A summer apart

I left Illinois, the freeway clogged by downtown Chicago to Wisconsin, to drive across Minnesota, over the Mississippi, through the green and tree-less rolling hills of South Dakota, around the increasingly craggy tops of Wyoming countryside, and into Montana, where the mountains come together like folds in a scarf.

My drive to work has constant reminders of fatal sentences. Little crosses dot the winding two-lane roads, bunched together like flourishing bouquets of roses. 4 together, right outside Missoula; beyond the Sinclair gas station, 3 placed in front of a study pine. The hit deer sit still in the highway medians, their eyes open (I can see it even though I rarely go below 70 miles per hour), their heads crooked back beyond the natural curve of their necks.

My home for the summer is a converted hotel. Dark wood masks the age of the building, but swallows have nested in the entry beams in front of the lobby for decades, one of the signs inside tells me. Their droppings coat the welcome mat outside my room door, which opens out onto the highway. The drive to the closest Target is 40 minutes. I'm told that Seely, closer, is more expensive, but has good ice cream.

Most of the people in this hotel are 20 -- young girls playing cowgirl for the summer. One asked me, in a roundabout, almost polite way my age, saying, "so if you just finished grad school, how old exactly are people when they graduate from grad school?" Sally is slight and blonde, Lauren rosy and chipper; Ariel is kind and shows me how to use the coin-operated washers in the basement, which stain my new twin-sized bedsheets orange. One is learning how to cook chicken and a few cluster around the only stove, looking under the greenish flourescent light for hints of pink. "I think it needs like 15 more minutes," one says; another: "I think like 5." The would-be cook has drizzled hunks of salt across the top of the near-rare meat and cut up a few leaves of rosemary, which idly sit on top.

This summer, I think, will be solitary. I'm reading now Hilary Mantel's "Bring Up the Bodies," the sequel to Wolf Hall. In my car, I listen to Harari's Sapiens. 

In school we study the great explorers: Magellan, Cook, Columbus, Hillary, Earhart, Armstrong. More often than not, history is kind to these, mostly, men. Their desire to be the first -- to explore -- is taken as a given, assumed. Who wouldn't want to go to those new shores, where sand is undisturbed, moon dust untouched? Even now, where there are no new worlds left to conquer, the inky darkness of the deep sea calls to come; the oppressive constriction and open expanse of space to others. Some awakened urge voices across time to seek new lands; to make the unknown known.  

The American West has been in the national consciousness the unexplored, untamable "other" -- the place apart. Tribes were fought and killed and banished, settlers pushed continuously. They were driven by the surety of their manifest rightness and destiny. 

I've never really wanted to explore; I would likely be the last to sign up for a one-way ticket to Mars or to a trip across an unexplored Arctic. And yet, when I pass through the thousands of miles of country, I start to understand the drive to seek, to wander. For the first time, I feel that push to keep moving forward, to stake a claim in the wide expanses of prairie, to claim the tall and spindly firs, the herds of brown fattened cattle that loll in a sun which stays high and direct overhead, the swallows which dart above my doorframe.