Passage West

Dearest and Closest,


I sometimes have no interest in writing, in sharing our lives. They feel so privately hard, that to share them is almost too much of an effort because there’s this shadow of shame that rises up and threatens to choke me. I guess the shame has something to do with the questions how did our lives get here and what did we do wrong? Intellectually I know that Dan and I did nothing wrong. We work harder than most people we know. But still. having to look every day at my innocent child’s face and know nothing is stable in our lives makes me sick sometimes. So, I let stuff bang around in my head like a rusty can until I can’t stand it anymore and I need to say something, anything.

* * *

This is what I can give my son right now: Some form of routine to his day. We wake up sometime between five and six AM, he plays for about one and a half to two hours (usually with Dan while I catch a few more zzs after a night of nursing), then back to bed to nurse and nap until nine or ten, then a walk outside, maybe a trip in the car to somewhere like the library or the grocery store or some visiting with Dad and Gail and then another nap (sometimes this happens in the car seat or wherever we are) and then home for bath time every night at six PM. I cannot give him a house. I can’t give him his own room or all the toys and clothes and strollers and things I want for him. But I can give him a bath every night and keep his clothes very clean (all hand me downs from Vanessa who has saved our lives in this department) and I can give him love and structure. That’s it. That’s what I can control.

I told my sister in law Margot about how bath time at six is never missed and how we’re still doing it in the style of Dr. Sears Attachment Parenting where I get in the bath and Dan hands M. in and we take a bath together, M. sitting on my lap with his little rubber duckie while Dan soaps him up across the tub rim. She said she loved the safety of that image. But the other night, because Dan was off at a catering job with a local company, I had to bathe M. by myself. For the first time in his tiny life I chose giving him a bath alone over forgoing it altogether, mostly because I wanted him to get warm water and soap before bed—there’s nothing in my own life that’s ever been quite as soothing as a bath and I didn’t want M. to miss that. I got out a little plastic dish basin and filled it with warm water and some bubbles. And then I lowered him in. The way he gripped the sides of the basin broke my heart. I want him to trust that I’ve got him. Not just with the bath but with all this craziness in our lives, I want him to know I’m there. And seeing his little/big hands grab the sides like that made me ache because he has already learned that he must control some portion of his survival. And I wish I could protect him from everything—water, our lives, myself. Everything.

Tonight, after bath time, we left my mother’s to drive in the dark three hours south to Portland. Dan booked three days of work photographing with his friend Gary and being apart these days is harder on us than not. So, Hopper, M., Dan and I all piled into the car—the one roof over our heads that has been constant since last year and is ours, sort of (I mean we do pay our rent to Toyota every month!). When we got in Dan said “ I wish I didn’t feel so desperate for work, that I have to upend us at a moment’s notice to take just about anything.” What we have is each other, I keep thinking. At least we have that. But it’s true—we’re always on the go, back and forth between my parents’ and down to Portland to stay with our dear friends who open their doors each time. Sometimes, when M. wakes up and cries I can see on his face he’s not sure where in the world he is. Because of these moments, this look on his face that melts from the fear of betrayal to the recognition that I am right there, that I am his constant, I find myself thinking of Moses waking up in his basket, the bulrushes around him, the water slapping the sides of his little basinet and I wonder what happened when fear and panic took root? I hope, for myself and my ability to stomach the lack of constancy we are inflicting on our young, innocent son, that Moses found some peace in the blue sky (I imagine it as blue), the yellow spartina grasses, the clouds and sun, the stars and moon. This hope helps me sleep.

Last week was a roller coaster. Dan had been gunning for the last three weeks for a job as the in-house photographer at Stonewall Kitchen. We’d gone down to Portland a few times to stay with our friends the Amory’s in their big rambling town house in the West End so that Dan could interview and then do a test shoot. It came down to Dan and one other person. And on Thursday we learned that the other person got it. We don’t know why. Just that they felt, after an astronomical number of applicants from all over the country, that this other person, from “out of state” was an “easier fit.” And then, on the same day, Dan got a call from Mass Art. Graduate School and was offered one of their six graduate spots for the fall. At any other moment Dan might have been clicking his heels to get into graduate school—this is, after all, what he wants the most in his life--to be a fine art photographer who teaches. But our lives have been so uncertain, we’ve had so little money, we have the responsibility of a son whom we adore and we have nothing to fall back on financially right now. We’re in the worst position one can be in to even consider graduate school. And yet, here it is. We haven’t received the financial packet yet, which will tell us more. So, who knows? I still believe in miracles.

