I
One July, a couple of years ago, I got in my car and drove from Calgary, Alberta, to Phoenix, Arizona. The summer heat battered my lips until they split and bled and I pummeled my digestive system with foodstuffs foraged from oases along the interstate, like honey mustard pretzels and gas station Caesar salads, but besides the beating my body took, I had a great time. Coasting along the Albertan plains and being dropped from the mountains of Montana into the parched scrub of Idaho, then watching the coral dunes of Utah bleed into red rocks and forest fires in Arizona, made me feel awake, and to this day, I can’t believe that in some parts of my country, there are babies opening their eyes for the first time and seeing cacti instead of pines.
I live in London now, and I don’t have a car. I get everywhere by foot, tube, or bus, but sometimes in summer there are days when the gray fleece of the sky and the trees confined to tidy plots on the sidewalks and the body odor of strangers barking into their phones on a packed tube make me yearn for that road trip and the personal interior of a car. This yearning sometimes gets so strong that I go for a run.
I don’t like to run. But it’s ingrained in me, whether I like it or not, from running cross country in high school—when I say I ran cross country, I don’t mean that I ran well. I came last in almost every race. I envied my friends, who were all race-winning gazelles, and cursed my big hips and bigger boobs as I heaved myself up the hill of a lonely country road, knowing that my friends had already finished the run and were back at school hanging out without me. I had to run cross country because I needed to pad my college applications with a sport. But I kept running because I was nurturing a quiet, tiny hope that one day, I too could win a race. Or at least be skinny and muscular at the same time, like the girls who already knew what it was like to win. Science has been known to say that the music one listens to in high school remains one’s favorite music for the rest of their life, and I believe that running, like my adoration of Alt J’s An Awesome Wave, has calcified somewhere along my neurons. I hate running, but there are days when I need it to call back to an old self.
On my runs in London, I am pushed out the door by a desire to feel as wild as I did on my road trip. I can’t replicate the feeling by renting a car and going for a U.K. road trip. It’s too dense here. There are no roads outside of London on which I could drive alone for hours and see nothing but the occasional flutter of litter. How far could I even go? Up to the Scottish highlands? I can appreciate that the landscape there would be different than here in the south of England, but not so different as Calgary and Phoenix. For a road trip to be worth my time and money, point A needs to be radically different from point B. I want to feel like I’m walking on a different planet.
So if I can’t drive, then at least I can run. On my own two feet, I can go from my neighborhood, shoddily built in the 1980s and patrolled by a pair of cats who could be fraternal twins, to Southwark Park, which is kind of nice, if only because there’s some grass. The muscle memory of running and the sound of my own panting brings me down the grooves in my mind that lead back in time. Back to an amalgam of all of my past runs—pebbles and neon Nikes, the smell of a pond strewn with pine needles just around the corner, houses of people I knew and the forest trails that connected our neighborhoods. What’s clearest of all is running in summer. I remember the sweat would sting as it dripped down my sunburn, and zigzagging across the road so that I could run in patches of shade, and the heat bugs. I listened to music on my iPod Touch, which was a treat because the cross country team did not listen to music during practice. All of the winning runners won because they were able to slip into a trance after a mile or two. This running trance has always eluded me, so in the fall, I would run with the soundtrack of I hate this I look fat why did I sign up for this in my head. I would count my thousands of steps in the attempt to make the time go by faster.
But in summer, I was propelled by the music that was calcifying along my neurons, and there was no race to win or lose, and back at home, I made a peach protein smoothie while my dopey dog licked the sweat off of my calves for the salt. I was free, and with that freedom, I depleted my body through heat and an elevated heart rate. Then, the sun set begrudgingly, the crickets started up, and I painted my toenails and stuck them in front of the air conditioner to dry. In bed, I soothed myself to sleep by imagining all of the future men who would, obviously, be obsessed with me. In the death-like sleep of adolescence, I annihilated time.
