The message disoriented me for a moment, and made me chuckle—it wasn’t the 9th, and though I did feel desperately cooped up at home most days, I certainly hadn’t typed an entry in my phone calendar to remind me to get out.

I soon realized it was a calendar entry from January 9th, the last time I opened my iPad to write. The note was truncated from a since-deleted reminder to leave my house unlocked for the furnace cleaning guy. I tried unsuccessfully to take a screen shot, then before I could turn on my phone camera to capture it, the screen refreshed with the correct date and the reminder that I had “No events today.”

The message was lost, but the irony was not.

For two months since I turned around my van and abandoned my winter road trip, I’ve sat alone at home wondering what to do with my life. The days have felt long, and slow, and mostly wasted. It’s the kind of quiet and stillness that I’ve craved at many points in my life—a spaciousness that yearns to be filled with creativity, curiosity, and fun. I could write! I could read! I could reach out to friends! I’ve done some of those things, a little bit, but it hasn’t been enough to fill the yawning hours and days and weeks of an endless winter.

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Sitting in this emptiness, I’ve developed a scrolling habit I don’t like. I notice with every pang of discomfort a dopamine-induced urge to distract, and I usually give in, toggling between the despair of the news, and the garbage that is social media. I am aware of not wanting to click even as my finger moves magnetized toward the familiar icons on my phone, like the mysterious motion of the pointer on an Ouija board. Each unconscious click spills another hour of life through my fingers like sand.

I would be better off on the beach sifting actual sand through my fingers, with grains embedded in the skin of my knees as I smelled the salt air, watching terns circle and drop into the waves. That was my reality one year ago, on the coast of Baja, Mexico, and it never felt like wasted time. It felt like exactly where I was supposed to be, and exactly what I was meant to be doing with my one wild and precious life.

So what am I doing here, alone in my house in New Hampshire, behind frost-covered windows, with days and nights dipping below zero?

I am awaiting the precious hours when Seth is home.

I turned my van around two months ago because I couldn’t bear the thought of being without him for an indefinite length of time (six months? A year? More?). It’s not that I can’t function on my own—I proved to myself last year that I can. I wasn’t even that lonely in my six months on the road, even though he only visited once. I had the terns, and the hummingbirds, and my dogs, and the whales and dolphins, and my fellow travelers. I had gorgeous views out my van windows every day. I had a map and a guidebook and a tiny home on wheels, ready to explore.

I felt pulled to escape the winter again this year and repeat my epic Baja adventure, but something held me back. It was the people I was leaving behind. It was the uncertainty of the future. It was the inability to reconcile how I could live my life on the road when my husband’s life was firmly rooted in New Hampshire—in his job, his projects, our home.

I came back because I am committed to this person and I wanted to find a way to make our lives work together. Years of daydreaming had not yielded a viable solution for Seth to join me on the road, partly due to finances and logistics, and partly because he’s just not that interested in van life. He likes his job, he likes his projects, he likes spending summers with his parents at the lake. And he seems to like these things more than he likes the idea of waking up camped on a beach in Baja or next to a glacier in Alaska. He also likes financial stability, which in this economy is getting harder to come by (raise your hand if your health insurance just doubled!).

So I stare out my bedroom window every day at the same tree branches covered with snow, the oak across the street still grasping dry leaves. I watch the same frost tendrils creep across the glass and then melt in the afternoon sun. I make a mental note (if not a physical one) to “LEAVE HOUSE” at some point every day, usually for an afternoon ski with the dogs. By the time I get home, Seth is here, and we clean up and curl up and eat dinner on the couch and watch a show. I dread falling asleep on weeknights because I know that when I wake up the next day, he’ll be gone, and I’ll have to fill the hours all over again.

This week, though—and for the rest of the winter—I’m down to one-dog ski trips. Baxter had been limping on her right hind leg ever since one of our adventures a few weeks ago, so I’d booked an appointment with a canine orthopedist. I was afraid she would need the same surgery she had on her left knee two years ago—the cranial cruciate ligament, or CCL—the canine equivalent of a human ACL. She was already scheduled for surgery in March to remove the metal plate from her left leg, in an effort to resolve her residual lameness. But I wasn’t prepared when the vet confirmed that now her right knee was unstable too, and he offered to perform CCL surgery that same day to save me another six-hour round-trip drive.

I hemmed and hawed, not at all emotionally prepared to put my pup under the knife and then confine her to a pen for the next two months. It would mean canceling her 9th birthday party with my parents, when we dress in party hats and feed the dogs “Australian Shepherd’s Pie” off of our bone china at the dinner table. It would mean no more skijor adventures or walks or runs. It would mean Seth and me not leaving the house together for more than a few hours, because we can’t bring her with us. It would mean no more snuggles on the couch, no more falling asleep with her curled up between us, no more waking up to wet kisses.

It broke my heart.

But I resigned myself to the inevitable and went ahead with the surgery that day, in the hopes that Baxter would heal in time for our spring and summer camping trips and our visits to Seth’s parents’ lake house. It will be 8-12 weeks before she can be out and about again safely, and probably longer before she’s cleared to run up and down the stairs or jump on the bed. The timeline will extend further if we proceed with the additional surgery to remove the first metal plate, once the second one has healed. It’s traumatic and sad and heartbreaking seeing her wild spirit confined, and knowing there are only so many minutes out of the day I can sit on the hardwood floor scratching her ears and icing her knee. She’s only allowed to leave the pen to go potty.

Yet I take some solace in thinking that perhaps this is another reason why I felt the pull to turn my van around in December. I sensed that something might happen while I was on the road, though I didn’t know what it might be. On the one hand, this surgery was not an emergency; I could have reduced her activity level and waited until I got home to take care of it. But on the other hand, it would have been no fun for Baxter to be stuck in the van while Laney and I went on adventures. And even if I had come home this summer, we would have had to put the surgery off until fall; otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to travel on weekends to visit Seth’s parents. That would be a long time to postpone the inevitable, so a part of me is relieved that we were able to get surgery right away, and she’s on the slow road to recovery. It makes these long winter days almost seem worth it.

Even as I’ve languished through these dark days, I’ve been on a mission to figure out how to build a life here with my husband that I don’t long to escape. I’m exploring employment opportunities that would get me out of the house and engaging with the community, because being home alone all day every day isn’t good for anybody. Seth and I have also revisited our remaining options for bringing children into our lives, though we are no longer sure that’s the right path for us, as the grief of our previous losses remains.

Would I feel more fulfilled if I had a job? Kids? Both? Either choice would be a big shift from the childless, self-employed, wandering life I’ve grown accustomed to. I just know that the version of my life where I stay in New Hampshire to be with my husband does not work when I’m stuck home alone all day. I need to explore my options.

Today I was supposed to “LEAVE HOUSE” to hike with a friend, then go visit my parents for the weekend. I’ve been itching for some company and a change of scenery. But ever since my visit to the vet on Monday, I’ve had a tickle in my throat that had me concerned enough that I canceled my plans. If there’s a chance that I’m getting sick, the last thing I want to do is expose three octogenarians to my germs.

So I am stuck at home, counting down the weeks and months until I can escape in my van to the coast of Maine, or sleep in our 1991 Winnebago in my in-laws’ driveway at the lake. I’ve made it through the first half of winter thanks to the joy of my skis sliding through snow. But now that February is here, I’m already dreaming of that first mild day in March when I can pull on a pair of spandex shorts and ride my bike to the edge of town, watching the glow of sunset on the mountains.

I did manage to “LEAVE HOUSE” once today, for Baxter’s potty break. The short walk from the back door into my yard reminded me of one of my favorite aspects of van life—the fact that so much of life takes place outside. Just those few minutes of feeling sun on my cheeks and listening to my boots crunch in the snow rejuvenated me. If I was meant to abandon my road trip to take care of my pup, perhaps her recovery period was also meant to take care of me—to force me to put on my coat, hat, gloves, and boots and step out the door, if only for a moment.

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I sit with my torso folded over my dog Baxter, resting my head against the curve of her spine. My hands grip her floppy ears like handlebars, cupping each triangle to make it funnel-shaped as I stroke them in sync. The soft velvet caresses my palms.

Her fur smells like nothing—not like a dog, not an animal, nor the perfumed scent of human hair. Seth and I have always marveled at our dog’s lack of odor and joked that she self-cleans like an oven. Her full name is Baxter Rose, and I tell her she smells like a Baxter Rose bud, borrowing a phrase Mom used in my childhood.

Baxter and Laney came up the stairs at full trot a few minutes ago and circled like sharks, only their snouts and fishhook tails visible above the edge of the bed. They took turns barking at me before relenting and leaping onto the mattress to lie next to me.

It’s the third time today they’ve lobbied me to get up and go on an adventure. Most days by this time we’re loaded into my 2003 Chevy Astro van heading for a cross-country ski trail. But today the van is in the shop getting four leaky, corroded tires fixed, and the ski trails have turned to slush with the January thaw. We tried to ski yesterday and ended up a half mile down the trail with two inches of snow stuck to the bottom of my skis. I’d stopped to let a porcupine waddle down the trail in front of us. Seth restrained Baxter, but my ski-heels wobbled and Laney pulled me face-first into a fir tree. The porcupine wasn’t in any hurry, and the dogs weren’t letting up their frantic pull, and the snow stuck back onto our skis as soon as we scraped it off. So we turned back, and I brushed fir needles from my hair before climbing into the van.

With today’s temperatures pushing 40 and rain in the forecast, I’m not interested in a repeat performance, even if I had a vehicle to get me there. So I’m sitting inside staring out the window at the waning gray day, wondering whether to run around town in the rain to make the dogs happy, or “take a zero” as we say in the hiking world and give up on the idea of exercise.

Laney stands up and comes over to kiss me, her tongue transmitting static electricity that shocks us both in the mouth. Then she jumps off the bed and circles again, staring at me with her golden eyes and barking.

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It’s been one month since I pulled into my driveway with my other van, my 1999 Roadtrek camper, after a pointless 2,500-mile drive to South Carolina and back in ten days. I’d thought I was going back to Baja, Mexico this winter, but got overwhelmed by traffic and rain and loneliness, so I impulsively turned around. That’s left me with six unscheduled months on my calendar in the dead of a New Hampshire winter.

A decade ago, that would have been a dream. In January 2016, I was busy hiking a list of peaks called the New England Hundred Highest, trying to summit them all in a few consecutive winters. My work schedule constrained hiking time to weekends, and when the weather didn’t cooperate, my friends and I set out anyway in marginal conditions. One of those winters I stood atop the twin peaks of the Bigelows in Maine with my thermometer reading 25-below-zero and the wind gusting 50 miles an hour. Tiny icicles covered my eyelashes, and my toes ached as they thawed on the descent. That Monday morning at 5am, I drove from the motel in Maine straight to my middle-school teaching job. Mist rose from the ice on the Androscoggin River at twenty-below zero.

On New Year’s Day last week, I lay in bed wondering what to do with my life. The first thing that came to mind was that I could fulfill my former dream of summitting all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot peaks in a single winter season. The most peaks I ever bagged in calendar winter was 31, back when I was teaching, so I reasoned it wouldn’t be hard to hit all 48 in the ten remaining weeks before the vernal equinox if I had nothing else to do.

“Hard” being a relative term here—there was plenty of time to orchestrate a few dozen hikes between now and March, but my body would still have to do the climbing. And my brain would still have to do all the planning and worrying, keeping daily and sometimes hourly tabs on the higher-summits forecast and trail reports, then calculating which peaks I could safely summit in what conditions, and whether I could do it alone or needed to find a hiking buddy or join a group.

The first weekend of the New Year brought valley highs in the low teens and summit wind chills more than thirty below zero. I didn’t want my first winter hike in years to be a repeat of the Bigelows, so I stayed home and skated the town ice rink with Seth instead. By the time the temperatures turned mild again, I had lost my ambition for peak-bagging. My all-or-nothing brain told me that if I couldn’t finish the whole list, it didn’t feel worth it for me to hike a single peak. So I bought a season pass to my favorite cross-country ski trails and vowed to take the dogs as often as I could.

Winter hiking wouldn’t be the same anyway, I reasoned, since Baxter couldn’t come with me anymore. Her adventures have slowed dramatically since her knee surgery two years ago. She can tolerate jogging a few miles on leash, but the few times I’ve let her run wild in the woods, she’s come home limping. We don’t know if it’s the metal plate in her knee, or arthritis in her hips, or the other knee starting to go, or some combination of all three. So far she’s done alright trotting ahead of me on leash while I ski for a few miles, so we skijor instead of peak-bag.

Skijoring is a comical sport for the dogs and me. I wear a harness on my waist that loops around my legs, and the dogs attach to me on long bungee leashes that connect their harnesses to mine through a flat red strap around my waist that doubles as an emergency release. But before I can attach them, I have to lay out my skis and poles, shoulder my Camelbak, and start the GPS tracker on my phone. Then I sling open the sliding door of our Astro van and the dogs burst out, sniffing every pile of snow that their bungees will stretch to as I try to untangle their leashes and connect them to me.

Once the dogs are attached to my harness, I turn my attention to clicking the toe bar on my boots into the narrow slot on my bindings while balancing on one foot at a time, poles in hand. In the midst of this, Baxter flops over to writhe on her back, Laney strains to sniff distant snowbanks, the leash wraps around them and around me, and I nearly fall over. Repeat on the other side.

After I untangle the dogs from my poles and myself and each other, it’s time to hit the trail. But the first twenty minutes of “skiing” consists of taking a few strides and then being jerked to one side or the other (sometimes both sides simultaneously) by dogs stopping to sniff or pee. When the first poop happens, I stop and awkwardly attempt to flick it off the trail with my ski pole and bury it in the snow, then scrape the poo off my pole. By then, Baxter is belly-up scratching her back in the snow, Laney is wrapped around a bush, and I am tangled in another web of leashes.

It’s worth getting through that first mile, though, because once we hit our stride, I feel like a championship musher in the Iditarod. As we crest our first hill and begin the descent, both dogs lean into their harnesses and sprint, kicking snow in my face as they keep pace with me. I hoot and howl and yip as I become one with my team, gliding through the woods with the focus of those early sled drivers delivering life-saving serum to Nome. My dogs are overjoyed to move as a pack, ears pricked forward, mouths agape, tongues flapping. We wind around the curves of the winter trails as if we were on a sleigh ride. The louder I cheer, the faster the dogs go.

The bliss is short-lived, as we descend the hill much faster than we’d climbed it. Soon it’s time to detach my skis and carry them across the road to start again on the other side, giving the dogs two more opportunities to tangle around me. Once we get on the move, I herringbone my skis up a steep pitch, slide down the other side, and cross the railroad tracks. We’ve arrived at my favorite stretch of trail, where we glide through the corduroy of freshly-groomed snow along the banks of the Saco River. Baxter drags behind me now, tired from the downhill sprint, and I slow my pace for her.

After fifteen minutes, we arrive at an open spot on the riverbank where the last rays of sunlight reflect golden on the water. The edges of the clouds turn pink and purple behind the silhouettes of the surrounding mountains. I stop and breathe. Baxter lies down to rest. We stay like this until the sunset starts to fade and my fingers feel cold. Baxter stands up and barks at me as I wrap my pole straps around my wrists. She’s ready to go.

We’ve had this same adventure several times this week, but not today. Today, Laney barks and stares at me from beside the bed, begging to do it again, but the van is in the shop and the rain is tapping the roof and I decide I’m too lazy to bundle up for a cold, wet run.

Instead, we snuggle, and I write.

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I didn’t need gas, but I stopped at a gas station anyway to top off my tank and buy myself a little time.

Since leaving New Hampshire the day before, I had felt my heart ripping out of my chest with each mile I drove further from home. There was the sad goodbye to my parents and husband in a grocery store parking lot, after Seth had spent two hours trying to make a last-minute fix to my 26-year-old camper van. There was a long, dark, rainy drive late into the night to park in a stranger’s driveway in Pennsylvania, where I could plug in and run my electric space heater, bracing against the 30-degree cold. There was waking with a feeling of dread and wondering if I should turn back, but I kept going, hoping my discomfort would fade.

Now I was six hours into another miserable day of highway driving, my van stacked between semi trucks for hundreds of miles straight. It was 5pm, and I was only halfway to my next stop. Each mile I traveled farther from home stretched my heart closer to breaking.

The moment I exited the highway, I decided I couldn’t stretch it any further. I had to stop and reevaluate my plans, because every mile I drove was another mile I’d have to retrace if I turned around.

After topping off the tank, I pulled up to a patch of grass and let the dogs out. I gave them dinner. I had a snack.

Then I opened my maps app. I was hundreds of miles from my next stop, with darkness descending. I opened my weather app. Flashing yellow signs all along the highway had been warning of a winter storm coming. I would be heading straight into the storm if I turned back.

I was stuck.

I agonized for hours about what to do. I was two days into a six-month adventure I’d been planning for months—a repeat of the road trip to the U.S. Southwest and Baja California, Mexico that I’d embarked on exactly one year earlier. I’d spent weeks ordering and organizing everything I’d need to stay on the road for up to a year. I’d spent a day on the phone renewing my travel insurance, my satellite radio, and my Planet Fitness membership. I’d spent two days packing the van, tucking everything into its place and ditching what didn’t fit. Seth had devoted weekends to getting the van ready for me, installing new brakes and new speakers and a new fire alarm, scrubbing the awning, and building a barrier around my solar panels to decrease wind resistance. Two months of my life had been devoted to the singular goal of getting back on the road.

And now all I wanted was to turn around and go home.

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Two things, actually, that are equally exciting and terrifying.

First—I am planning to get back on the road for the winter, hopefully leaving this weekend!

The little exclamation point at the end of that sentence feels forced, because I am honestly more terrified than excited.

My heart aches at the thought of leaving my husband behind, and my friends and family, just before the holidays. My palms sweat at the thought of frantically driving south and west for thousands of miles, chased by storms and freezing temperatures, before I can relax. My chest constricts when I think of all the things that could go wrong with my 26-year-old van, so far from home. I had more than my share of headaches on my way to Baja and back last winter.

The fear consumes me every time I kiss Seth on the lips and count down in my mind to the last kiss on the morning I leave. It wakes me up before sunrise remembering one more thing I need to order on Amazon while I still have an address. It nags at me to stay up late getting everything ready so I can make it far enough south before the next polar vortex hits.

My fear is trying to keep me safe. The hyper-vigilant parts of me are flashing red warning lights of everything that could go wrong because it would be safer for me to stay home and hibernate all winter than drive 10,000 miles and live alone in a van with my dogs.

Yet I know that despite my body’s very visceral protests, I will pull out of my driveway in a few days with tears in my eyes and wave goodbye to my life in New Hampshire for the next six months.

I know this because the pain of staying feels greater than the pain of leaving.

Beneath the fear of leaving is an even greater fear of staying put. Of stagnating. Of spending all winter sitting in my bedroom staring out the window instead of waking up in some of the most beautiful places on earth to watch the sunrise, and falling asleep beneath a sea of stars.

It’s the fear of letting fear run my life; of letting my scared parts keep me safe and small. Because once I give in to it, I stop truly living.

The pull of the unknown is only slightly greater than my fear of it, but it is enough for me to feel the fear and do it anyway.

Which brings me to my second scary thing.

Some of you know that I’m certified as a life coach, and I’ve been working since 2018 to help other people work through their fears and mindset blocks so they can follow their dreams. Many of my clients have been aspiring entrepreneurs who successfully launched their own businesses doing work they love.

I haven’t offered a new program in a couple of years because I’ve been on the road to Alaska and Baja without internet, and when I wasn’t on the road, I was home trying to start a family, and navigating the grief of that not working out.

But all along I’ve had this idea in my head that I just couldn’t shake.

I wanted to create a program that would integrate all of the coaching tools I’ve learned—Positive Intelligence, Internal Family Systems, and the Enneagram—to support people for a full year in designing and building their dream life.

Because I know we all have these same kinds of big dreams, and the same kinds of fears that hold us back—that we will fail, that we don’t deserve it, that we are safer just staying where we are.

We will start by evaluating all areas of our lives—financial, career, health, relationships, personal growth, and leisure—to figure out what feels out of balance. Then we will powerfully visualize what we want our lives to look like in each of those areas, and set goals to work towards, with weekly support.

Try it for yourself right now: Write down those categories and rate each one on a scale of 1-10 based on your life today. Then think about what you want the score to be in each category, and visualize what life will look like when you achieve that. (Let me know in the comments what you come up with!)

What would it feel like to wake up every morning with that new life?

The beauty of this new program lies in doing this work in community with other people who are experiencing the same fears and excitement of the unknown, and being guided by a trained, certified coach (me!) who understands the tricks our brains use to try to keep us safe, and how to work with the afraid parts and tap into our badass parts to expand what’s possible in our lives.