We have days here at my mother’s where we have some kind of faux order. They get structured to some degree by M.'s routine and the necessity for one of us to go out to do work at the library, or to search for jobs on the Internet at a coffee shop or go to the bank, the post office and the grocery store. Those days, when order seems achievable despite the internal and external chaos we feel our lives have become, are soothing and give me a sense of accomplishment. But they only seem to come once or maybe twice a week. I don’t know why. There’s still the same basic structure of M.’s day, but there are many other factors that affect us—things that come up as they would in anyone’s life, the emotional turbulence of where our lives are and where we want them to go that is hard to ignore, how much sleep we got the night before, how heavy our hearts are.

In an effort to restore some serenity in what feels like it may be a longer sojourn at my mother’s then we had initially hoped, we changed our two little rooms around so that we can all sleep together again in the same bed. We discovered that the mattress Dan has been sleeping on in the loft was actually a Queen not a Full and so we brought it down and set up the smaller of our two rooms as a bedroom with the mattress on the floor and then made the larger room a place for M.’s bureau/ changing table, our bureau, a play area for M. and his little co-sleeper crib for nap time. Dan hung one of M.’s mobiles over his changing pad and we made the loft area a little spot for paying bills and organizing the papers that dog our lives. It feels like we suddenly have so much more space. And it’s wonderful to all be in the bed again. I am sleeping so much more deeply knowing that Dan is on the other side of M. and that all the vigilance is not on my shoulders.

M., despite the fact that I can’t totally control his environment because this is not our home where I can affect everything he’s around, despite the fact that we spend a lot of time all piled in the car going wherever we need to go together, is thriving. He’s five months old and weighs nineteen pounds and is twenty-seven and a half inches long. He is, in percentiles, bigger than 95% of babies his age and off the charts for height, over 100%. He is so vigorous it astounds and moves me. Maybe nature is bigger than nurture. Or the nurture we’re protectively giving him in the midst of what feels out of control somehow helps his nature. I could go on and on, twisting that one around. Regardless, the child is strong and has huge hands and feet and red cheeks and more energy than anyone I’ve ever met. He inspires me.

And, this, maybe, is why we have children—because despite the maelstrom that is life, they inspire us to be stronger, healthier, better and they make us laugh. I can’t imagine any other time in my life where I laughed like I do with my son. And that’s the rueful truth of this whole time, this whole thing. I smile and laugh every single day. I am blessed. And so grateful.

Love, M., Hopper, Dan and Caitlin.

Dearest and Closest,

Sometimes, this is hard. This is not just a “going home to have some time off” period of our lives. No, this is the fall out of lives that, in AA terms, became unmanageable. And the thing that sticks in my craw is that it’s not our fault. I mean, really. The greed of a few whom we will never know made this possible. Or, should I say, inevitable?

Dan and I are sleeping in separate beds. Not by choice. But there’s no bed in my mother’s house that’s big enough for both of us and M. safely in between. And we still feel strongly about co-sleeping. Or, maybe it’s better to say, we’re not ready to let him go, which will be a lifelong education, I suppose.

I’m sleeping in my old spindle bed. Dan is sleeping in the little loft bedroom that adjoins the library where my mother put my bed. He goes up there every night and turns out the light. Most nights Hopper ends up sleeping on top of me. I awake with my body aching from being contorted in a snail position around my son, my legs positioned at a vertical in order to give Hopper as much room as he needs. Sometimes I feel like I’m holding on to my son with a desperate vigilance to protect him from our lives.

I miss Dan in the bed. And yet, M. still needs me throughout the night to nurse at various points (in his sleep, which means he doesn’t wake up, but I do). Giving up this close mammalian bonding right now feels like another loss no one’s up for. Dan has said he wants to be back in the bed together but he feels we’re in this weird position of choosing for us over M. and M. is the priority. Of course, he’s right.

