When I was 24, I lived in a tiny town called Parker, Arizona, located on a reservation straddling the Arizona/California border. It was a short-term thing. A “zig” on the path of my life; a zig that was unexpected, but much needed. I had landed there because that’s where my college friend M was from. He had sent me a one-way plane ticket out of Trenton, New Jersey, which was another short-term thing. Unlike Parker, Trenton felt more like a “zag”; a rut in the road you can’t get out of. Nothing against Trenton itself. It was the situation I was in. M brought me to Parker to get away from a romantic relationship that was never going to go anywhere no matter how much I tried to convince myself it would. M saw me stuck and growing increasingly depressed and offered me a life rope to the desert.
Situated along the Colorado River, Parker itself was a complicated little town. Part tribal land, part cowboy town, part parcels in dispute. In one direction you could find yourself in the resort town of Lake Havasu, a playground for boaters and spring break partyers. In the other direction you could stumble upon the remnants of one of the largest Japanese American internment camps in the middle of nothing but brown dirt. I learned a lot living there, but that isn’t what this story is about.
One day M and I were driving into Phoenix. I don’t know why, but it was probably to go shopping because Parker was pretty much the middle of nowhere and Phoenix was the closest, biggest city there was. Sure Blythe, California was closer and had a K-Mart and a Del Taco, but that didn’t really count unless you were desperate. The drive itself was always long and dry — two and a half hours of desert brush, cattle guards, old-timey mining towns, and lots of truck stops. I don’t remember the specifics of this particular trip, but I’m pretty sure that along the way we laughed a lot, played the radio too loud and undoubtedly talked about how we were one day going to be rich and famous. Our version of famous was very specific — you were going to see our picture in the top right hand corner of People Magazine waving while we left the Betty Ford Clinic. For some reason, that seemed cool at the time. It’s not actually cool, but it made sense to us. And if you knew our childhood backgrounds, it would make sense to you, too.
To get to Phoenix from Parker, you start by heading southeast on State Route 95, which turns into State Route 72, which eventually drops you to Interstate 10. When you get to the junction, you hang a left to go east. Another one and a half hours and you arrive at your destination, the Valley of the Sun.
I know we must have made this trip a least a few times together, but for some reason on that day, the green highway sign near the junction seemed to be offering us a hitherto ignored option. Phoenix continued to be a destination option, but why not Los Angeles? Why not go there, whispered the Gods of Wanderlust.
I had never been to Los Angeles and the whisper beckoned me that day. L.A. had previously been my “go-to” starter city to begin my post-college life. As someone who had grown up in Hawaii, it was the sunny warm place on the Pacific Ocean that was in the Continental US. In my mind it was like being home, yet being out in the world. I loved Honolulu, but it’s hard to see the world from there. My plan had been to wait a year for my boyfriend to graduate from college (he was a year behind me) and we both would move to L.A. for a fresh start, free from his longstanding addiction to being a “momma’s boy”. I discovered much too late for my self-esteem and nascent professional development that that was all a one-sided pipe dream (thus the one-way ticket to Parker, AZ).
When M said, “Let’s go to L.A.!” I was reminded of the road trips we used to make in college, when we drove throughout New England or headed south to New York or D.C. Back then I wasn’t much of a planner. M was better than me, but not by much. This was in contrast to most of our Ivy League classmates who pretty much knew freshman year what they would be doing upon graduation and had their summers planned out accordingly. I took opportunities that were in front of me and lived mostly within the moment. I didn’t worry about money although I should have because I didn’t come from a rich family and my college experience was financed by scholarships, students loans, and the hard work of my single librarian mom and my blue collar grandma with an eight grade education. This isn’t to say that I misused their money or didn’t work. I did work and was pretty smart about how I spent what money I had. I simply enjoyed my experiences and wanted more of them.
