What matters

After a year and a half on the road, we're two states from home. Time to figure out whether it was worth it.

By Kate Convissor

May 7, 2002 | We are at the Tennessee state line heading north. After a year and a half of travel, we are two states away from home. Grocery stores have begun to look Midwestern. They are clean and bland and as grating as our nasal twang. No fresh tortillas, boiled crawfish, tripe, pig lips or cane syrup. We still hear soft Southern cadences, but they are muted now. We rarely hear Spanish anymore.

We set out those months ago to take a look at America, but also to take a look at ourselves. It was time to clean house, to empty out the junk drawers and poke about in the closets where skeletons gather dust. We even dragged out the parlor furniture -- those fusty old habits and dearly held beliefs -- for a thorough dusting. This kind of introspection is the time-honored purpose of a road trip, and it was one of ours.

So. We've reached the end of the road. The moment of truth. We are reviewing the balance sheet that will tell us what we've gained or lost.

Was this trip worth it? Was it worth selling almost everything we owned, pulling the kids out of school and shaking up our settled lives to wander around the country? And after all this wandering, have we figured out what really matters, anyway? Do we know more clearly what's important? How we might want to spend the time we have left?

The door to those existential questions cracked open a bit in Nevada. Nevada is more than a place; it's a metaphor. Once you get beyond Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada yawns and stretches into a broad, desolate landscape. Sagebrush and pinyon pine dust empty miles. Distant mountain ranges cup broad basins in their rocky palms. Aliens are said to land here, and it must feel like home to them.

We were traveling west on State Road 50, dubbed the "Loneliest Road in America." I looked at this otherworldly landscape with its stark, expansive beauty and thought: This is how time feels to me now.

Time has been as spacious as Nevada on this trip. It has felt almost timeless. I have nowhere to go, or rather, I can go anywhere, so I'm never late, and I'm never in a hurry. I have time to wait in line and time to be nice to the clerk at its end. I have time to notice things: the sound of birds' wings beating the air, the graceful, swaying dance of fir trees in the wind, the way peace feels. I have time to read and think, to pray and walk, and to sit beside the campfire until it burns to embers.

This expanse of time may seem alien and even scary to a culture that has perfected the fine and complex art of scheduling. Only our very old and very young are allowed unscheduled time; the rest of us are expected to be efficiently productive. But I have tasted the forbidden fruit of unproductive time, and it is very sweet. It is delightful to wake up in the morning with a sense of purpose but no sense of constriction; no tightening of the throat, no leap forward from the starting gate. Instead, days stretch without boundaries to the horizon. Sometimes I forget, even, what day it is, although I usually know where the moon will rise and whether or not it will be full.

Time is one of the things that matter, but it does not come cheaply. In our case, it was the direct descendant of radical simplifying. In this unequal world there are good moral reasons to simplify, but our reasons were purely practical: We needed money for the trip. We could not have traveled had we kept our modest (by most standards) accumulation of worldly goods. We left it all, along with the commitments, projects and promises that had seeped unheeded into the junk drawers of our lives.

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