I’m calling it the Badass Academy.

Because what’s more badass than following your dreams?

Two and a half years ago, I bought a 1999 Roadtrek camper van and drove 5,000 miles to Alaska alone with my dogs, because I couldn’t shake this pull to explore real wilderness and sleep next to a different glacier every night.

One year ago, I overcame some massive fears and took my van to Mexico alone to spend ten weeks exploring the Baja peninsula, waking every morning to watch the sun rise over the Sea of Cortez as pods of dolphins swam by and whales breached offshore.

In between, I’ve visited dozens of national parks in the U.S. and Canada, dangling my legs over the rim of the Grand Canyon, sitting under the spray of Old Faithful, and wrapping my arms around giant sequoias.

To embark on all of those adventures, I’ve had to dig deep.

Being a Badass does not mean being fearless. It means feeling the fear and yet finding the courage to go for it anyway, knowing it will be worth it.

Telling you about the Badass Academy is scary for me because how dare I sell something to my readers and what if you unsubscribe? Or worse, what if nobody signs up?

I still have these fears, even though I’ve successfully enrolled coaching clients for years and seen our work together change their lives.

But I’m sharing it anyway because I know that this program will find the people who need it and will transform them in ways none of us can yet imagine.

I can’t wait to meet this cohort of Badasses, and see how empowered and fulfilled they will feel a year from now!

I’m going to email you on Monday with all the details about the program, because I don’t want it to get lost in the chaos of Thanksgiving and Black Friday.

I’m hopeful that I can integrate my coaching and my writing worlds in this space without losing my loyal subscribers, because I want to share the tools that have helped me build a life of adventure and work through my fears of the unknown.

So please stick around and join me as I pursue my dream of living a nomadic life!

The next time you hear from me, hopefully I’ll be sitting under a saguaro cactus. Keep your fingers crossed that the Dream Catcher can make it back to the desert, so I can keep bringing you stories of life on the road.

Much love, and Happy Thanksgiving!

~ Liz

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His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There’s vomit on his sweater already, mom’s spaghetti
He’s nervous, but on the surface, he looks calm and ready
To drop bombs, but he keeps on forgetting
What he wrote down…

- Eminem, “Lose Yourself”

Anyone who came of age in the early 2000s could recognize the iconic words of Eminem narrating the rap battle scene from his autobiographical film 8 Mile. The first two lines of the song were famous enough for the rapper to name his Detroit restaurant Mom’s Spaghetti. I knew these lines by heart, and the rest of the song too, because I always identified so strongly with that nauseating stage fright—the kind that makes your mind go blank despite the dopest skills and the best preparation.

So it was with some trepidation that I said yes to an invitation for a live 2-hour interview on North Country Community Radio (NCCR) with of the Mind, Body, Soul Show. Megg and I have known each other since our early entrepreneurial days, and she’s been a cheerleader for my writing and adventuring at Liz Explores from the beginning. I was surprised and honored that she would include me among her lineup of guests meant to “educate and inspire.”

But what, exactly, did I have to teach people, I wondered? In my writing, I share about my challenges with infertility and mental health to help people feel less alone, and I share about my adventures to inspire. But as a writer, I’m not in the business of offering advice.

We decided that I’d tell the story of how my life didn’t go according to plan, and how managing my mental health and grieving infertility led me down an unexpected path to fulfill my dreams of writing and adventure. The theme became Living Life on Your Terms, and in addition to sharing my story, Megg and I both would share some tips and tricks to move toward a more authentic life.

Knees weak and arms heavy, I joined Megg in the NCCR studio on Monday, September 15th from 1-3pm Eastern, and we had a phenomenal conversation. She is a truly gifted interviewer, empathetic and curious, and she knows how to hold space, so my jitters evaporated and we sat down and chatted like the special friends we have become. Best of all, because it was a radio show, I got to have Megg DJ some of my favorite songs live on air during our breaks! Unfortunately those didn’t make it to the recording due to copyright issues, but we talked about most of the tunes so folks should be able to find them and have a listen.

So if you’d like to hear my talking voice instead of my writing voice, and find out what songs I played on repeat on the road, have a listen here at the Mind Body Soul Show with Meggen Wright. Megg is a certified yoga therapist, so she starts every show with some stretches (which I highly recommend). But if you’d like to skip straight to the interview, it starts about 8 minutes and 55 seconds into the recording:

Meggen’s Substack

Mind Body Soul Radio

Mind Body Soul Radio is your weekly boost of inspired wellbeing to live your best life from the inside out - because kale, pushups, and blowing dandelion wishes aren’t always enough…

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7 months ago · 1 like · Meggen Wright and Liz Medford - lizexplores.com

1,000 Subscribers!

Four months into writing on Substack, in April 2023, I had amassed 50 subscribers. I doubled that number when I left for Alaska in July 2023 and hit my first 100 subscribers. It was surreal to imagine myself in a room reading something I’d written to 100 people, most of them strangers. Every time I shared a new piece of writing, a couple of people would leave the proverbial room, and a few more would walk in. I built connections with people on Substack through engaging with others’ work. Writers started recommending Liz Explores to their readers, including one New York Times bestseller. My numbers grew steadily.

It took another two years of slow and steady growth, but Liz Explores hit 1,000 subscribers in June 2025, thanks to EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU! Seeing the “1K+ subscribers” on my Substack profile has been a dream since my early days on the platform, and I’m so grateful to every single reader for welcoming me into your inbox, reading my stories, and following my journey. It especially means a lot when you take the time to hit the “like” button (which shows my posts to more people) and leave comments (which lets me know you read and enjoyed my piece). of Hello Beautifuls writes that “Un-hearted posts are like wiggly puppies asking for pets and not getting any.” Yes, that’s how desperate we writers are for praise!

At the end of every essay, I say that “writing is a lonely pursuit”—I feel naked every time I hit the send button, and the more feedback I get, the more worthwhile it feels putting all that time and energy into baring myself to the world. So THANK YOU ALL for being here, and please don’t be shy—join us in the comments, or even better, if you haven’t already—join my Inner Circle for just $5/month or $36/year and get access to my most personal stories (the ones behind that annoying paywall). Paid subscriptions allow me to continue investing time and energy into my writing, so if you like what you read, please join us! I try to keep subscription fees as low as possible to be accessible to all.

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Want to help me find my next 1,000 subscribers? If each of you would recommend Liz Explores to just one friend, we could do it! Send your pal, your daughter, or your cool grandparent to www.lizexplores.com or even better, forward them your favorite essay and ask them to subscribe for free. With the holidays approaching, you could also purchase gift subscriptions to my Inner Circle so they can get all-access! My next big goal is 100 paid subscribers, which would get me a fancy badge next to my name in the Substack app, and every single one counts. Please join, and if you’re already in my Inner Circle, THANK YOU and please spread the word!

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I’m on the Substack Leaderboard!

Several times in the past few months, I’ve appeared at random on the Substack Leaderboard at #61, #40, #38, and #24 Rising in the Travel category! The way the Leaderboard works is that there is a Top 100 Bestseller list for each of 29 categories, followed by a Top 100 Rising. There are over 75,000 newsletters published on Substack, so to hit the top 200 in my category feels like a big deal.

I have no idea what kinds of metrics the algorithm looks for, but I seem to have risen in the ranks when a post has been getting a lot of views, likes, and comments, so please keep them coming! I’m doing my best to write more frequently, hoping that helps as well.

Numbers aren’t everything, of course. But they really matter as someone who is hoping to make a living as a writer. When I go to a publisher with a pitch for an article or book, the first thing they will look at is the size of my platform, i.e. how many readers I have. Unfortunately, numbers drive the publishing world nowadays. And in the meantime, until I can land a New York Times article or a Penguin Random House book deal, the goal is for my Substack income to keep me afloat, so paid subscriptions are especially appreciated (did I mention that already? ;).

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Changing Lives

runs a Friday afternoon interview series as part of her Changing Lives Substack, and after hearing about my appearance on the Mind, Body, Soul Show, she invited me to join her for a chat!

I sat down and did my very first Substack Live with Wendi on Friday, October 17th, metaphorical spaghetti on my shirt and all. Like Megg, she quickly put me at ease, and it felt like a conversation between friends. We chatted about Wendi’s childlessness, my infertility, the spiritual power of nature, petting whales, and my favorite place I’ve traveled (can you guess?). We also shared a bit about our background as life coaches and talked about the Internal Family Systems model of parts work, because it’s been so powerful in both of our lives.

If you’d like to see me on camera (do I look calm and ready to drop bombs?), check out the recording at Wendi’s Changing Lives Substack:

Changing Lives

Changing Lives: Trials, Travels, and Triumphs

At 56, I’m happily childfree. Liz is decades younger and dealing with infertility. We discuss how personal, religious, and cultural expectations about motherhood affect our mental health and our fav…

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6 months ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Wendi Gordon and Liz Medford - lizexplores.com

How to Live This Life

invited me to do a guest interview for her Bare HEARTS series, which is part of her wonderful Substack called How To Live This Life. These are written interviews (which calms my clammy hands), and she’s featured some incredible humans in the series thus far. I’ll announce when my interview drops, but in the meantime, check out How To Live This Life with Danni Levy.

Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About This?

has an amazing new Substack I love called Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About This? She had me at hello with her first post, “Perimenopous Psychosis or The Time I Thought I was a Gremlin Who Had To Move To The Woods.” Being in the depths of perimenopause myself, let’s just say I could relate.

Jianna invited me to do a guest interview for her Substack and pick my own topic that no one’s talking about. You can maybe guess where I’ll be going with it, but you’ll have to wait until the interview drops to find out more.

In the meantime, check out Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About This?, and subscribe if you like it to help her grow (she’s nearly doubled from 12 to 23 subscribers in the past few weeks!).

Thank you!

Thank you for reading and/or listening to Liz Explores! I’ll be back in your inbox soon with more raw and relatable stories from my life about infertility, mental health, and adventure.

This poll is anonymous, but please feel free to explain your choice in the comments.

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The mid-afternoon sun has turned the rapids into a moving mirror, and I squint as I watch the reflected light undulate over submerged rocks. Where the stones emerge, white foam froths over and around them, converging in front of my campsite in the characteristic V of rapids. Wind bounces the boughs of balsam and the branches of maple, its orange leaves quivering and letting loose one by one. The breeze tickles the hairs on my arms; I’m in a t-shirt and shorts the first weekend of October, somehow, even as foliage is already past peak.

Seth is in the camper cooking second breakfast—not lunch, despite it being 3pm, but maybe blunch? Because breakfast foods are always breakfast, no matter what time of day they are consumed.

“What are you thinking about?” he’d asked me earlier, as we’d sat side by side staring at the water.

I told him I was thinking how badly I wanted to drop a kayak into those rapids and paddle six miles downstream to our usual pullout, making a day of floating alongside the pointy trees and negotiating the curves and drops of the river, until I was happy and bored and spent.

“I’ve already paddled the river in my mind today, too,” he said.

But we hadn’t even brought my boat on our annual trip to this campground along the Androscoggin. All summer I’ve been on doctor’s orders not to use my arms, which rules out paddling plus most of my other favorite activities. What started as a dull ache in my elbows a year ago progressed to debilitating pain this spring that radiates down my arms and curls my fingers into painful claws. I’ve been to my acupuncturist, chiropractor, and two occupational therapists, plus several doctors and an orthopedist. Aside from a diagnosis of lateral epicondylitis (AKA tennis elbow), a few stretches, and cortisone shots in both elbows, the main takeaway has been don’t use your arms and maybe it will get better eventually. Maybe. If you’re lucky.

Or maybe I’ll need a surgery that has a 50% success rate.

So I sit here not using my arms, except I’m a writer and that requires the kind of arm usage (cell phone, iPad) that probably caused this problem to begin with.

“It’s probably worse for my arms for me to sit here fiddling with my phone all day than it would be to run the river,” I told Seth.

“I know,” he replied.

Still we sat, and I told him what else had been on my mind all morning.

“Mostly what I’ve been thinking about is how I want this to be our lives,” I said, gesturing to the plot of grass where our two camp chairs were perched on the riverbank, and the dogs curled up in the sun, and the picnic table behind us and our 1999 Roadtrek camper van parked nearby.

“I’m already itching to get back on the road, but I don’t want to leave you again,” I said. “I wish you could come with me. Doing this on the weekends is so much work,” I told him, thinking of all the packing and unpacking that went into a two-day trip versus the ease of life on the road in our van.

“Well, this is how most people live,” he said, referencing the American tradition of working five days a week, fifty weeks a year, tethered to one geographic location.

“I hate it,” I told him. “It’s not how I want to live.”

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* * * * *

I’m lucky to have the choice to hit the road in my tiny home on wheels—we have kept our expenses low enough that we can manage our bills on Seth’s carpentry income (barely), and I can sneak away for months at a time in the van if I live cheaply enough (cooking my own food and choosing free campsites). But Seth can’t build houses remotely, and he’s not a huge fan of van life, so he stays home and flies out to visit me every few months while I roam. The freedom to travel like this the past few years has been one of the few perks of my infertility.

After returning in June from my six-month road trip to Baja, I’ve been contemplating our two remaining paths to parenthood—donor-egg IVF and adoption from foster care—and whether I still see myself becoming a mom at 45 the way I dreamed of motherhood at 25 or 35 or even 40. Something has shifted, between the dread I felt in my body this spring at the prospect of parenting a newborn, and the anxiety and grief we experienced with our first two foster placements. After five years chasing my dream of the love and laughter of children, with heartbreak the only result, I have grown wary of parenthood. A part of me holds on to hope—our foster license renewal is almost complete, after a year of delays!—but the weight of grief makes it hard to open my heart again.

The river hums in front of me now like a white noise machine. I fell asleep and woke to its sound, forgetting where I was, transported in that liminal moment before I opened my eyes to the clinic waiting room with the round white radio that played the sounds of ocean waves and crickets chirping. A picture of a mountain decorated the pale green wall of the doctor’s office.

Most of this year, I have fallen asleep to the actual ocean and the actual crickets, and laid eyes on the actual mountain, I had thought that day at the clinic. What am I doing here?

Now I am back where I belong, dogs at my feet on the banks of an actual river, smelling water splashed over algae-coated rocks. I will fall asleep tonight in the back of my van next to my husband, under a sleeping bag, a furry dog leaning against my legs as cold air filters through the window. And tomorrow, I’ll sit here some more, and have Seth paddle me upstream in our tandem kayak so I can float on the flat water and look at some pointy trees.

* * * * *

Now a few days have passed, and I’m back home. The white noise of the river’s rapids has been replaced by the ringing in my ears, which my Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist says is caused by my Temporomandibular Joint Disorder (TMJ, or TMD)—the constant tension of my jaw muscles. The audiologist called to schedule a hearing test, but assuming I don’t need a hearing aid at 45 (I don’t think I do?), there’s not much I can do about the TMJ besides more physical therapy (which I can’t afford) or the $9,000 appliance a specialist offered me last year (which I really can’t afford). I am waiting to see if another TMJ specialist will accept my insurance—after learning that my insurance plan is being discontinued at the end of the year and I’ll need to find another (no doubt worse) plan.

The jaw and the arms are two of about twenty medical issues I’ve been navigating this summer into fall, piling up costly copays and coinsurance bills, running back and forth between primary care and specialists, and having everyone tell me that I’m basically fine or there’s nothing much they can do. Some stuff has been routine—my first colonoscopy! My annual mammogram! Another specialized mammogram because the first one was inconclusive! Some stuff is probably me being overly cautious (the thing they flagged on my EKG that the cardiologist says is actually nothing to worry about—but now I have a cardiologist.) And some stuff, I have since concluded, could probably be blamed on the hormonal changes of perimenopause (why am I so tired all the time, and why does everything hurt?) since I’ve so far tested negative for every autoimmune disease.

The bottom line is that the past few months have been mediocre health-wise, and abysmal fun-wise, since I’ve spent hours every day for weeks on end in and out of the doctor’s offices with the white noise machines and the mountain pictures on the walls. Every visit to the clinic begets more visits; they never want to do the treatment until next time (which will be at least six weeks away), or until something less effective has been tried first. I’m not sure if that’s a medical strategy or a business plan.

It does mean, though, that I have specialists scheduling me out into December already (I won’t get the results of my July sleep study until the week before Christmas), and it’s making it tough to plan my getaway if I want to get back on the road. It’s beginning to feel like these medical professionals could string me along indefinitely with more costly tests that don’t turn up anything, and being hypervigilant, I say yes to all of them.

I should probably quit complaining and be grateful that I have access to medical care at all, and that I have insurance that pays for the bulk of the cost (for now), and that most of the medical providers seem genuinely interested in helping me. It’s just frustrating to spend all this time and money and have no answers, and little relief.

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* * * * *

Now a few more days have passed, and the water in front of me ripples as the tide recedes, revealing mats of yellow seaweed coating the rocks in front of this weekend’s campsite. Every year, we book-end Seth’s birthday week with these two weekend trips to the river and the coast, stuffing our faces with Smart Dogs, Beyond Burgers, and these weird vegan marshmallows called Dandies. Our setup is the same: our camper van is on leveling blocks but still a bit slanted; Seth strings a tarp over the picnic table and chops kindling for a campfire; I set up my gray camp chair with the footrest and pull out my iPad; the dogs get tied to their cables and flop down at my feet. We pop popcorn over the open flame and half the time, it burns. Seth slices and grills squash and eggplant over the coals and throws an onion in foil off to the side. This week, when we got home from the river campsite, he made an amazing babaganoush out of the roasted eggplant.

The water at my feet reflects the pink of the sky, and a half hour later, everything is gray, a silhouette of oak branches framing my view of the inlet that separates Hermit Island from the mainland. We’ve come for the campground’s annual Dog Weekend, the only time of year that dogs are allowed on the island. Tomorrow we’ll dress Baxter in her UPS outfit and Laney in her lion’s mane and pink tutu and walk them down to the dog parade, where they’ll compete for the best costume.

When I was lying in the back of my ninety-degree van in the Planet Fitness parking lot in Folsom, California in May, deciding whether to head north to Alaska or east toward home, my mind drifted and suddenly I was standing in the crowd at the Hermit Island Dog Parade, watching the Master of Ceremonies march by in her suspenders handing out Milk Bones, leading the small breeds around the ring, then the medium, then the large, then the geriatric, as smiling kids and adults pet each other’s dogs and talked about how cute the costumes were. That memory nudged me toward turning east.

That wasn’t the only reason, of course—I also thought I was going to try one more time to have a baby, by borrowing another woman’s egg. When fear and anxiety got the best of me, though, in the middle of the Nevada desert, all that was left in lieu of Alaska was a summer with Seth, lots of medical appointments, some visits with friends and family, and the Hermit Island Dog Parade.

The promise of the parade gave me something to look forward to every time I was dreading the next medical procedure. After tomorrow, though, what will be waiting for me?

We finally got our foster license renewed this week, after a long period of administrative delays, which reopens a doorway to parenthood that had been closed to us for the past year. We had been so frustrated by the process that we had pretty much written off the adoption option, and now we have to decide if we are still serious about pursuing it. Adopting a teen would avoid the challenges of becoming older parents to young children, but finding the right fit in our state’s foster system could be tricky. What if I get on the road and then the perfect match becomes available? What if I stay home and spend all winter waiting, but nothing moves forward? Seth and I had just begun to accept the idea of childlessness, so getting back on the adoption rollercoaster is another big adjustment.

The campground has gone dark now; the only way I know there’s still water in front of me is the reflection of lights from houses across the inlet. I’ve moved my chair closer to the campfire. There’s a chill in the air. The last two nights back home have dropped below freezing; Seth drained the water lines in the van and ran the space heater so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. We’ll have to winterize the camper after we return from this trip.

The cold presents a hard deadline for my trip departure. I can manage a few nights in the high 20s and low 30s without freezing my pipes, but anything colder than that or that stays below freezing during the day risks damaging my plumbing. Basically, if I’m going west this winter, I need to leave in the next few weeks. Otherwise, I won’t make it across the continental divide before winter arrives, no matter how far south I drive. Last year I left for my trip the day before Thanksgiving and booked it to southern Texas. I still hit freezing nights along the Rio Grande.

And so, I don’t know if Hermit Island will be my last camping trip of the year, or just a prelude to another six months of life on the road.

It’s hard to think about leaving again. I’ve barely been home all summer, between our weekends at Seth’s parents’ lake house and running around to all my medical appointments. I’ve just gotten used to spending time with my husband again after six months on the road to Baja last winter.

