Travels With Nadia

The Space Between: On the Road and In the Shadow of My Great Grandmother

By Nadia White, Guest Writer, 7-15-10

	Nadia White's trek from Kenton, Okla., to Sumner, Wash., loosely followed the travels of Alice Josephine Keys, her great-grandmother and a pioneering outdoorswoman. She blogs about the project at travelswithjosie.com.

Wayne was driving on a cloud of dust up and out of the deepest hole in North America when he felt the need to fish something out of a little jar in his pocket.  I shifted the metal detectors on my lap, reached across a mandolin and took the walnut-sized lump he was holding back to me.

The nugget was the color of an orange-mango smoothie, buckled in soft folds that whispered what it was: pure gold.

“Oh, man,” I said. “What’d you do when you found that?”

“I jumped around like a kid,” Wayne said. He is pretty spry for a retired lumber mill saw sharpener, but pretty far from being a kid. “I just whooped and yelled.”

The part-time prospector was on his way to a family reunion on the Oregon side of Hell’s Canyon when he gamely became my savior and the sole cheater move on a bicycle journey in search of the spirit of my great grandmother.

Wayne, left, and his brother, Gene: Just two of many helpful Westerners encountered on this trip.

Alice Josephine Keys White moved a half-dozen times in her childhood, but left the family homestead for good when she boarded a wagon in the Oklahoma panhandle in 1890. She caught a train in New Mexico, thinking her destination was her sister’s house in Sumner, Wash. She did make it there, but that was just the first stop in a life propelled by “Why nots?” rather than reined in by “What ifs?”

That spirit guided me as I picked a route less traveled by the cycling tourists. Against popular wisdom, I rode southeast to northwest, as her route took her. That pointed me into the prevailing breeze as I picked my way across the Rockies, Wasatch, Sawtooth and Cascade ranges. It drenched me in sun and parched my skin as I crossed the big flats—prairie in Oklahoma, lava beds in Idaho and huge agricultural valleys of San Luis in Colorado and Yakima in Washington.

I don’t know that much about Josie except that she was a woman who did things, she didn’t just talk about doing them. Her obituary remembered her as a crack shot with a .22, a mountain climber and a dead-on bowler, of all things. The few photographs I have of her tie her to action – a bowling team, a tennis team, on a rock in a raging river my grandfather at her lap, at a mountain camp armed with shovel and rifle.

Josephine Keys White and her son, Albert at Auk Lake near Juneau, Alaska.

She would not have talked about getting to know her great grandmother. She would have gone and sought her out. So it was that I felt the hot hiss of air when I plucked the first goathead thorn out of my tire in northern New Mexico; that on a day with temperatures in the high 90s I ran my hand across ice in a cave in Idaho; that I tasted the ocean in the wind as I turned to face the Columbia River.

The power of place is so often celebrated. On this ride with Josie, I am as interested in the space in between.  What connects here to there? What’s between leaving and arriving?  I think a lot about the genetic material that binds one generation to the next. What made Josie move so often? How does her sense of adventure at the start of the 20th century play out in me at the start of the 21st?

Josie got on a train in Clayton, New Mexico, to start her trip. I got off a Greyhound there to start mine. Neither of us quite knew what to expect once the wheels got rolling, but once rolling, we each found it hard to stop.

The terrain has been the canvas of my trip, but the people have been the pigment that gave it life and depth, laughter and at times anxiety. Often, they’ve appeared just as I needed them. Wayne found me pushing my bike and trailer up a steep, seldom-used, BLM road in an effort to get out of Hell’s Canyon. The usual route had washed out and this road, well, it might be done by bike, people told me.

Ashleigh and I exchanged fewer than a dozen sentences before she seized on what I needed, changing a bleak RV parking lot in Utah into a party: “Quick! Grab your stuff and run around to the gym. Tell her you’re with us and she’ll let you take a shower.” Later, her husband handed a cleaner, happier me a beer, her father tended chicken on the barbecue and we shared a late night of laughter in our gravel surround.

Nadia White outside a contender for the best food of the trip, Taco el Gordo on Main Street, Vernal, Utah.

Not everyone has been a charmer. There was the shrieking girl-fight across from my tent that sounded meth-fueled to me. I moved. There was the kid who screamed in my ear from a passing car. But mostly, the world of strangers has proven willing to become one of friends. A couple who passed me in Malta, Utah, picked up my tab at the diner, a man on a camping trip let me warm myself in his tiny travel trailer after a first-light rainstorm caught me breaking camp.

After more than 2,000 miles, I’m at the end of this ride. But I hope it’s only a start. How we navigate the space between says a lot about who we are. I’ve learned bits about Josie as I’ve gone. I suspect she was a pragmatic optimist, because hard things are just easier that way. I imagine she took some pleasure out of taking the long way if the view from the top was breathtaking, even briefly. I think she enjoyed the time she spent with others in part because she enjoyed being alone so well. I believe these things about her in part because I see them in myself this trip.

Josie didn’t stay in Washington long after word came that there was adventure to be had in Alaska. She married and ventured north to make a life and a family. She went, she has written, for the adventure rather than to strike it rich. But in living her life saying, “Sure, why not?” she pulled people together into groups that could work hard and play and laugh and extract from each other the pale yellow nuggets of experience that make life rich.

As my trip approached our shared destination – today’s suburban Sumner, Washington—I found myself slowing down, dragging my feet, taking the time to meet one more stranger, to pick up the little things that make me want to jump around like a kid, whooping and yelling at the richness of life.

Nadia White, a member of the faculty at the University of Montana School of Journalism, blogs about her trip at travelswithjosie.com.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.