But, oddly, sometimes, I actually feel scared down there in the small library with M. and Hoppy. It’s weird that I grew up here, in the boonies, and I’m scared of the dark and the woods. Frankly, so is Hopper, which is not very comforting. Dan tells me I’m crazy when I say this and that Hopper would rip anyone’s head off who came near us, but I’m not so sure. When I take him out some nights to pee if Dan has crashed early and I can’t sleep so I’m up reading and puttering around till all hours, we both stand on the porch, neither one of us at all interested in being the first to step off. He’ll turn and look at me, his long face fairly confident I’m not going to force him because then I, too, would need to get off the porch in order to convince him that peeing right now is a good idea. We stand like this for a moment and then turn back to the house. As soon as our backs are turned we both run the ten feet to the door like we’re freaking Orpheus. I slam the door fast behind us and then we’re both so relieved. It’s ridiculous.

Many nights I find myself at 4:30 AM standing at the bottom of the ladder to the loft where Dan is sleeping. I call up to him, “Dan are you sleeping?” Silence. Of course he’s sleeping, because he’s willing to accept for the moment where our lives are and do what any sane person would do—get some rest so he can tackle our lives tomorrow. Then I call up again, “Dan?”
I hear a muffled, like from underneath ten comforters, “No…? What’s wrong? ”
“I can’t sleep. Our lives are chaos…” (This has become a mantra, one that I can’t help myself from saying and drives Dan nuts because it makes him feel squeezed—But, he’s admitted, also puts a fire under his ass.) “…And I hate this. I hate our lives being like this. I hate not sleeping in the same bed. I hate not having sex. I hate that nothing is solid and the only real solid place we have is our car, or maybe my mother’s, I’m not sure which is more fucking solid, but the problem is the same. And I feel overwhelmed and hysterical.”
“Do you want to come cuddle? (This is more in response to me saying I hate not having sex than anything else.)”
Pause.
“No.”
Let me explain: We’ve only had our child for four months and given he was 8.12 pounds, I think I might not be alone in the history of women in feeling some anxiety about having sex. I mean, not only is there the fear of pain to an area that was, frankly, traumatized, but, also, in my case, I’ve focused on the worries that I’ll be super loose down there or that my soft belly will be a turn off or that I’ll squirt milk everywhere. I have I’ve longed for sex with my husband but our lives have been, let’s face it, chaos. And we’re at my mother’s. And her house has no sound proofing of any kind.
“Cait, I don’t know what to tell you. It will get better.”
In the half light I look at the pile of bills we haven’t opened looming on my brother’s dresser my mother has put downstairs in the bottom of the two small rooms with a loft we’re inhabiting. It has a butterfly, a dragonfly and some beetles my father painted when my brother was born, all of which are so picture perfect and beautiful they should be in National Geographic.

“How is this going to get better” I want to scream. But instead, I say “Ok.” And go back to my bed and curl around my son, his little body safe as houses next to me. He reaches out his tiny hand and smiles in his sleep. I reach out and hold his hand, and, like this, I fall sleep.

There are also times when being at my mother’s feels safe in a way we haven’t felt in so long. Like the other night we did a big bulk order from a community organic buyers thing my mother belongs to—ten pounds of flour, a pound of peanut butter, chunk of cheese etc. This reminds me, for some reason, of my childhood when my parents grew almost everything we ate and bought a huge thing of oats, peanut butter, flour and butter each month. There’s something cozy about it. We sometimes make pizza from scratch. We all delight in M. At night the spring peepers won’t shut up and the house is so still it’s as if it’s been immobilized by their crazy music.

And my mother and Dan are putting the in garden and working on the yard. I’ve been sorting old family photos at night for my mother and piecing together from those images the encompassing embrace of family.

The truth is, I love my life right now more than I don’t. That’s the odd thing. I feel frustrated and scared and like the sky is falling many many days. I feel annoyed that I have nowhere to work and that I carry my things to the library to work for an hour before I need to rush back to nurse M. so that Dan can go do some job related thing or go over our bills or make phone calls about our bills. I feel exhausted by the fact that it takes me forever to write something between having a new born and living with my mother and having no space that’s ours and my career seems to get the last rung of the ladder. And yet, oddly, I also feel totally present in a way I can’t ever remember. Maybe that’s the lesson here. I don’t know.

