I am on the road. Back on the road. The road. The road. The road. The repetitiveness is a comfort and a guide, like the beating of a distant drum communicating itself to me the secrets of life I’ve yet to learn. I may be skimming the surface of the earth but I am also going deep within myself. I have been here before but at the same time I am stepping into new ground.
It is late spring, early evening. I notice the light is lingering, taking on summer’s languid, honey-colored glow. That makes me happy. But I wonder if I am seeing things because I am traveling north, in the wrong direction at this time of year after having just endured a long winter. I am going back into the cold, maybe back in time—back to some winter long ago and to something I’d dropped in the deep snow, the blizzard of my thoughts and emotions and desires, could not find, got busy, and left it there. Maybe it is something I love.
So, back I go. I must have been 8 or 9 years old when I began to like driving. On some summer Sundays my aunt and uncle would visit from their home in Bronxville, New York and we’d all spend a leisurely late afternoon roaming the winding roads through the Connecticut suburbs where my family lived. On some evenings my dad would drive us to town for ice cream. We owned a convertible in those days. I was thrilled to be out in the open, in the wind that whipped my hair and the sun that flashed though the trees that canopied over the roads. It was perhaps my first love—inspired, emotional, instant.
One day when I was 12, I asked my mother to show me how to drive. We were coming home from the grocery store and had just turned onto the dead end road we lived on. I slid across the bench seat and she made room for me, let me take the wheel. Eventually, she showed me how to use the gas pedal and the brake. We would do this often over the years. By the time I turned 16 and was old enough to drive on my own, cars had become second nature to me, like someone who’s trained on the piano and can play anywhere, any time. Put me in a car and I’m at home. Friends are amazed at the lengths—measured in time and miles—that I can sit behind the wheel and enjoy it.
I enjoy the motion of going somewhere—as I am doing now. It does not matter where I am going. I am here. And though I am alone I feel as if everyone and everything I care for is with me—in my head, my heart. It’s as if, by some strange Newtonian law of physics, the more miles I put between me and the presence of these people and things, the more they crowd inside me. It is a lot to carry, I know. I do not travel light.
But this is a floating world, what the Japanese call ukiyo, “pictures of the floating world.” It was a popular art form in 17th-century Japan. Asai Ryoi, a 17th-century Japanese writer, describes ukiyo as “Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating; … refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world.”
The Mass Pike has drifted away behind me. Interstate 495, too. Interstate 95—Portsmouth, Portland, Augusta, Bangor—are all gone over the horizon that I glimpse in the rearview mirror from time to time. Nothing back there now but this narrow slice of road that cuts through the deep woods of Maine and rolling carpets of wild blueberry scrub. There are long grades up and down. On either side of me, the sun angles in the tall pines and on the still, dark ponds that shine black like polished ebony. The radio is off so I can hear myself think, pay attention to what’s around me. I can feel my pulse settle into a slow, steady beat as if corresponding to that distant drum that beats just below consciousness, leading me onward, inward.
We often dream of places we’d like to be, of what we will do when we get there. But it’s often the getting there that I dream about, that makes me happy, that I tell my friends and family about. Downpours, rainbows, animals, sunsets, the moon.
“There is always hope, always something better, if you keep moving”, I’ve heard people say with a snicker of cynicism. But that’s not what this is about for me. Sometimes when I am on the road, life just doesn’t get any better. I’ve no hope because I don’t need it. I’ve no expectations about any place because I am already there. And I am never disappointed because the motion always gives, and gives, and gives.