Road Trip

Sometimes the only way to get back to yourself is to go far away.

Badlands, SD

Somewhere past the Badlands of South Dakota, after the sleepless night in a noisy motel of Interior, SD that was comprised of a rundown bar and a jail smaller than a one-car garage, we made it to the mountains of Minturn, Colo. It was there, in a large log home, that we decided to call the road trip our honeymoon.

Interior, SD

Minturn, CO

We were overdue. Though we'd married in September of 2009 in a 15-minute ceremony by the St. Croix River, we'd been apart for most of the intervening year, waiting for the INS to come through with Miguel's immigration visa. It wasn't until November 2010 -- 14 months after our wedding -- that we began living together. The first year of marriage can be a challenge under any circumstances, but ours is a special late-in-life variety that comes with my pre existing family: ex-husband, our two kids, 18 and 21, his girlfriend, her teenage daughter. Miguel jumped in without a parachute.

A few days after he arrived, we had a modern Thanksgiving -- Miguel's first -- with my ex, who'd shared this very house with me for 20 years, his girlfriend, her daughter and mine. Soon after that, my 21-year-old son returned home for the holidays, but his drug addiction intensified, launching him into a cycle that those who love addicts know all too well: jail-treatment-relapse-homelessness-recovery-relapse. There were rough spots with my 17-year-old daughter, too, who was trying to save her brother and soon told me she felt pushed aside by my new marriage. She stopped speaking to me for a time.

There was my new husband, a man of life-long independence who'd quite deliberately never married or had kids, completely dependent on another human being, with no driver's license, no job and a bunch of crazy people circling the drain of addiction. For the first time in my life, I was the sole breadwinner, a complete 180 from my former life as stay-at-home mom and wife.

So our road trip was also the Great Escape, an equalizer of sorts. We were on neutral ground -- mostly. Though he'd never seen the southwestern part of the U.S., I was as awe-struck as he was. Almost immediately my eyes adjusted to the distance as the road spooled out behind us and reached far into the horizon. Prairies gave way to grasslands, lunar canyons, mountains and vast skies. Around every corner was a new view and even the sky was never the same from one moment to the next.

It was almost everything a honeymoon should be: sex, laughter, relaxation, conversation. It was also everything a road trip should be: getting lost, changing plans and fighting. Combine the two, honeymoon and road trip, and you've got fireworks with long silent stretches. Cheyenne, WY was the backdrop for our first big fight of the trip. I don't even remember exactly what started it; something about flying his big box kite. Kite flying with Miguel is serious stuff, nothing like a day at the park with the kids. It takes muscle, skill and a gift for moving with the wind. Miguel has all of these. I have fierce determination and a competitive nature, but after trying the sport with him in Brussels, I decided to sit out the event in the Badlands, trying to settle on assisting instead. But I'm not good assistant. I like to be in the driver's seat, and by dinner, my resentment had built. One thing led to another and, after a steak dinner, I found myself screaming into the wind outside the hotel in Cheyenne, while Miguel tried to coax me back inside.

Miguel's Kite

I'm not sure if we ever really figured it out, but we left Cheyenne. Sometimes that's enough. We left the bad feeling in the plains and were soon in the Rockies. The bed was soft. We slept like mountain animals. The kite stayed in the trunk the rest of the trip.

Miguel's face grew more relaxed. It became apparent in photos. He bought cowboy boots.
I bought a cowboy hat. And as soon as I put it on in Madrid, NM, I felt changed. I thought of Thelma when she said, "Something crossed over in me and I don't think I can ever go back." 

Madrid, NM

But you can't drive forever. Sooner or later you run into cliffs and canyons, like Thelma and Louise. And, wherever you go, there you are. There I was with my hat, Miguel with his boots. We found ourselves there in the desert with each other and this amazing marriage that happened to us in much the same way as seeing the canyons of Utah for the first time. I still find myself struck, sometimes at the oddest times, like watching him fly his kite, by the breadth and depth of this thing between us, this thing that swept over us in Italy three years ago and brought him here to me in Minnesota.

As we drove back, leaving the mountains, canyons and deserts, back to the gentler landscape of Minnesota, I am still haunted by the desert landscape and the knowledge that love is as beautiful, wild and sometimes harsh as the landscape of the Southwest. But in it, we are alive and always ready for the next discovery. You never know what is around the next bend.