It was only later at age 30 when I was in law school trying to “catch up” with my “peers” that I learned that what kind of life I had been living. During an interview with a prominent county prosecutor in a Midwestern city, he looked at my resume and said, “I can see that you are a free spirit”. In that moment I slipped deeply into shame. I felt my rickety cover that I had been fashioning for the last few years had been blown away exposing all of my inadequacies. But then he said, “other people aren’t going to like that about you, but I do.” In that moment he handed me a key to self-love that I would have to pull out over and over and over again, because he was right — a lot of people don’t embrace free spirits. Sometimes they even terrorize them.
So when M said, “let’s do it”, there was a part of me that wanted to go so badly. I wanted to take a leap and be someone other than who I had come to be by age 24 — fearful and lost.
At the junction of the desert, I had no money in the bank and barely a job to speak of. I was suffering a crisis of confidence that was crippling. I was embarrassed that after all the opportunities afforded to me and after all my education I couldn’t get my shit together and I felt like I was never going to catch up. By 24 my decisions were morphing into practicality. Where would we stay, how would we pay for gas, how would we eat? I took a four and a half hour drive and made it seem like a two-week cross-country journey. My free spirited ways were devolving into over-thinking and stabs at security. So it was no surprise when I said “No. “Let’s keep driving to Phoenix. We can drive to L.A. another time”. Well we never did drive to LA, which in retrospect was probably a good thing, because even I knew at the time that time spent with M could land us somewhere worse than the Betty Ford Clinic.
Over the years I thought a lot about that green highway sign and wondered what would it have been like to indulge the sensation of “I wonder what’s over there, I wonder what’s that like”. As hinted above, I did eventually go on to law school in an effort to catch up with my peers. In many ways that never happened (yay for unexpected victories), but I did experience a level of financial security I hadn’t known before.
Twenty-four years after the whispering green sign, I was living in Seattle and thinking about that day. It was a week after I quit a job that I had held for twelve long years. Twelve years in an environment that left me seriously doubting myself. That is a huge understatement by the way. By leaving that job, a thorn had been removed from my paw, but it would take quite a while before the throbbing subsided. It would take even longer to truly heal.
Even though I was initially freaking out not having a paycheck coming in and couldn’t for the life of me describe what this state was (was I between jobs, following my heart, being stupid), I was also secretly feeling free. So fucking free.
I had one thought about what to do with my newfound freedom and turned to the memory of that day in the desert. I wanted to get into my car with some clothes and toiletries and drive south down I-5. Where down I-5? I didn’t know and didn’t care. Mt Saint Helens? Portland? Mt Shasta? Los Angeles? San Diego? Tijuana? The end of my street? It didn’t really matter because I wanted the road and my mood to dictate my destination. I just wanted to take that leap. And I told myself this time it would be different, because unlike me at 24, the me at 48 had money in the bank, platinum credit cards in my wallet, a cell phone and the title to my vehicle.
I didn’t end up making that particular trip.
I talked myself out of it because I had two very beloved elderly cats that I was afraid of being away from and I focused too much on the logistics of their care, and the “how will this work”. Yes, they eventually passed on, but it was over a year from that “whisper” telling me to get in the car and drive down I-5.
Do I regret not jumping in my car and turning right? A little bit, but that regret is tempered by the memory of so many trips that I have made throughout my life, where I did answer the call to adventure and I did honor the voice that called to me.
My regrets aren’t necessarily that I missed out on something as much as a larger habit of cutting myself off to possibilities. If I say “what if” less and “why not” more, it may not turn out the way I hope it will or it might end up a complete bust in terms of what I thought I wanted, but I would always have a story to tell and a lesson learned along the way.
I could say the moral of this story is, when a sign appears, calls your name and gives you direction, do what you need to do, run it through whatever process you have to, but don’t just automatically cast it aside. But that isn’t really it.
I’m not sure what the moral of this story is. I suspect it has nothing to do with signs. Maybe it’s more about giving myself permission to be me regardless of the circumstances I find myself in. And to stop judging myself so harshly for what I did, what I didn’t do, or who I am or was.