administrative office of a chain bookstore.  Our life together is Joy, and our creative partnership is as weird and fun as we could ever hope for.  Our current Adventure Project is a search for the mystical objects of American folklore. So it seems that the Run Across the U.S., which seemed like the End of All Things, was really only the prologue to the Journey that Never Ends.

Aaron & Heidi at Mesa Verde, 2012

FLASHBACK AUGUST 17, 2011: A WORD ABOUT THE ROUGH ROAD

Some Roads are deliberately built to be rough, both for cars and for people.  They are often no more than two ruts of hardened mud or dirt and gravel.  The ruts are deep and full of potholes and will break your axle if you’re not careful.  They climb (and descend) steep grades and round corners at angles that could easily send you topside over.  These roads are only found in the Wilderness, and they are meant to test your strength and balance and endurance and willingness to enter into the Dark Places.  They are never Main Roads, and so the choice to travel them is mostly voluntary.  Mostly voluntary. The Rough Road is the one Road that everybody has to travel at least once—whether they like it or not.  And success is never guaranteed.

Yesterday, it was exactly two months since Aaron and I started the Run Across the U.S.

Over these last couple of days, my mind has been a mess.  Half of me hopes that Aaron’s solo trek won’t work at all, that he’ll give up after a couple of weeks, and then we’ll laugh this whole terrible ending off, and be on our way to finding a new place to live.  The other half of me is so relieved not to have to worry about the fights, the temper tantrums (both mine and his), the excruciating boredom, the frustration of not working, that his being gone feels like an early Christmas present.  There’s a strong possibility (or fear, I just don’t know anymore) that for any number of reasons, we might never be partners on anything ever again.  And honestly, how I feel about that changes from one second to the next.

I’m still at the Fremont Lake Campground.  I’m stuck waiting here until Aaron gets far enough ahead of me that the road forks, and we can go our separate ways without crossing paths.  Yesterday, to pass the time, I drove up into the Wind River Range and went for a hike on the Pole Creek Trail.  The weather was unpredictable and I got caught in the middle of a hailstorm.  On the way back down, I stepped wrong and for a split second, partially dislocated my hip, which was a really strange and fairly painful thing.  But overall, it was worth it.  The total indifference of the natural world to my emotional turmoil is humbling, in a good way.

The Wind River Range, Wyoming

I heard from Aaron last night.  He has decided to leave the highway just below the town of Boulder (Wyoming) and is now following the Oregon Trail.  According to the map, the Oregon Trail is a dirt road crossing forty miles of absolutely nothing but empty landscape, which is where he spent the night last night.  I’m worried, because it’s hard to pack enough supplies—especially water—in the stroller to last for more than a day or two.  But I’m also kind of proud of him for taking it on, even though it’s the craziest thing yet.  He sounds like he’s doing okay.

His leaving the highway means that as of tomorrow, I’ll be able to put Fremont Lake Campground and the town of Pinedale behind me.  Forever, I hope.

I’ll spend the rest of today in camp and try to be more diligent about working (wasn’t that one of my biggest complaints?), and then tomorrow…I don’t know where I’ll go, or where I’ll stop.  I guess it doesn’t really matter too much anymore.

Addendum:

Tonight, at five o’clock, Aaron called me to come and pick him up.

The Run Across the U.S. is officially over.

 

FLASHBACK AUGUST 15, 2011: THE SEPARATION MONSTER

The Separation Monster will no so much eat you, as mercilessly break you down into your component parts, just to see how you tick.  It will then forget how to put you back together into a complete whole, and will leave you dismembered by the side of the road for the coyotes and the vultures.  I know this for a fact.

Fremont Lake Sunset

It’s the first day without Aaron.

At 7:15 am this morning I was sitting at the edge of Fremont Lake at a pretty picnic area, staring at the dull purple pink sunrise with painfully red and swollen eyes, not giving a rat’s ass about the beauty of nature.

I feel cut off from everything: from God, from any sense of purpose, and most especially from Aaron, my best friend in the world, whom I love and who drives me absolutely crazy.

I feel sick.  Did I do the right thing?  What if he gets killed out there?

Today the sky was full of thunderstorms all day.

FLASHBACK AUGUST 14, 2011: THE DIVIDED ROAD

Today is Aaron and my last day together on this Run Across the U.S.