It’s especially hard to leave, given my reasons for coming home. Although I got cold feet about trying another round of fertility treatments, I still sneak peeks at newborn Facebook reels. A part of my Instagram algorithm is devoted to outdoor-adventure-moms and moms-having-babies-over-40, who make it all look so easy, and so full of love. I keep reminding myself that I can desire a baby and still decide not to have one—separating the desire from the decision. But that sliver of a percentage of me still wonders: What if I went for it? Would it all work out? And she is afraid to leave again, because it would make that small chance go away.

So how will I decide? How will I know if, or when, it’s time to go or time to stay?

I only have my gut to guide me. I trusted my gut when it brought me home this summer, despite knowing shortly into that trip that I wasn’t going to follow through on the fertility treatments. I still don’t regret that decision, even if my only medical breakthrough was taking four months to find out I needed a cortisone shot.

Maybe I needed a break from the road to remind me just how much I need to be on the road. Every day I wake up at home, I feel flat, uninspired, unmotivated, and trapped. I move between the same four rooms I’ve spent the past seventeen years of my life in.

Seventeen years.

Yet the moment I walk out into my driveway, open the side door of the van, and step inside, my whole body relaxes and my face softens. I sit on the end of the bed and sigh. Life doesn’t get much simpler than distilling it down to what those four wheels can carry; it’s everything I need and nothing I don’t.

* * * * *

The coals of the campfire are burning red-orange, throwing blue fingers of flames around charred logs. Seth and I toasted some Dandies, wondering as we always do why real marshmallows made out of horse hooves get so much crispier in a flame than these vegan imitations. Seth is scrolling Facebook Marketplace for TIG welders, and I’m still typing away at my keyboard, our two favorite pastimes. Children’s voices from the next campsite fill the silence, and dogs bark across the island. The sulfurous smell of low tide mixes with campfire smoke in an aroma I’ve only ever experienced at Hermit Island. Seth snuggles Baxter in his chair, hugging our 45-pound lap dog to his chest. Soon it will be time to walk to the bath house and contend with Hermit Island’s narrow and breezy shower stalls. I’ll sit by the coals a bit longer.

A bright light emerges through the trees to my left—the reflection of moonrise on the ocean. In the distance, I notice the familiar shushing sound of the white noise machine from the doctor’s office. Then I realize it’s the ocean waves crashing on the beach at the southern tip of the island. I’ll crack the camper windows open tonight and let it lull me to sleep, the first or last of many nights lived on the edge of the water.

This poll is anonymous, but please feel free to elaborate in the comments! Of course I know you can’t decide for me, but I’m curious about your perspective.

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Start here: An Unexpected Turn, Part 2: The Doubt

The phone call with the fertility doctor was almost a moot point. In the two days I’d spent driving from Utah’s red rock country through Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, climbing 12,000-foot Loveland Pass in a bumper-to-bumper crawl of semi trucks detoured off Interstate 70, I had listened to enough books about the challenges of parenthood that I was all but convinced to cancel our donor-egg IVF procedure. I chafed at paying $200 for the telehealth visit since Seth and I were so uncertain about moving forward, but I’d waited five weeks to see Dr. Brown, since that fateful day in the Mojave when donor #1111234 had arrived in my Inbox.

The phone call almost could have happened in the same room in the same friend’s house in Denver where I’d decided two years earlier to cut my Alaska-to-Baja trip short and go home to pursue adoption. But the detour off the interstate made it hard to predict when I’d pass through town, and a torrential thunderstorm bore down as I finally approached Denver at dusk, so I made the disappointing decision not to bother my friend Sarah and her family at 9pm in the middle of a deluge. Instead, I continued in a northerly arc on the outskirts of town and drove until I found a rest area. The Rocky Mountains gave way to the Great Plains in a dramatic shift, and I felt like I was in Nebraska long before I crossed the state line.

That rest area in Julesburg, Colorado was my last chance to change course; in theory, I could still retreat up the spine of the Rockies toward Banff and Jasper National Parks in Canada and on to the Alaska Highway, retracing in reverse the drive I’d made in October 2023 when I thought I would continue south from Alaska to Baja. I considered this as I sat in my van in the rest area’s RV parking after spending the night next to a picnic table and trash can, waiting for the text from the clinic with a link to my telehealth with Dr. Brown.

I’d thought my doctor’s appointment would present me with a final deadline to pay our deposit and commit to our donor, perhaps once my tests were complete in the next couple weeks. Instead, I was surprised when Dr. Brown informed me that the third-party coordinator at our clinic had already relisted our donor in the database since we hadn’t yet made a five-figure deposit, and that this was OK because she could donate up to six times, so even if someone else claimed her, it would just mean waiting a couple months for her to be ready to cycle again. I knew it wasn’t so simple—would this woman want to go through six different egg retrievals for six different families? Knowing that there was no more decision to make—at least not anytime soon—made my stress and urgency of the past five weeks seem silly. It turns out, I could have continued north from Baja and spent the summer in Alaska and probably still claimed my donor when I returned. In fact, I could still change course now without losing my preferred donor. How did I not realize this? Should I have asked?

But for all the reasons I’d come up with before, going home for the summer seemed to make sense even if we weren’t going to pursue IVF. Momentum kept me heading east toward home, along with the promise of kisses and snuggles from the husband I hadn’t seen in three months. Alaska would always be there, I reasoned. The things I was going home for may not be.

I braced myself for the next five days of driving. I decided I could realistically make 350 miles a day in my van, equaling about five driving hours plus a couple hours of stops for lunch, dinner, and dog walks. This would let me sleep late enough to start the day well-rested, and arrive at my destination before dark.

With the Colorado Rockies in my rear view, I headed east across the Nebraska plains, stopping at dark just across the border in Council Bluffs, Iowa to enjoy a massage chair and shower at a 24-hour Planet Fitness. I spent the night in the gym’s parking lot next to a gravel median. When I emerged the next morning to walk the dogs, it was 88 degrees in the van with 50% humidity—the hottest I’d felt on the whole trip. A sticky layer coated my dry desert skin, and the air was thick enough to taste. Across the street from the strip mall, I found a sidewalk skirting a neighborhood like any I might have walked back home in New Hampshire—green leaves popping from bushes and shrubs; green branches leaning overhead; green grass covering fenced-in lawns and the margins of sidewalks. It reminded me of a walk near the house I grew up in, and my soul settled for the first time in six months. I had crossed the Missouri River. I was still 1,500 miles from home, but I was officially back East!

The greenery—and humidity—continued through the rolling farmland of Iowa and Illinois and into the industrial belt of the Great Lakes, as Interstates 80 and 90 skirted Lakes Michigan and Erie and the highway bloated from two lanes to four in each direction. My tired arms strained to hold the wheel as the semi trucks passed, pushing puffs of air under my solar panels that tossed my van sideways. I white-knuckled when I passed them as well, anticipating the displaced air and bracing myself against the push. Traveling at night wasn’t much easier, as the trucks also preferred to avoid daytime traffic. Each night I drove later, pulling in around 10pm,11pm, or midnight at a rest area, Walmart parking lot, or Planet Fitness, walking the dogs, and tucking myself in for the night.

In the home stretch, my route took me through the heart of the Adirondacks toward Baxter’s vet in Burlington, Vermont. I stopped at a lakeside park in upstate New York and frolicked across the grass with the dogs, dodging goose poop and giggling with excitement at my arrival in the Northeast. I marveled how six months out West could make places as foreign as Council Bluffs, Iowa and Speculator, New York feel like home.

A few hours later, I crossed the Crown Point bridge over Lake Champlain into Vermont, and I was officially on my home turf of New England. The sun had begun to set, and I realized I was only 20 minutes away from another friend’s house, but it felt strange to stop by at this hour so out of the blue. Plus, pushing 2,200 miles since Moab had drained all the energy out of me. I needed a shower and a massage chair and a parking spot, and I found these at Planet Fitness in South Burlington. I resolved to reach out to my friend the next time I was in Vermont.

I awoke the next morning to a knock—THE Dreaded Knock that plagues all van-lifers at some point in their journey—the knock that says You Don’t Belong Here. I had assumed I could get away with overnighting at a 24-hour facility, but apparently not. I had my strategy, though: ignore, and pretend I was in the gym. The dogs kept quiet, but even if they had barked, this strategy still checked out. The knock silenced, and by the time I changed out of my pajamas into my workout clothes (to act like I was about to go into the gym) and peeked out my van curtain, no one was in sight. I quickly switched everything into drive mode and scooted away, making the dogs wait to pee until we arrived at the vet office ten minutes later. I smirked at the irony that my first-ever knock in nearly a year of cumulative van life happened on the last morning of my trip.

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* * * * *

Three weeks of family commitments, medical appointments, catching up with friends, unpacking, and repacking passed in an exhausting blur, and the next thing I knew, I was floating on my inflatable lounge chair next to the island on Spofford Lake. I had known that I would hit the ground running as soon as I got home, and it was as intense as I’d imagined. It was nearly a month after my return before I could finally lounge on the lake as I’d dreamed of since Tahoe, and sit on the deck outside my 1991 Winnebago in my in-laws’ driveway in New Hampshire writing about my reasons for coming home.

The fertility tests had turned out fine; my uterus was intact, my mammogram and EKG were normal, my blood work checked out, and everything was good to go if we decided to proceed with donor-egg IVF. What those tests did not detect, however, were the subtle shifts in my heart and mind as I’d headed east, and the realizations I’d had once I got home.

As I floated on my tube on a sunny, 80-degree afternoon the day before the Fourth of July, families began arriving for the long weekend and occupying the spaces adjacent to me on the island. A dad paddled a canoe with his young son and daughter and landed nearby, then spent ten minutes swimming and digging for clay in the lake bed before corralling the kids back into the boat. A mom and dad pulled up in a speedboat with their three teen boys and anchored offshore, mom diligently spraying sunscreen across the boys’ pasty-white torsoes before they set off wading in the shallows with fishing poles.

One after another, over the course of four hours, I watched families come and go, making anthropological observations on the American family unit. Would I want to be them, I wondered, as I floated peacefully by myself? One mom rounded the tip of the island in a paddleboard flotilla with her tween daughters. As the girls disembarked their boards to swim, mom eagerly flopped on hers to lounge in the sun. Within moments, one of the daughters came over and demanded that mom surrender her board so that she could lie on it. Mom obliged and instead stood in the cold water, holding the board for her daughter. Would I have martyred myself as readily in that scenario? Or would I have reminded my daughter that she had her own board she could lounge on beside me? Would that have resulted in the kind of bickering and whining that had perhaps trained this mom that giving in was the path of least resistance?

Being at the lake brought back memories, too. July Fourth was the one-year anniversary of the last time I’d seen our two young foster kids. Our week-long summer visit with them had gone well—thanks to daycare and camp—until we got to the lake. I had awoken to the sound of the one-year-old girl screaming for strawberries and the four-year-old-boy chattering nonsensical questions while Seth tried to make oatmeal for breakfast. I had pretended to stay asleep, even though in our camper, my bed was four feet from the kitchen counter. All I wanted to do was escape for a quiet morning on the deck overlooking the lake—despite finally having the full house that I thought I’d always wanted. The overstimulation that day pushed me to a breaking point, and we made the heartbreaking decision not to move forward with our pre-adoptive placement.

So the Fourth of July was extra bittersweet, but the memories also highlighted how spoiled I was to be able to sit and relax whenever I wanted; to do what I wanted to do; to stay up late and sleep in, or get up for sunrise and go to bed early; to live some hybridized version of college life and retiree life. What even is it to be 45 and childless? I was still figuring that out.

My body registered more data on the baby question when I attended my friend Anne’s baby shower. I was so happy that she’d gotten pregnant after an infertility journey as long and fraught as my own, but I wondered how I would do being immersed in the celebration. I rolled up to the restaurant in The Dream Catcher, my 1999 Roadtrek camper van, fresh off my long drive east. Anne and I knew each other from a job I left a decade ago, and she seated me at a table with her high school and college friends. They responded to my travel tales with awe and admiration, which was exciting for me, since it was the first time I’d talked about my trip with strangers who weren’t also on the road. Anne’s friends could not believe that I’d driven solo to Mexico. They told me I was brave. It was the first time I’d felt validated for my choices—ironically, among a group of women celebrating our friend’s pregnancy.

The experience of rolling up to a baby shower in the Roadtrek had me feeling like a badass, but I found the event itself to be terrifying. I overheard a mom in our circle talking about her entire family getting sick on vacation. Then Anne’s sister gave Anne a hospital care pack containing nipple cream and adult diapers—thoughtful and humorous, for sure, but not something I found myself longing for. I was surprised to feel horrified by the thought of putting myself in Anne’s chair, opening the tiny sweaters and breast pump and newborn diapers. I thought about the sleepless nights, and the decades-long commitment to that tiny human who (in my case) would be in college when Seth and I qualified for Social Security. The thought felt so suffocating at one point that I had to step out for air. I was glad that I wasn’t hiding in a corner crying tears of grief, but I hadn’t expected the opposite reaction—relief.

That surprising sense of relief at being childless followed me to my week-long vacation at the beach in Maine. I was nervous going camping alone at the same beach where we’d brought our foster kids the summer before—the beach where I’d spent decades imagining my kids splashing in the surf and building sandcastles. I arrived early each morning to stake out a spot, and by 10am I was surrounded by families, pregnant women, and babies.

Again, I observed the parents with curiosity—were they having fun? Just like at the lake, there were moms chasing little ones with a bottle of sunscreen. Dads seemed to get the job of entertainer for the older ones while moms held down the blanket area with the babies and toddlers. There was a lot of yelling, directing, and redirecting, just like I remember with our foster kiddos (the 4-year-old had a habit of running up to strangers). As I sat in my beach-cabana van in the parking lot, I watched families haul their weary bodies back to their cars with all their crap as the kids melted down and bickered and the parents snapped. It became predictable after a while. It did not look fun.

All Joy and No Fun—my mind pulled me back to the title of the parenting book by Jennifer Senior. No doubt these parents adored their kids, were proud of their kids, and wouldn’t trade their lives for anything. But I wondered if, deep down, they loved the 24/7/365 job of being a parent? Upon closer consideration, knowing what I knew now, I wasn’t entirely sure I would.

These doubts crept into the bedroom as Seth and I resumed lovemaking once I returned home. For the first time in five years, we started using condoms again. I believed that the odds of a healthy, viable pregnancy with my own eggs were so infinitesimally low compared to the stress and distress, the hope and hopelessness, of wondering every month if I might be pregnant, and if any potential pregnancy would last, and if we even wanted to be pregnant at this point in our lives, that it wasn’t worth the uncertainty. My periods had become erratic in the past six months, sometimes skipping months at a time as I barreled toward menopause, and I couldn’t bear to indulge in another dance with hope, only to be destroyed again. It was the final stage of giving up on my ovaries. Still, I couldn’t help but joke with Seth in a moment of passion, “Wanna make a baby?”

As the baby prospect grew less appealing, I returned to the possibility of adopting an older child, which was the idea we had started with two years earlier when we’d become licensed foster parents through our state’s Division of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF). I had been in touch with our new Caregiver Coordinator throughout the winter and spring, but she had been less engaged than the one who had left last fall, and in April she had informed us that the Division was no longer working with adoptive families unless they were also willing to foster. The problem for us was that if we accepted a regular foster placement, we would be committed to helping that child reunify with their birth parents for up to 18 months, and we did not feel we could do so in good faith if our goal was to grow our own family. Also, that would be a long time to delay our family-building goals only to have the child leave and then have to start all over again. Either way, nothing was moving forward because the relicensing paperwork we had submitted back in December still had not been processed.

As soon as I returned home in June, I tried to reconnect with our Coordinator to find out the status of our relicensing and figure out how we could move forward. We had become licensed through DCYF two years earlier so we would be eligible to submit our home study for waiting children on the AdoptNH website, which also affiliates with AdoptUSKids. I had started looking at available children, but we would need a valid home study before we could inquire. Our interview had been completed in February but not yet written up. I was able to get a meeting with our Coordinator’s supervisor to move things forward, but then two more months went by without a response. Finally, in mid-August, I received an email from our Coordinator informing us that the next day would be her last day on the job, and her replacement wouldn’t start until September.

I had held out hope that there was a child waiting for us, and that it may be an older child who just needed a boost to launch themselves into the world. Adopting a teen would put us on the same timeline as our peers, and might be less exhausting than running around after toddlers. Seth and I remained open if the right fit came along, but the stress of working with DCYF and the trauma of our first failed match made us question that path. In any case, it seemed we would be waiting a while longer before we could consider moving forward.

In the meantime, my friend Anne’s baby was born—a beautiful little boy. She wanted to stay home alone with him the first ten days to bond, but I planned a visit on the eleventh day for some baby snuggles. I wondered what it would feel like to hold a newborn; my only experience with a brand-new baby had been the previous fall, when DCYF placed us with a newborn boy and I’d visited him twice in the hospital. I had entered the maternity ward thinking that baby might someday be mine, but DCYF called the next day and informed me that a family member had stepped forward to care for him, and our services were no longer needed. I never saw him again.

How would it feel to hold my friend’s baby, knowing that my egg donor was out there waiting for me, and I could potentially be holding my own newborn a year from now? Would the newborn smell and the weight of him on my chest trigger a hormonal response? Would it reignite my baby fever? Would it be sweeter than all the newborn Facebook reels I could ever watch?

I wondered what to bring the baby, and I realized that I had tucked away so many baby things over the years for my own theoretical child, it might be time to pass them along. But was I ready to part with all the moose onesies I’d collected, dating back to my first marriage? They had hung in my closet for over a decade, a sad reminder of a dream deferred. I’d squeezed our foster daughter into a couple of the 18-month outfits, but the 6-12 month sizes were unused.

On impulse, I plucked them all from their hangers, laid them flat for a photo, and then packaged them up with a note telling Anne I wanted her to use them until if and when I needed them (which wouldn’t be until her boy had outgrown them). “P.S. There may be a few tears on this card,” I warned.

The baby had just finished feeding when I arrived, and he was ready for a snooze. Anne passed him to me and I sank into the rocking chair with a six-pound boy scrunched up on my belly in the fetal position. He fell asleep as if he were in my womb, and I held his tiny body with both hands. He was warm like a lap dog, and I felt a wave of oxytocin release as I gently stroked the velvety blond hair on his neck. Anne and I chatted for two hours while he slept, and it was only my effort to reposition that roused him and got him rooting for his next meal. I passed him back to Anne and organized some bookshelves while she nursed.

Despite the bliss of baby snuggles, I was relieved to know I could hand him back to his mama and walk out the door to go climb a mountain. I could enjoy the baby without being the one stuck inside all day, trapped in the wake-feed-nap cycle. Anne seemed tired but blissful, and I knew I would be too if he were mine. But he wasn’t, and I still didn’t think I wanted to go through everything I would have to go through to maybe get what she had. I made it through my first baby visit without shedding a tear, and perhaps, again, with a shred of relief.

On my way home, I parked my van at the Randolph Town Forest to climb Mount Crescent. The trail was steeper than I remembered—or I was more out-of-shape than I’d realized, owing to the busy-ness of the two months since I’d returned home. Despite my best intentions, I’d only done a few short hikes all summer, besides my usual jogs around my neighborhood. I climbed slowly, stopping frequently to rest and enjoy the forest. Earthy moss and balsam fir filled my lungs as I listened to the susurration of the birch and aspen leaves. At Lookout Ledge, I sprawled across the granite to catch my breath and gaze across the valley at the Presidential range. Mounts Madison, Adams, and Jefferson towered over 5,000 feet, reminding me that I’d booked a hut-to-hut hike with my friend Becky and would be walking across that ridge the following week. I wondered how I would survive three days in the high peaks when I could barely climb an hour up Crescent.

But today, all I had to do was gaze at the Presis, and rest, and contemplate my existence. Life was pretty good, I realized, and I wasn’t convinced that having a baby would make it better.

I let the newness of this feeling settle in. For five years, I’d been saddled with this chronic urgency to start a family by any means possible, before some imagined deadline. Letting go of the urgency, the deadline, and even the idea of a family were new concepts to try on, stretch out, and settle into.

Since embarking on my six-month road trip, I had just started to feel happy for the first time in a long time. I had thought that meant I was finally ready to move on to the next phase of life and become a mom, where I’d find even more happiness and fulfillment. But what if, instead, it meant that I’d finally found the magic formula for my own happiness—zero stress and 100% freedom—and pursuing parenthood would derail that?

What if the perfect life for me meant bouncing between my mountain and lakeside homes in New Hampshire with frequent camping trips to the ocean… and rotating my New England life with seasonal road trips from Alaska to Baja… and being able to make it work because we don’t have the expense and responsibility of children? Yes, I had dreamed of doing all those things as a family, but we could barely afford this lifestyle as-is, so there was no guarantee it would work out financially or logistically with kids (most van-life families I saw on Instagram and YouTube seemed to disappear once their kids reached school-age, even if they made it work when they were young). The safest decision for me now, I realized, was to continue the status quo and feel into this kind of happiness and this kind of life.