This is what I do know: The links between us, the glue between me and Dan, M., Hopper and my mother, this is what gets me up every morning and somehow saves me.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, M. and Hopper.

Dearest and Closest,

On Saturday night, Easter Eve (if you can call it that) we made the last leg of our trip. We drove the three and change hours from Portland to my family in Down East Maine. It took us eleven full days to get across the country and home. As long as that may be, the weird thing is that we felt like we were working really hard at it—given a baby, our exhaustion levels, snow in the south and just sheer distance, I can’t imagine how it could have gone faster.

Early spring in Maine is one of the dreariest times—all brown and dirty, the kind of time that, for me, is specific in that there’s so much dust all over you car, that every time you try to get in or out, you’ve got smears of sticky dust on your coat, jeans, boots. You feel dried out with the heaters on in the car and too cold with the windows open. Everything, even when it’s raining, feels dirty and muddy and, as my friend Jess like’s to say, it’s dog shit season because every dog shit that made it through the winter intact and has been perfectly preserved within a crust of snow is only now thawing and melting into a brown mess. But dreary as it is, we’re home. Plus there are glimmers of the beauty we missed when we were 3,000 miles away: Crocuses, Daffodils and Lilies are coming up little tender green shoots, like babies’ fingers. The sun coming in the window feels warm and thawing—in fact, Dan spent a good part of yesterday sitting outside in a chair with a book in the sun. Home, imbued with all the trials and tribulations of one’s past, all of the hopes we impose and anxieties we try to suppress, is just that: home. One must be grateful that one has it, because it means that one is from somewhere. And being from somewhere, dog shit season, dusty jacket and all is worth more than all the excitement of traveling this enormous country, your heart palpitating at the built in majesty and tragedy of everything we as a people are and have become. Hemingway always said to write what you know (he also said that anyone who couldn’t remember what they wanted to write and needed to make a note wasn’t really a writer—Hemingway clearly never breast fed). I’d say know what you know—because from what you know about your land, your place, yourself, from there your dreams begin…. I hope. I’m counting on this, I guess.


Last Thursday night when we got to Boston our friend Annette, who with her husband Erik had waited up until 10 PM to make us dinner, took Dan aside and said “You did the right thing.” Mind you this is the same woman who told me after one week in LA that we should “get the fuck out of there as soon as possible and come home.” Nevertheless, she knew intuitively that Dan needed to hear this. And she is rarely wrong. Dan was heroic, and I mean this in the truest sense of the word. He drove us across this entire country, save two hours when he let me drive a really straight stretch in Oklahoma He drove against the pressing sounds of a crying baby, the long faces of a miserable dog, and the grief of a wife who was sobbing over her the death of her beloved cat who kept saying, Rain Man style, “Our lives are chaos” over and over again. And he mostly kept it together. Or, at least, like Winston Churchill once advised, he kept going. He lugged all our bags—and believe me (ask Annette or Craig) there were many of them, all a mess, nothing organized so things came into hotels in bits and pieces, messy and heavy. He had to get on top of our car and actually SIT on top of our Thule bin to make it close every morning (the hotel workers in Memphis, he told me, all stopped what they were doing to come outside to laugh at this skinny white kid on top of his Prius trying to shove some useless crap into the bin atop his car.) He was willing to eat fast food which he hates and go through drive throughs in order to not stop driving because M. was asleep, which he hates even more. He drank an outrageous amount of coffee and grew his beard out and has bags hanging off his face and his eyes are red with exhaustion. Then, after all that—not to mention packing up our entire place in LA and packing up the ABF pods ( somehow I managed to pack only about three boxes and carry zero)—he unpacked all our stuff in Portland and loaded it all into a storage place at Uhaul. He has bruises on his shins and knees from wrestling items that are really too big for one person to carry. What he lacked in strength, he accomplished in sheer determination and, honestly, never complained. He got us here. Without him, M. and Hopper and I would still be in Oklahoma. That’s the truth. We’d have to become Pioneers. Or Casino owners, which Hopper might be pretty good at. This is a guy who will do anything to take care of his family, even at his own expense—mostly at his own expense, I fear. And if he didn’t prove this before in our lives, her certainly did now. He deserves my constant and persistent love and respect for his sheer determination of will. I mean it. And I should also mention that after he got us all the way to Portland he sat down and did our taxes. I couldn’t have added two grocery receipts together at that point—and am still too exhausted—but his own bodily feelings weren’t a consideration. Now, he’s collapsed. And I’ve told him I want him to stay collapsed for two weeks. But it’s hard. This is a guy who believed in every bone in his body in the American Dream—who worked his way out of a trailer park and put himself through college, who has worked every day of his life. For our lives to unravel so quickly, so surprisingly, so far away from home with our first child in the picture—this has hurt him in ways that I worry about. And yet. All I can do is love him through this. A task that requires more grace and less selfishness than I may be capable of because my own anxiety and tension and exhaustion all make him an easy target, given he’s my husband. This is not what he deserves—“he deserves a fucking parade,” Annette said. And she’s right.

