There is a moment, sharp and strange, when the wheels begin to turn and the house, the trees, the neighbors, all slide backward into memory. On the morning of April 17th, with New Hampshire trying its best to look like spring, we pulled out of Portsmouth at nine in the morning. I have known departures before — grand, tearful, hasty, silent — but this one carried a particular weight. Maybe because it was not a trip with a ticketed return, but a casting-off. A trust fall into the unknown. I’ve learned that leaving, no matter how many times you do it, never gets easier. It’s only numbed by motion, by the necessary distractions of the road. But in that moment, waving goodbye to a home that had cradled me for so long, I felt all of it at once — the thrill of the unknown, the gnaw of homesickness, and that ancient human urge to move forward anyway.
Freedom. It sounds pure and bright when you speak of it — live free, see the world, shake off the chains of habit — but it always carries a shadow of fear. It should. Otherwise it’s just recklessness. I thought of my family. There was Poochie too at fifteen years old. I thought of her and the old ache that no amount of distraction can fully cure flared again. You cannot explain to a dog why you must leave, nor to yourself, really. You only know that sometimes you must. The road demands sacrifices, though it never asks politely. There is a feeling that presses against your ribs when the familiar falls away behind you. Ahead were the adventures we had dreamed of — the clean sweep of the horizon, the strangers who would become characters in our story — but behind were the people and places whose roots ran deep in my heart. Leaving is never clean. It rips and bruises as it frees.
Our destination for the day was Ithaca, New York: a college town tucked into hills, where Charlie’s family member waited with a driveway that would fit a skoolie and a kitchen to share a meal. The road stretched out, long and gray, through Massachusetts and across New York, and the bus settled into its rhythm: a little loud, a little awkward, but loyal enough. Somewhere past Albany, the wide lanes gave way to backroads stitched between farms, the kind of roads that seem stitched by hand rather than engineered. We climbed and dipped, learning the language of gear shifts and curves, the bus grumbling in complaint but carrying on.
Urban driving, we learned quickly, was not our friend. In Ithaca, the narrow streets dipped and twisted without warning, pocked with potholes that rattled our bus and scraped our gray water tanks more than once. Each scrape was a blow to the nerves, a reminder that the open road is never as easy as you would believe. We discussed a potential need for raising the tanks. Learning the ways of a machine that, like us, would need to toughen up for the miles ahead.
Ithaca itself is a place stitched from the same cloth as Burlington, Vermont — brick sidewalks, handmade signs, liberal politics. It clings to the southern edge of Cayuga Lake, a long, slender body of water sitting between rounded mountains. I thought how nice it must be to settle here, to fall into its rhythms.
Emily and Nat welcomed us with warm lights and warm food. We made chickpea curry and settled into the slow pleasures of puzzling and talk. Later, in a wood-fired hot tub under the budding stars, the strain of the day sloughed off and I felt something like peace.
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