I didn’t want the people who said “everything happens for a reason” to be right. I didn’t ever want it to be “right” that someone who desperately wants a family can’t have one. But I had to admit that childlessness may be the best option for me and my mental health—given the crippling anxiety I experienced when contemplating fertility treatments, and when trying to move forward with adoption.

I also realized that I didn’t have to convince myself that I didn’t want kids—I reminded myself that the desire was separate from the decision. I only had to accept all the reasons why it was the right choice for me not to have a family at this point in my life, and embrace all the ways my life could expand from that decision.

I breathed more balsam air on the Randolph ridge. My butt felt sore sitting so long on the granite, and it was time to get moving. I snapped a selfie with the Presidentials, picked up my teal Camelbak, and trod through the needle-laden duff of the boreal forest to the summit of Mount Crescent.

* * * * *

The more I came to accept and even embrace childlessness as a viable path for my life, the more energized I felt about the future. For five years, my parenthood path had been hoped-for but unfulfilled, and the weight of the uncertainty made it harder and harder to imagine a satisfying life. It had felt like if Seth and I never became parents, the path into the future would be cold, dark, and empty. Now I saw it brimming with possibility. It finally felt possible to accept childlessness without resigning myself to chronic grief and despair. There was a light at the end of the tunnel.

Other childless women had promised me this—they shared that they had struggled for years, but it finally got better; amazing, even. At the time, I never wanted to consider joining their ranks. I thought I would do anything to become a parent. Now I was beginning to realize that there was a limit to how far I could go, how much I could endure, how long I could put my life on hold before choosing the other path.

I returned often to that phrase, “separate the desire from the decision.” I had always desired a family. I would always desire a family. And, after five years of infertility, five miscarriages, six IUI cycles, and two failed adoption placements, I could decide that I had tried hard enough, the time to raise a family had passed, and I didn’t need to keep trying. Maybe, at 45, I didn’t still want what I wanted at 25 or 35.

But I knew, deep down, that if someone knocked on my door and handed me a child, and that child embraced me and called me Mama, and it was as simple as that, I would still say Yes. The yearning, the longing, the mothering instinct would win, if I didn’t have to fight so hard, and risk losing again.

And so I was learning to hold both truths at the same time—the wanting a child and the not wanting one; the endless grief of childlessness, and the endless possibility. I knew that there would never be a day I wouldn’t be reminded of the life I could have had, either way—as a childless woman watching the families frolic at the beach and the lake, or as the exhausted mother entertaining my children and watching the solo woman lounge on her float. I was learning how to be happy being childless, but whether I’d find happiness as a mother was a mystery. I could simply choose the safer path, the one that I knew from experience would promote my physical and mental health. Could I risk doing otherwise?

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* * * * *

Vans beckoned everywhere I went.

When I first returned home in June, I was driving down Main Street and saw a Sprinter parked on the side of the road with out-of-state plates, and wondered where they had come from and where they were going. Were they visiting my town, or just passing through? I thought of all the places I’d stopped for mere minutes or hours, crossing paths with people’s lives before moving on. Now I was the local and they were the tourists.

It didn’t feel right.

On my way through the White Mountains, I was driving my 2003 Chevy Astro when I saw a Roadtrek camper of the same vintage as mine. I wanted to give the signature 3-finger Roadtrek wave, until I remembered that it made no sense; I was driving the wrong van.

On a trip to the southern part of the state for a medical procedure, my heart skipped a beat when I saw a camper van in the parking lot. After my appointment, I ate lunch in a strip mall that had a Planet Fitness, and I imagined myself making a home for the night in the parking lot, noticing it had a nice lawn in the corner where I could walk the dogs.

You know you’re a van life dog-mom when you get excited about a nice patch of grass in a strip-mall parking lot!

I took a few weekend and week-long summer trips in the Roadtrek, and my mini-home fit like a glove every time I stepped inside. The stress of my medical appointments and messy house and piles of bills melted away as soon as I simplified my existence to what fit on those four wheels.

Second-best were the weeks spent in my other old camper, my 1991 Winnebago, in the driveway at my in-laws’ lake house, falling asleep to a serenade of crickets and cicadas, and writing these three essays while bald eagles circled overhead.

Maybe my life was meant to be simple.

All of the striving and trying and pushing and pulling and bending-over-backwards I’d done my whole life to make everything happen had left me with a lot of stress and not a lot of happiness.

Simplicity suited me.

New York Times best-selling author Tom Ryan, who had been following my journey as a fellow writer and adventurer, sent me a hand-written card the previous year in which he offered:

“No matter what we tell ourselves, no matter what we try to force, the truth stands in front of us without budging.”

What was my truth, I’d been wondering ever since? I had wanted it to be one thing—family. I had wanted my happy ending to be a pregnancy or adoption. I could not conceive of the possibility of happiness in a childless life. But what if that was the life I was meant to live all along, once I learned to accept it?

I had started writing on Substack in December 2022 by posting a response to a piece in Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar column, “The Beauty of What Is,” in which she reprinted her well-known letter “The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us.” A 41-year-old man wrote to Dear Sugar asking for advice on deciding whether or not to have children. Cheryl (Sugar) spoke of a poem in which Tomas Tranströmer talked about our “sister lives”—the ones we could have lived but will never know. Cheryl advised the man to answer the question from the perspective of his future self rather than giving in to his fears:

“Not regretting it later is the reason I’ve done at least three quarters of the best things in my life…. So much so, that I suspect that whether you’ll regret it later is the only question you must answer. It is the very one that will tell you what to do.”

I had revisited this piece while I camped at 4,000 feet in the Panamint mountains of Death Valley National Park in May, deciding whether to head east and claim my egg donor. Sitting on the bed in the back of my van, I thought, “Of course I’ll regret not taking one last chance to have a baby,” and I vowed to pursue IVF (until my anxiety shut me down).

But the truth is, I had absolutely no way of knowing now what I would or would not regret; what pregnancy and childbirth might do to my body and brain; what kind of parenting experience I would have, or what kind of child; what might happen to my marriage or my life in the coming years that would complicate things; or even how the dynamics of donor conception (or adoption) would play out in my family. I could imagine the perfect family scenario, but I didn’t want to think about all the imperfect ones (I am no stranger to intergenerational trauma).

A van-life friend had recommended the novel All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover, about a couple struggling with infertility.

“I recently read a book that made me think of your situation, and perhaps the ending of the book is one that might be fitting to your story, too,” she emailed.

Not knowing how the story ended, I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, though she implied that it might not end with a baby. This intrigued me, so I started listening to the audiobook while camped by the Kings River in California, contemplating my decision to head home.

As I waffled with my commitment to IVF on the journey east, I had to take breaks from the book, but once I was home I resumed my nightly audiobook-in-the-shower routine. Still, I didn’t finish the book until three months later, at the end of August, after my shift toward accepting childlessness.

The final chapters were remarkably serendipitous:

“Where do you think we’ll be ten years from now?” the narrator, Quinn, asked her husband Graham, in a flashback to their first wedding anniversary.

Graham described a vision of having their own house with a big yard and two kids, a boy and a girl, with a third on the way. They would drive a minivan, and she would work from home as a writer, and he would have his own business.

”That sounds like the perfect life,” she told him.

“Or,” he added, “maybe nothing will change. Maybe we’ll still live in an apartment. Maybe we’ll be struggling financially because we keep moving from job to job. We might not even be able to have kids. So we won’t have a big yard or even a minivan. We’ll be driving our same shitty cars ten years from now. Maybe absolutely nothing will change and ten years from now our lives will be the same as they are now and all we’ll have is each other.”

Quinn smiled and told Graham, “That sounds like the perfect life too.” Then, in her narrator’s voice, she reflected: “And it does. As long as I have Graham, I don’t know that this life could be anything less than what it is now. And right now, it’s wonderful.”

I stepped out of the shower, sudsy and dripping, to replay that line over and over again. Only in my mind, I replaced Graham with Seth:

“As long as I have Seth, I don’t know that this life could be anything less than what it is now. And right now, it’s wonderful.” (Shitty old cars and all!)

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Start here: An Unexpected Turn, Part 1 - The Donor

I awoke to the chatter of children—hordes of kids surrounding the van I had parked at a pulloff in the middle of the Nevada desert. I peeled up the corner of a curtain and peeked out to see them spilling out of a yellow school bus and descending on a cluster of picnic tables behind my rig. They must be on a field trip, I thought—either visiting the petroglyphs down the trail that I’d explored with my dogs the night before, or just stopping for lunch and a pee on their way to some other destination. America’s Loneliest Road suddenly wasn’t so lonely.

Ever since the 7:30am launch of fighter jets from a nearby air base, I’d been awake and making phone calls to doctors back home in New Hampshire to schedule the tests I’d need before moving forward with donor-egg IVF. I was able to book a mammogram, EKG, and urine test back-to-back the third week of June. That would get me home in time for my mom’s surprise 80th birthday party and my friend Anne’s baby shower.

Now I just had to drive 3,000 miles.

Before leaving the petroglyph pull-off, I took the dogs for their morning business. On my way back to the van, I picked up an orange peel and an apple core off the sidewalk discarded from the kids’ lunches. My good deed felt motherly, like I was an imaginary chaperone. These kids looked to be middle-school-age, the age of the kids I would have had if I’d gotten pregnant with my first husband in my early 30s. I scanned the children's faces and imagined one of them being mine. What would they tell me about their trip when they came home from school? As I pulled my van back onto the highway, my chest filled with warmth. My geographic movement away from my Alaska trajectory and toward home allowed my heart to finally open to the possibility of becoming a mom.

The basin-and-range topography of the Nevada desert unfolded before me as I bisected the state on Highway 50. The road was flat and straight for half an hour at a time, slicing through a landscape painted in shades of ochre and mahogany, sepia and burnt umber, taupe and tan. I had expected the drive to be boring, but the Great Basin bore a wild and desolate beauty, with folded mountain ranges of bare desert rock dabbled with juniper and pinyon pine intersecting the highway every 25 miles, and low-elevation sagebrush and saltbush punctuated by occasional snow-capped peaks in the distance. This was the historic route of the Pony Express, bringing mail and news from East to West and back again.

As the sun cast its final rays at a low angle across the folded earth, I arrived at Great Basin National Park. I had chosen this route to have a second chance to visit the ancient bristlecone pines I’d missed in California. A grove of them lived above 10,000 feet on the flanks of Wheeler Peak, the highest peak whose mass lay completely in Nevada (technically the state’s high point is Boundary Peak, but half of that mountain resides in California). I circled the campground to find that my reserved site had a white van occupying it, and they weren’t waking up as I shined my headlamp in their windows at 9:30pm. Luckily a nearby spot was vacant and it was late enough that I felt confident pulling in for the night and claiming my reserved spot in the morning.

I let the dogs out for one last pee and looked up. At first, I thought it was cloudy, but the clouds didn’t move. I put my glasses on and realized I was gazing at the brightest Milky Way I’d ever seen. I sat on the picnic table for a while marveling at the universe, struggling to find the familiar constellations because there were so many stars filling the spaces around and between them. Then I fell asleep in my van with a rectangle full of stars sparkling through my window in a black sky.

When I opened my eyes in the morning, my throat unexpectedly tightened, my fists clenched, and a feeling of dread took over my body. In six months on the road, I hadn’t had a poor night’s sleep or a bad dream, or woken up with this sense of doom. Before I left in November, every night and every morning I awoke to a strangling anxiety that barely released its grip in my waking hours. The sudden resolution of that feeling upon leaving home was a miracle; I’d been physically calm and relaxed even when my trip had been stressful. What was going on now?

This dread feeling had also happened a couple days earlier when I woke up in Tahoe. That morning, I had dreamed that I was walking alone down a wooded dirt path when I came upon a wagon carting a monster in a cage, like a scene out of Lord of the Rings. I had known in my bones that the monster was about to escape and kill everyone in its path. I needed to get out of there as fast as I could. Instead, I woke up, fists and body clenched. It was the first morning of my journey east, though I still hadn’t made my final decision to continue home to New Hampshire. I’d chalked up my stress that morning to the bad dream, but what if the monster itself was a sign?

I tried to pinpoint the thoughts behind this new strangling dread, and then it hit me: if I got pregnant and had a baby, there would be no more relaxed mornings or evenings; no more lounging in bed; perhaps no more road trips. I would be up early, sleep-deprived, stuck in my house, and struggling to make it through the day. The thought weighed on my body as if I’d been sucked into a pit of quicksand.

It was a familiar feeling.

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I had just spent an hour waiting in line for the RV dump at the Maverik gas station in Carson City, just down the mountain from Lake Tahoe, not knowing which direction I was going to go: north, towards Crater Lake and Vancouver, then Alaska and the Arctic Ocean, continuing my year-long road trip up the West Coast from Baja? Or east, towards my New Hampshire home, my husband, and the fertility clinic where we had finally matched with an egg donor, to try one more time to have a baby?

In the hour I’d spent in line behind a dozen other RVs waiting to empty our septic tanks on Memorial Day, I had to make the biggest decision of my life. I’d had a month to think about it—ever since that day in the Mojave Desert when egg donor #1111234 had popped into my inbox, and I’d texted Seth to tell him that she was The One.

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She looked like me: blonde hair, blue eyes, tall and big-boned, with similar features. She was hard-working, outdoorsy, and loved animals. She had a clean family health history. She adored her young step-children and wanted to help another couple achieve their dream of parenthood. I loved her instantly, and felt a connection that had eluded me in the two years we’d been watching donor profiles land in our inbox. Plus, her donor number seemed to be a sign: my whole life, I’ve made wishes when the clock hits 11:11 or 12:34. How could this not be cosmically ordained?

That first week of May when I discovered our donor, I had been camped alone in my van in the middle of the Mojave, along the trail to Banshee Canyon, surrounded by desert mountains and ancient petroglyphs. I’d needed a place to regroup after two and a half months traveling Mexico’s Baja peninsula, followed by several weeks in Arizona getting solar panels installed on my van. The plan was to continue up the West Coast, catching a ferry in June from the northern tip of Vancouver that would transport my dogs and me to the island of Haida Gwaii off of northern British Columbia, then drive up the Cassiar and Dempster Highways through the Yukon and Northwest Territories to the Arctic Ocean at Tuktoyaktuk. I had conceived of the journey two years ago, when I bought my van and traveled solo to Alaska after our first round of fertility treatments failed. In the intervening year, I had returned home from that trip and spent a year trying to adopt from foster care, enduring more heartbreak. When our case worker left her job last fall and left our adoption hopes in limbo, I’d gotten back on the road, spending the winter exploring Baja and the national parks of the American West while I healed my grief (again) and decided what to do next.

I’d been on the road nearly six months, sleeping under some of the darkest night skies in North America, studying the saguaro and cholla and cardón cacti of the western deserts, and strolling the white-sand beaches of Baja while I also fielded phone calls from the fertility clinic and filed paperwork for our foster relicensing. The parenthood question never strayed far from my mind, and if it did, it came rushing back when a Mexican girl smiled at me with her brown eyes as I jogged past the playground in Mulegé; when I listened to a family of four giggle around the campfire in Joshua Tree National Park; or when I watched a linen-clad, modelesque couple pull up to the brew pub in Baja in their sparkling white Mercedes Sprinter van and emerge with a cherub-cheeked toddler and a stroller. In taking this trip, I’d hoped to have a break from the relentless pressure of the past five years, wondering every day if or when or how I would become a parent. But the decision, and the reminders, followed me wherever I roamed.

So I notarized the paperwork for the foster agency as I passed through Roswell, New Mexico en route to the International UFO Museum; I had a video call with the donor coordinator at our local fertility clinic after snorkeling in the spring at Balmorhea State Park in Texas; I did a telehealth appointment with the Maternal Fetal Medicine specialist as I stared down the iron rungs of the Mexico border wall at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument; and after a day exploring the slot canyon and petroglyphs in the heart of the Mojave National Preserve of Southern California, I sat in my camp chair researching an embryo donation program in Sacramento that guaranteed success or your money back.

The Sacramento clinic sent me back down the fertility rabbit-hole, because I realized I was in California already, and what if I could just stop on my way north, run some tests, and pay $20K to have them pop a donated embryo into my uterus? I could hang out in my van for a couple months while I waited for the IVF procedure, eliminating the added expense of flights and hotels and car rentals if I’d had to travel back and forth from New Hampshire. Surely I’d be pregnant by fall and could drive home and have my baby?

I cranked out the awning on my van in the middle of the Mojave and set up in the shade, cell phone in hand and Starlink connected, while free-range cattle wandered through camp and distracted my dogs. A bit of research revealed that this clinic didn’t have the best ratings; people had waited a year or more to receive an embryo, and they weren’t typical donor embryos (the kind left over from a prior couple’s IVF treatment); they were embryos created at random from donor eggs and donor sperm for the purposes of the program. People said it felt like a baby-mill, and communication and empathy were lacking from the staff. There were stipulations for the money-back guarantee. By the time I cranked in the awning and climbed back into the van for the night, I had given up on that idea, but I felt determined to find another solution. Then I remembered the egg donor back in New England who had arrived in my inbox, and I opened the email and found our match.

Whereas a donor-embryo baby would not share any DNA with my husband or me, doing in-vitro fertilization (IVF) with a donor egg would allow us to use my husband’s sperm. He would be the biological parent, and I would be the gestational parent. The process was considerably more expensive, but it seemed worth it to have more control over the donor-selection process and maintain some genetic connection. Having given up all hope for my aging ovaries after my 45th birthday, I had accepted donor conception as our next best option to have a baby.

As stars filled the desert sky, I lay in bed in the back of my van reading donor #1111234’s profile, and my heart expanded. For the first time in years, I felt something akin to hope—that a healthy egg would lead to a healthy pregnancy; that I could be spared the grief of more miscarriages or unsuccessful fertility treatments; that this baby would look like us and deepen the roots of Seth’s family tree. With our foster relicensing held up for months by the staff turnover at the state agency, and after the challenges we faced trying to adopt children with significant trauma, a donor-egg pregnancy seemed like the best way forward.

Over the next few days as I migrated from the Mojave to a campsite at 4,000 feet in the Panamint mountains of Death Valley National Park, I contacted the coordinator to claim our donor, set up the medical tests I’d need to proceed, spoke to the financial navigator at our fertility clinic, and secured support from Seth’s parents (as an only child, he’s their one chance at having grandchildren, so they deemed it a worthwhile investment). I felt happier than I’d been in a long time, with the realization that I would finally be part of the parenthood club that had eluded me for so many years. I was finally allowed to fantasize about my child splashing in the waves at the beach in Maine where I spent my summers vacations; taking a running leap off the dock at my in-laws’ lake house; dressing her in a cute little apron and mixing dough for cookies or soft pretzels; filling closets and drawers full of tiny little clothes; hearing the words “Mama” and “Dada” for the first time; choosing a name!

The fact that we could spend all this money and go through all this treatment and it still might not work was not something I allowed into my consciousness. As with all fertility treatments, there are no guarantees (even those that guarantee a pregnancy or your money back can’t promise a baby in your arms). The donor might not produce enough eggs, or her eggs might not be healthy (and that was assuming she didn’t change her mind about donating). The embryos might not divide properly in their Petri dish, or the blastocyst might not burrow into the lining of my uterus. My body might reject the fertility medications, or if I did become pregnant, I could miscarry again. There could be complications with the pregnancy—at 45, I would have a significantly higher risk of gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and maternal mortality. And for the tens of thousands of dollars we spent, we would only have as many chances as we had embryos—maybe one, maybe three, maybe five or six (luckily our clinic guarantees you at least one embryo, or they will cover the cost of another egg retrieval).

I told Seth that we were not allowed to talk about all the “what ifs”; that if we were going to do this, I needed to believe that it would work—that I was signing up to have a baby, not to go through more months of uncertainty, loss, and heartbreak. I knew of women who’d put the last of their hope and their money into donor conception and it hadn’t worked. I had to convince myself that that would not be me.

With this new turn of events, suddenly my road trip was in limbo. I drove through Badwater Basin in Death Valley on an unseasonably mild day, marveling at the vast salt flat surrounded by mountains, and trail-running through the painted hills of Artist’s Palette after a rare desert rainstorm. When the heat returned the next day, I retreated to the mountains, hiking 9,000-foot Wildrose Peak. I holed up in my van at a free campground frequented by wild burros, enjoying the 70-degree breeze on days that hit triple-digits in the valley. The fertility clinic sent a message saying that our donor was a genetic match—she and Seth did not share any genes that could transmit rare diseases to an offspring. Now we were just waiting to confirm her availability to donate.