II
The reason I drove to Phoenix was to see my friend, Josie, who was pregnant with her first baby. Her husband, Owen, was in law school in Indiana and had gotten a summer job in Phoenix. When Josie told me she was spending the summer in the desert, immediately I thought…pregnant? I had never been pregnant, but I could imagine that being pregnant in one-hundred-degree heat could very well be miserable. I was living in Calgary and working as a school librarian at the time, so I had the summer off, and Phoenix was an easy straight shot down from Calgary, so I told Josie I would come and spend some time with her.
I could have flown to Phoenix for less money and less trouble, peering out of the window at the mountains morphing into desert, all while eating a Biscoff cookie. But I had always wanted to do a long road trip, perhaps because of my childhood fixation on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s descriptions of covered wagon travel. This was perhaps the only time in my life I would get to do a road trip too. I would turn twenty-five that summer; soon, I would be closer to thirty than twenty. Youth, as I knew it, was being stripped away from me. It was all the more evident when my friends started to have babies.
My plan was to drive five or six hours a day, in two hour stretches. Beforehand, I looked at a map and pinpointed small towns two hours away from each other that I could pit stop in.
Once I crossed the border from Alberta to Montana, I became afraid. It occurred to me that I was really doing this. I was a young(ish) girl traveling alone. I didn’t even learn how to change a tire before I left. My mere presence in the middle of nowhere was a wanted ad for murder.
In Montana, however, on a road among creek-dappled fields, I saw a good sign: a car, with a Maine license plate. My car also had a Maine license plate, since that's where I and my car came from. By the time I noticed the Maine license plate, however, the car had already zoomed past and I didn’t get a chance to wave to someone else who also may have been shocked at Montana’s hazy flatness. Regardless, I was comforted in knowing that there were people on these roads who were farther away from home.
My first stop was Choteau, Montana. The second I got out of the air-conditioned car I was hit with a wall of heat. I saw the first of what I later understood to be a blueprint for small towns in the West: a linear stretch of downtown, on the brink of abandonment, peppered with a vintage movie theater, the pioneer cabin of the town’s founder transposed into town for display purposes, a coffee shop, maybe a library or a sad boutique. I walked and people stared, because I was an alien in their town of 1,000, so I walked down a side street.
I passed a boy and a girl sitting at a table set up outside of a house with a chain link fence.
As I passed, the boy gestured to the loose candy on the table and said, “Do you want some sustenance?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have any American money,” I said, which was true. I hadn’t had a chance to exchange my Canadian currency yet.
Continuing on, I heard the boy say behind me, “We take cash too.”
I added this anecdote to a road trip diary I was keeping. I wanted to collate a mass of details that, compounded upon each other, could communicate the experience. I wrote things like: I walked to a coffee shop, and there were a lot of empty storefronts. The coffee house, however, was very cool and rustic. There was a blonde teenager at the cash register, and he had an attitude.
I collected all of these details, hoping that by recording them, I would never forget. Over time, however, a few details have risen up and bloomed, taking on more and more color as I remember them, while all of the others have withered into the loam of my subconscious. In Helena, I went to Reeder’s Alley, a brick complex built in the 1870s for miners, and stepped inside of a pioneer cabin, but was soon shunted out of it by a cold bristling, which I understood immediately to be a ghost. In Idaho, I was sitting at a picnic table in a desolated rest stop, eating cheesy popcorn, when I noticed wild horses out of the corner of my eye. Just past the Arizona-Utah state line, where not even cacti grew, I saw a black puppy limping along the dusty road. I stopped the car and got out with some water, crouched down and stuck out my hand, baby-talking, but the puppy was too scared, as if it had never seen a person before, and it limped away from me. At a rest stop on the Navajo Nation, I watched a frustrated bald man yell at his golden retriever, “Go peepee! Go peepee!” At Kickstand Coffee in Flagstaff, I saw a car from Nevada with a bumper sticker from the store in Maine my sister works at.
All of these moments happened outside of the car.
