rerouting

Where am I? Where am I going? How do I get there from here? How do I know?

Here is one way. I open the app and accept a ride. I begin at one place, and navigational technology tells me, turn by turn, how to get to another place. When I get to that place, labeled with a street name and building number, I’m told I’ve arrived at my destination. I guess that’s true. I have arrived. But when I confine myself to this way of getting to where I need to go, I feel sad, bereft actually, as though I’ve lost something or someone. 

The unrelenting Uberverse pulls hard and tight, binding my attention until it can’t breathe. Start with the initial jarring yank of the ride request. Next, attend to the navigational commands above the scant picture of the world portrayed in stark black and white on a tiny rectangle on my phone. But don’t get lost in the phone. Look up! Because even as I process the simplified information on that screen, I must relate it in real-time to the street signs and traffic hurtling at the windshield. 

Squeezed between the chaotic real world and its stripped-down virtual version, I become a little arrowhead on a screen, a pinprick of calculating attention. That is how when I’m told I have arrived at my destination, I have no idea where on earth I am. I am existentially lost.

I know this feeling. It came when I lost my job, career, and marriage. To say I lost my sense of direction would be an understatement. I lost my sense of who I was and why I should even be on this earth—anywhere on this earth—at all. 

Then, by some mysterious good fortune, I was surprised by a forceful urge to put myself in nature. The outdoors had been a part of my life growing up, but as an adult, it had receded to the margins. Maybe I was looking for a way to make the human world—my self especially—smaller. Maybe I was reaching back to a time in my youth when I felt connected to something bigger than me, bigger than all humans— something unconsciously associated with nature.

I first recovered that feeling on a weekend camping trip at the seashore. One morning, alone on the beach in the dark just before dawn, I settled in on a cushion of soft, cool sand. Letting my hands rest in my lap, I gazed at the sand in front of me and at the water extending beyond it, the edge of their encounter barely distinguishable in the quiet kaleidoscope of pastels set in motion by the sunlight, radiating up from just below the horizon. And then the sun slid through the narrow slot between the ocean and the night sky. Rising through mere slivers of clouds, it cast slow shifting planes of peach, orange, yellow, red, pink, purple, silver, and deep blue across a path leading to where I sat, on my little mound of soft sand, a few feet from gently breaking waves. 

Gratefully carried off in the solution of earth, water, air, and fire, the edges of me slipped away. The despair of existential loss gave way to utter fullness, the fullness of the universal whole of which I was—had always been and would always be—a part. And I had only to surrender my small self to feel it.

Thus, I decided—having no job or home and no clear plan for getting either—that I’d use up some retirement savings and spend the first six months of 2020 on a solo camping trip around the US, catching as many seaside sunrises and sunsets as I could. I kayaked among crocodiles and manatees in the Everglades, camped on the beach on the Gulf of Mexico, and scrambled, fearfully, to the top of Emory Peak in Texas’s Big Bend National Park. Before COVID cut the trip short in southern Oregon at the end of March, I’d hiked among the mysterious giant saguaro in Arizona, watched whales off the Channel Islands of Southern California and sea otters among the crashing waves near Big Sur, bathed in the dappled light filtering through the canopy of ancient redwoods in Northern California, and had the jaw-dropping experience of total solitude in Yosemite.

My first day walking on slick red rocks dusted with winter snow in Arches National Park stands out. The solitude and silence set the backdrop against which the rock formations’ immensity, colors, and fragility, standing dignified like ancient solitary sentinels or else sometimes huddled together like child giants, kept stopping me short. Those rocks existed as I saw them only because they’d lost most of themselves. They stood, unmoving but ever-changing, with pure vulnerability and innocence. And, gazing at me without expression, they, in turn, bared me, revealed me, and I came to feel, accepted me as younger kin and apprentice in the art of patient, graceful self-erosion 

The part of the earth that I drive on now is not as spectacular as Arches. But the experiences of that trip seem to have deposited in me some sort of time-release capsule that delivers—just when the Uberverse disorients me—a fresh dose of the realization that I am not merely on but rather of the earth and its unfathomably deep, myriad layers of time. I am only ever as lost as I allow myself to be.

So, where am I? Where am I going? How do I get there from here? How do I know?

GPS is one way. Here is another. I have driven more than 27,000 miles under the direction of rideshare navigational apps. That is greater than the circumference of our planet around the Equator. This reminds me that the part of the Earth on which I’ve driven those miles—on or around Interstate 91 in Western Massachusetts—once upon a time lay on that same Equator. That was two hundred and fifty million years ago. Since then, it has moved 5,000 miles northeast. I stretch fruitlessly to grasp how something so massive as a continent moved so far and, at the same time, how anything could move so slowly: less than one inch per year. I try to imagine having such determination and such patience.

Cruising up and down Interstate 91, the Connecticut River Valley opens before me like a book. Two hundred fifty million years ago, Pangaea, the earth’s last supercontinent, began to tear apart, unzipping itself along this seam upon which I now drive. Millions of years of rain carved stream channels in the resulting cliffs flanking the valley floor. Like raindrops racing down a car window, those streams captured one another, deepening and broadening to become the Connecticut River that now flows, veiled by the morning mist, outside my window.

Now, if I look to the east, I see the edge of a tilted lava field—we now call it the Holyoke Range—stretched out like a sleeping dragon. Here, not long after the rifting of Pangaea, volcanoes erupted. Lava flowed, pooled in the valley, then cooled and hardened. Over tens of millions of years, the soft valley floor beneath these lava fields shifted downward toward the east. To the west, the basalt remains of volcanoes rose upward like a see-saw. And just a few miles ahead, dinosaurs left tracks that I can touch with my bare hands. 

If I get off at Exit 25, I’ll enter a traffic circle that will spin me out onto the Coolidge Bridge, spanning the Connecticut River, and then onto Route 9, a narrow strip of big box outlets arrayed like play blocks, dotted with the other toys—bulldozers, massive coils and culverts—of a giant man-child. But I also see, rolling out to either side, dwarfing our creations, some of the most fertile soil in the United States, laid down layer after layer and mixed over millennia by the flooding flow of the river and the advance and retreat of glaciers. When I stop at this farm stand, I can buy asparagus, and when I eat it, I am taking into my body the soil, the river, the sunlight, the rifts and shifts, and flows of fire and ice, and beyond these, the cosmic blasts that started it all. I incorporate eons. 

So here I am. I have arrived at my destination, and here you are, my rider. And grounded together, as creatures crawling upon this surface of shared earth, adrift in this ocean of archaic time, we can notice and appreciate each other. 

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