My mother, bless her heart, has set up the two downstairs rooms (which used to be a little library and my brother Aran’s room) for us. She’s put my childhood bed which only fits me and Marsy in the library part and then in the little loft above Aran’s room there’s a space big enough for a mattress and some books and a lamp, and there Dan is sleeping. I think he kind of enjoys it. I hate being spread out. When Ellison was alive I had to go get her and the dog and have everyone in the bed at night. I like a big family all piled in together on the lifeboat of our bed. One of my favorite times in my life that I can remember was a weekend soon after my grandparents died when my whole family converged on Nantucket and we slept all over the place—in all the beds and couches, the kitchen full of chaos and banter every morning. I love that kind of thing. Dan, although he makes noises about missing being near Marsy and me, I think, after the intensity of what he just drove us through, is liking the space.

But what a weird moment in a young marriage, new parenthood, a life. If I start to think about it too hard my anxiety mounts. I’m almost thirty-five years old and I’ve just moved in with my mother. I have a child, a husband and a dog. The dog is very happy here—loves the air, the sticks, the woods, the yard, the big family kind of thing like I like. The baby is happy, but his schedule is all messed up. The husband and the wife are trying to just accept what’s happened and re almost too tired to figure a Plan B.

And that’s where we are. On a lifeboat of sorts, home with family graceful enough not to press us too much on the what and the when of the future, enjoying small moments, trying to rest even though the reality of what’s just happened weighs down with a force that sometimes takes my breath away.

But, and I’m counting on this: Once green tender life begins to take over the dusty, muddy, cruddy early spring everyone endures in Maine, just the pure exuberance of nature flourishing will rekindle something somewhere within us and, I hope, bring our dreams back.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, M. and Hopper.

Dearest and Closest,

On Tuesday we turned the corner and started heading north. Tuesday night we had hoped to get as far as DC, but we only made it as far as Roanoke, Virginia because of snow squalls that came and went, making visibility impossible so that we’d turn off the road for a while, wait it out, then it would clear, then again the same pattern. Because of snow we lost almost two full days in the south as antithetical as that seems.

By Wednesday morning when we left Roanoke and headed for New York City the realization that something familiar was almost in our sights kept us going. Also, there's a built in drama to a drive like this—the motion of the car, the vistas through the windshield, the lives you imagine in the houses that are going by as if in a movie that’s being fast forwarded just outside your window, the landscapes that change from dramatic and beautiful to hideous and depressing. On our way to NYC, Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley rolled out on either side of us as we drove; farms that were hundreds of years old with miles of land and horses and cows grazing, big barns, rolling hills of grass and crops. Dan said to me, “I wonder if you had told the farmers building these farms that an interstate would one day cut right through their land what they would have said.” Some of these farms, you could have thrown an apple from your car and broken their living room windows.

