It is hard to stay still now. It always has been for me; I am naturally restless; it is nearly impossible for me to sit in one place for more than an hour. It seems like such an oxymoron that I spent eight days primarily stuck in a car and didn’t mind a single second of it. I didn’t mind it because I was moving, and my eyes became my feet as I traveled through farmland, through mountains, through desert, and back home again. Maryland to Utah, a trip of over 4,000 miles total, and now I feel homesick for places I’ve only seen once.
The car becomes your best friend on a road trip. There were times when it felt less like I was piloting the old RAV4 and more like it was piloting me; in particular, one night we drifted through the Nebraska dusk for hours, rolling through the entire state nonstop. I couldn’t see much past the edges of the highway; everything beyond that was a deep, dark blue, and the sky softly spattered rain on the windshield. At one point I bumped the gear by accident and the car shifted into neutral, and I panicked, unaware of my mistake and confused as to why the car would no longer accelerate. As I pulled onto the shoulder my girlfriend stirred from her sleep in the passenger seat and shifted the car back, mumbling something about how it happens all the time, and immediately fell asleep again. I stayed on the shoulder of the highway for a few minutes, trembling, thankful for the ability to keep moving but appreciating the momentary pause.
Sleep became a thing of the past that week. We would drive until a sort of pre-exhaustion hit and then find a hotel a few hours away from our current point. Finding a hotel was always an ordeal, they were often already booked or didn’t allow two 19-year-olds to acquire a room. One night, our eyes burning and our bodies spent, we called 11 hotels to find that none had a vacancy. The 12th hotel was hours away in Nebraska while we had already crossed into Colorado, but we drove to it anyway, navigating foggy, tumbleweed-blanketed roads with a kind of quiet desperation. We stumbled into bed at two, maybe three that night, sleep just another resource we needed to keep our bodies going. Like food. Like water. Like air. We were so close to our destination.
We didn’t stop moving once we reached Utah, crisscrossing the state to reach various places, Antelope Island, Bryce Canyon, Logan. The shortest day we put in was a five-hour drive and I started feeling like we weren’t moving enough. The beauty of a road trip is that everything can be new if you let it and so we took a different route on the way back, dipping down through Kansas and Missouri, the evangelical states of the Midwest where peeling billboards on the side of the highway called to us to change our ways.
My mom thought we were ridiculous when I called her sometime in the evening on July 7th and told her we still had seven or so hours of driving left. She didn’t understand our need to push on, to make it home, to keep moving because to stay still would be to stop entirely. I remember a thunderstorm over a gas station in West Virginia and wondering if it was a good idea to keep on pushing. But standing still made my skin crawl so I stayed awake with my girlfriend, one final sleepy conversation as she drove slowly through the mountains, the windshield wipers working furiously and lightening lighting up our path. We made it home late that night.
I don’t know if motion sickness is the right term, but that’s what I’d call it. It’s more of an anti-motion sickness, I guess, a motion homesickness, a whole-body ache to be moving again. Nothing satisfies this feeling to move; two-hour trips are the same as five-minute ones. I want another 12-hour day of driving, the kind that leaves my muscles cramped and my eyes burning; I want to crawl into bed knowing that I’ll want the exact same thing again in the morning.
Perhaps motion homesickness isn’t a universal feeling, or maybe it’s something you have to experience for yourself, but I can try to encapsulate the feeling for you. Around midnight I pulled over at a rest stop in Colorado, the same night we would later end up back in Nebraska. I had been driving for hours and my girlfriend had been sleeping for the same amount of time. She sat up slowly, asking where we were, and when I turned my head to look at her I felt a jolt. It was like the car was still rolling at 90 mph and I pushed my foot on the brake harder, unsure of what was real. The rolling sensation, even in place, cemented for me the fact that staying still was always going to feel surreal. In an ideal world, I am always 100 miles from my destination, a nonstop cycle of motion, never giving the homesickness enough time to start.
