(The third of four installments. A continuation of The Long and Ridiculous Drive Home: Week 2)

From Edgerton it was a short 200 mile trip Rapids City, South Dakota where I splurged on two nights at a quirky little hostel called Robert’s Roost. I stepped past a man doing yoga in the living room when I arrived. And I soon met the other women staying at the hostel, Kate and Jo, who were traveling together, and a solo traveler–also named Heather–from Chicago.

The four of us compared our travels and it felt good to know other women on the road like myself. In the months leading up to my trip, I had been inspired by classic road trip books like Blue Highways and Travels with Charley. But it seemed like most American travelogues were written by or about men, On the Road, Into the Wild, and A Walk in the Woods, to name a few more. Either women had been less inclined to make these kinds of journeys. Or they just didn’t write about them. So it was easy to recognize kindred spirits in each other as we became better acquainted and explored the neighborhood that afternoon.

There was another woman staying at the hostel as well. Towards her, I felt less kindly. Less kindred.

Originally from Australia, Leah* had recently made the move to the United States for a man she had only met on-line. Not long after she arrived, he threw her out of his house.

The only conversation I remember having with her took place in the kitchen. I sat at the table while she waited for a call next to the payphone. Leah wasn’t shy talking about how she was spending food money on internet dates or how she was willing to make love to any man for a bus ticket anywhere. She said it was her dream to be a wife.

Leah sparked both sadness and anger in me. And perhaps a bit of moral superiority because clearly this woman needed me to save her. I tried to probe for any passion that could be a moral compass in her life. But what do you really, truly love deep down, I asked. Men, she said, her Australian accent pulling the word up like a question.

As we talked, one of the two men staying at the hostel entered the kitchen. Disheveled, he appeared to be in his fifties. For most of the year he lived outside under bridges and in cemeteries but would come indoors for about two “sleeps” a month. Overhearing our conversation, he placed a palm over his chest and said:  “Your stories make me sad,” he said, his palm over his chest, “Let me spare you your heartache with a bit of ancient wisdom: The world is home to the man. The home is world to the woman.”

This pissed me off. (Even now, if I were to ever find his stupid proverb in a fortune cookie, I would crumble the entire thing in my fist. And then probably eat the crumbs as I hate to waste a good cookie.)

After he left, I turned to Leah. Has believing that kind of thing made you happy? I asked. Has not believing made you? she replied, You’re just one of dozens come through here, and I’ve met them all. I didn’t know what to say to that. The phone rang from Arizona. Leah picked it up and began to talk to someone on the other end about the cost of a bus ticket.

When I later asked the hostel owner about bookstores in the area, the man who had been doing yoga earlier overheard me and asked to come along as well. I reluctantly said yes. As I sat in the jeep waiting for him, he walked outside, raised his hand in a gesture of royal command and proceeded to urinate on a nearby tree. This baffled me as he was literally standing a few feet away from a toilet. I regretted letting him in my car. He smelled musky. I was both repelled by and attracted to him.

His name was Gul. He was thin and wiry with dark hair. Gul spoke with an accent but was vague about his personal life and history. But when he found out I was looking for books on sustainable agriculture, he became animated, telling me about his plans to own his own farm one day and some of the general principles of permaculture.

In truth, I did want to look for books on sustainable agriculture. But I had about as much commitment to serious learning on the subject as I would now if I just read a Wikipedia article on it and then watched a cat video afterwards. I was just toying with the idea of living on a small farm and growing my own food. Sort of like I once thought about becoming a ballroom dance instructor. Or studying Russian. Or going to clown school. I’m an easily excitable person. This means that I tend to know a little about a lot of things. This is a great skill for a chaplain to have in trying to find meaningful connections with strangers on a daily basis. But it also means that I have an annoying habit of saying things like, “I once read an article about this really interesting study but I can’t remember where I read it or any of the relevant facts but, oh my god, it changed my life.”

