“A rule of the blue road: Be careful going in search of adventure. It’s ridiculously easy to find,”  William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways.

In the late summer of 2000, after graduating from college with no plans for my future (my entire strategy of waiting for Jesus to return before making any important life decisions was working out terribly) I went on a 9,000 mile road trip to look for home. I mean this literally. Though my parents affirmed I would always have a home with them if I needed it, I knew I couldn’t stay. Like the baby bird in the children’s book Are You My Mother?, I thought I could find my home–my new “adult” home–if I just looked long enough for it, as though I would be able to recognize it by its “Welcome home, Heather” sign. And once I found that place, I intended to curl up in its lap like a tired puppy and never leave.

So I set out on an epic quest. But mostly I just drove a lot. And camped in between. I meant to spend a good two or three months on the road. But in the end, my little Daihatsu Rocky covered 9,000 miles in a little over one month of travel–2,000 of those miles being driven, for reasons I will eventually explain, in the last three days of the trip. Full of adolescent angst and entitlement at the time, I regret that I burned a lot of carbon fuel for a search I now understand I could only take within myself.

In the beginning, I didn’t want to be alone. I was terrified to go by myself. Of course, my fear was not helped by my parents’ anxieties that I would certainly be raped and murdered or my uncle’s suggestion that I take a gun. (Although, I did sleep for a time with a hunting knife and mace.) But the terror for me was less about any physical dangers I might experience on the road but more about how afraid I was to be alone. I was angry I had no one to go with me. After attending eight weddings in one summer without myself ever having had a single date, I felt cursed to be alone forever. (I was 22 years old with a B.A. in English Literature. Of course, I was prone to hyperbole.)

So on my first day on the road, frustrated and scared as I headed north out of Sacramento to Crater Lake 400 miles away, I inaugurated the trip by screaming into my windshield.

It was the Tuesday after Labor Day. Most of the summer travelers had returned home. Except for retirees in motor homes and Europeans. That first night, in a campsite near Crater Lake, I set-up my tent near an older couple and their RV because somehow sleeping near grandparently types made me feel safer. Luckily, these were the days before I even thought to google things like: “elderly serial killer couples.” Trust me, don’t do it. They exist.

But even having them close by didn’t prepare me for how freakishly loud everything becomes at night when you are inside your tent and blind to the outside world. A deer walking through your campsite sounds surprisingly like a man breathing through his mouth and holding a knife as he creeps towards your tent, preparing to slice through the rain flap into your heart. Really, they sound just the same. Which made falling asleep difficult. I wrote Psalms on my forearms in ball-point ink like they were word amulets.

On the second day, I drove west to the Oregon Coast to the town of Seaside, home of one of the largest sea caves in the world and a colony of sea lions. But I happened to arrive on a day when the ea lions were not at home in Sea Lion Cave. I was disappointed. And perhaps a little annoyed given my journal entry about the wasted $6.50 entry ticket. Quote: “The cave itself was only worth $3.00 to me.” Stupid, selfish sea lions.

I’m not proud of the hissy fit I was having as I embarked on my solo adventure. Instead of embracing the moment, I was in full temper tantrum mode at not getting to have my way according to my itinerary–either for my trip or my life.

I stubbornly drove on, preferring to stay in motion than to stop for very long and face the quiet. Quickly, I found myself two days ahead of my itinerary. Driving was easier than I expected. It was the stopping I wasn’t ready for. Months of talking about and planning this trip and the one thing I did not account for was the terrifying quiet I would face once the engine stopped. So instead I kept the engine running, consuming America like an American–quantity over quality. Though I was intent on seeing all the beauty of the vast and wild American landscape, I was treating it like a fast-food restaurant. If I were to write a book about that trip in the vein of William Least-Heat Moon’s Blue Highways–a book that most inspired me to take my own drive around the country–I regret that I would need to call mine Drive-Through Nature.

Even in my petulant state, however, the world still tapped on my shoulder in love. My search for home took me to a beach in the Northwest, where blue-black mussels held onto rocks with single-minded commitment, and I began to do things like sit on a rock for half an hour and watch the ocean. Little by little, as I began to acquaint myself with quiet and solitude, I began to let go of the fear and fight that had been driving me forward.