Somewhere in Virginia a huge truck loaded chickens, packed at least 4 to a tiny milk crate sized cage and then stacked on top of each other, barreled up the highway, feathers flying everywhere. As we passed, I saw their small beaky bodies huddled against each other for warmth and comfort, their eyes wide and terrified, their wattles flapping in the wind. And my heart broke. I felt so disgusted with the way we eat other bodies, how we raise them, often, in such disgusting conditions where their deaths are possibly the only reprieve in a life of misery and suffering. As we passed the driver, without thinking, I turned to him and gave him the finger and mouthed, “Fuck you.” I have no idea what came over me. I just felt outrage. Maybe at my own fuzzy morals that allow me to eat meat and like it even though I know the suffering my meal has sometimes incurred.

The closer we got to New York, sadness and an anxiety began to take over the small, cramped quarters of our car. The trip is ending. And as much as we’re dying to get out of the car, to have this iconic journey come to a close, the very real question looms on the horizon: what next? When the literal journey ends we begin a whole other harder journey of rebuilding. Yesterday Dan told me that he was worried that this trip might somehow break him. I pressed him on what that meant and he said he worried that he just might not rebound. That as a man, as a father this whole experience—the not working for months, the stress of getting us ready to go, Ellison dying, the trip with all our stuff that he’s had to pack and unpack and pack again day after day, the endless driving, the vigilance to make sure we’re all safe—and Dan has been very vigilant and protective--and the exhaustion—that he just wasn’t sure where he would be at the end. I know how he feels. Around Nashville I, frankly, started to feel a little broken.
And yet we must go on because we have no other option. M. and Hopper depend on us to go on.

On Wednesday night we stayed with our friend, Craig, in New York. He came down from his apartment building to help us unpack our bags from the car and when he saw the pile of things mounting on the sidewalk he said,” Jesus Christ you are the fucking Joads.” Being in his place, surrounded by things that are familiar not only in that we’ve seen them before but also that they are like our things was such a relief, I looked over at Dan and I knew we were almost home.

We had planned a victory lap of sorts—victory for having made it across, I guess-- to Providence to see Anna, to Westport to see Vanessa, to upstate NY to see my aunt Maggie and Uncle Eric, to Cambridge to see my Uncle Jay and Ed and Lisa--but those two days we lost down south and the fact that we had to meet our relo-cubes filled with all our stuff in Portland today made this tour impossible. But we did get to stop in Boston with Annette and Erik and have a home cooked meal (our first in days, if not weeks, because we stopped cooking so that Dan could pack the kitchen and started eating sandwiches long before we left LA).

In Massachusetts, the air became crisp and familiar and Hopper started to perk up. Now he gets it, we realized. Now he knows where we’re going.

By the time we hit Maine this afternoon, he was a entirely different dog: His eyes were bright, he wanted to sniff at the window, he was bouncing up and down to the window to look out, then over to poor M. for a French kissing session that verged on such passion it seemed indecent to watch, then a paw knocking at my elbow from the back seat, then back to the window. We stopped in Scarborough to let him out to run at Ferry Beach. And this, to watch, was like exonerating the falsely accused—there was such joy, such grateful beautiful, heartrending joy to be out of the car, at this beautiful beach, splashing and playing in the clear water and rolling in the clean sand—this made all those days of the long slog worth it.

Believe it or not we’re in a hotel one more night in Portland before we leave tomorrow for my mother’s. Tomorrow we still need to unpack all our stuff into the storage unit. Although friends offered meals and a place to stay tonight, we are so exhausted, so totally wiped out, we decided to stay one more night on the road, just the four of us. And then, after that, the trip is over. And a larger journey begins.

We will wait for Ellison’s ashes, anxious and needing the weight of them in our hands. And then we will do what we need to do—pick ourselves up, dust off our saddles and ride into some sunset that will take us somewhere.

Love, M., Dan, Hopper and Caitlin.

.

Dearest and Closest,

I am weary of being on the road. I’m weary of hotels. Weary of road food. Tired of hanging out with M. in the front seat and then putting him back in the car seat before he’s ready so that we can drive. Today was our sixth day and although we’re so much closer, home still feels far away. Some kind of routine, some kind of stability, some kind of phase where we’re not adjusting and rebuilding, but just, instead, holding steady for a little while—all this seems almost unreachable. Even more so tonight because we had to stop in a small town in the mountains slightly west of Knoxville because it started snowing and freezing rain.

