Detour Ahead—I Hope

By Sutton R. Stokes, 10-09-08

	Caption: Let's all go to the sun. Photo by V. Banowetz.

An automobile traveling at 70 miles per hour along a winding two-lane blacktop seems as good a place as any to think about inertia. The “bodies in motion staying in motion” part feels most obvious, particularly when a tight inside curve is tugging the car close to an oncoming dump truck and I remember that the odds of our continued survival are at least slightly decreased by the blown rear struts we are planning to get fixed as soon as we can find a spare $500.

But while Amy piloted our car from East Glacier toward the park’s west entrance earlier this week, and as her parents — out from southern Maryland on their first visit to Montana — chatted in the back seat, I was considering the corollary, i.e., that bodies at rest tend to stay that way, and specifically that when my body comes to rest behind the steering wheel on a long road trip, it tends to stay there until at least the third or fourth time Amy offers to drive.

The successful offer came this time on Day Two of our three-day trip as we were all piling back into the car after a hike up to the Aster Park overlook above Two Medicine Lake.

“Do you want me to drive?” she asked.

I didn’t, really, but, after thinking it over for a few seconds, I decided that it was probably for the best.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to give up the wheel. It’s not that I don’t think Amy is a good driver, and it’s really not that I believe there is anything especially safe about the same person driving, uninterrupted, for hours at a time, no matter who it is. Against all reason, I just settle into being the driver, and good luck trying to pry me loose.

While the car hurtled along Route 2, I gazed out the side window at hillsides full of aspens glowing so golden yellow that it was as if individual droplets of the bright, early-autumn sunshine had somehow taken up residence inside each leaf. I tried to quantify just how much of this kind of scenery I’ve missed out on as the primary driver over the years (my initial estimate includes approximately one quarter of a billion acres of trees in full fall color) and how much damage this loss has done to my poet soul (pretty much incalculable).

Watching the towering mountain peaks and fireball-colored trees roll past, I started thinking about growing older and what it means to be an adult, as I’ve been doing on and off ever since my 34th birthday, which came just a few days before this trip. While not really old, by any stretch of the imagination, 34 is an age that starts to put one firmly in grownup territory, in the sense that my life at, say, 54, seems a lot more likely to look the way it does at 34 than the way it did at 18 or even 24.

What I’m talking about here is the way that possibilities seem to fall away the older I get. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I felt so much more open to the world than I do now. Back then, in the course of a couple of years, I made plans — to varying degrees of seriousness — to become a filmmaker, a translator, a firefighter, and a police officer. I soon scrapped these and signed up for four years in the Coast Guard. When I got out, I studied for three years to be a teacher before moving on from that idea, too.

The world seemed to offer millions of interesting paths, all worth pursuing if only for the knowledge I might gain about myself. It felt like I had the potential to be many different people than I was.

Now, in my mid-thirties, I have noticed that I seem to be more firmly one specific person, with set routines and opinions, certain strong tendencies and predispositions, and drastically reduced interest in becoming anyone else. Sometimes it feels irresponsible to hurtle on toward middle age without going back to school for training in a job field that has a little more potential and stability than scribbling — the law, say, or maybe welding. But the thought of having to subject my mind to the process of learning some new field’s body of knowledge — of really needing to care about that knowledge, lest I end up just wasting more time — is vastly and apparently incontrovertibly unappealing. (I find this true about law more than welding, though, for what it’s worth.)

In my best moods, this change — this narrowing — seems all for the good, just part of figuring out who I am and focusing on what I really want from life. But in this youth-obsessed culture, where so much conspires to suggest that the only worthwhile stage of life peters out sometime in one’s mid-twenties, it is sometimes difficult to accept that ceasing to want what we wanted as teenagers — no longer looking at the world the way we did then — represents maturation and growth rather than giving up on life and conceding to decline and death.

So sometimes I worry that I live the way I drive: sticking to the highways, focused more on the destination than the journey, the blue lines and byways hard to spot and even harder to slow down for from these speeds. With each passing year, it becomes easier and easier to just keep going along the same old highway I’ve been traveling — becomes less and less likely that I will get around to being all those people I dreamed I might be when I was younger.

After our visit to the Two Medicine region of the park, the plan was to head around to the west and drive up Going-to-the-Sun Road as far as Logan Pass, where we would be blocked by construction and have to turn back, but from which incredible views were supposed to be available. Then we would eat dinner at the Izaak Walton Inn in Essex before retiring to our rooms at the Glacier Haven to view the vice-presidential debate on television.

As we filled the gas tank in West Glacier, however, I did some calculations and realized that time might be a little tight for all of that. At first, I thought of proposing that we skip the scenic drive, but then I realized that would be just another version of staying on that metaphorical highway that had lately started to feel so grim and oppressive.

After all, there is in life no shortage of opportunities to watch politicians making fools of themselves.

There is, however, only one place on earth where you can watch the setting sun pick out details on the towering Garden Wall ridge formation, gaze on Bird Woman Falls across a valley so incomprehensibly massive that the 500-foot torrent looks like an insignificant trickle, and take in plunging hillsides blanketed in autumn pyrotechnics so infinitely varied in tone and shade that it looks as if every conceivable fall color has been collected and archived there for future reference. That place is Glacier National Park, and there I was right next to it, and who knew when I would be back?

So when we piled into the car and pointed ourselves toward the pass, it felt like a victory over inertia — a small one, but sometimes you have to take what you can get.

On the other hand, I was driving again, but at least I had a good reason.

Everyone else was eating ice cream cones.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.