Going on a Road Trip Didn’t Change My Life

I think of the American West and I think of big skies and sprawling stars. I think of mountains and fields strewn with rusted machinery, defunct for half a century. I think of national parks crawling with tourists and the deepest reaches of forest that remain untouched except by fire. Highways with speed limits marked 80 MPH and the RVs tearing through them. Roadtrippers and hikers, honeymooners and families with whining children in the backseat, the late-1800s gold mines and those who flocked to them in droves.

About three summers ago, before I drove across most of the country with a close friend, this is what I thought about. I aspired to be a proper outdoorsman, but I was far from it. I’m hardly even a traveler. Every time I go somewhere new, I feel a certain reluctance to depart. I thought this experience was going to change something for me.

Days before I left, I realized just how much I like my life of small luxuries. My small life in an insignificant town. The town in which I know where my next meal is going to come from, where every night of my life I’ve had a bed to sleep in. I think of the apartments I’ve lived in at college paid for by my hardworking parents and a cellphone that connects to the internet wherever I go. This is a level of opulence that I am so terribly used to. This is something you don’t get on a road trip.

And I knew this, or at least a part of me did. I knew I was spoiled, and I thought there was something about a road trip that would make me stoic. I thought trading air conditioning for the desert heat of mid-August was an opportunity for self-improvement. I thought maybe I’d come home a different person, laden with stories to tell.

You embark on these sorts of journeys, and you want to be Kerouac, or Hunter S. Thompson, or Steinbeck in Travels with Charley. You want to experience the joy of being entirely untethered to a regular old drudging life. It’s a thing you think will inspire you to write some poetry, or tell your children about someday. This is what you expect, but at some point you realize expectations for things like this are worthless.

The road fell indelibly behind, and the road ahead just seemed to double and then triple in length.

I felt a hook in my belly with a line stretching back over the states we’d passed through, through the backroads of my Connecticut town and then into my house, up the stairs and into my bedroom. It was the first time I’d experienced true homesickness, and I experienced it quickly.

I’d never seen such vastness, and I felt pathetic in the face of it. This notion only increased when I thought about the fact that we were only driving to Colorado before I’d fly back home, and then more so when I realized this was far from adventuring, far from roving through the middle of nowhere just because. The trip was, at the end of the day, for the very practical purpose of moving my friend into his dorm room when we reached Colorado. It’s a trip he’s made three or four times since. And to think I was making such a fuss about everything.

I was out there almost every night for two weeks in a small yellow tent surrounded by trees and a nearby creek, or sometimes just unfathomable nothingness, staring up at a sky uncontaminated by northeastern light, and I couldn’t quite believe that somewhere in the back of my mind, all I wanted to do was go home. The stars made me feel small. At the time, I was worried I might’ve felt unimpressed. The loneliness of the roadside hotels we stayed in a few nights left a greater impression on me than anything. Now, I realize that I was simply afraid, or, more than anything, disappointed in myself.

On the road, there’s a lot of boredom to wade through. You read and drive and nap when you can. You pull over to piss and then you eat. There are 100-mile stretches without phone signal. It’s then that you realize that you haven’t been bored, truly bored, maybe ever in your life. It’s an opportunity for reflection, a chance to consider how to live your life differently, but this doesn’t come to fruition. I wallowed in it. I felt vaguely sorry for myself. I thought about how shitty a traveler I am. I went to Hawaii once with my family for a week, and I spent a lot of time there being moody at meals, hiking begrudgingly with earbuds in.

Years have passed since the road trip. I’ve worried that all future travel experiences will be tainted by the same tendencies I revealed to myself that summer.

I sit here and I wonder about this. I wonder, What the hell did I get from this road trip?

And therein lies the problem—the fact that I went into the experience expecting anything at all.

Expectations strip away the joy of something like this. It’s not that I should have lowered my expectations, but to have had any at all was foolish. I went into this assuming grandeur. I went into this assuming this would be some sort of life-changing experience. I wanted to be Dean Moriarty in On the Road, hollering to nobody at all with my head out of the window while driving.

But there is very little special about a road trip if you go into it thinking there will be. Lots of people have taken long trips across the country. Many of them have gone the whole way and back, and some have even walked it.

I sat in the passenger seat thinking about where my next shower was going to be, or when I was going to get rid of this scratchy beard I’d half-grown. I sat there and wasn’t thinking about the trip itself, where I was, the present moment. I wanted out of this place, away from these ponds of boiling blue water, and the mountains with snow at their peaks. This is not what I wanted. I tried to anticipate this trip, but there’s not a moment of it I could’ve prepared for. That’s what should have been remarkable about it: going into something without a single expectation. I thought I’d learn a thing or two, but I came home feeling like I knew exactly nothing.