I didn’t want to turn east until I knew the donor was a sure thing. If the match fell through, I thought, at least if I kept migrating north I could still catch my British Columbia ferry. And if she wasn’t available until fall, maybe I could make it to Alaska and back before starting my family?

I returned to the valley part of Death Valley National Park to dump my RV tank, and when I set my thermometer on the dirt, it registered 140 degrees. I needed to get moving.

I drove west out of the park, from an elevation below sea level to nearly 4,000 feet at Lone Pine, California. I camped in the Alabama Hills off Movie Road, a desolate landscape of rock formations where movies like The Lone Ranger and Star Trek were filmed. I caught my first glimpse of the snow-capped Sierras and Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States. The radiator in my van overheated as I drove to 8,000 feet on the Whitney Portal Road, but after giving the engine a break for an hour, I made it to the trailhead for Lone Pine Lake. This glacial tarn lay covered in ice and surrounded by snow-capped granite peaks, yet I could sit on its slope and see the hundred-degree Nevada desert below. I stood alongside streams of snowmelt cascading down the valley, the first running water I’d seen in six months, inhaling the damp moss and listening to water cascade over rocks. It stirred something in me, part primal instinct, part nostalgia for the woods and waters of my New England home.

On Mother’s Day, I parked at a gas station overlooking Mount Whitney and called my mom while I debated my next move. Snow shimmered on the crest of the Sierra while I holed up in my van with the air conditioning on. I had planned to work my way north along the eastern Sierras, but the town of Mammoth Lakes was forecast to dip into the 20s overnight, and I didn’t want to freeze my pipes. I’d also hoped to visit the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in California’s White Mountains, but after my radiator trouble ascending Whitney Portal and the acrid smell of brakes on the long descent, I thought it unwise to push the van to 10,000 feet where the bristlecones grew. When I hung up the phone with Mom, I deliberated for an hour. My only option to avoid the freezing temperatures of Mammoth and the elevation of the bristlecone forest was to head south and west in a windstorm towards Bakersfield. I would loop around the southern tip of the Sierras towards Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite.

This would buy me time, I figured; a few weeks of sightseeing and a leisurely drift in the general direction of Alaska while I waited for all the fertility pieces to fall into place.

After a sweaty night sleeping in my van parked at Planet Fitness in Bakersfield, I crossed the Sierra foothills into Sequoia National Park and spent a day among the largest living organisms on Earth. The sequoias might not be as ancient as the bristlecones, but many of them were alive before Jesus and the Buddha. The scale of their colossal trunks looks comical compared to the surrounding incense-cedar, red fir, and ponderosa pine (which themselves are bigger than any tree I’ve encountered back East). I pictured my child’s hand pressed against the furrowed red sequoia bark, and imagined her picking up their egg-shaped cones that contain seeds capable of outliving civilizations.

A few days later, I was camped along the roiling Kings River when I got word that our donor was available for an egg retrieval in June or July. I had just spent the day hiking alongside the South Fork of the river to Mist Falls, sandwiched between the granite walls of Kings Canyon. This was the moment it finally felt real—this woman, that very week, had undergone a psychiatric consultation and genetic counseling in preparation to harvest her eggs for me. Now all I had to do was pay an astronomical amount of money and those seeds of human conception would be mine.

It was the moment of certainty I’d been waiting for, but my celebration felt muted. Now that this could really, truly happen—I could go home and become a mom—was it still what I wanted? Spending time in the Sierras stirred something inside of me—the towering trees, the granite cliffs, the starry skies, and the roaring rapids right outside my window—this felt like home. Returning to a wet, green environment after so many months dried up in the desert expanded me like one of those plastic capsules that turns into a foam dinosaur when soaked in a bowl of water. This expansion complicated the resolve I’d felt in the Mojave to go home and have a baby. Now I could see myself backpacking the 210-mile John Muir Trail, summiting 14,505-foot Mount Whitney and her surrounding peaks. I could imagine living in the national parks for months on end, falling asleep to the smell of campfire smoke and a thousand stars shining through my window. I could picture going back and forth between Baja and Alaska and exploring everywhere in between, for the rest of my life.

And yet, all along, I’d hoped to do those things with my kids. As I’d strolled through Sentinel Campground in Kings Canyon, I’d watched the families around the campfire, finally allowed to think that it could be me. Instead of skulking alone in the dark with my dogs, I could be smiling at glowing faces covered in marshmallow goo and graham cracker crumbs, laughing and telling stories. It felt complete. It felt right.

I held that image as I continued north to Yosemite, counting down the days before that final turning point at Tahoe, where I would either go east and forsake Alaska or continue north and forsake parenthood. It felt like it was now or never—THIS was the time, THIS was the donor, and if I didn’t act, it would slip through my fingers.

There were many reasons for my sense of urgency. Seth and I would already be 46 by the time the baby came, and our parents are approaching 80. Every month made a difference. I hoped to time the birth for the following summer, when my in-laws visit their New Hampshire lake house. If I waited a few more months to conceive, they would be on their way home to Ohio by the time the baby came. And it already felt uncertain whether all four of our parents would be well enough to enjoy a grandbaby in a year’s time.

I also feared that if I didn’t claim this donor, someone else would, and I’d lose out on our opportunity. I hadn’t had the energy to explore national donor databases (which are more expensive) or switch clinics in search of the right match, and the donor pool at our clinic is small. I’d waited years for the right one to come along. What if she changed her mind, or her life shifted in a way that wasn’t conducive to a month of hormone injections?

There was the money factor—spending a summer in Alaska would draw down our savings, and a shift in circumstances could impact our family support. Seth’s or my physical health could change at any time with an unexpected diagnosis (a mammogram is a prerequisite for fertility treatments over age 40, as well as a uterine ultrasound). I couldn’t justify waiting, even if it meant missing my dreamed-of return to Alaska.

I also realized that my resolve for driving another 15,000 miles to the Arctic Circle and back was waning. I’d been living alone in my camper for six months. I’d only seen my husband once, for two weeks. The roads in Baja had wrecked my van, and I was wary of spending several more months driving teeth-chattering washboard and dodging potholes.

I was tired, and a little homesick. I had left New Hampshire on the cusp of winter, those gray and brown days of late November. Now in May I knew that leaves were bursting from buds, flowers were blooming, and it was warm enough to sit outside. This would be the summer of my mom’s 80th birthday and my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary. It would be the summer of my friend Anne’s long-awaited baby shower and the birth of her son after years of her own infertility, and my friend Erik’s long-awaited wedding to the man of his dreams. I missed my friends and family. I missed sleeping in a bed that wasn’t made of couch cushions. I missed having a shower that I didn’t have to set up and take apart and wonder if I’d run out of water mid-suds.

Giving up Alaska and going home felt surprisingly right, even after years dreaming of living on the road and my persistent urgency to escape my life. I could spend my summer in our retired 1991 Winnebago at Seth’s parents’ lake house, writing about my adventures from the comfort of our outdoor living room. I could swim and paddle and finally ride my bike again. I could get my teeth cleaned and my hair cut and have my annual physical. I could take Baxter and Laney for off-leash hikes without having to worry about them stepping on cacti or messing with rattlesnakes. Best of all, I could wake up in the morning and not have to wonder where I was or worry about where I was going.

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As the month of May passed by, Alaska felt more distant even as I drove north. I traveled slowly, spending days in each of the Sierra national parks while I contemplated my future. When I arrived in Yosemite, I booked three nights in a campground at the base of Half Dome, thanks to someone’s last-minute cancellation. I knew this was my last stop before making The Ultimate Decision, and I lingered as long as I could.

Yosemite was packed: every campsite was reserved six months out, and every parking spot was filled by 8am. It was the week before Memorial Day. I drove up to Glacier Point to escape the valley heat and bugs, jockeying my way between tourists to take my picture with the rounded gray cliff of Half Dome in the background. The next day, I joined a parade of hikers to Vernal and Nevada Falls, leaving later in the day so that more of them were going down than climbing up. I was rewarded at the end of the day with a waterfall rainbow all to myself.

I wanted more.

I observed parents and families like an anthropologist observes a primitive culture. What were they thinking and feeling? Were they having fun, or stressed out? Were the tweens and teens that swarmed the campground charming or annoying? I studied the face of a dad backpacking up the start of the John Muir Trail to Little Yosemite Valley with his young son and daughter. Were the kids having fun? Was he? I imagined him studying my dogs and me, wistful for the days when he used to run mountains.

From moment to moment, I wavered in my commitment to pursuing parenthood. Moms and dads 10 or 15 years younger than me walked by wearing baby backpacks. I imagined they had been up since 5am entertaining and soothing their child. I knew they wouldn’t be hiking the ten miles I had just done after sleeping until 9am. Was I willing to trade this life for that one?

A little boy at Glacier Point helped make up my mind. He toddled around outside the visitors center, alert and curious with his bright blue eyes, giggling with his mom and dad. He locked eyes with me and smiled. I wanted him to be mine.

“I’m coming home!” I announced to Seth that night as I drove down into the valley. He had been vacillating with me about the decision, but said he would support whatever I wanted to do. I pulled the van over in the shadow of El Capitan, the 3,000-foot vertical cliff that Alex Honnold famously “free-soloed”—climbing the sheer granite face unassisted, without a rope or harness, in less than four hours (a climb that normally takes four to six days). As dark descended on the valley, climbers’ headlamps illuminated like a constellation of stars up and down the rock face, forming vertical patterns along cracks where they would hang hammocks and bivouac for the night. Seth asked if I was sure, and I told him about the little boy with the blue eyes. On my last night in Yosemite, I had made a decision. I was going to be a mom!

To celebrate the occasion, I jockeyed for parking at the park gift shop the next day so I could buy a Yosemite shirt for my baby as a token of my commitment. They were sold-out of onesies, but I found a green toddler t-shirt with moose, owl, and bear on it that said “Greetings from Yosemite.” I folded it and tucked it away in my clothes cabinet in the van.

I slept outside Sacramento the next night, in the parking lot of a Planet Fitness in Folsom, California, after purchasing a bottle of prenatal vitamins at the Sprouts Farmers Market next to the gym. On the outskirts of the town whose fertility clinic had sparked this turn of events, I called Seth on a Saturday morning and talked until the thermometer in my van topped 90 degrees. It was my last chance to change my mind and head north, and I still felt deeply ambivalent, despite my resolve at the base of El Capitan. Exhausted by the heat and the rehashing of all the same points, I decided to drive two hours to Tahoe before I made up my mind for sure. From there, I could either head east on Route 50 or continue north through Oregon and Washington to my Vancouver Island ferry.

This is how I found myself in Carson City on the Monday of Memorial Day, still debating my fate as I waited to dump my black tank at the gas station. Even after I’d finished the dump, I dragged my feet. I parked to let the dogs out, have another snack, and explore possible routes. It was already 5pm and I had to get on the move and figure out where I was sleeping—western Nevada, or Northern California?

When Seth called, I told him I was not ready to abandon the possibility of getting to Alaska this summer, and I thought I would continue north for a few more days while I made up my mind about the baby thing. But after spending another hour lying in the bed in the back of the van researching a route through some of northern California’s national parks, I felt my energy drain. If I was committed to parenthood, I couldn’t spend tens of hours and hundreds of miles driving in the other direction.

Frustrated and exasperated, I swiped out of my maps app and into Facebook for my daily hit of baby videos. I found it hard to articulate why, at 45, I still wanted a child after five miscarriages and multiple failed adoption placements. I could articulate a million reasons why diving back into fertility treatments and trying to have a baby at my age was a terrible idea. My logical brain couldn’t counter those arguments. Only my heart could, and it spoke when I watched those reels of newborns scrunching against their mom’s chest or letting out a big yawn and stretch, or a baby smiling at her mama and giggling.

Making a decision about anything in life based on how it looks on Facebook is probably a terrible idea, but that’s all it took. I put the van in gear, pulled out of the gas station, and turned left onto Highway 50, America’s Loneliest Road.

TO BE CONTINUED….

COMING SOON: PART 2 - THE DOUBT…

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It’s the first time in 143 days on the road that I’m cozied up in my 1999 Roadtrek camper van with the heater running, the dogs napping, and my built-in desk deployed as wind and rain chill the 42-degree air outside. Last weekend I hiked three miles down the Grand Canyon on a sunny, 80-degree day; tonight, the temperature will dip below freezing. Such is Arizona in springtime.

I crossed the border from Baja two and a half weeks ago, and it’s taken me this long to get my bearings. I traveled exactly ten weeks in Mexico, alone with my dogs, for the first time. I learned a lot. I had some out-of-this-world magical moments. But every day was also really, really hard.

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I wrote early in my trip about the challenges of traveling in Baja. Crossing the border and making it through the murdery part of the peninsula was one of the more stressful aspects (which played out in reverse on my way back). I’d had no time to plan, beyond getting myself there, so I spent most of my days in the first few weeks figuring out where I was, where I was going, and where to get what I needed (talking to locals and fellow travelers helped immensely with this, and writing down everything they suggested). Then once I had a plan, I spent the next few weeks scheming Seth’s trip to come see me, and getting myself five-hundred miles south to Cabo by the time his flight arrived.

My itinerary was complicated by multiple extended stays at the mechanic. Luckily I found a good one in Mulege, thanks to a retired expat couple from California who picked me up off the side of the highway when my van broke down and let me camp in the backyard of their riverfront casita while I awaited shipment of a new radiator. Their mechanic Daniel Bukovecz spoke perfect English and went out of his way to get me back on the road. Unfortunately, two weeks later I found myself back in his shop following an accidental six-hour trip down a four-wheel-drive road in the mountains that wrecked my suspension (by the time I realized what I’d gotten myself into, there was no turning back). I spent another week in the shop while Daniel replaced two ball joints and control arms and patched up some other parts that had broken loose.

By the time I made it to Cabo to pick up Seth, I’d spent almost as many days at the mechanic as I had at the beach. Our two weeks together got off to a rocky start, but the argument that nearly ended our marriage brought us closer, and the rest of our time together felt really special. We drove from Los Cabos to the East Cape and La Paz, camping on white-sand beaches overlooking clear turquoise waters, watching whales breach and slap their tails, snorkeling with hundreds of colorful reef fish, and paddling with the dogs to a secluded spot we dubbed “Honeymoon Beach” (since we got married during Covid, we’ve counted every trip as our honeymoon).

Once Seth and I quit bickering and settled into our life in the van together, I felt my body begin to relax for the first time since I’d left home. Van life is a grind even on the best of days, with the drudgery of daily tasks amplified by the small space, nonexistent storage, and limited supply of water, power, and septic capacity. It takes an hour to Tetris a cart-full of groceries into a two-cubic-foot refrigerator. It takes an hour from start to finish to set up the shower, bathe with Navy-style squirts of water, dry the curtain and the floor, and put it away. It takes an hour every few days to dump the black and gray tanks and fill the water tank. It takes two hours to dig the cookpot out from the back of the cabinet, chop the two-cubic-feet-worth of vegetables occupying the fridge, cook up a stir fry, and wash everything in the tiny sink without using too much water. Sharing these tasks takes a huge load off—or, in my case, letting Seth take on most of them so I could finally have a break.

Seth’s presence also drastically reduced the stress of the usual van crises, since he’s skilled and equipped to handle most mechanical things. On our third day together I was tapping the shower head to get all the drips out before I put it back in the closet, and the plastic bracket holding the sprayer to the wall snapped in half. On my own, this would have meant weeks of washing my hair one-handed while holding the shower wand over my head, then paying a mobile mechanic hundreds of dollars to fix it back in the US. Seth went to the hardware store the next day, bought a screw, and engineered a solution.

At Playa El Tecolote, we spent an afternoon lounging in bed with the back door open to the shimmering water, looking out at the craggy silhouette of Isla Espiritu Santo and pondering our future. I told him how good it felt to be traveling together. I pointed out that exploring new places brought back the spark from early in our relationship. He’d wooed me on our first date using a headlamp to illuminate the eye shine of frogs on an after-dinner walk in a wetland, and sealed the deal a week later when he spent two hours crouched next to a tree trunk with me watching a cicada nymph metamorphose into an adult. The tedium of daily life back home meant we hadn’t shared many moments like that in recent years; Seth worked all day and spent evenings and weekends fixing our fleet of ancient vehicles and doing projects around the house. In Baja van life, we awoke every morning to a beach sunrise, watched whales smack their tails offshore and sharks surf the waves, and worked as a team to keep the dogs happy and get the daily chores done. There was less to worry about, and more to enjoy.

Was it ridiculous to think about turning our lives into a perpetual vacation? Was it even possible? What would it take?

In my travels, I’ve met many couples who’ve made it work. They sell their house and most of their stuff, simplify their expenses, and either save a bunch of money, work seasonally, or parlay their experience into passive income on YouTube or social media. I know it can work because I’ve seen it work.

Seth and I took a look at our finances: selling our house would earn us a cash profit and eliminate at least $20,000 in expenses a year. What else could we trim from our budget? Healthcare and veterinary care are generally cheaper in Mexico and Canada than the US, and we could spend up to six months a year in each country (*pending any future political crises). Boondocking and traveling at a slower pace saves on campground and fuel prices. Food is cooked in the van. Could we save just enough and work just enough to make it happen?

The thought quickened my pulse and sent a rush of energy from my belly to my throat. It was the first time in my four-month trip that I’d truly felt excited. I’d been so stuck in the daily grind and stressed about planning my next move that I hadn’t truly felt happy, despite some incredible experiences along the way. The thought of traveling as a team, with Seth by my side, suddenly felt right. We’d been struggling to envision what life would look like in another year (or another decade) if I stayed on the road, away from home and away from him. If he could join me—problem solved!

But could I really sell my house? It’s the one asset I own. I cashed out a very meager retirement two years ago to buy my Roadtrek. Due to my mental health, I am chronically unemployed/underemployed/self-employed and doubt I’d ever be able to get a mortgage again on my own. My house has been the one constant in my life through over a decade of turmoil, and I vowed to never give it up. It represents my last thread of independence.

Except… I kind of hate it. The house itself is cute, the location is nice, but the memories haunt me. I probably should have left my small town ten years ago after my first marriage collapsed. Instead, I vowed to rebuild the same life in the same place with a new guy, and Seth stepped into the picture. But by the time he moved in and married me and found steady employment, the babies never came and the adoptions fell through and grief filled every corner of every room, and every block of every street in my small town. I longed to escape the trauma of constant reminders.

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What if true independence means no mortgage—and with it, no electric/water/sewer/homeowners insurance/property tax/maintenance and upkeep? What if, instead of living inside a museum enshrining the traumas of the last decade and a half of my life, I let go of the past and live in the moment, wherever I may be? What if Seth could build cabins or work on a fishing boat in Alaska, or start his own mobile mechanic business, or spend the summer maintaining a campground? What if we took the profit from selling our house in New Hampshire and bought a home in Baja with a garage and workshop for all of Seth’s projects, or a bigger RV to sustain our travels? What if having his help on the road freed up enough of my time, energy, and creativity that I could actually make a living as a writer? It’s been a massive struggle to share my adventures, pitch articles, or write books when every ounce of me is drained at the end of every day. I’ve savored the few precious days in the past four months when the wind is blowing or the rain is pounding and I’m stuck in the van with my iPad and my thoughts.

As I’ve been writing this, the raindrops grew thick and heavy and started turning solid, splashing white slush on the windshield like bird droppings. It feels like a belated April Fool’s joke to be caught in a snowstorm in Arizona in spring, after spending all winter escaping the cold. Then, a loud clap—thundersnow! I put on my raincoat and went outside to capture some photos and videos before it melted, and to scoop a tiny handful of snow in my palm like a child. Within an hour, the storm passed, the pile of slush on my windshield melted, and just a thin coat of white covered the yellow grass around my campsite.

I’m back in Arizona for one reason: to get solar panels installed on my van. At the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous in January, I talked to a guy named Glen about whether my 1999 Roadtrek could be modified for a solar setup. As a volunteer for the Homes On Wheels Alliance, he offered to help me at a discounted rate. My main limitation boondocking on the beach in Baja was that my battery only lasted a few days, and I’d either have to idle half the night or run my noisy generator to charge it back up. I could tolerate doing that if I was parked alone, but it became problematic if I had neighbors. I envisioned a solar setup that would allow me to run my hair dryer and microwave for a few minutes at a time and keep me charged up for an extended off-grid stay. Glen and I spent the past few months discussing my goals, and he mapped out a plan and sent me a list of components to order. I used my Harvest Hosts membership to book stay on a property near Glen’s town where he could set up and do the work. I’ve been here for two weeks, indulging in long, hot showers at Planet Fitness following stints in their member-only massage chairs, getting my taxes done, and catching up on email, text messages, and bills.

