It is a truth universally acknowledged, or if it isn’t it should be, that lighting out on a road trip is almost never the wrong thing to do. The Blackfoot Indians knew this back when the only roads were buffalo trails. They had plenty of bison to hunt right in their own backyard, but frequently they would range over hundreds and even thousands of miles just to see what they could see. We hardly ever regret a road trip, and on the best ones, no matter the vicissitudes of the highway, the times, our age or career or health, there comes a moment when we know that it was exactly the right thing to do.
For me, on the Great American Book Tour, that moment came in about as unlikely a place as I can imagine. Late in the afternoon on the hazy June day when I was harried out of my hometown by the Battle-ax, I found myself traipsing from bookstore to bookstore in New York City. I was thinking of what my uncle and I had planned to do here—visit the great writer Joe Mitchell’s beloved fish markets, have a look at the Battery, immortalized by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick—when I stopped in my tracks in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Surrounded by honking delivery trucks, street vendors, tourists, homeless people, and fans in Derek Jeter sweatshirts hustling to catch the subway out to the stadium for that night’s Yankee game, I stood stock-still. Staring at me from less than one hundred feet away crouched the two lions I’d first seen as a boy of six, holding my uncle’s hand and wondering if they were getting ready to spring. Not that I was all that worried. If the big cats attacked, I had no doubt that Reg could handle them, just as he had that assailant in the grocery store, whom he’d beaned with the can of corn.
“Get out of the way, Clyde, you’re not home in East Jesus,” a cab driver screeched as he swerved around me.
I did as he said. Then stood on one of the busiest sidewalks in America, looking at those lions. And right then, I knew that setting out on this improbable journey, at this fraught juncture of my life, had been exactly the right decision.
I have to confess that I’m no fan of misogynistic old Paul (formerly Saul). I’ve always suspected that on the road to Damascus, he was either falling-down drunk or struck by lightning. How else to account for his promptly going out and inventing a new religion that would consign me, for the better part of my youth, to that exquisitely cruel inner circle of Hades known as Sunday school? Still, personal epiphanies do happen. I experienced a small one in front of the main branch of the New York Public Library that day. And I’m pretty sure I’d had another one, many years before.
On the day of our wedding, Phillis and I drove from upstate New York to the Northeast Kingdom, just as we had done in the spring for our teaching interview. We arrived in Orleans around midnight, but Verna, our new landlady and soon to be our dear friend, was waiting up for us. “Welcome home, Moshers!” she called out as we approached her lighted porch. “Welcome home.”
Until that moment we’d had doubts, and plenty of them, about deciding to come to this little outpost a few miles south of the Canadian border to start our married life. With her simple, warm greeting, Verna laid those doubts to rest. Whatever lay ahead for us, we knew that at least for the next year, this was the place we would call home.