A beloved seminary professor once sat me down in his office before graduation to address this character flaw/strength of mine. Part intervention, part recruitment speech, he made an appeal for me to consider Presbyterian ministry. I was neither interested in becoming a Presbyterian or a minister. But he was concerned I had talents I was at great risk of never using. He said to me that in almost thirty years of teaching that he’d only seen a few students like me–students who were capable of almost anything they put their minds to (except, in my case, complex math) but never really amounted to much because, like driftwood, they just aimlessly moved from one thing to the next. And his concern was that my indecisiveness was linked to perfectionism, that if I couldn’t be the best then I didn’t want it at all or if I couldn’t the change the world then I won’t do anything. I took his words to heart–and his insight into the debilitating power of perfectionism was an important one that I hadn’t been able to articulate for myself. But at the time, his words felt like a curse as I imagined a future in which I would achieve nothing of substance. Now, my mind is able to convert those words into a blessing. I mean, think of all the places a piece of driftwood can go. And if you were treading water in the middle of the ocean and came across a large piece of driftwood on which you could rest and hold out hope for rescue, I am sure you would never again be inclined to speak disparagingly about the life choices of driftwood.

But as Gul and I talked, we continued to find deeper things in common. It turned out he was coming with me to look for books on wilderness survival. Specifically, for any books by Tom Brown, Jr.,  a renowned wilderness survival teacher and tracker. This felt like a remarkable coincidence. From about the age of fourteen–ever since I was first attended a wilderness survival class at summer camp–I had been interested in the subject. And my first wilderness teachers had all been strongly influenced by Tom Brown. (And the Book of Revelation.) The summer before I graduated from college, I had even managed to attend to fulfill a personal dream of attending a week of classes at Tom Brown’s school in New Jersey where I learned techniques for things like tracking animals without them sensing your presence. I don’t spend almost any time in the wilderness these days. But I do continue to use those techniques to avoid being seen by people I don’t want to talk to in the coffee shop.

I showed Gul the two Tom Brown books I had brought with me: a practical wilderness survival guide and another book called Grandfather, a more philosophical account of the life of Tom Brown’s teacher, an Apache scout named Stalking Wolf. I gave him Grandfather. But I kept the wilderness guide for myself. Just in case I ever ended up in Wyoming again.

We were only alone together for an hour or so. But something about Gul both scared and excited me. My heart was like two sides of a magnet, one part of me wanted to turn towards him. The other part wanted to get as far away as possible. Especially after he started to do this thing where it felt like he was trying to go spelunking in my head.

He said a big change was coming to my life and that if need be, that I should leave all that I love, turn away from family and friends. He said he could tell that I was an “independent thinker, passionate, and sensitive.”

I laughed and said, “You can know that about someone after 15 minutes of conversation?” He replied, “No, I can know that about somebody in two minutes.”

Now, it’s entirely possible he was just making stuff up to get laid. But it honestly didn’t feel like that. He made me uneasy not because I thought he had any special insight into who I am but because he seemed to represent the human version of the edge I had been playing with on my trip. Part of me wanted to dive in, the other part wanted to run away.

I chose the latter. After that afternoon, I didn’t speak to him again. When I left Monday morning, I hugged the women  good-bye and left. But I barely acknowledged Gul. As I walked out the door, I lifted my hand and mouthed “Bye.” He looked a little surprised at the tenor of my good-bye. Maybe even a little wounded. And I almost immediately regretted the coldness with which I left him. For a couple hundred miles afterwards, I felt like something was missing. I hadn’t said good-bye to Gul in the way that I should have. The brief connection we made mattered. But there was no gratitude in my good-bye. There was no recognition that if life was one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books–perhaps it is–that meeting him could have been one of those moments that would have pivoted me into an entirely different story than the one I was on, a story that would have likely involved a lot of travel, patchouli and amazing sex. But I was scared to let him see how he had touched my life for even a second. And for that, I was sorry.

For the next few days, I was in nearly constant movement as I drove a checklist of things to see: Mt. Rushmore, The Badlands, Wisconsin in the fall, Lake Superior and the Upper Peninsula. Heading south again, I took an afternoon break on the shore of Lake Michigan at Sleeping Bear Dunes, another landmark whose nomenclature had charmed me into visiting. The day was clear and windy and brisk. I took my shoes off to walk barefoot in the sand. But soon, I was running down the dunes, every step pushing away waves of sand. I wondered if it was safe, the thought of glass or metal in the sand momentarily worried me. But what faith does it really take to run barefoot in the sand when the feeling is so delicious you never want to stop?

* not her real name