In the Hoh National Rain Forest–the only naturally occurring one in North America–I went for a walk down to the river through the densest, greenest forest I’d ever seen. Completely surrounded by vegetation so that I couldn’t even see the sky, I realized that except for the experience of gravity I wouldn’t be able to orient myself up or down.

The forest receives over 100″ of rain a year. So of course it was raining the day I visited. But I didn’t run back to the car or shake my fist at the sky as I might have on those first few days of my trip. I just stood there and let myself be rained on. The Hoh River runs a supernatural shade of blue as glaciers far upstream are ground down over time by the relentless movement of water. The light reflects off the ice powder and appears to illuminate the water from within. I’d never seen water like that before, water that appeared to be equal parts light and matter.

An enormous sense of peace flooded my body. I thought to myself, “There is nowhere else in the world I want to be.” And in the moment, I meant it. Not because I was simply overwhelmed by the natural beauty of the place–which I was. But because for the first time in my adult life, I had the distinct feeling that the path I was on was merging with the path I was supposed to be on. If only I could live moment to moment knowing that I was where I was supposed to be, then the future would take care of itself. From this vantage point, even facing death felt a little less awful.

This epiphany gave me my first big clue about my search for home. I had to figure out where I was supposed to be. All the time. But what did that mean? How would I know where I belonged? And how would I know when I found it? Those kinds of questions were the very one that fueled the anxiety that compelled me to keep driving. The peace in the forest was short-lived.

I spent that first weekend on the road with a childhood friend and her husband in their farm-house outside Spokane. Tousled and exhausted, I arrived after needlessly pushing myself for 12 hours on the road. And I couldn’t help but take in the contrast between our lives. Sitting in their matching armchairs, they seemed deeply happy talking about their garden, the birds that lived there, their plans for remodeling the house, the end of the world. You know, your average Seventh-day Adventist chit-chat.

My girlfriend gave me a tour of the house and shared their plans for improving it. She said:  “We’re going to remodel the kitchen and guest room first. But God will come before we get to the basement.” I stayed quiet–hers was an application of Seventh-day Adventist theology I knew only too well–but I couldn’t help but marvel at the incredibly risky project of remodeling a kitchen that could very well be destroyed next month in the Battle of Armageddon.

And the approaching Apocalypse wasn’t derailing their plans for a baby, either. They were trying to get pregnant, my friend told me, using a phrase that always makes me uncomfortable as I can never hear someone saying it without imagining that person having sex. At that very moment. And that’s a weird thing to be thinking about your friends while you are standing in their kitchen.

But I was enjoying their gracious company and being in the comfort of their home. For dinner that night, they invited another married couple over to the house. The four of them were only recently becoming friends so there was still a lot of sharing to be done about the roads they had each taken to be sitting at that dining room table together.

The wife, whom I will call Sarah, was an amazing storyteller. She had a simple and efficient way of talking that still felt like poetry all the time. Born and raised in Montana, she had recently moved with her husband and children to rural Washington. When she described Montana to us, you could hear the longing for home in her voice. She said that where she was from the mountains rise up on all sides of you, all the trees shelter you, and you can’t help but feel safe because nothing can come up on you without you seeing it first.

This sounded exactly like the place I was looking for. Even her hometown’s name sounded poetic. Helena. I suddenly knew where I was headed.

The following morning was Sabbath in my friends’ home. So they took me to their church which happened to be in the middle of an intense evangelism series. The 10-12 man evangelism team was from a Seventh-day Adventist seminary in Michigan. I went along out of politeness. Church had been the gathering point of our childhood for my friend and me, after all. She didn’t know that I had begun to lose my grip on our shared life preserver of faith and community. During the service, I watched the wife of one of the evangelists give her little boy a dollar bill to place in the offering basket. After he dropped the money inside, he appeared ready to resume his quiet play on the pew. But instead, his mother took him by the chin, looked him in the eye, and said firmly, “That money is for Jesus.” Somehow, the way she said it made me feel like Jesus was a loan shark. I was afraid for the little boy, wondering who he would become, imagining him desperately scurrying through life  as he anxiously tried to pay off that impossible debt.

From Spokane, I got back in my jeep, more determined than ever to hunt for that place that would welcome me in as its own. Piggy-backing on Sarah’s longing for Helena, I headed towards Montana. On my seventh day of being on the road, I arrived in East Glacier. I was too tired to do anything but flop into the hostel’s armchair with a book in hand. I kept my head down as I became aware of another person entering the common area. He greeted me. It was clear he was British. I made some kind of brief response in kind before returning to my book. I was suspicious of strangers. Especially men. After all, most rapists tend to be men. But the tall, thin Brit persisted, playfully teasing me at how “grumpy” I was being. His name was James. What was mine? Something about him registered trust in me. I truly hope that I was realistically intuiting his trustworthiness and not simply being duped by the fact that he was an cute guy who spoke with a British accent. Whatever the case may be, we began to talk.

James was traveling with two other friends: Jeremy, also British, but from the very northern part of the country so that his accent sounded closer–to my ear, at least–to Scottish, and a shy German university student named Bjorn. The three of them immediately endeared themselves to me. The next morning, having relinquished my fear that they were going to kill me, I drove all four of us the out to the trail head to Iceberg Lake. We hiked five miles through pristine alpine landscape until we reached the shoreline. It was breathtaking. Sheer cliffs boxed in half of the lake and small icebergs floated atop the water. The wind was bone-chillingly cold and the water was the same transparent glacial blue that had mesmerized me ever since I first saw it earlier in the week.

The ease of being with the guys surprised me. We played and talked and teased each other. And after only one day in their company, it was hard for me to say good-bye to James, Jeremy, and Bjorn. Wherever they are in this world, I still carry a bit of a torch for all three of them. I couldn’t believe how quickly I bonded to them. At the train station later that afternoon, I wanted to hug each one to let them know how much their presence had meant to me. The British and Germans aren’t exactly known for their open, spontaneous embrace of life. But these three men showed me that I could never find my home if I wasn’t actually open to receiving it.

James was the one who had called me out on my unfriendliness. If he hadn’t persisted, I would have never known the joy of their company or the beauty of the lake. I hadn’t realized how unfriendly I could be. Or how easily I could isolate myself–out of paranoia or just the resistance to opening myself to liking people when I knew I would have to say good-bye.

One of the three holds a very special place in my heart, though. As we crammed luggage and four bodies into my little jeep on a tight time frame to catch their train, I was worried we wouldn’t be able to fit everyone. And if we needed to make two trips, I wasn’t sure there would be time. Jeremy responded to my concern with a wink and said,  “I’m a very acrobatic person, Heather.” Those words–with their exact inflection–seared themselves into my brain. Nearly fifteen years later, I can do no other impersonation of the Northern English burr except for those six words. Oh God, can I.

After I left the train station, I returned to the empty women’s dormitory at the hostel. I was alone but I also felt lonelier than I had the night before. By 8pm, I was ready to go to bed, not because I was tired but more because I wanted to sleep away my boredom and loneliness. But then the owner of the hostel let in another guest into the room. Her name was Mimi. We didn’t talk much at first. She made her bed then started to write in her journal like I was doing. Mimi was middle-aged, attractive with dark, wavy, shoulder-length hair. She wore jeans and a silver belt.

When she turned off her light to go to bed, I continued to write by the light of my little Coleman lantern. But then, from the dark corner across the room, Mimi began to talk. She wanted to be a writer, too, and told the story of her sobriety and the marriage she had to leave behind to get there. She was deeply spiritual but was always careful to qualify her beliefs as being her own, saying “The God I believe in,” or “What works for me.” Now I can appreciate that kind of humility. At the time, still steeped in fundamentalist religion, I thought she sounded full of wishy-washy therapy talk. (This is before I embraced therapy, too.) But I liked her all the same. She was genuine and open. Another traveler finding her way.

We talked for over an hour but I never saw her face as she spoke from the darkness. At first, the fact that she could see me and I couldn’t see her felt a little unnerving, like I was in an interrogation room. But the darkness seemed to provide her with the comfort to simply be herself. And she was eloquent when she was being herself. The one thing she said that most caught my attention was that I should write because it makes me happy. If I am a happy person, she said, I will spend my life making those around me happier as well. You should write, she said, for no other reason than it sends joy into the universe and the universe is made better because of it.

So simple, I thought. What a lovely idea. But looking back on that conversation now, I wonder if she was looking at me with the help of another light source that night. Because Mimi was giving me a clue about where I would find my home. But all I could hear in the moment was something vaguely inspirational. So I wrote it down then soon forgot about it. That night, I fell asleep prepared to head further east in the morning. Towards the magical land of Helena.