CARTOGRAPHIES OF SILENCE
I’ve always remembered those road trips as the happiest times of my childhood. I felt as though I were being introduced to Blue Sky America, our Big Beautiful Country into which I had been lucky enough to be born.
It was the nostalgic promise of that Blue Sky Big Beautiful Country that called me back out onto the road the summer after I turned 23. But only a few hundred miles down the Interstate, I realized that things didn’t feel the same.
In 1985, America was struggling. So was I. Farmers were losing their land. Wall Street might have been flourishing in those Reagan years, but the American middle class was not. Driving the back roads through rural small towns in states I had never seen—Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina—I witnessed the disappearing middle-class neighborhoods, the anxiety of farm communities, the unhealed splits between black and white, the growing stratification between poor and rich. There was a national angst that seemed to mirror my own internal confusion. America felt a lot like I did: We were watching our familiar landmarks get boarded up, graffitied over, and plowed down, with no idea what would replace them.
That summer, I drove cross country and back in my baby blue 1963 convertible VW bug with my partner Sam and our two large dogs for the ostensible reason of attending the 90th birthday party of Sam’s Italian-American New Jersey grandmother, whom I’d never met. Two months on the road. Two revelatory life-changing months. More than just a road trip, that summer was an awakening.
Six months earlier, I had dropped out of the prestigious graduate school in acting to which I had been accepted right out of college. From childhood on, I had wanted to be an actor like my dad, but by my early twenties, I had begun to feel more passionate about social justice than I did about the theatre. After I came out to my mom and she had rejected me, I felt even more called to do something that could help the world and not just me. Since I didn’t yet know what that would look like, I decided to move to Albuquerque to be near my brother. Having jettisoned all the plans I had been making for myself since childhood, I craved the safety of someone I loved and who I knew loved me.
I got a job working on a horse ranch by day, and I baked 250 loaves of five different kinds of organic whole-grain bread by myself on late-night shifts at a cooperative bakery—which is to say, I was pretty lost. My whole life I thought I was going to be an actress. Now I had no idea what I was going to do. So I decided to take a few classes at the university that happened to be right up the street from the bakery.
That’s where I met and began dating Sam—a smart, intense, deeply political, New Jersey-raised, Italian-American Women’s Studies professor eleven years my senior. Sam lived in a log cabin without running water or heat, drove an old VW van in which she loved to camp, and had a fluffy caramel-colored mutt named Sage, who was possibly the sweetest—and certainly the dumbest—dog I have ever met.
On our summer road trip, Sage, Sam, and I were joined on our adventure by Polo—a true trickster coyote—a German Shepherd mix, who had adopted me when he showed up at the horse ranch. I named him after Marco Polo, another fellow wanderer. Like his namesake, Polo had a penchant for wandering off and returning with amazing “gifts”—the dismembered haunch of a dead deer, for example. Hilariously, given his name, he also adored swimming pools—which was how he ended up swimming laps in Conway Twitty’s pool after hopping out of the car at Twitty City to go on a little walkabout. Thank God for Polo, who provided the comic relief in our summer road trip movie! We sure needed it.
Sam and I could not have led more antithetical lives. I was a rich kid from a very famous family who had no clue just how different my childhood had been from 99.9 percent of the other people on the planet. I was also 23 years young, though I didn’t know that either. Having always spent far more time with grownups than with people my own age, I was mentally precocious, which I equated with maturity. Although my head might have been smart, my heart hadn’t yet entered preschool. I had never been in a long-term relationship. I had no idea what I was doing. And I had certainly never met anyone like Sam.
Sam had gone through some really tough experiences in her life. She had developed a quiver of learning resources, healing techniques, self-care strategies, and coping mechanisms, which I was eager to have her share with me. The books she read, the people she knew, the ideas she had developed about how the world worked blew my mind. I loved learning from her. But she had one coping mechanism she rarely let anyone see. When something really scared her, she soothed herself in a cocoon of solitude. The problem was that I was often what scared her, which meant that her go-to form of self-care felt to me as though she pulled away in times of stress and difficulty.
That summer, as we began to experience the differences between us in our conversations, in the ways we moved through the world, in how we spent money, in what brought us joy, Sam often retreated. Sometimes that meant sleeping in her own tent when we camped out; other times it meant that we spent days together in the car in near silence. When she was finally able to share what had made her withdraw, it was almost always something I had said or done that had triggered and scared her—which, in turn, triggered and scared me. There we were, two women who hardly knew one another and had precious little in common, traveling across country with our two dogs, freaking each other out. It was not the road trip I had imagined.
It was the silence that did me in. When I was a very little girl, the punishment I feared the most was being sent to my room to have dinner alone. I think my mother thought I hated that punishment because I wasn’t with other people. That wasn’t what I hated at all.
When I ate dinner alone sitting at my desk, I faced a huge plate glass window that overlooked a courtyard below. At night, everything outside was pitch black, so all I could see was a reflection of myself and the room behind me. I stared at my own unhappy face until I couldn’t stand it anymore. Then I forced myself to look at my bedroom behind me.
There was a door at the far end of the room that opened onto a long upstairs hallway. It was always left cracked partway open. I would stare at that door and quake in fear. I was convinced monsters lurked just beyond that door. I sat there in the eerie silence of my lonely room knowing I could never cry for help, and waited for the monsters to come.
On that summer road trip, every time Sam pulled away, I felt like that little girl sitting in dreaded anticipation, knowing there was no one I could ask for help. My mother had rejected me and my sinful lifestyle, and I was all alone camping in the middle of nowhere with a woman I barely knew who sometimes didn’t speak to me for days. In the silence, I waited for the monsters to come.
That summer, they did. The monsters in my head told me that I really was a sinner. That I had rejected the one person who had always been there for me—my mother—and now I really was all alone. They told me that I had abandoned everything I had been given—my life of privilege, my education, my friends. For what? To find my true self? To find my purpose? The monsters mocked me with their questions. The silence all around me was deafening. I heard no answers. There was no help. I was terrified.
That summer, I felt afraid in a way I never had before. What was I really afraid of? Everything and nothing, as we all are when we are caught in fear’s clutches. What feels like the weight of the world when we are in it, we know to be flimsy mirages when we are not. I had heard fear’s arguments for years. I had felt fear’s icy claws scrape across my heart. But I had never experienced fear at its persuasive best until that summer road trip with Sam.
In twenty three years of a mostly lonely life, I had never felt so alone, so afraid, or so vulnerable. As I stood at the threshold between childhood and adulthood, fear had me in its clutches. Now that the monsters had finally come, they had no intention of letting me go.
Thank God some part of the joy-filled, hopeful younger me remained. My Inner Pollyanna. She still surfaced from time to time that summer, and when she did, how I loved her!
I still do. I think we all need a Glass Half Full Girl as our internal co-pilot, running down every rainbow not only for the pot of gold she is sure she’ll one day find, but also for the sheer joy in smiling at that shimmering, many-colored arc of light.
The younger Pollyanna Me believed that every problem could be solved with a positive attitude, money I didn’t always have, and overcoming the things that felt unfeelable by summoning a storybook spirit of adventure that could sew a silver lining on anything—transforming difficulty into a tale for the future. My Glass Half Full Girl soothed every fear-filled freakout that summer as best she could.
Mostly, though, she spent a lot of time looking out the window as this brave new world rolled by. What she saw ultimately became the whole reason I remember that trip.
In the end, it was not all the monsters that surfaced through the silence of that summer that stayed with me. The true treasure that prevailed from that road trip was the wildflowers.