When I was nine years old, I went to summer camp for the first time. It was sleep-away camp, and the session was a month long. I don’t know of any camp that has month long session for any age campers these days, and it seems almost impossible that a nine year old would go to sleep-away camp. But this was a different age. Besides, my mother and sister had gone to the associated girls’ camp, and my two older brothers had gone to the boys’ camp. In fact, within two or three weeks of my birth, I was bundled up and put in a dresser drawer that was placed on the floor of the station wagon that was taking folks to camp. My poor mother.
In the days leading up to my departure, my mother and I had gone to the grocery store. For whatever reason, she let me pick out a box of Pop Tarts. They were filled with something red, either cherry or raspberry, and they were definitely frosted. (Fool me once with your unfrosted Pop Tarts and I won’t be fooled again.) I was really looking forward to having a packet of those on the morning of my departure. The night before, however, I discovered that my special Pop Tarts were all gone.
My brother had eaten them, and I was furious. I remember him coming to talk to me as I lay in bed. He told me that I was being ridiculous. They were just Pop Tarts after all, and I was about to set out on one of life’s great adventures. I should be focused on that, not on the stupid toaster pastries. He was wrong about that. It was not fair for him to eat them all, especially since the box had three packets. But he was also right.
Four days before I was supposed to start my grand sabbatical trip, driving from North Carolina to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, across the northern tier of states to Idaho, down through Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, and back home through Nebraska and Iowa, I got COVID. It was the first time I had been diagnosed with it. I did manage to get Paxlovid and the vaccinations seemed to help, but I felt like dog shit. Plus I did not want to be spreading this thing around. I would have to alter my plans, including giving up the two nights I had reserved in a campground in Yellowstone.
About that same time, I learned that my recently officially ex-wife had taken a new job. That’s none of my business except that our separation agreement, specifically the part about the significant amount of alimony I would pay her, was based on the salary of her previous position, which was in a different field of work and paid about half of what she would be making in the new gig. A few days later, a friend shared a social media post in which my ex-wife was soliciting recommendations for her upcoming trip to Europe. The anger and resentment that I had spent a year trying to work through came back in full force. I did not want to spend the better part of three weeks alone in a car with these feelings, and there was no way I could just forget about the whole thing.
So I had some Pop Tarts to deal with on the verge of stepping out on one of my life’s great adventures. (I have done a trip like this before, through the lower part of the country. I still have vivid memories of that experience and anticipated the same from this one. It would also be an opportunity for me to visit the rest of the lower 48 states that I had not yet been to.) I started feeling well enough on day three that it seemed reasonable to plan to start my trip a day late. In addition, I would break the first couple of days up into shorter trips and stay in hotels to make the traveling a little easier and limit my exposure to other people.
I loaded up my 2021 Jeep Wrangler with a tent, camp kitchen, cot, foam sleeping pad, sheets and a blanket (plus my lighter weight sleeping bag, just in case), as well as a large suitcase full of all my underwear and seemingly half of all the rest of the clothes I own. My first destination: Dayton, Ohio.
Had I been in better shape mentally and physically, I would have researched filming locations for Episode 13 of Season 4 of “The West Wing”. What’s that? You do not have a worrisome relationship with the greatest show to ever air on television? Instead of looking it up, I’ll just tell you that it is the story of how Press Secretary C.J. Craig goes to her hometown, Dayton, Ohio, to deliver a speech at her high school reunion. In all likelihood it was not filmed in Dayton, Ohio, and if it were, I would probably not have been able to find the locations as I arrived near sunset.
What I did find along the way was what appeared to be a full scale model of the Hall of Justice from the Super Friends cartoons of the early 1980s. It’s an image that was seared into my and many other young people’s brains when we woke up early enough on a Saturday morning to see the show. If you woke up too early, you had to watch the children’s gospel program in black and white. Sleeping late is better for your constitution.
What I did see, off to my left as I passed through Cincinnati, was their marvelous art deco train station. My father is a train nut, so I am genetically predisposed to checking out a good railroad terminal. Also, that is kind of what this trip was supposed to be about: seeing things I’d never seen before. So I stopped, marveled at this facade, and got to Dayton around dark.
Somewhere out on the road that day, I encountered, or remembered, or reconnected to what the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous calls “the unsuspected inner resource.” There was a place in me where resentment was living like a cancer, but there was another place, more calm and more cool. Almost like a pool of water in a cave. I started to learn that, when the resentment got going, I could choose to go along for the ride or I could call on this unsuspected inner resource. I fell asleep in Dayton unsure if this trip was really a good idea but grateful to have started.