Inside the car, I was not in Alberta, Montana, Idaho, Utah, or Arizona. I wasn’t on Crowchild Trail, or I-15, or US 89. I was in my own little pod, which I could transform into a comedy club by playing a podcast where the hosts get high and recap 90 Day Fiancé, or into a lecture hall by playing an audiobook on the history of ancient Rome, or into a nightclub by playing all my favorite songs. The tar was sizzling outside, yet my toes were cold, because the air conditioner was on high. All of that on-demand comfort was dull. Time slowed until it became gelatinous. I glanced at the ETA on Google Maps about every five minutes. Somewhere in Arizona, right after I saw the limping puppy, I blasted the song “Ricky Bobby” by Rei Ami for about two hours straight, because its chunky beat rocked me awake.
When I pulled into Josie’s and Owen’s driveway in Phoenix, I turned my car off. I sat there, feeling the desert heat seep into the last of the air conditioning. Josie came out to meet me and took me inside the house, which was buzzing with its own air conditioning.
“What I’ve learned about Phoenix,” said Josie, who, like me, had grown up in New England and had never been to the Southwest, “is that they treat summer like how we treat winter. We try to be outside as little as possible in winter, because it’s so cold, and they try to be outside as little as possible in summer, because it’s so hot. I can only go outside at six a.m., because that’s the only time it’s bearable.”
I told her that I had wanted to go for a run while I was here. She advised me to wait until the early morning. The day had already gotten too hot.
III
The other day at work, I was talking to a girl who also ran high school cross country. I had told her that I had run, but I had never clarified that I was slow. She described someone in our department as “bear bait:” the slowest runner in the pack who will be the first to be eaten if a bear suddenly comes charging at the team from out of the woods. I had never heard the term “bear bait” before. Then I realized, as my laughter fizzled, that I had never heard the term before because I was the bear bait. If I had been fast enough, I would have been in on the joke.
I must be bear bait, because I am always looking back. If a bear was charging at me on a cross country trail, I would be looking back to see how close it was to catching up with me, just as when summer rolls around, I look back to all of my past summers. Maybe I am so reflective in summer because my birthday is in August, and June is the beginning of a liminal period when, to the tune of the crickets and the air conditioner hum, I try to define how 24 or 25 or 26 feels, so that I am ready to become 25 or 26 or 27.
This June, I am trying to define how it feels to be 27, so that I can be 28. But I am finding it difficult. In a London summer, not a cricket stirs. Instead, the nights are full of brawling foxes. The air conditioners are rare, but when they appear, they are not the ones of my youth, the big blocky rickety dusty machinations shoved into the window and held upright by duct tape.
The summer I did my road trip was the last summer that actually felt like summer. It could have been because I had never experienced heat like that before. The Phoenix heat is cruel in that it sucks the life out of you, and merciful in that it sucks the life out of you quickly. It could have been because that next summer, I was stuck in my parents’ house waiting for my U.K. visa, and the uncertainty of it clouded any enjoyment of s’mores and fireworks and kayaking. It could have been because, by the mere fact I was working at a school, I was granted a bona fide, endless, lazy summer vacation, just like the ones from my childhood.
This is not summer, I think now, as I run around Southwark Park. I think about my past summers when I sit on my floor and paint my toenails, hoping to recapture a smidge of what should be. My toes dry on their own, without the aid of an air conditioner, and while they dry, the cat I bought with my own money nudges his nose under my hand. My fiancé soothes me to sleep by telling me all about his favorite albums.
However soothed I am at the beginning of the night, I jolt awake at three a.m., not knowing why or why it has to be the same time every night. I toss and turn for what feels like twenty minutes, but then I check the clock and see that an hour has passed. Sleep is not the annihilator of time it used to be.
This isn’t summer, I say to the 16-year-old girl inside of me who is lacing her neon Nikes, as I hide my face in my pillow. No, she says before she disappears down a wooded trial, but it is 28.
Even though she is gone, I can still smell the pine needles kicked up in her wake.
Image sources: