(A continuation of The Long and Ridiculous Drive Home: Week 1)

I left East Glacier–close to the Canadian border–and headed south into central Montana, traveling through Glacier National Park on Going-to-the-Sun Road, which is quite possibly the best named road in the world. For fifty miles, feeling high on the bliss of the previous day, I soaked in the awe-inspiring views. Of course, I was doing all this from behind my steering wheel. Like being in a long line at In-N-Out, I slowly moved forward in temporary caravan of hundreds of other travelers also waiting to get their hands on a tasty treat of sublimity. I take mine animal style. Mountain goats and black bears, mainly.

Once I exited the park, I pointed my jeep towards Gates of the Mountains–also an amazing name. In Spokane, Sarah had talked about a beautiful place in the mountains near Helena where the Missouri River is guarded by massive rock embankments on either side. The way she described it implanted a magical impression in my mind. Like the fantastical landscape of “The Never-ending Story,” I imagined The Gates of the Mountains as a luminescent, strange, and beautiful portal into eternity guarded by Sphinxes. Or something like that.

But instead, I drove 150 miles to look out at a vista that made me say, huh. That’s it? Where the hell is Atreyu? Without knowing it, I’d become a greedy beautymonger. After bathing in the magnificence of Glacier National Park, I was just looking for my next fix. So when I stood out on the overlook and saw terrain that looked remarkably similar to parts of the Sierras where I’d spent part of my summers as a child–beautiful but more like a 6 or 7 on the hotness scale–I was disappointed.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t even got out of my car.

Angry and tired, I drove back 150 miles to Missoula. I glanced at Helena as I drove. Whatever magic had been in the name had left it. And everything just felt so, well, ordinary. I felt ashamed because I knew I didn’t have reason to be angry or tired. When I listened to Sarah talk about her home with such love and appreciation and wonder, I subconsciously planned to piggy-back on her memories. Like a hermit crab finding shelter in an abandoned seashell, I thought I could just make myself at home there. I should have known better.

Because like Sarah could talk about her corner of Montana, I can tell you about my hometown of Madera which is essentially situated in the geographical center of California. (A little north of town, in the middle divider of Hwy 99 stand two trees–an evergreen on the north side, a palm tree on the south–marking the place where the two landscapes of this great state converge.) West of town vineyards and orchards extend for miles and miles. There’s something so soothing about driving with your windows down at twilight with the scent of fruit and nut tree blossoms in the air. And east of town you quickly begin to move into rolling, grassy foothills that become their own gateway to the Sierras.

But if you travel through Madera–and most people only travel through, never stopping except to fill up their gas tank–it is likely you will only notice that it looks like any of a dozen other water-hungry towns along that same highway. You might notice the smog that hangs most days over the Central Valley. Or let out an exasperated sigh as you drive past the umpteenth fast food restaurant and McMansion. But you won’t see the town as I did as a child. You won’t see home I grew up in at the end of a wide, quiet street that felt to me like the center of the world. Until, of course, I moved away and then came back and saw all the same things that strangers passing through see for the first time, leaving me with a little less magic in my memories.

I drove over 600 miles that day in Montana, nearly 300 of them feeling like a total waste. Today, of course, I wish I hadn’t left Gateway of the Mountains in the way I did. If I am ever again in its vicinity, I would like to go on that boat tour of the Missouri River, let myself be eclipsed in the shadows of those massive rock formations, then sit awhile on the shore and apologize to the land for being such a brat that day.

That night, I begrudgingly spent fifty dollars on a hotel room on the side of the highway where it was apparently mandatory to smoke a pack of cigarettes for every night you slept there. And the next morning, I drove on to Idaho.

Perhaps in the way a child exhausts itself after a crying fit, something calmed in me after that day. My observations about my trip began to change. For a time, things felt less urgent. My first night in Idaho, I drove 17 miles of narrow, unpaved road to the top of Hell’s Canyon where I pitched my tent at a place called Seven Devils. At sunset, I sat near the edge of the canyon at an overlook called Heaven’s Gate. (If you ever want me to show up somewhere, just give it a cosmically impressive name. You might be luring me to my death for all I know. But well-named places will get me every time.) The terrain was laid out like giants sunbathing with their knees propped up and bellies flexed in the late afternoon sun. I noticed a plane flying below me. Then a large flying insect whirred by my head, the flapping of its wings sounding eerily like a horse neighing in my ear.

I traveled on and met up with my dear college friend Anna who drove us to a hot springs where I took my first shower in a warm waterfall. She then took me to a small town called Crouch a little north of Boise to a bar there sweetly called The Dirty Shame. A young logger named Jake asked me to dance. He seemed nice enough until I met The Cowboy. I never found out The Cowboy’s name. He never asked me to dance–he just took my hand and led me onto the dance floor where he proceeded to give me lessons in two-stepping and looking a man in the eye when there are less than two steps between you. Still a boy-shy virgin, I had never been held like that by a man. Even through my cargo pants and long-sleeved camping shirt, I could feel that he was intimately comfortable with the shape of a woman. That was a very, ahem, pleasant first.

I began to record other firsts. Both the transcendent and mundane.

There was the first time I met a bison the middle of the road. The bison stood motionless for a minute, looked at me, then walked right up to the front of my hood before casually passing by on my passenger side, close enough to graze the mirror with its gloriously big, shaggy body and leave me giddy with delight.

There was also the first time I saw sunrise on the Tetons. Or received a 3am wake-up call from the sound of wolves howling. Or witnessed a young elk scratching his fuzzy budding antlers against a sapling, thrashing it back and forth.

For the first time in my life, I went without a shower or a change of clothes for five days. And stopped shaving my armpits and legs. And lived off of Fig Newtons and saltine crackers. One day, I achieved the dubious first of eating an entire box of Fig Newtons in less than 12 hours.

But it was during these days that a deep peace began to travel with me. I had known this kind of peace but never for long stretches at a time. It was the first time I could remember living in a state of peace that arose simply out of being in the moment. I felt free and blessed and challenged. Becoming aware of how many firsts I was experiencing began to open me to all the firsts that were always happening around me if I just paid attention. Gratitude for each new moment of life filled my heart. And the loneliness left. For a time.

I drove the wildly alive ground of Yellowstone for the first time and stepped up to the edge of a hot spring where an early snow lifted steam out the ground. These hot springs were not like the ones I played in while in Idaho. The water in these springs were hot enough to kill. And they have. The gift shop in Yellowstone sells a book that lists all the known deaths in Yellowstone, many of them caused by terrible and gruesome accidents involving spring water hot enough to burn skin off bones like wax from the wick upon contact. The book exists in large part, I’m sure, to warn visitors to take this wild land and its animal inhabitants seriously. To not treat it like an amusement park where the attractions will not harm you. Standing at the edge of these hot springs was mesmerizing to me. I felt like I was standing close to the mouth of God.

But the mid-September snow became a little more fierce than I expected. Actually, I didn’t expect snow at all. In California, September is warm and golden. In Wyoming, the weather cannot be trusted. Ever. This snow-naive, California flat lander learned my Wyoming lesson the hard way as I drove 350 miles in 11 hours through my very first snowstorm. I saw cars slide across the highway, including a few that slid off the road all together. Having a 4×4 vehicle helped my first on-the-job training for steering through skids.

The last few miles of my drive took me through highway construction and a long stretch of unpaved road which had turned to icy mud. My hands cramped from having gripped the steering wheel for almost half a day. But I managed to make it to the small town of Edgerton, Wyoming where I sat down in a diner booth and unexpectedly sobbed to a teenage waitress named Jana. When she gave me my bill, she included a handwritten note with Phillipians 4:13 printed on it. It said: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”  The memory of her kindness in that moment is why I still have that receipt fifteen years later.

Two grizzled truckers in another booth began to chat with me about my trip. And somehow the topic turned to love and marriage. Both men were full advice on the topics as each had been married for over 30 years. And there were things you needed to make a marriage work, they told me. One said: “You got to be friends. You sure do.” The other said: “No thinking about a way out. You’re in it. You have to make your way through the rough spots.”

The next day, they let me follow their semi-trucks out of the snowy landscape until the road became smooth again. And I kept driving, once more protected inside my hard shell jeep, learning to approach the edge of something wild and fierce and divine but not yet ready to get out of the car.