Where the Wonder Lives

Two weeks.

Every time Trav and I say that to each other, we do it in the voice of "Arnold Schwarzenneger" malfunctioning in his lady-disguise in Total Recall. 

It’s absurd. Which is honestly apt since that is what this last slide into home feels like. Absurd. How is it only two weeks? Didn’t we just leave yesterday? 

This last bit of travel brings us across the vast, unending plains of my childhood summers. This land echoes with numerous trips across South Dakota with my dad, who drove down annually to pick us up from our home in Denver and drive us back to stay with him for long golden summers in Minnesota. Here, there were long car rides, dipping into Custer, detouring through the Badlands, broken up by visits to Wall Drug and Crazy Horse, which was still a lump of mountain back then. These Black Hills are familiar, imprinted soul-deep. After months of traveling and exploring new spaces, I recognize this place. But even as we slip into the familiar, everything has changed. 

The girls and I are no longer doing “RV School.” As much as I loved it and wanted to school them forever, I am honoring the traditional summer break, punctuated by bits of “road schooling” through Junior Ranger programs at the national parks along the way. But for the most part, their days are formless and aimless, digging in mud, riding bikes to a playground, making up games, beading bracelets and keychains, and yes, screen time. Summertime kid stuff. 

And everywhere we go, there are other summertime families, grilling, biking, swimming, and exploring. The parks are bursting at the seams. Gone are our quiet wintertime days pulling into empty parking lots and spending hours hiking alone. Now: So. Many. People.

And so this part of our trip is starting to feel like the last bits of a long family vacation road trip. And I'm already starting to forget what RV LIFE is. 

I am afraid of the forgetting. 

We aren’t even home yet, and I miss this life. I miss the living of it. The feeling of routine and adventure blended together in our days scattered across this wide, vast country. Of waking up and making coffee, and gazing out of a window that looks out over a new view each week. The mundane act of morning coffee against a backdrop of unfamiliar. 

I miss RV School. Math centers and choice boards, and reading the novel Wonder together and listening to podcasts. I miss calendar time, morning meetings, and even the thousand tiny fights over space, pencils, and “the good” scissors. 

I miss afternoon excursions into the urban and rural wilds, discovering, uncovering, exploring, inspecting, unearthing all of the secrets of the universe according to 9-year-olds. I miss museums, and parks, and hikes, and beach days, and tiny ice cream parlors and car picnics and the 1,001 nonsense stories coming from the backseat while I navigate in a beastly oversized truck through narrow city streets and across wide open spaces. (I never noticed how much noise a 9-year-old makes until our 24/7 life together. Like, constant noise. Talking noise, singing noise, totally-made-up-words noise, whining-for-food-or-rest noise. Why do 9-year-olds emit so much noise?) 

I even miss driving around trying to figure out how to park that ungodly long truck in tiny parking lots and hunting for bathrooms at the most inconvenient times. 

I miss seeing the overlooked corners of the country. And the well-traveled avenues. All of the beautiful and the ugly. The natural and the odd. Big sprawling mansions and wondrous architecture. Abject and utter poverty. Empty dying towns. Booming new developments. Changing landscapes–mountains so high and huddled together you can’t see a horizon for days on end. Unending prairie with nothing but horizon in sight. Tumbleweeds. I really love tumbleweeds. 

I miss laundry days. The whole rig shivering and shaking from the machines, assuring my family once again for the hundredth time that, “Yes, I am doing laundry,” and “Yes, Trav, I opened the gray tank.” I miss putting in my AirPods, closing the bedroom door, tuning into a mindless show, and folding clothes into tight, tiny squares, tiny enough to fit into our limited closet space, with windows opened onto a brand-new city, town, village, landscape, something extraordinary just outside. This was my “never-quite-alone” alone time. 

I miss work days. Fighting for an internet signal in the wilderness. Trying to connect to Zoom in the wilds. Yelling into my computer, “Can you hear me? Can you see me?” Setting up and taking down my workspace. Listening to Trav in his office talk about building codes and doorknob choices and blueprint specs. Listening to him recount our adventures to his colleagues, awe in his voice at his own great luck to be here. 

I miss evenings cuddled up on the RV couch with Trav, recounting the day, planning our next adventure, zoning out in front of the TV together, and getting ready for a long, exhausting hour of wrestling our tired girls into bed and convincing them to quiet their minds and still their limbs. Get them to stop making noise. 

I miss listening to the winds outside at night whispering in the willow and oak trees, rustling palm leaves, whipping up waves that crash on ocean shores, whistling across desert hills and around saguaros and ocotillo, sliding across sands, howling through deep forests, skimming the tops of redwood giants. 

Even though we were traveling, our days had a form that meant we were living a life, not vacationing. We were truly living. 

I am already mourning the end of this RV Life. 

It will be a hard transition to Stationary Life, I know. Because we are changed. Just as I knew we would be. I just didn’t understand how deeply. It is as though we have finally awoken. Sat up and looked around for the first time. And now that we have truly seen with our eyes wide open, we are restless and yearning to move and to voyage. 

How do you go from a nomadic life that offers daily wonder and surprise to a still life of routine? How do you take all of the things that have made you gasp in awe, made you laugh with delight, moved you to tears, and stow them away? 

More importantly, how do you hold onto it all, and make your still life sparkle with the same kind of wonder? What lessons do you keep and bring into the next chapter? How do you stay awake for the awe and delight and sadness? 

This is the job, then. To move into the next leg of the journey with the same appreciation for it all. To keep our eyes open. To avoid the numbing. 

And because I am me, my job is also to figure out how to turn our love of our national parks and for this great big messy, ugly, beautiful, astonishing country into something meaningful. Stewardship. Advocacy. Championing, Action. But maybe that’s for later. 

For now, my girls have taught me how to slow down. How to get down on my knees and get closer to the earth, to look around and inspect things up close. To ask a million questions, pose a million possible answers. To look at everything with appreciation. The lovely things, yes, but also the horrible ugly things. To feel grateful that we are here to witness everything and to be able to feel it at all.

I can’t lose that. I will not lose that. 

Our days on the road are coming to an end. We are gliding into home. And we are utterly changed. 

During these last days here in South Dakota, the ghosts of my childhood summers comfort me, but they also make me sad. It’s a poignant sadness that makes these days feel urgent. We will spend these last two weeks wringing every last ounce of wonder out of our days. 

But then we will go home, put our Big Fun RV in storage, unpack all of the glorious things we have picked up along the way, hug our family and friends, collapse into our old bed, and start dreaming of the road. 

Oh, how I miss these days already. However, I am so absolutely, gloriously grateful for the journey and the brilliant revelations that came along the way. The truth is, all of that wonder lives inside of my family. It’s in my girls' questioning minds and their excited giggles. It’s in my husband's beautiful smile and his kind, loving eyes. No matter where we are, my family will continue to discover and to marvel at it all. And as long as we are all together, whether it’s in our RV, our Stationary House, or someplace new, we will be home.