Being in Baja put much of life on hold. Cell service was spotty, and campground Wi-Fi rarely worked. I finally broke down and bought a Starlink* Mini at Home Depot in La Paz on my way north, convinced by a fellow traveler that internet access would make some aspects of van life less stressful (plus, the satellite dish and the service plan cost half as much in Mexico as they do in the US). Yesterday, Glen affixed the Starlink receiver to the roof of my van and wired it into a 12-volt outlet. I now feel like I’ve officially joined the Nomad Club.

(*I have massive misgivings about supporting a company owned by the world’s richest oligarch at this moment in American politics, but my 23-year-old rocket-scientist nephew just landed a job at Starlink, so I’m going to imagine my $80/month paying a small part of his salary… unfortunately they have a monopoly over satellite internet.)

So since I returned Stateside, I’ve been enjoying unlimited gym showers, unbridled internet access, and grocery stores that carry all the foods I like to eat (as a vegan, food shopping was a huge stressor in Mexico). I’ve also been staying put, which limits the frequency of calamities with the van. (In the week between dropping Seth at the airport in Cabo and arriving in Arizona 1,200 miles later, I had a drawer full of books collapse on my head while driving, spent four days at a tire shop making six attempts to get my steering in alignment, and had a grinding sound in my driver’s side window fixed by one of those $150/hour mobile mechanics as soon as I crossed the border.)

Right up until the end, Baja nearly broke me. Every day presented some new challenge (I now know how to talk about my van’s suspension in Spanish!). Life pushed the limits of my health and sanity. I struggled with language barriers, despite my daily dose of Duolingo. I languished in loneliness. My marriage nearly crumbled on a beach in Cabo, then brimmed with possibility overlooking the ocean in La Paz.

But for the most part, I held it together. I accepted what I could not change, and used my many hours at mechanic shops to plan, catch up, write postcards, and make phone calls (pro tip: mechanics have the best internet in Baja!). In the moments I couldn’t hold it together, I let myself fall apart, parking the van and curling up with my dogs and crying myself to sleep.

I benefited from an incredible amount of help and support from people I met along the way—Mexicans who didn’t speak a word of English; American and Canadian expats; travelers and tourists from all over the world. My book-drawer got fixed the next day by Pedro, whose son Juan runs the Four Points Campground in Ciudad Insurgentes (Juan had also taken me on my third gray-whale tour when I stayed with him on my way south, and invited me to his friend’s daughter’s Quincinera). Deme, an American retiree living year-round in Mulege, took my trash into town every day when I was boondocking on a local beach that she visited with her dogs (she also invited me to see a live band at the local brewery during one of my mechanic layovers in town). Blanca and Manuel let me use the shower and dump station at their campground when I couldn’t afford to stay there (I picked up some groceries for them on my next trip to town as a thank-you). Her brother-in-law Martin guided me to visit the 7,000-year-old cave paintings at San Borjitas (which is how I accidentally ended up driving six hours on a four-wheel-drive road in my 26-year-old, two-wheel drive van). Part-time nomads Martina and Thomas planned my whole itinerary, showing me on their map some of the best campsites in Baja. Fellow campers with homes in Oregon, California, Yellowstone, and Alaska invited me to come stay with them on my way north this spring. Arturo at the Palmas Altas Retreat cooked me batches of vegan lentil burgers and tamales (he used to own a vegan restaurant in La Paz). Brenda and Darrell let me camp in their yard and use their shower while I waited a week for my radiator to arrive. Jade, Josie, Frank, and Irit were Baja van-life friends on a similar route who got ahead of me because of my mechanical delays, but kept in touch and sent me tips on campsites and local attractions. John and Britton were a sweet couple from California who caravanned north with me when my alignment was dodgy. A young guy running a purified water station in Loreto gifted me a bottle of fresh-squeezed orange juice and told me in Spanish that I was beautiful. The kindness and generosity of these people and many others kept me going when I was near the end of my rope.

I did my best to pay it forward, too, offering a ride to a former US Park Service employee named Stephanie who was backpacking through Mexico; rescuing a tourist who’d been stung by a stingray in the middle of the bay while I was kayaking; picking up enough plastic debris off one beach to fill an entire trash barrel; grabbing dog poos that didn’t belong to my dogs; giving generous tips to the Mexicans who pumped my gas, bagged my groceries, filled my water tank, and washed my van. I didn’t come close to repaying all the kindness I received, but I did what I could.

In these four-and-a-half months on the road, I realize I’ve fallen into the same trap I found myself in during my trip to Alaska in 2023–driving too much, having too little down-time, doing too many things. Aside from Seth’s visit, the most restorative part of my Baja trip was the two weeks I spent boondocking alone on a white-sand beach, waking up to hummingbirds hovering over the bush in front of my door; watching the sun rise over the ocean; spending my afternoons floating on my inflatable lounge chair on the Sea of Cortez; rushing out to paddle with pods of dolphins when they swam past; collecting giant sand dollars from the shallows; walking down the beach to find exotic-looking shells; jogging along miles of sand with the sun setting behind the cardon cacti on one side and the orange moon reflecting on the ocean on the other side; spending hours watching frigate birds glide, pelicans and terns dive, and surf scoters disappear underwater by the dozen before popping back up again. That spot was so magical for me, I almost didn’t leave (I knew I’d have more problems as soon as I started driving again, and I was right). But if I hadn’t had the courage to get back on the road, I would have missed all the wonders that awaited Seth and me down on the Cape, like watching two huge barracudas glide through green water as I stood at the top of a cliff with Baxter and Laney, watching the sunrise.

Baja was as full of magic and hospitality as it was riddled with trials and tribulations. As much as I struggled and stressed, everything worked out somehow, and I was fortunate to never find myself in physical danger. Staying safe as a solo female traveling in a foreign country is a huge win. I endured more than my fair share of Murphy’s Law, but I made sure to wring every moment of beauty, awe, and inspiration from the Mexican landscape and people as I could muster. I hope I may bring more of those stories to the page someday, but even if I don’t, they live in my heart, right next to the tremendous pride I feel for traveling alone 2,000 miles down the pothole-ridden peninsula and back.

I’m already planning to return next winter, if life allows me to. And next time, I’ll have scores of friends waiting for me along the way… along with a few mechanics!

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I scanned the glassy green water and saw the back of a gray whale break the surface. I went to the van to grab my binoculars. The whale waved a flipper; its tail broke the surface. I was about two football fields distant, and I watched it for a while, lolling in the water, rolling on its side, the periodic puff of its blowhole audible from my campsite in the dunes.

Within an hour, the tide came in, the wind made ripples then waves that drowned out the whale blows, and the cetacean swam away. I can still see the spray of distant blowholes from some of the other hundred or so gray whales that winter in the Vizcaino biosphere reserve just south of Guerrero Negro. In a few weeks, nearly a thousand gray whales will complete their journey from the Bering Sea to mate and give birth in this lagoon. I took a boat tour in a small panga when I arrived, and one whale came close enough for the guy sitting behind me to pet its forehead.

For the two days since then, I’ve been camped in the dunes next to the lagoon doing nothing but watching tides rise and fall while ibis and gulls forage in the mud flats. The mornings are quiet and calm, then the wind picks up about 10:30am and blows until sunset. If I position my chair just right, the few surrounding campsites are obscured by dunes and my van, and it’s like having a deserted beach all to myself.

I hadn’t planned to stay more than one night—the best beaches in Baja are further south. But after two months on the road, I desperately needed a down day. Or two. Freezing temperatures chased me south from New Hampshire at the end of November and followed me across Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico. I had to keep moving so the pipes in my camper wouldn’t freeze. By the time I reached Arizona and Southern California, nighttime temperatures stayed reliably in the 40s, but there was so much to see and do along the way that I never had the time to sit still (except for one morning when the Santa Ana winds immobilized traffic on the interstate and I holed up in my van off of I-10).

So I’ve stayed on the shores of Laguna Ojo de Liebre (Hare’s Eye Lagoon) a few extra nights, sitting in the sun, blocked from the worst of the wind, as puffs of dust collect on my iPad and my chair and my dogs, then stick to our feet and find their way onto my carpet and bedspread.

With nothing better to do, I thought I’d collect my first impressions from a week in Baja, traveling from the Arizona border at San Luis through the Mexican state of Baja California into Baja California Sur.

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Border Crossing

The most nerve-wracking part of the whole trip was crossing the border into Mexico. I spent weeks debating which crossing to use, on which day of the week, at which time of day, and researching what I could and couldn’t bring with me. I timed my grocery shopping to empty my fridge of produce before crossing, lest I be detained for a stray banana. I stayed up till 2am the night before, digging through every drawer and cubby of my 1999 Roadtrek camper van to remove anything valuable or suspicious (personal safety devices like mace are illegal in Mexico). I organized cash, credit cards, and my passport into one of those touristy under-your-clothes waist belts, with a stash hidden in a secret compartment of my van. I tucked away my prescriptions, electronics, and anything else that might attract an inspector’s attention. I installed seatbelts for my dogs to restrain them if my van was searched.

When I finally arrived at Mexican customs in San Luis Rio Colorado at 3pm on a Tuesday—much later than planned, thanks to some last-minute van repairs and Amazon returns in Yuma—crossing was a non-event. In most of the lanes, cars with Mexican plates appeared to drive right through without stopping. That didn’t seem right to me, so I voluntarily selected the lane to declare stuff (not knowing if I had anything to declare). A young kid in a customs uniform poked his head in my van, peeked in my fridge, and made no comment about the stray avocados I’d forgotten to throw out. I asked him where to go to get my FMM—the Forma Migratoria Múltiple—a stamped piece of paper that would allow me to stay up to 180 days in Mexico. I parked and walked to the building, where a sharply-dressed guard with her hair in a bun opened the door and showed me to the counter. A steady line of Mexicans streamed through the pedestrian crossing, presumably on their way home from work, school, or shopping on the American side of San Luis (it felt like one city, divided in half by the border wall). An agent took my passport, filled out the form, and sent me next door to the bank to pay. I then returned with my receipt and got my passport and FMM stamped. As I drove away, I felt like surely I’d missed something—didn’t they want to inspect my animals or hassle me over my forgotten fruit? But I rolled down the streets of San Luis, away from the iron border fence, with barely a glance from the fatigue-clad, machine-gun toting young man whose face was covered with a camouflage bandana.

Safety

My primary concern after crossing the border into Mexico was safety—specifically, whether I would be kidnapped or killed. Border towns in Mexico are notoriously dangerous, with drug cartels exerting control over local governments and murdering anyone who gets in their way. I knew enough about the cartels from watching Ozark on Netflix that I wanted to get away from the border as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, towns along both of the main routes south into Baja had been in the news for high-profile violence. On the west coast, three surfers were murdered outside Ensenada last year when some thieves tried to take the tires from their vehicle. Along the Gulf of California, there had been several recent cartel-related murders in the quiet expat city of San Felipe. From what I read on Facebook, a local official wouldn’t bend to the cartel’s wishes, so they shot his sons at their restaurant on Christmas Eve.

I locked my doors as I navigated the streets of San Luis Rio Colorado, and soon I’d made it to the US State Department-sanctioned route that traced the outskirts of Mexicali before heading south. Dwellings along the highway were pieced together from scrap materials. I counted three dead dogs on the side of the road after I exited the highway, and when a pickup passed me, a spray of blood and feathers splashed on my windshield—the remnants of a feral chicken? I made a note-to-self to find a car wash once I made it to Baja California Sur.

With my later-than-planned border crossing, I had less than two hours of daylight, so I opened my iOverlander app and found a safe-sounding campground just off the highway on a riverfront property owned by American expat Don Thousand. Rancho Mil was the perfect stopover. A mile-long dirt driveway took me through a locked gate to a campsite on the banks of the Rio Hardy, which used to be a part of the Colorado River before a century of dams and drainage ditches altered its flow. White pelicans glided along the riverbank as the sun set behind the Sierra Mayor, a perfect panorama of river and mountains.

My sense of safety was short-lived when I connected to WiFi and read in a Baja Facebook group that two bodies had been dumped around Kilometer 75 of Highway 5 the week before. In the morning I asked Don where that was. “Just down the road,” he told me nonchalantly.

The American expats I’ve spoken to seem largely unconcerned about the violence, which they say targets people who get in the way of the cartels. “They don’t want to scare the tourists,” Don explained. “Some of the cartels own hotels and other businesses that benefit from tourism dollars.” Elsewhere on Facebook I’d read that the US government’s recent murder of a cartel boss had set off turf wars between rival gangs. The consensus seemed to be that San Felipe was safe now, due to an increased military and police presence since the murders a month earlier.

I spent my second day in Baja driving as far south as possible. I had to stop in San Felipe for groceries, since I’d dutifully emptied my fridge for the crossing. Everything seemed like business as usual at the Calimax grocery store, where I got pesos from the ATM and replenished my stock of avocados and bananas. Billboards advertised RV parks and vacation rentals in English for American expats and tourists. I glimpsed the emerald waters of the Sea of Cortez for the first time, but I bypassed the beaches. My destination was Bahía de Los Angeles, a quiet seaside town 200 miles south and 40 miles off the main highway.

Driving south from San Felipe, I encountered my first real safety concern in Mexico: the roads. Highways near the border could have almost passed as American roads, but just past the last of the weekend-expat enclaves, Highway 5 got sketchy. Breakdown lanes ceased to exist, and the highway narrowed to 19 feet total width, with a sharp dropoff at the edge of the white line on either side. Giant potholes appeared out of nowhere, in the middle of my lane, in the middle of the oncoming lane, or straddling the center line. They could mostly be avoided when traveling at a modest speed with no oncoming traffic, but things got scary when a semi truck approached, and I hoped we didn’t meet where there was a hole for them to dodge. I stuck strictly to the speed limit, which alternated between 60 and 80 kilometers an hour, or 35-45 miles per hour. Even this was too fast on the worst stretches of road. It was five hours of white-knuckle driving, but the scenery made the trip magical in spite of the road conditions (see the Landscape section below!).

I made sure to heed the other safety warnings I’d read about traveling in Mexico:

1) If you see a gas station, stop and top off your tank. There can be long stretches without services, and sometimes the only station for a hundred miles will be out of gas. I filled up my van and my spare 5-gallon gas can in San Felipe.

2) Make sure the gas pump is zeroed out before the attendant starts pumping. Most gas stations in Baja are full-serve, and I’d heard that some of the attendants will neglect to zero out the pump, leaving an unsuspecting Gringo to pay extra, with the attendant pocketing the difference. My attendant in San Felipe pointed out the zeroed pump to me before she started.

3) Act like a tourist at military checkpoints. Mexico has official (and sometimes unofficial) roadblocks where armed soldiers stop vehicles. Camper vans like mine are frequently searched, and some gringos get caught with drugs (all of which are illegal in Mexico, including marijuana). Police are known to extort hefty bribes if they catch you breaking a law. Besides not carrying contraband in the first place, playing the role of the dumb tourist is apparently the best way to avoid hassles. Even if you know some Spanish, act like you don’t, I was told. I smiled, stared at the soldiers with a blank look on my face, responded “yes” when they said “Tourist?” and said I was going to Cabo. Each time, they waved me along. Baxter barking in the passenger seat probably helped expedite the process (I’ve noticed Mexicans are wary of dogs, probably due to the ubiquity of strays roaming the streets).

4) Don’t draw attention to yourself! Drive the speed limit, obey the laws, don’t wear flashy clothes or jewelry or anything else that could make you a target. The night before crossing the border, while camped in a Planet Fitness parking lot after a coveted gym shower, I removed my Liz Explores magnets and tire cover from the van. I didn’t want people thinking I was some famous YouTuber with lots of money and fancy equipment. I definitely feel better driving my 1999 Dodge van than I would in a new Mercedes Sprinter (though there are plenty of those in Baja, too).

Landscape

Once I made it south of the border, the scenery was breathtaking all the way to Bahía de Los Angeles. In the course of a couple hundred miles, I passed through barren salt flats ringed by rocky volcanic peaks, skirted a cliff high above the Sea of Cortez, and wound my way through a cactus forest of cordon, boojum, and elephant trees. I texted a friend to say that it felt like driving through Big Bend, Joshua Tree, and Saguaro National Parks, plus the Pacific Coast Highway all in one. Coming from the East Coast, I love the ocean and the mountains, but I’ve always lamented that they’re separated by several hundred miles. No so in Baja. The potholed road to Bahía de Los Angeles spilled out into a vista of ocean, islands, and mountains. I needed to keep pinching myself to make sure it was real. I’ll let the images speak for themselves:

Wildlife

The Sea of Cortez, which separates the Baja peninsula from mainland Mexico, is known as “the world’s aquarium.” Humpbacks, gray whales, and whale sharks spend their winters here, along with hundreds of migratory and endemic birds. Hours can be passed just watching pelicans dive, ospreys skim the surface, and ibises poke their long beaks into the sand. One night I listened to coyotes howl outside my van window; in some places they’re known to wander into camp. When I reach the warmer waters further south, I look forward to snorkeling and scuba diving, paddling along the coast, and exploring marine environment. My original major in college was Marine Biology before I switched to Environmental Science, so I’m excited to geek out on my coastal ecology!

Climate

After spending two months in the zero-percent-humidity of the Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and Mojave deserts of the southwestern US (and obsessively washing and hand-sanitizing everywhere I went), my fingers were cracked and bleeding so painfully that I wore rubber finger-gloves just to survive the day. Within 24 hours on the coast of Baja, my wounds closed up and the Band-Aids came off. The digital thermometer in my van shows 60% humidity here, which feels just about perfect.

I’m finally able to slow my pace because I left behind below-freezing nighttime temperatures when I crossed the border. The northern parts of Baja have a climate similar to San Diego, with a couple weeks of cold nights in January but almost never below freezing. I’m about halfway down the peninsula now, and nighttime temperatures are in the 50s with daytime highs around 65 or 70. It’s perfect, except for…

THE WIND! In the comments section of my post about California’s Santa Ana winds, someone warned me of the El Norte winds in Baja. On the coast, the mornings start out calm, but the wind picks up around 10:30am and blows all day until sunset. I don’t yet know if this is a constant thing in winter, or if it comes and goes, or if it’s worse in some places than others. All I know is that most afternoons, the wind makes it uncomfortable to sit on the beach, because it cools the air so much, and because you get sandblasted. Some days are worse than others, but every day I’ve been on the coast, it’s been a thing. I’m hoping there will be some protected beaches further south so I can sunbathe without a jacket.

And I have been wearing my puffy jacket daily, in the hours before the sun warms the air, and in the afternoons when the wind picks up, and in the evening when it cools off again. So far my daily wardrobe has been pants and a long-sleeved shirt, except for one afternoon in downtown Guerrero Negro. I started sweating setting up camp, so for a couple hours I changed into shorts and a t-shirt and turned on my air conditioner.

It hasn’t been as sunny here as I’d imagined; most days are a mix of sun and clouds, with some more cloudy than others. A couple nights ago I saw rain on the horizon, somewhere in the Pacific. A 60-degree day can feel 75 if it’s sunny and then feel 45 if the clouds roll in and the wind picks up, so layers are key. At least I haven’t had to slather up with sunscreen.

My husband Seth keeps sending screenshots of 18-below-zero Fahrenheit mornings in New Hampshire, so I can’t complain about some clouds and wind!

People

Everything I’ve read says that the people in Baja are friendly and helpful, and that’s proven to be true for me so far. I’ve had fun practicing my Spanish with Mexicans who don’t speak English, and they’ve been patient and accommodating. When I arrived in Guerrero Negro, I spent a Sunday morning seeking out a car wash (remember the feral chicken incident?). The first two were closed, but the third one had three men waiting to help me. They quoted me 200 pesos (about $10) to wash my furgoneta (I quickly looked up the Spanish word for van), and I sat in the driver’s seat doing research on my phone while they spent an hour scrubbing and detailing the exterior, roof, and undercarriage by hand. When I asked for help finding an agua purificada station to fill my van with drinking water, one of them jumped in his pickup truck and led me there. Then the agua purificada guy joked around and told me about the best beaches to visit near Mulegé.

My fellow tourists are friendly, too, and eager to swap stories or recommend places they’ve been or plan to go. They’ve also been able to help out in a pinch. When the wind picked up this morning, I was cranking in my awning when the 26-year-old sun-baked plastic snapped. A German couple walked by while I was trying to reel it in one centimeter at a time with a pair of pliers. I asked if they could help, and then I flagged down an Austrian couple a few minutes later, and with three of us ladies taking the weight off the awning and the two men improvising a new crank, we were able to get it closed. (Sadly, I won’t be able to deploy the awning again until I can replace this ancient part, who knows when.) If they hadn’t come along, I might have been driving to Mulegé with a horizontal sail sticking off the side of my van.

