Originally published in Oregon Quarterly
Spring 2001

Life, even for a writer, can just be life.We’re back from a three-week, 7,500-mile trek across America, my two sons and I. It has been one of those Experiences with a capital E, traversing the country on the diagonal, northwest to southeast and back, in a 24-foot rented RV. My sons are 13 and 11, old enough to be decent company but young enough still to listen to me, at least some of the time. We saw what we planned to see: national parks, Civil War battlefields, historic settlements, the Mississippi, the Gulf, the Atlantic, their Orlando grandfather. But that’s not what made the trip an Experience.What made the trip an Experience was catching a glimpse of a pale green Luna moth with an eight-inch wingspan one night in Checotah, Oklahoma. Or pulling into a gas station in Ogalalla, Nebraska just ahead of a pick-up truck with an eight-foot statue of Elvis bungeed in the back. Or the humid, buggy night we camped at Eskew's Landing, "Mississippi's Best Kept Secret," a 200-acre former plantation. "There's been an Eskew on this land since 1859," the old woman drawled from behind the counter.I was there, but I came close to missing it. I was almost too busy being a writer. ***For the first few days, as we barrel across Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Arizona, my mind works overtime turning every observation into a story. My reporter’s notebook is on the floor next to me, wedged between the driver’s seat and a shoebox full of triple-A maps. It couldn’t be any closer unless it was on my lap.Our second morning out, my older son falls asleep riding shotgun, and I sneak a glance at him: the long legs, the lanky arms, the feet that are suddenly two sizes larger than mine. By next summer he will have a deep voice. By next summer he will be giving me that sulky how-can-I-possibly-be-related-to-someone-as-lame-as-you look. I am sure there’s an essay in this. I grab for my notebook, balance it on the steering wheel and scribble ideas as we speed across southern Idaho.Morning three, we drive through heavy fog west of Chicken Creek Reservation in central Utah. The weather looks ominous -- gray and cold and stormy -- and I steel myself for hours of tough driving. But the front I imagine turns out to be only a fog bank, and we are through it and back in sunshine in less than five minutes. I am so buoyed by this, by having something turn out so much better than I expected, that I want immediately to write about it: Hail the pessimist who goes through life pleasantly surprised; pity the optimist who can only be disappointed. I grab the notebook.Day four, I fill pages with seventy-mile-an-hour scrawls. I am drowning in ideas: “Everyone ought to love the place they live,” reads one entry. I write it after watching a girl on horseback gallop across a field next to the highway. The land is baked brown and hard and dotted with scrub, unlovely and, I imagine, unloved. But the girl, her long, chestnut hair streaming behind her, has a huge grin on her face. She loves it.Next page I write: “RV subculture -- class collision,” which comes from pulling into a KOA campground the night before and finding that our assigned space is between a $250,000 motorcoach featuring a washer and dryer, and 50-inch television, and a 1962 Airstream held together by duct tape.Next page: “Traveling west with Dennis and Phil in ‘71 -- when a trip was a trip.” Then: “The Zen of long-distance driving -- meditation on the interstate.” Finally: “Planes, trains and automobiles... how you get there matters.” One of my pens is already running out of ink.On day five, negotiating hairpin turns in Zion National Park, I am struck with an idea for another essay. I go for the notebook but realize I can’t write and keep us on the road at the same time. “Zane,” I call to my younger son, who has the best penmanship, “come up front and help me with something.” I hand him the notebook and start dictating.We inch around another switchback, the one-lane road snaking between towering cliffs the color of terra cotta. I keep talking and glance over at Zane to make sure he’s getting it.Then, I get it: There he is, head buried in a notebook dutifully recording my words in his careful cursive so I can later make a tale out of a moment neither of us is living. Later that day, when we stop for gas, I take the notebook from its place by my seat and put it in an overhead storage cupboard next to a six-pack of Spagettios.Plato said “a life which is unexamined is not worth living.” But I don’t think he meant examining should take the place of living. I don’t think he meant we should be so busy mining our adventures for meaning that we don’t have time to live them.Of course writers use their lives as text and context. That’s part of the gig. Although I do not often write about myself, everything I have written in the past decade and a half is deeply connected to my life, a reflection of who I am or who I was or what mattered most. I know that life and art can mix, enriching both. But the danger -- the danger I recognized when I saw my son hunched over a notebook instead of marveling at the landscape -- is that art can overpower life. It can, for a long moment, actually replace the experience of living.I recently met a woman whose mother had just died of cancer. She might have spent the last year of her mother’s life with her mother, but instead she chose to spend it hundreds of miles away at the keyboard, crafting long, lyrical, literary letters about her mother’s illness which she arranged to send to an acquaintance. Before she drafted the first letter, she imagined the book the letters would some day become.She told me this proudly while on tour promoting the book, and I tried hard not to look horrified. I appreciate that writing can be therapeutic. No doubt the letters helped her through a difficult time. But writing also detached her from the present -- from being present -- and shielded her from the moment. Her present was painful, mine was pleasant, but we were both prisoners of our craft.I was at first concerned, scared really, that I’d be wasting the experience of the trip if I didn’t write about it. But I am beginning to understand that it pays to “waste” some things, if wasting means living the moment fully rather than taking notes on it for later.We’ve been home for a while now, but I still cherish the long mid-June days I wasted with my sons, the mornings full of talk and silence, me driving, the boys taking their turns sitting up front by my side, sometimes dreamy, wordless, other times deep in monologues full of mind-numbing details about computer games and wars waged with little pewter action figures. But there was thoughtful talk too, conversations about what makes a good friend and how you decide what you want to be when you grow up and why grandma died.At noon we would stop at some local park, where the boys would explore the terrain and play tag and fight off the insects while I busied myself in the tiny kitchen heating up cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli and slicing apples. I loved to watch them from the window and listen to their voices, loud and confident. Wherever we were -- Little America, Wyoming; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Byhallyah, Alabama -- they were immediately at home. The afternoon stretched out before us. We would eat and then spread the maps on the grass and plot the rest of the day: how many miles, how many states, which campground.After lunch, they would often disappear into the upper bunk for hours to drowse or read or play with their Gameboys or get on each other’s nerves. I drove in silence, aware of them jostling above me, happy to be close but separate. Some afternoons Zane would sit by my side, and we’d listen and relisten to a tape of Wind in the Willows, enjoying the tale of Rat and Mole as if we hadn’t heard it a dozen times before, looking over and smiling at each other at the same silly bits of dialogue we always did. Other afternoons it would be Jackson, my older son, who would join me. Sometimes we talked. Once we whiled away an afternoon composing an epic poem about road-kill. But often we simply sat together, our minds blanked by the tedium of the road. We listened to the thrumm of tires on pavement. We breathed the warm, close air. Time slowed.There was real pleasure in this boredom, these hours and days and weeks of traveling together, of being together, of just being. The things we did, the places we saw, the thoughts we had about ourselves and each other were part of that time, and that time alone.I think some adventures should be lived just for the sake of the adventure. Some feelings should be private; some lessons learned for one’s benefit alone. Life, even for a writer, can just be life, not a narrative to be crafted and sold.We leave for a camping trip to the mountains next week. The reporter’s notebook stays at home.