Plan, Move, Repeat.

As the theme I’ve been using for these posts reflecting on my life is irresponsibility, I’ll tell you about my recklessly meticulous planning for the road trip of my younger days.

While I was laid up after knee surgery, I not only wrote my thesis in one shot, I also mapped out my road trip route. In-between writing and planning, I went to physical therapy three times a week and did my exercises with the zeal of a fanatic so I would be ready to go come June. My trip would be anchored to national parks and forests at the start, a drive down Route 101 in Oregon to Route 1 in San Francisco and finish off with a run across the Salt Flats of Utah. I don’t know why the Salt Flats were important to me, but I was convinced it had to be done.

I would backcountry camp in parks, stay at a few big campgrounds, surf couches when available and stay in hostels when needed. I studied national parks maps for routes and campsites I thought my repaired knee could handle with a 40lb pack. Months before I departed, I secured my backcountry permits. I would know where I would be sleeping every night for the first several weeks of my trip. 

I began in Grand Tetons National Park and followed it with, Yellowstone, Glacier, Cor d’Alene, Olympia and Mt. Saint Helen’s. I then started down Route 101 from Seaside Oregon. I took a side trip to Crater Lake and the Redwoods before switching to Route 1 and heading into San Francisco for a long stint on a couch. As my time to check in to my cubicle was fast approaching, I finally and reluctantly headed for the salt flats, the last leg of my trip. 

Yeah, that’s how I do reckless and impulsive things in my life. I get an idea in my head and plan the shit out of every detail then go do it. A solo road trip like this might sound imprudent, but I also always cautiously plan these things very conservatively relative to my own capabilities. 

In hindsight, I can’t even say any of it was really that wild or spontaneous save for a few unplanned side trips. Even when my knee brace rubbed me raw and bloody, forcing me off the trail on day two, I had a phone number of a nearby youth hostel already at hand (I even planned plan B). My photos from this trip are of the paper variety and I don’t have any of them here with me, so I offer you some random photos from a few of those places from different eras.

I guess the real final leg of my trip was when I headed to Texas for that job. 

I am a planner. College, job, moving through the ranks and maybe even that trip were born of the idea that took possession of me that day my dad stood over me beating the shit out me. Never again. This was the plan. It may not have been mapped in every detail, but I was confident in knowing where it was going.

But, once I got there, it was just being there. The motion stopped. The plan ran out. I had arrived, now what? I didn’t have that next idea. I tried to move forward, but I just ended up grinding the gears and my teeth in frustration. I work best in the planning and execution phases. The preparation and travel, the design and make, the map and move. . . those are the things I crave. When I arrive, complete and finish, rather than sitting at the destination, I long to start mapping the next move.

In the last several years, restlessness and frustration have been consuming me. I feel cemented in with the incessant nagging of stuff I needed to do to stay exactly where I already am. It is a feeling of being overwhelmed by a wave, sucked into the turbulent washing machine under the surface then spit back out only to find you’ve made zero progress and another damned wave is coming at you to repeat the debacle. They tell me there are pills for those feelings, but they don’t actually stop the wave or make you get the fuck out of its way; they just make you accept the next pummeling with a smile on your face and a tingling in your brain.

I want to get the fuck out of the waved and fashion a surfboard out of a piece of drift wood and be on my way. I don’t want to eat sand yet again.

There is peace when I am on the moving. I feel content when I am on the move headed toward a destination. Despite the world sliding by around me, everything in me slows down. I am taken with the motion of moving forward. To do lists don’t exist when I am moving; they can only be attended to once I stop. They only drown and suffocate me once I stop. They exist at origins and destinations, in-between, there is only motion. The plan being executed. Thank you, Jack Kerouac.

I don’t know if a literal road trip actually completes this ridiculously elaborate metaphor I have created here, but I am planning and mapping something out that I will execute next month. And that feels pretty good for now.

Happy cooking and Dharma bumming!