Language

Thank goodness 18-year-old me had the foresight to minor in French and Spanish in college. I never became fluent, but I reasoned that if I could speak and understand English, French, and Spanish, I could converse with about half the world’s population.

That was twenty-five years ago, though, and I haven’t used it since. A month ago I downloaded the Duolingo app and took the upsell for ad-free Spanish lessons. Every night after I tuck myself into the back of the van, I do a five-minute lesson before falling asleep (sadly, this requires internet, so it’s been harder to keep up with now that I’m actually in Mexico). I’ve managed to communicate surprisingly well, finding ways to ask or explain most things. I use Google Translate to find words and phrases I’ve forgotten. It’s been an unexpected joy of this trip to rekindle my love of languages, and to have real conversations with non-English-speaking Mexicans.

I’ve started suggesting to people (in Spanish) that they speak to me as if I were a three-year-old girl: slowly, and using simple words. I can only catch about 10% of a conversation between native speakers, but when someone speaks to me directly and I ask clarifying questions, we usually get the point across.

Nonverbal communication is also surprisingly effective. It’s usually possible to point or demonstrate what you’re trying to say. My dogs are an excellent example of this: when they are hungry, thirsty, want pets, or need to go out, they make themselves perfectly clear by barking at the dog food cabinet, pawing at the empty water dish, nudging my hand, or wagging their tails at the door. I can usually make my point in a similar manner if all else fails.

I’ve found Mexicans to be particularly indulgent of my desire to practice their language. When I studied abroad in France, my nearly-impeccable French would usually generate responses in English, which hindered my efforts to gain fluency. Even English-speaking Mexicans have been patient enough to let me work through what I’m trying to say and respond in their native tongue. Most campgrounds and tourists establishments have personnel who speak English, so traveling without speaking any Spanish is definitely doable.

Camping

I’ve only been here a week, but so far the camping in Baja has been amazing. The peninsula is remarkably undeveloped. Any American coastline this beautiful would be lined with high-rises and resorts; not so throughout most of Baja. Much of its thousands of miles of coastline is public, and in many places you can pull your van right up to the beach. Established campgrounds cost between $5-15 per night, depending on the location and services. In some places it’s worth the price for the added sense of security (plus a hot shower). Other beaches have popular boondocking spots where you can park for free, usually with some fellow travelers nearby. Everywhere I’ve camped so far has felt completely safe.

Sunrise and sunset are the highlight of every day. The transpeninsular highway winds back and forth between the westward-facing Pacific and the eastward-facing Sea of Cortez, so every day I’ve been able to enjoy either sunrise or sunset over the ocean. It doesn’t get much better than this:

Cost

Not everything in Mexico is as cheap as I’d hoped, but it’s remarkably affordable. I asked an expat how the cost of living compared overall to the average in the US, and she said it’s probably 30% cheaper to live in Mexico.

The biggest expense is gas, which averages around $5.50 a gallon (I still haven’t done the math to convert pesos per liter to dollars per gallon, but this is what I was told). Eating out at establishments catering to tourists is only slightly cheaper than in the States (I have twice ordered something simlple, like chips and guacamole or avocado toast with fresh-squeezed lemonade, and it’s cost about $10). Groceries seem significantly cheaper, depending what you buy—maybe half of what you’d pay in the States (unless it’s a specialty or imported item). Campgrounds are less than half of what they cost in the US, and some offer full hookups.

The tradeoff, of course, is that availability of certain things is limited compared to the US. I tried to stock up on speciality grocery items before I crossed the border—things like veggie burgers, almond milk, tofu, trail mix, and granola bars, since small-town Mexico is not the most vegan-friendly. I’ve been purchasing produce locally, of course, and disinfecting it in a solution of Microdyn, available in every grocery store. (Other travelers and expats I’ve spoken to don’t do this and haven’t had any gastrointestinal issues, but I’d rather not take my chances.)

Tourist stuff seems to cost what tourist stuff costs. I’ve only done the gray whale tour so far, which was $65 for two hours—enough that I’ve been reluctant to take a second trip. They also wanted payment in cash, preferably US dollars. I don’t typically spend much on organized tours, but I’ll try to budget for a few more unique experiences like that.

Challenges

Van life in Baja is an adventure, for better and for worse.

One of the biggest challenges is the ubiquity of dust and sand—it seeps into every crack and crevice. Moments after opening my iPad outside, the keyboard was gritty and the screen was coated in a fine layer of dirt. The dogs track sand in and out of the van all day long, especially after they’ve been lying on the beach (and despite my best efforts to wipe it off). Following the awning incident earlier today, I moved my office inside the van, and there is somehow still a fresh layer of dust on the tabletop and the screen of my iPhone. It’s also coating the windows of my freshly-cleaned rig.

The challenges of driving, wind, and language barriers have already been discussed, but they are worth mentioning again, because they come up day after day.

Connectivity is the other big issue. Before crossing the border, I paid $100 for two months of unlimited internet using the Mexican eSIM company Holafly. I spent several hours in a parking lot in Yuma figuring out how to install and activate the eSIM on my phone, and now it works great—IF I have a good cell signal. Most of the 500 miles I’ve traveled so far have had zero signal. When I do have cell coverage, I can make and receive calls on my Spectrum phone plan; I pay an extra $10/month for unlimited international talk and text.

Luckily I have offline access to Apple Maps (I downloaded Baja before I left) and iOverlander, the app I use to find campsites. So I’m able to figure out where I’m going and how to get there, even without the internet. Everything else I need the internet for has to happen in the brief hours I spend in a city (with cell service) or a cafe (with internet)—calling home, checking the weather, reading the news, researching travel stuff, and keeping my streak going on Duolingo. I make lists of internet things I must do, and when I get service, I’m trapped there until I get them all done. I haven’t been able to keep up with backing up my photos to iCloud; the connection at the cafes I’ve visited has been too slow to upload the number of photos I take in a day, let alone multiple days. I try to get my phone backed up once every week or two, just in case.

The solution to the connectivity problem would be to invest in Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet company. There is now a mobile version for use in RVs. The problem is that 1) the equipment and service are expensive; 2) I’ve heard it uses a lot of battery power, and I don’t have much; 3) from what I understand, you have to set it up and put it away everywhere you go—and that means having a place to store the panel inside your van (I have occasionally seen them roof-mounted, but I’m not sure that’s the best idea?). And also, you’re giving money to Elon Musk, which doesn’t feel so good to me these days.

I’ve heard that Starlink is cheaper if you buy it and set up your service while in Mexico… like $75/month instead of $150/month, and the receiver might be $350 instead of $500-600? It’s tempting. But for the most part, I don’t mind being off-grid for a couple days at a time. I have a Garmin InReach Mini GPS device that, in theory, I can use to text my family that I’m alive, though when I took it out today it wouldn’t pair to my phone. When it works, that’s really all I need.

My other main challenge when it comes to boondocking (i.e. camping on a beach without an electric hookup) is that my RV battery only lasts a couple days, even when I use it minimally for lights and phone-charging. Before I left the States, I looked into installing a couple hundred watts of solar on my Roadtrek, but I didn’t have time to get it done before the trip. That will be a priority when I get back, because the alternative is that I have to either run my loud, stinky generator or idle my loud, stinky van for a few hours every couple days to charge my battery (if I’m not driving between destinations or plugged in at an RV park). And that’s not the best way to make friends on a beautiful beach in Baja.

Advantages

So far, the advantages of visiting Baja absolutely outweigh the challenges. It’s incredibly beautiful and remarkably affordable. Most areas are undeveloped and not at all touristy. There’s so much freedom in being able to camp—for free!—on any number of gorgeous beaches. I have a million-dollar view every night. No matter where I am, there’s a beautiful sunrise and sunset. The pace of life is peaceful, relaxing, and restorative. And best of all, I can have my dogs on the beach—something almost unheard of in the US.

The challenges, the remoteness, the language, the culture, and the landscape all make travel in Baja a true adventure. It’s my kind of place.

Conclusion

I’ve only been in Baja for a week, so these are just my first impressions. I wanted to get my thoughts on the page while they’re fresh, because after I’ve been doing this for a month or two, the newness will fade.

Now it’s time to go enjoy one of the biggest perks of Baja life—a sunset beach stroll with Baxter and Laney!

It’s midday now and the van is still rocking back and forth as clouds of dust drift by outside. I’m parked on a piece of BLM land outside the southern entrance to Joshua Tree National Park. There’s a panoramic view of Interstate 10 through my windshield, and ever since I woke, immobilized semi trucks have lined the on- and off-ramps of the exit a mile away.

The wind flung the door open when I let the dogs out this morning, their sixteen-foot retractable leashes bowing in a southerly arc between us. Several gusts nearly knocked me off my feet. According to the weather app on my phone, it’s blowing 35 miles per hour sustained winds, with gusts approaching 60 mph. Los Angeles is on fire a hundred miles west of here, with wind-fueled flames consuming six football fields of land a minute in neighborhoods near Calabasas, where the Kardashians live.

I was supposed to be arriving at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous in Quartzsite, Arizona right about now to attend a session about camping on federal lands. But when I looked at the wind forecast and the semi trucks grounded on the highway and noticed that none of the dozen RVs parked nearby had budged, I realized it might not be worth leaving the safety of my federal-lands campsite to attend that session 100 miles east of here. I googled “Should I drive my van in 50 mph winds?”and the Reddit consensus was that if the semis have stopped, you probably should have already stopped. Even if I could manage the squirrely steering on my 1999 Dodge Ram 3500 van, I couldn’t prevent an empty box truck on its way out of LA from blowing over on me, which apparently is a thing.

So I’m waiting out the biggest windstorm Southern California has seen in a decade. My water tank is full, my black tank (that’s RV lingo for sewage) is empty, and my fridge is stocked from an Albertson’s haul in Yuma last week. Laney is foxed up in the middle of my kind-sized bed, and Baxter is sprawled across the driver’s seat, her face and paws on the center console next to me. She likes to be close to Momma. Her black fur feels warm from the windshield sun.

It’s the first time I’ve written in months, because it’s the first time I’ve sat in months, with nowhere to be and nothing to do. It’s not worth backtracking into Joshua Tree National Park to go for a hike through clouds of desert dirt, and it’s not worth getting blown off the Interstate on my way to a how-to-live-on-the-road event. There is only waiting, and writing, and watching the creosote branches wave in the wind as the Santa Rosa Mountains fade into the haze.

I actually have written, twice, in the four months since I last published on Substack. I spent September through November in a purgatory of grief and uncertainty punctuated by daily trips to doctors and vets. But the two pieces I started sat unfinished, and the many pieces I didn’t start sat in bullet-point notes on my phone. There was too much to do, too much to process, and life moved on before I could finish a thought.

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Those two unpublished pieces offer a bit of the backstory of why I ended up packing my 1999 Roadtrek camper van and waving goodbye to Seth and my parents the day before Thanksgiving, en route to Baja for the winter. I struggled with whether to stay or go. That struggle has been the theme of most of my published writing these past two years, starting with one of my first essays on Liz Explores two years ago: I’m Not in Arizona Today. Back then, a roadblock in my fertility treatment spawned a plan to drive to Baja for the winter in a Honda Element camper conversion, with a stop at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (or RTR) along the way. At the last minute, I found a cancerous lump on Laney’s leg, and my period returned following a series of uterine surgeries, so I was back to the vet and the fertility clinic instead.

I sold the Element this fall before I left, since I now have a full-sized camper van with a kitchen and shower and toilet. To be 100 miles from Quartzsite holed up in that van is certainly closer than I was two years ago with the Element sitting under snow in my driveway, but as long as these winds keep up, the RTR eludes me.

The Santa Ana winds originate in the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah, where high-pressure systems hang out in that huge desert bowl and push air through narrow mountain passes into lower-pressure parts of Southern California. The squeeze between the peaks makes wind patterns unpredictable, gusty, and powerful. Driving west through New Mexico I’d seen warning signs to pull off the highway during dust storms, but that sunny, windless day made it hard to imagine an Interstate obscured by blowing sand. Now I can picture it.

Just yesterday I had been wondering what Act of God might waylay me this week. In six weeks on the road, I’ve endured some kind of crisis each week that’s derailed my plans. Leaving New Hampshire in late November, the freezing temperatures chased me south, and I spent the first few days without running water before I could dewinterize the van in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The following week, a squealing serpentine belt held me over for a couple days outside Big Bend National Park in Texas, waiting for parts to get delivered to the local mechanic. The week after that, my black tank clogged and I had to make a trip to the RV dealership in Carlsbad, New Mexico for a $50 hose and spend two extra nights at a full-hookup campsite to rinse it out. Then in my haste to fill my freshwater tank outside Tucson, Arizona on Christmas Eve, I accidentally used an unmarked hose that turned out to be non-potable water, so I spent Christmas Day brushing my teeth from a jug and figuring out how to empty and sanitize my tank. Over New Year’s, Baxter went a full 24 hours without peeing, and I had to detour to Yuma, Arizona and wait for a vet appointment. So I was due for some kind of crisis this week; I just didn’t know what or when. Hopefully this wind is the worst of it.

There is so much more to share, but the van has stopped shaking and the breeze is now pleasant enough for me to open a window. It might be time to think about hitting the road so I can make it to Quartzsite before dark. The line of parked semis has dwindled, and some of my camper-dwelling neighbors have headed for the highway. Once I make it to Quartzsite, I’ll spend a week at the RTR before heading back to Yuma to stock up before crossing into Baja!

[This piece feels unfinished, but I’d better hit publish before another two months go by.]

I never noticed before that hydrangeas have opposite branching, not alternate like most plants. This must classify them in the viburnum family, caprifoliaceae. I remember this from my days teaching plant identification. The brown leaf buds are erect at the base of each lateral stem, tightly clasping the stalk.

Transfixed by the garden, I sit on a granite step. I assume it’s granite because I’m in New Hampshire, but geology isn’t my strong suit. It is mottled ivory and gray, with small chunks of quartz and flecks of silvery mica. It cools my bottom through my pink pajama pants.

I finally got to bed early last night. A long bike ride following a couple of late nights made my eyelids heavy. It still took hours to fall asleep, but 11pm is better than 2am. I slept fitfully, half awake with strange dreams, my naked summer skin not dressed for the cold night. I awoke in time to see a golden sunrise shimmer on the lake. I pulled on my PJs and sweatshirt and walked down to the waterfront.

Now as I sit on the cold granite step, I notice another rock to my right, broken off along a vein of quartz with rough, tiny crystals like a white and amber geode. I’ve climbed these stone steps a thousand times and never noticed it.

The fronds of a hay-scented fern (that’s its real name) tremble in the breeze. I pick a few leaves off and crush them in my hand to smell its earthiness. The feather of a blue jay lies beneath the fern next to brown, crumbling oak leaves. It is striped black and cobalt blue with a white tip, looking like it’s been for a swim. It must be drenched from the thunderstorms last night.

I paddled to the island before supper yesterday, just as puffy white thunderheads blew in from the west, blocking the sun. As soon as I dove into the lake, the sky rumbled. I paddled back to the dock as it grew darker. The warm deluge of the outdoor shower contrasted with the chill of the swim. As I toweled off, it started to sprinkle. Thunder clapped as soon as I climbed into my camper. I lay on my back on the bed under the blanket, listening to torrents tap the roof.

A jogger ran by as I soaked in the first rays of sun on the dock this morning. He was an older guy with the build of a distance runner, wearing a small hydration pack on his back. He must be doing a six-mile lap of the lake, I thought. That was an hour ago. He just ran by a second time. I used to do miles like that. It’s been more than a decade since I ran a marathon.

The leaves of the hosta in front of me are an insect snack, yellowed at the edges with small angular holes dotting the center like an irregular paper punch. Some are chewed along the margins. They will wither in a month or so, joining the oak leaves and ferns in the mulch.

One of my dogs barks, so I stand to walk up the stairs to the camper. I pause at the 54th step to examine a clump of Indian pipes (is there a more politically-correct name?) that are drooping, decomposers about to be decomposed. I wonder what will decompose them?

I google Indian Pipes and can’t find a better name, but I’m surprised to read that they are angiosperms (flowering plants), not fungi. They have ghostly-white flowers and stems that resemble a tall, skinny mushroom more than a wildflower. Unlike most plants, they don’t use chlorophyll to photosynthesize. Instead, they feed on mycorrhizae, an underground web of fungi. This late in the season, their white petals open to reveal a bulbous rose-colored eyeball with a black iris. I’ve never noticed that before.

The loon makes a plaintive cry, maybe calling for its mate and babies? I’ve seen them floating up-close on my paddle trips, the young ones still small and speckled brown, circling their parents and peeping for food. The large black-and-white mother (I can only assume) dives bottom-up to search for whatever loons eat—fish? Algae? She has dense bones for diving, unlike the hollow bones of other birds. She can swim underwater up to 90 seconds. She surfaced and put a shiny minnow in the youngster’s mouth. It chirped for more. I was close enough to see the black-and-white checkers adorning the ring around her neck.

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Now the osprey calls from above, or is it the bald eagle? Seth can tell the difference, when we spend weekends sitting on the deck in front of our camper, perched among hemlocks on a steep slope. It feels like a treehouse that you don’t have to climb. The front of the deck is propped on an old stump with a giant shelf fungus growing out of it. Hen of the woods, Seth wondered? I’ve never seen them that big. The ospreys and eagles like to land in the neighbor’s white pine. Sometimes they sit on a branch of the oak in front of the cottage. Last week one of the raptors dropped a headless fish at the base of the front steps. My dog rolled in it.

The dog! I’ve gotten sidetracked lounging on the deck. She’s settled since her initial squeak. I have to pee, so I imagine my pups do too. They haven’t been out since last night.

But now there’s a chipmunk sitting still as a statue on a nearby stump, its tail curled around its torso like a fox. It could be mistaken for a lawn ornament until it blinks. A tickle in my throat creates a cough that sends it scurrying. I reach for my metal water bottle.

My mother-in-law’s teatime company arrives on her porch, and I’m glad I’m not still in front of the cottage, stooped over the hydrangea in my PJs. I’m hiding in the woods up back, on the deck with a view of the lake, wondering whether to sit in the swing chair, the hammock, or my reclining zero-G. A breeze blows the swing and rattles distant windchimes.

My bladder beckons, and I head up to the camper to start my day.

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Liz included a video explaining what Letters from Love are, and where the idea came from. It’s a way of channeling Love—from yourself, the Universe, God, or whatever speaks to you—so you can articulate the things you wish someone would say to support you right now, and offer that love to yourself.

As I process the grief from my most recent loss in my quest for parenthood, I figured it couldn’t hurt to sit down and write myself a love letter. I opened up to the last pages in the journal I bought at a Barnes & Noble in Miami two years ago, grabbed my purple gel pen, and wrote the prompt:

Dear Love,

What would you have me know today?

Love,

Liz

Love immediately started writing back. Using my fingers to pen the words, here’s what she shared:

Dear Liz:

Know that it is hard right now. It’s not in your imagination. You’re not overreacting. You’ve put your heart on the line so many times in pursuit of parenthood, and it’s been broken every single time. Until now, you’ve chosen not to give up on that dream. Know that it’s OK to give up, and it’s OK to keep trying—to keep holding onto the hope that something is meant to be. Know that you will love and be loved either way. Your worthiness does not depend on what happens or which choices you make. You are always worthy of love, and you will always have other beings to love. (Now go pet your dogs!). 

Know that the world is beauty-full and wonder-full, and that beauty and wonder are always available to you. Just stop and look. Smell. Listen. Taste. Feel. Breathe. That you can do those things is itself a miracle. 

Know that hard things make you stronger, even (and especially) when it feels like they will destroy you. You’ve been through a lot of hard things. It feels like it will never get easier—like the pain and regret will never go away. It will; they will. You know now that if your first marriage hadn’t fallen apart—if you hadn’t fucked it up—you never would have had Seth in your life. It’s OK to fuck this up too. Something else will come along—maybe even something better.

Go easy on yourself. It feels like you are doing nothing, but you are healing, and growing. You’ll know when you’re ready for the next thing, whatever that may be.

Listen to the loons. Watch the bald eagle glide across the lake, and the osprey dive for fish. See the chickadees flit among the hemlock boughs.

Relax your damn body! Know that it’s all in your mind—this tension that clenches your jaw, strangles your throat, and knots your shoulders all day and all night. Notice the tightness in your body, release it, and your mind will ease. Notice the unease in your mind, let it go, and your muscles will soften. This is in your power. Keep noticing.

Know that you are not a victim. There is no one to blame, including yourself. As the saying goes, accept what you cannot change, and change what you can. The wisdom lies in knowing the difference. Right now you are trying to change everything. When you stop fighting reality, you will accept, and you will finally relax.

