Hall Thorpe: Home (c. 1919)

"Life continues even when the protagonists are off Roading."

Traveling demands a different governing ethic than home ever does. At home, a certain level of control seems possible that traveling renders unlikely. Different comforts satisfy there, too, with novelty and unfamiliarity replacing comforting routine and predictability. For sure, I find traveling enticing, so much so that I have grown to avoid its seduction, insisting that I have pressing business keeping me in my place at home. I contend that I've found my center, and leaving throws me off that balance. I even feign pressing business that might otherwise remain easily deferrable, attempting to deflect the old seduction Roading resurrects. I was once what might have passed as a road warrior, so familiar with airplane schedules that I never had to look them up, gone more than I ever came back.

As with most seductions, I eventually awakened from that dream, however enticing it continued to seem. I lost that edge and convinced myself that I should settle, however exciting I once found that lifestyle. I found my place in this world and defended that place with unusual vehemence. Our exile, twelve long dog years when we were forced to continue Roading, however much we sincerely wanted to return home, rendered home more precious than it had ever seemed before. Thereafter, I swore off my former almost addiction and forswore going back there very often.

In those increasingly rare times when I begrudgingly consent to leave, vestigial instincts return. After a day or two. I catch myself knowing what to do when I couldn't have possibly known what I would be called to do, a common Roading requirement. I could find the only decent lunch restaurant in a town I'd never visited before and thereby save The Muse and me from another Formica lunch experience featuring more neon flash than taste or nutrition. So few decent lunch places remain that it's almost a fool's mission even to try to find one. I knew I'd found it from more than a block away, a notion confirmed when I saw a map of the country festooned with pins designating the hometown of every prior visitor. Our hometown had not been pinned, so I asked how I qualified for a pin. Our greeter brought me a gold one, which, once stuck in, made our hometown look like the capital of the whole danged country, which, of course, it is for us. We ate lunch at home that day.

What might seem like synchronicity elsewhere manifests as a result of embedded instinct in those experienced in Roading. We've learned to take our foibles as givens after decades among the missing. When I left my toiletries bag at last night's stop, I knew how to order a two-day supply of my usual prescriptions to my current location. I am familiar with the protocols of freeway driving, and I appreciate those who diligently follow them. The rookies mistake the exercise for road racing and unknowingly tangle up the flow by trying to go faster than everyone else. They'll never know they cause the clogs they complain about. The truckers who display the discipline to maintain their reduced speed limit allow automobile traffic to maintain their flow without being subject to the vagaries of hills and turns from which trucks can't escape. Properly engaged, nobody ever needs to make a federal case about freeway driving. If only those less experienced could comprehend.

Gratefully gone are the days when there was only one place to get a decent cup of coffee in San Francisco. Likewise, the times when a coffee in NYC automatically came with creamer already infused. It remains difficult to find a decent loaf of bread when in wheat-growing country, an inexplicable feature of this country, if no other. I was pleased to notice that sitting in The Schooner feels like sitting at home, even after we'd driven it fifteen hundred miles from there. I could have the best of both worlds, I suppose, remain a homebody yet still go on the occasional extended excursions. I learned long ago that I could never travel alone, for even when unaccompanied, a supporting cast was taking care of my obligations I'd left behind. Sprinklers don't quite live up to expectations. The cats won't consent to just anyone's attention. The never-ending porch project could not be suspended just because the sponsors were absent. Life continues even when the protagonists are off Roading.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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