Once we were actually on the road, I could hardly sit still. I’d never looked so carefully at my own city before—the city I was born in and had lived in my entire life. I craned my neck as we passed through town, the skyline in the distance, the businesses and buildings and billboards and street signs, the leafy trees wavering in a slight breeze. When we passed homes, I wondered who lived there and what they were doing right at this very second. Probably they were at work or school, doing the normal things that normal people did. I dared myself not to close my eyes as we passed over one of the smaller tributaries of the Sacramento River.
Goodbye, river. Goodbye, city.
Dad asked, “You’re not going to fidget around like that for two thousand miles, are you?”
“That’s how far it is?”
“Sacramento to Omaha is one thousand, five hundred eighty-two miles.”
“So, barely nothing.”
Dad grinned, flipped the dial on the radio and found Aerosmith, a band that proved strangely generation-bending. “How are you doing so far? Everything’s okay?”
I rolled my eyes. “Sure. What in the world do I have to be afraid of?”
Only everything.
But as the traffic thinned and I sat with my Fear Journal open on my lap, I found that I wasn’t that afraid, after all. Sure, the road through the foothills was curvy, with long climbs and sudden descents, lined with the sort of trees that looked as if they could take out a small village when they finally went, and I couldn’t see myself through to our destination—but somehow, what we were doing was liberating. Instead of sitting through the daily tedium of American History/Statistics/PE/Spanish/Chemistry/English, I was doing something brave and unexpected. I might have been a character in a movie, minus the expansive “open road” music that usually accompanied such scenes. Maybe my lack of fear was related to our spontaneous (poor) planning—if I didn’t know what was ahead of us, I could only form very general fears: large stretches of uninhabited spaces, winding roads, mountains.
It wasn’t so bad. Four days, and the hard part would be over—at least until our return trip.
And then, somewhere outside Auburn, I lost reception on my cell phone. I held it up to the window, toward the dash and against the roof of the car, trying to get more than a single bar.
Dad laughed. “You might not be able to rely on that the entire way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well...there’s going to be some spotty service, plus if you drain your battery on the road, you’ll have to wait to charge it until we get to the hotel.”
I grimaced. “Like the pioneers, then.”
Dad chuckled. One of the coolest things about my dad was that he could be counted on to laugh, even if my joke wasn’t in the realm of funny.
We lost one radio station after another as we entered the Sierra Nevadas, until the dial held nothing but a buzz of static. I played a few hollow-sounding songs through my phone and leaned against the window as the scenery became majestic—white-capped peaks, towering evergreens, stately redwoods. Our gray strip of I-80 was like a flimsy string threading over and in between and around the mountains, as if the path had been designed like one of those fun house mazes. I read each of the warning signs along the route to Dad, in case he missed them: Landslides! Avalanches! Danger black ice! Deer crossing! But it was a beautiful spring day, the air clear, the sky cloudless. The landslides, avalanches, black ice and deer must have been on some other road, interrupting someone else’s drive.
I tried to take a few photos on my phone, but the results were indistinct blurs. “Why didn’t we ever do anything like this before, like take a road trip?”
“Because we were so...” Dad’s voice trailed off. Maybe he was regretting, like I was all of a sudden, the cloistered, practical life we’d lived the past few years, like fugitives in our own home, only venturing out for the necessities. “I don’t know. We should have. I’m sorry, Liv. We absolutely should have.”
His voice had this strange, almost weepy quality to it, and I blurted quickly, to change the subject, “Nah, forget it. Even if you’d suggested it, I would have been too scared. Like right now, these mountains are pretty terrifying.”
“Because of their height?”
“No, because they’re mountains.”
Dad smiled. “Give me one good reason other than heights to be scared of mountains.”
“I’ll give you five,” I said, counting them off on one hand. “Mountain goats, mountain lions, black bears, coyotes and...” I did a drumroll with both hands against the dashboard. “The Donner Party.”
Dad shook his head, laughing. “Ah, a history lesson that has stayed with you. No doubt because it involved tests of human strength—”
“And cannibalism.”
“—an expansion of the Western frontier—”
“And cannibalism.”
“—and an extraordinary rescue effort.”
“Don’t forget cannibalism.” I shuddered, studying my arm. “Can you imagine a world where your best option includes a bite of someone’s bicep?”
“So, to clarify—essentially, mountain equals cannibalism.”
“Right.”
Dad threw back his head to laugh, the first real laugh I’d heard from him in what felt like a million years, an actual belly laugh. “The Donner Party,” he mused. “Now that was a road trip.”
We stopped for gas and a bathroom break in Truckee, and that’s where it all went to hell.
Actually, hell came at the exact moment when I realized my bladder was about to explode and my only option would be a public restroom. At school, I didn’t drink anything and still ended up crouching over a toilet once a day, but that was nothing compared to the horror of a gas station bathroom. I did some quick mental math: if I used the bathroom twice a day while we were on the road, and we were on the road for four days, this meant eight encounters with public restrooms—and that was being optimistic
Inside the store, I glanced around, taking in the aisles of chips and candy, the nacho cheese dispenser, the hot dogs rotating slowly on a rotisserie. I tugged on Dad’s sleeve like a two-year-old. “I don’t see a bathroom.”
The clerk behind the counter, with a Metallica shirt and greasy hair, held up a massive board with a single key attached. “It’s around the side of the building, toward the back.”
“Um,” I said, still clutching Dad’s shirtsleeve. “This is how every episode of Criminal Minds starts, with someone heading into a bathroom at a deserted gas station.”
“Not every episode,” Dad corrected. “Also, it’s not deserted. I’m right here.”
The clerk was staring at us as if we were both out of our minds. “You want the key or not?”
I squeezed Dad on the shoulder. “You’re coming with me.”
The clerk rolled his eyes.
Dad laughed. It worried me that he had such a hard time separating my jokes from my cries for help, but he bought a cup of coffee and followed me around the side of the building.
I hugged him at the door. “If I’m not out in exactly thirty seconds, please call 9-1-1.”
Back in the car, I gave Dad the play-by-play: my boots had stuck to the floor; there was a puddle of mystery moisture next to an overflowing trash can; the mirror was cloudy; the toilet had so many rings it seemed to be measuring either age, like a tree, or despair; and instead of a hand dryer there was a crusty loop of fabric carrying at least twenty types of bacteria whose names we would probably never know.
Dad was unconcerned. “Yeah, but you still washed your hands, right?”
What I wanted was to wash my whole body, clothes included.
“Life’s about the journey, not the destination,” Dad reminded me. “Isn’t there a famous quote about that?”
I rolled my eyes. “There are a thousand quotes about that. And each one is a cliché.”
But Dad had gone quiet, retreating to that place inside himself where he’d been for the past week, thinking about things I didn’t know and might not understand if I did. I figured we would be lucky if this trip was nothing more than a cliché, just a few days on the open road and a happy reunion waiting for us at the end.
But none of that, of course, was guaranteed.