We spent the whole day yesterday up in Jackson, re-equipping for the solo trip.  The result was a very expensive and half-baked plan, but we did the best we could.  Aaron will use a big jogging stroller to push his equipment.  He does not want us to meet up again until he is done (though he said it much more gently than that).  But we decided for safety’s sake that I will stay within two hundred miles of him in the van, and he will check in every seventy-two hours by phone (with allowances for cell phone reception crappiness). We made one other agreement: It was so expensive to re-equip, and expensive to be separated, that this has to be it.  If this doesn’t work, the Run is over.

Tonight I dropped Aaron off at the Warren Creek Campground on the Green River, and if all goes according to plan, I won’t see him again for two months. At least. Today, we went to church, then we went and had lunch at the city park and started packing.  We went to the Laundromat and watched a movie while we were waiting for our laundry.   Then we went to the Warren Creek Campground and got him all packed up and then we had dinner (chicken alfredo—his favorite) and played one last game of Forbidden Island together (we lost).

Then we said good-bye.

Aaron, the day before going solo.

FLASHBACK – AUGUST 12, 2011: NOTHING LEFT TO SAY

I met Aaron for his ten-mile break today, and he told me he was done.  I knew as soon as he said it, that he didn’t mean just for the day.

So, we packed up and drove back to Pinedale, and went to the Aquatic Center to swim and hang out in the hot tub and shower and talk.  While we were in the hot tub, we talked about what we should do.  I suggested that we do what we had planned to do after the run was over: take a month to drive around the country and find our new place to live.  He was nice enough to pretend to consider it, but I could tell that it was really the solo-run option that he wanted.

While I was in the shower, I asked God what I should do.  The answer, as much as I did not want to hear it, seemed to be that I needed to let him go.  That no matter how risky it is (financially, physically), no matter how much it hurts, I had to let him try.  I had to let him go.

When we met back up in the van, the decision was made:  He would continue on the run, alone.  When it was done, I felt both sick and relieved.

So, as completely insane as it is, tomorrow we go to Jackson to re-equip for Aaron’s solo trek.

FLASHBACK – AUGUST 11, 2012: THE SPIRIT OF CONTENTION

Roadside Memorial Cross, Pinedale, Wyoming

Aaron couldn’t run at all yesterday, and could only do ten miles today, and it has much less to do with physical pain than morale.  So, for the past two nights, we’ve been staying at the Fremont Lake Campground, which is just outside of  Pinedale, Wyoming.  Yesterday, I just couldn’t face the thought of spending all day at the campground, so we drove the twenty miles into Pinedale (a total waste of gas money), did a grand tour of the tiny town and went to the surprisingly huge and phenomemally-equipped Community Aquatic Center (paid for, apparently, by money from the oil fields).  Even though it was a good day overall, it ended with another huge fight.  I (for my part) think his head and heart is everywhere, on everything and everybody but this huge undertaking that has been, by the way, his dream for the past three years, and which is going to drag on and on until the second coming, if we don’t get moving.  He thinks I’m a selfish, controlling (insert epithet of choice here) who doesn’t understand him at all, and has absolutely no idea how difficult it is to do what he’s trying to do.

As usual, we’re both right.  Sort of.

We always manage to work it out in the end, but there’s always some ugly residue that is hard to get rid of after these arguments.  More than I’m worried about money, or time, or comfort, I’m worried about what trying to finish this run across the U.S. is really going to cost us.

Because I believe that now, things are truly beginning to fall apart.  Today, for the first time ever, Aaron mentioned going solo for the rest of the journey.  This life-defining journey that until this moment we have never questioned that either one of us couldn’t or wouldn’t do without the other.

He says it’s because he would rather risk the failure of going solo, than the failure of our friendship—but I only partially believe that.  I feel that the reason he wants to go solo is because he has come to see me as an obstacle, standing in the way of something he wants to get out of this trip.  And frankly, right now, I feel the same about him.  But I don’t feel that it’s because the fundamental nature of the partnership is flawed, it’s because of this horrible spirit of contention that has entered in.  Any monster you could name or imagine would be easier to handle than this. And I just don’t have any idea of how to stop it.

So. Going solo. It’s a completely insane idea—for which we are not equipped at all.

I find myself seriously considering it.