We spent the morning yesterday in Memphis, had BBQ at BB King’s restaurant, where we also caught a few minutes of local blues and hit the road in time to sit in a traffic jam for two hours and made it as far as Nashville. My exhaustion with being on the road started last night when the food at a local brew house was nowhere near as good as was advertised and I started to crave salad, kale, broccoli, clean grains, beans, proteins—well, anything that wasn’t covered with butter and grease or smothered with BBQ sauce. This morning I woke up feeling so tired I could barely move. Just thinking about getting back in the car made me want to immerse my head in my Starbucks decaf venti soy latte and weep, but going back into a hotel room for another night and delaying getting home seemed worse than the little island of our car.
This morning the adrenaline that has gotten me this far across the country started to give way to total emotional and physical exhaustion. We’ve been in crisis mode for so long, been paddling towards saving ourselves for so many days, been so saddened by the loss of Ellison this far into the 9th inning, that everything, suddenly, felt like it had caught up with me. There’s a vulnerability that happens to you when you’re on the road that’s unlike anything else. You’re a stranger. And you’re among strangers who are not strange to each other. Plus you have all your precious things in the car with you. In our case this means our son whose infant vulnerability weighs heavily on our every movement, our dog and all our stuff which Dan’s packing and unpacking every night and morning much to his discontent. There’s no way to not feel like a sitting duck in some ways—we’re just such an obvious target—a Prius packed to the gills, California plates (I think we encouraged less irritation with Maine tags) and a young white family. And then there’s the problem of stopping to nurse, sometimes late at night, sometimes in places that at first seem kind of ok, but then make us uneasy—me pulling out my breast in the front seat, then later, taking M.’s clothes and diaper off to change him. Once, in Oklahoma at an empty gas station, two guys were hanging around near our car while I tried to change M.’s diaper and Dan took Hopper out. I couldn’t quite bring myself to take the diaper all the way off—something made me deeply uneasy. I propped up a blanket hoping they wouldn’t see I had a child in the car and then finally tapped on the window at Dan to come back. We left and tried to find a new place to stop and nurse and change Marsy. But everything suddenly felt threatening. And it may not have been, necessarily, but late at night it’s hard to tell. It’s weird, when you stop and think about it, to realize that you feel unsafe in your own country. But, of course, this is not a new emotion for many people who feel threatened or endangered in their own communities every day—whether because of environmental pollution, drugs, violence, racism or any kind of intolerance.

Today, because of our collective exhaustion, we let M. sleep in the hotel for his first morning nap. Then, for breakfast we went out to lunch and I had a salad with blackened beef and blue cheese and Dan had what he says was the best meal of this trip—southern fried chicken, cornmeal stuffing, coleslaw and fried apples and a huge never ending cup of coffee. M. sat on his knee the whole time watching every bite Dan took with endless fascination. And everyone that went by us stopped to tell us how darling our baby was. Of course this lunch and all the compliments made us decide we loved Nashville.
Then, in our desire to give M. some time off from being in the car, we bopped around at some stores, had a second lunch at a small local soup and sandwich place and hit the road late in the day thinking that we’d drive while M. slept and get as far as Roanoke, Virginia.
But, instead, we’ve ended up here, in Monterey, TN, which boasts the brand new Super 8 where we are tonight, a Burger King, a Subway, two gas stations and not much else. Also, incidentally, Monterey is a dry town. I went to the gas station while Dan set up our room in the Super 8 to get us a beer and some bottled water. I must have circled the coolers ten times before asking where the beer was. When I got back and told Dan no dice on the beer, his face fell. So we’re drinking chamomile tea and lying in a totally airless brand new room, with brand new everything and the chemical smell to prove it (it’s great—no germs, but the chemicals are probably much more dangerous to little M. than a dirty comforter). The snow is rapidly falling outside—and it’s wonderful for my weather sore eyes. After going outside in the snow, Hopper came in wagging his tail for the first time in what seems like months. M. is snoring in his car seat (we have not yet wanted to disrupt him and bring him in the bed until we’re ready to konk out ourselves) and Dan is watching the Food Network on TV.

We’re so close tonight, yet so far away.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, Hopper and M.