You don’t need to try so hard. Even as you write those words, you don’t believe it, but it’s true. Let that be your life’s work. You do well enough. You are good enough. Let that be enough.

Go outside! Spend as much of your life outdoors as possible, not just moving through the world, but really being in it and with it. That is also your life’s work. 

And keep writing. It eases your mind and lightens your soul. Maybe it will even help someone. But don’t do it for them. Do it for you.

Now go pet your dogs!

Love,

LOVE

If you’d like to write your own Letter from Love, I’d love to read it! Please share in the comments, and be sure to thank Liz Gilbert for sharing this practice with the world.

XOXO Liz

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I sat in my favorite chair on the deck in my backyard with friends I hadn’t seen in years. We crunched carrots and cucumbers from the veggie platter my husband Seth had prepared. Our friends’ young girls sat with sectioned plastic plates on their laps that separated animal crackers from cantaloupe slices. The round-faced four-year-old with blonde strands wisping from her braid sandwiched a giraffe cookie between two strawberry halves and handed it to her dad. 

For the past hour, we’d been glancing at the sun every few minutes through cardboard glasses I’d ordered on Amazon. Every time we looked up, the moon bit a bigger chunk out of the sun, until the sun itself took the shape of a crescent. Through the dark lenses of our paper glasses, we might as well have been gazing at the night sky. 

Pink Floyd played on my portable speaker. The crescent thinned to a line and then a spot of light. As the music crescendoed and Roger Waters sang “I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon,” the midday sky suddenly turned to twilight. It was 3:29pm on Monday, April 8th in northern New Hampshire. We had reached the moment of totality. 

When the world darkened, the eclipse exploded into a ring of light. Our glasses came off. The tentacles of the sun’s corona radiated from the black circle of moon, a bright white Medusa suspended above the roof of my house.

Our mouths gaped. Our voices squealed. The collective cheer of hundreds of spectators downtown erupted from a few blocks away, and we joined in. Our small town was an epicenter of this once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.

Before my brain registered what was happening, a blinding dot of sun peeked out from the opposite edge of the blackened moon. Daylight returned as if God had flipped a light switch. We perched our paper glasses back on the bridge of our noses as the bright dot turned into the line and then the crescent. Pink Floyd blared, “Everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.”

It ended too soon—just 43 seconds after it began. Daylight’s sudden return erased the event as if it had never happened. Conversation resumed. Snacking continued. We talked about how amazing it was, the same way we will talk about it on our deathbeds decades from now when we reflect on the unforgettable moments of our lives.

I wanted to reach into the sky and push the moon back over the sun and hold it there so I could have a longer look at the gold tinge of the horizon and the purple hue illuminating the side of my shed. I wanted to bask a moment longer in the collective awe that spread across a 100-mile-wide swath of North America from Mazatlan, Mexico to Port au Basques, Newfoundland. I wanted to keep cheering with my neighbors, townsfolk, and the thousands of visitors who’d driven hundreds of miles through hours of gridlock to witness this celestial moment. I wanted to stare at the black hole sun, the one Soundgarden sang about the summer before I started high school. I wanted to worship its white tentacles like ancient humans did, if they weren’t cowering in a cave anticipating the apocalypse. 

Past the peak of totality, the show was over. We barely paid attention as the crescent widened and turned into the black chomp mark of moon leaving the sun. The album had ended, the veggies were gone, and we carried our empty plastic plates to the kitchen. We nostalgically peeked through the paper glasses an hour later to witness the last lunar speck disappear as the sun returned to its normal shape. We peeled off the sweatshirts we had donned when the sunlight waned, now that we once again sat in the warmth of a cloudless April afternoon, carrying on as if it were any other day on the deck with friends. 

But a part of me stayed suspended in that moment, that 43 seconds of solar night, when the moon’s shadow raced across the continent at 1,500 miles per hour. What are the odds that a total solar eclipse would pass through my backyard in my lifetime, or within a thousand years of it? How did a cloudless 60-degree day insert itself between a late-season snowstorm and a week of rain, the sky staying blue just long enough to enjoy this celestial phenomenon from the comfort of my deck? The miracle of it all moved me as much as the eclipse itself. 

I’d spent weeks feeling anxious about the eclipse—should I stay home, or brave the crowds to get closer to the center of totality? What if I got stuck in traffic? What if the weather was bad and I missed the whole thing? One night I awoke from a nightmare that Seth and I forgot about the eclipse, jumping in our car at the last minute to find a place where we could see it, but arriving too late. Even as the bluebird day dawned and I checked online to confirm that my yard was indeed a mile inside the 100-mile band of totality, I was eager for it to end. The weight of anticipation and fear of missing out crippled me. Would I have time to take photos with my camera and videos with my phone and celebrate with my friends and marvel at the darkness and gaze at the eclipse, all in a fraction of a minute? I woke up that morning wanting it to be over so I could stop worrying.

Now I can’t stop thinking about that glorious moment, wishing it never ended. I long for that liminal space where night and day commingled while friends and strangers communed in the blink of a celestial eye. I want to linger in the convergence of miracles that placed me in the path of something so sacred. I want to remember; to reminisce years from now and say, “I was there.”

So I did what humans have done throughout the ages to commemorate a bucket-list event, like seeing their favorite band in concert, visiting a national park, or running their first 5K:

I bought the t-shirt.

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I languished in bed all day yesterday, fighting exhaustion from the tail-end of a cold. I haven’t been sick since I had Covid two years ago, thanks to my anxiety about germs and my obsessive mask-wearing.

I had hoped to hike twice this week—big winter hikes with big miles to bag some of the last peaks my dog Laney needs to finish all the White Mountain 4000-footers. We returned to peak-bagging this month after a hiatus of more than a year, partly for something to do, partly to get back in shape, and partly because I wanted to finish Laney’s list in time for her to attend the annual awards ceremony in April, where she would stand in a circle of dogs and receive her patch and scroll for hiking the 48 highest peaks in New Hampshire. 

I clocked a couple of 12-mile days with the dogs the past two weeks, but then Seth brought home a sniffle and a sore throat that left us both coughing, sneezing, and stuffy. I’ve forgotten how miserable it is to be sick, and how privileged I’ve been to quarantine for so long. I tried to jog a mile the night before and it felt like ten, so I took exercise and expectations off the to-do list and spent the day resting.

My dog Baxter is on bedrest, too. At the end of both of our long hikes this month, I noticed her lifting her left hind leg, hobbling the last few miles. I thought she had some ice in her paw, or stepped on something, but I couldn’t find an injury. We went to the vet for a routine visit and when I mentioned the leg thing, they moved it around and did some blood tests. We learned that she has Lyme disease—strangely, since she’s been vaccinated and takes a monthly tick-control pill. Then we got a referral to a canine orthopedist, who discovered degeneration in her cranial cruciate ligament. It’s the canine equivalent of an ACL injury in a human’s knee, and it requires an expensive surgery with a six-month recovery. She will spend the first eight weeks in confinement. The doctor said we should stop all activity except for short walks to avoid tearing her meniscus prior to surgery.

So instead of doing another 10-mile hike yesterday like we had planned, Baxter and I spent the day in bed, then we leashed up just before sunset for a short walk in the woods behind our house. Laney joined us, and together they sniffed along the trail, bumping butts as they trotted in tandem along the narrow path. I always struggle to slow down enough to enjoy a walk, and I assumed they would, too—we are so used to powering up and down mountains. But the dogs loved our change of pace. Instead of yanking them along like I do on a run, I shuffled as we paused at every deer track, every patch of yellow snow, every log, every stump, and they thoroughly inspected it. There was no hurry, no urgency, just the delight of discovering what other critters had been up to in the forest. 

As we walked, I listened to the crows cawing as they glided across the treetops. My eyes followed sinuous trails left in the snow by small creatures—perhaps voles? I marveled at the almost-full moon suspended between swaying birch branches. I felt the crunch of snow beneath my shoes. I got lost following the maze of animal tracks, unsure if I was on a human trail or a game trail. It didn’t matter; both would end up somewhere. 

Attuning to these delights helped me appreciate the slowness, and it also got me excited. A secret I’ve barely shared with anyone is that Seth and I have been matched with two siblings in foster care—a one-year-old girl and four-year-old boy—as a pre-adoptive placement. I’ve been terrified to talk about this because it doesn’t feel real yet; because we’ve been through so much loss, and we still haven’t healed from our most recent one; because it feels overwhelming to take on two little ones when we have zero parenting experience. Yet it also puts us exactly where we would have been if the babies we conceived the past few years had been born. I always wanted two kids, a few years apart: a boy and a girl. 

We’ve started rearranging our house to turn two bedrooms into three, dividing our room in half with French doors I’d removed when I moved in fifteen years ago. The walls are literally closing in as we consolidate our two rooms full of clothes, furniture, and books into one, and add a crib to the other side of the double doors. I’m sorting through books I’ve read for the PhD I never finished, the notes in the margins of each one representing days of toil toward an academic career that never materialized. I tossed half of them in boxes Seth picked up at the dumpster behind the dollar store, to be donated or sold, excavating years of my life’s work to make room for a new dream. A new life. 

All of this overwhelms me, so I was calmed by my time on the trail imagining two little ones in tow, following squirrel tracks in the snow, feeling the softness of moss on rocks, and marveling at the moon together. It’s the vision I had for this life when I arrived in the White Mountains fifteen years ago. I bought this house because it abutted these woods, where I pictured my kids balancing on fallen tree trunks, finding salamanders under logs, discovering Jack-in-the-pulpits and red trilliums, and falling asleep with bedroom windows open to the serenade of peepers and wood frogs. 

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If these two children come into my life, there will be much to slow down for. The dogs will sniff while the kids collect and explore. I’ll teach them how to tell trees apart from the leaves and the buds. We’ll catch a red-spotted newt and keep it in our terrarium for a few days before letting it loose in the decomposing duff of the forest floor. If we’re lucky, we might see cubs climb the old white pine for a nap while mama bear snoozes at the base of the tree.

This slower pace will suit Baxter as she heals from surgery. Later in spring she can join us on short walks to gain back her strength. In the meantime, she will have eight hands to spoil her with pets while she lounges in her dog bed and heals. 

Baxter, Laney, and I are used to moving fast and covering big miles, whether on the trail or on the road. But this season of life invites slowness, a relentement (as the French say) from the relentless push of our bodies and minds. I wonder what I will hear, see, and feel taking life at this new pace? Who will I be when my movements are measured by stumps sniffed and bugs collected instead of minutes clocked or miles covered? 

I’ll be a mother. 

It’s scary to say out loud, because nothing is for sure yet. We haven’t met these kids; will we like them, and will they like us? Will they become legally free for adoption? Can we handle caring for two tiny people after spending decades of our adult lives on our own? What will happen to my writing? My road trips?

Maybe the slowness will make the path clear. Maybe I will follow a deer trail and find myself somewhere new and unexpected. Maybe when I turn over a rotten log, I will find something wonderful. 

Wonder-full. Full of wonder. That’s how I want to be. 

Walking in the woods, I allow myself to dream. To believe. To savor the possibilities.

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East, toward home. 

Up until a few days ago, my plan was to continue driving from Alaska to Mexico, heading south and west, through the red rock country of Utah and onward to the Grand Canyon, the Mojave desert, Joshua Tree, and south to Baja for the winter. Seth flew into Denver on Saturday to meet me, and we planned to explore the desert together for two weeks until he flew home. 

Then everything changed on Monday with a single Zoom call.

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They tell you about the bears—black bears, brown bears, polar bears. They tell you about the frost heaves, the potholes, the washboard. They tell you about the mosquitoes and the construction. They tell you about the midnight sun and the northern lights. They tell you about the mountains and rivers; the glaciers and the salmon runs. They even tell you about the earthquakes and the wildfires.

But they don’t tell you about the rain.

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I arrived in Alaska at the end of the second week of August, not long after a rare summer heat wave brought 80-degree weather to Fairbanks. I had driven through the heat and smoke of southern Canada and was ready for cooler days and nights. I traded shorts for pants and bought myself a Yukon sweatshirt at a gas station along the Alcan highway. 

After driving 5,000 miles solo from New Hampshire to Alaska, I picked up my husband Seth at the airport in Fairbanks and we drove to the Arctic Circle and back under mostly sunny skies. A few dramatic clouds blew across the rolling hills of the tundra and dumped dark sheets of rain miles away, but we settled into our campsite under a brilliant midnight sun. 

By the time we made our way south toward Denali National Park two days later, thick gray clouds shrouded the mountains and a relentless drizzle fell. We never got to see North America's tallest peak. At the scenic overlook, we had a guy take our picture in front of a gray sky and a sign showing the 20,000-foot mountain that should have been there.

The rain followed me a thousand miles around the state. I didn’t have to clean bugs off my windshield for a month. Seth and I had a couple of sunny days as we made our way south to the Kenai Peninsula, but each day the overcast encroached more. The clouds lifted just enough for us to hike to the Harding Icefield one afternoon, but we gave up on trying to schedule a boat trip or kayak tour. Fog draped the slopes of the 5,000-foot peaks that rise dramatically from Resurrection Bay, offering only occasional glimpses of their glaciated summits. We watched sea lions swim circles in glass tanks at the aquarium instead of watching glaciers calve into the sea from the deck of a catamaran.

The day after Seth flew home, the rain arrived in earnest. I spent an entire day holed up in the van, only letting the dogs out if it was an emergency. Every trip out meant muddy shoes and muddy paws and wet dogs and wet dog-towels that never dried. The next day I drove to the other side of the Kenai Peninsula hoping to escape the rain, but it followed me. 

The rain played tricks. Every day’s forecast had three blue drops in my weather app, but when those drops would arrive was anyone’s guess. I’d given up on planning tours or hikes or anything fun. But on the days I expected to awaken to raindrops on the roof, I’d instead be greeted by a sunrise. If I got excited and planned a walk on the beach, those raindrops would start falling as soon as I set foot on the sand.

I started to realize that you could tell the locals from the tourists based on who was wearing brown rubber boots. These old-school galoshes are the mainstay of the Alaska wardrobe, more ubiquitous than flannel shirts. They are worn to the grocery store, the movie theater, and the beach as well as on those fishing boats from The Deadliest Catch. When it’s actually raining, they are accompanied by a full rubber rain slicker and rain pants, or Gore-Tex for the younger crowd. The locals carry out their day-to-day activities oblivious to the weather. One morning as I lay cocooned in bed listening to rain on the van roof, a woman walked by in a full rain suit pushing a baby stroller and walking a dog. Perhaps the mud room was invented in Alaska?

As the weeks rolled on and I migrated from Seward to Homer to Whittier, then camped for a week in a friend’s front yard in Anchorage, the clouds followed me. If I timed it right, I could squeeze in a walk or a run in between rain showers. When I finally saw a round yellow sun in the forecast for Labor Day weekend, I scheduled my glacier boat tour, and I stood on the deck of the catamaran watching chunks of ice splash into the ocean. The rain returned that night and then cleared two days later in time for an epic hike and swim in a glacial lake, because sixty-five degrees and sunny felt like a heat wave. It was the only time I had the urge to swim in Alaska. 

As rainy days turned into rainy weeks and the long-term forecast showed no hint of sun, I gave up on my dream of seeing Denali or the northern lights. I hunkered down. I visited museums and movie theaters. I even saw Hamilton on Alaska Broadway!

But my mood mirrored the gray of the sky. I wanted to hike the alpine meadows of the Chugach range thousands of feet above the shimmering blue of Cook Inlet. I squeezed in a trail run at Little O’Malley peak when it cleared one afternoon, but I could have spent days meandering the dirt paths of entire mountains that rise above treeline. Instead I sat in the van scrolling the screen on my phone, wondering when the rain would let up.

It turns out that coastal Alaska is part of the largest temperate rainforest in the world. This little-advertised fact makes Alaska technically part of the Pacific Northwest, where the coastal mountains wring so much moisture from the air that the landscape east of them is a desert. This rain-shadow effect means that towering Sitka spruce and western hemlock grow in dense forests on Alaska’s Pacific coast, draped in gauzy green lichen and moss so thick it breaks branches off. Meanwhile, parts of the Yukon on the other side of the Wrangell and Coast mountains are as dry as the deserts of Utah. 

I know this because I left Alaska a month ago and traversed the Yukon and western British Columbia on my drive south, and I am now sitting in the high desert of northern Utah under the clearest sky I’ve seen in months, years, perhaps my whole life. Five weeks of rain chased me out of Alaska, and when I reached the drier interior I found myself racing south from the freezing cold nights. My 30-degree sleeping bag came out my first night back in the Yukon, and it’s been tucked under my sheets ever since. 

The rain returned when I dipped back down to the Alaska panhandle in Haines and Skagway, and when I arced south a week later down the Cassiar highway into the town of Hyder, Alaska, which is landlocked at the head of the world’s longest fjord by its border with Stewart, British Columbia. The rain broke just long enough for me to spend a moonlit night overlooking the serpentine Salmon Glacier, then I hunkered down in the aptly-named Rainey Creek Campground and watched the fog roll in and out of the Portland Canal.

The seventy-degree sunshine was such a shock when I rolled into Prince George in north-central British Columbia a few days later that I still dressed for my run in black tights and a hoodie, realizing too late that I was roasting. Fresh clothes smelled like armpits by the end of the day as I raced to complete the chores that awaited my return to civilization, like washing, drying, and folding eight loads at the laundromat, replacing my RV battery, getting my tires rotated, and diagnosing a propane malfunction that left me with no fridge, stove, heat, or hot water. The issue could not be addressed on the Saturday of Canada’s Thanksgiving weekend, so they shooed me south and told me to figure it out when I got back to the lower 48.

The rain, the gray, the cold—coupled with the failure all the appliances that could make my van warm and dry—drained my spirits. Even as I migrated south and the sun returned, the stress of finding someone to fix everything that was wrong with the van as I passed from town to town made my days heavy. I cruised back through Jasper and Banff National Parks by way of the Icefields Parkway, a blur of angular peaks now striated in fresh snow. I skipped soaking in Radium Hot Springs and instead sat in the van calling RV dealerships across the border in Montana, trying to find someone who would squeeze me in even though they were booked out three weeks winterizing the locals’ rigs. Montana came and went in a blur of multiple RV mechanics, multiple vaccine boosters, and multiple hours on the phone with Walgreens and my doctor’s office trying to refill some psychiatric medications I hadn’t used in years. I was back on the edge of sanity, walking a thin line between functional and fuck-everything. The clouds rolled in shortly after my arrival and parted just long enough to watch the moon cover 75% of the sun on the morning of the annular eclipse. 

The Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park transported me back into the clouds. A gray fog spilled like a waterfall from the lip of Logan Pass, and I jogged out of it and then back into it as I ran along the precipitous edge of the Highline Trail. Clouds dulled the clear waters of Flathead Lake, and I missed seeing its colorful stones illuminated the way I remembered them from my first visit two decades ago. The sun returned when I passed through Roosevelt Arch at the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park, but by the time it set over Old Faithful it lit a layer of clouds pink. Only when I reached the Grand Tetons did I feel the warmth of a seventy-degree day, amplified by the shock of waking to frost on the grass. 

I drove relentlessly southward, pushed by the cold and the closing of campgrounds and pulled by the promise of desert days. Back in Prince George, I had faced the decision to continue down the west coast, through Vancouver and Washington to Oregon and California on my way to Baja for the winter, or to follow the the Continental Divide toward a conference in Denver that I’d volunteered for. It seemed too late to bail on my commitment, and the Olympic Peninsula in October looked every bit as rainy as the Kenai had been in September, so I reluctantly angled the blue ribbon of my GPS south and east along the spine of the Rockies. As much as I longed to stand under a redwood tree, I was going to lose it if I spent another month in the rain.

I left Jackson, Wyoming as the sun set on the Tetons and drove through the dark to sleep outside a Walmart just north of the Utah border. I decided to detour to a place called Flaming Gorge en route to Denver, dipping me into northeast Utah’s red rock country. It was cold enough to see my breath when I awoke in the Walmart parking lot, but when I left the city limits of Rock Springs and turned onto the Flaming Gorge Scenic Byway, the sun warmed the inside of the van like a greenhouse. When brown grass and sagebrush gave way to red rock canyons dotted in juniper, I pulled over to take in the view. The most striking feature of the Utah desert was its lack of clouds. I stepped out of the van in my sunglasses and surveyed the horizon in every direction. Below me, the world was red with iron-oxidized dirt, but above me, it was the color of a robin’s egg, as if standing under a vaulted blue ceiling. The pants and long-sleeved shirt that had warmed me an hour earlier in the parking lot felt hot, and I knew I would be smelling armpits before the day was through.

It was glorious. As I climbed back into the van and kept driving, I fantasized about stripping off all my clothes and lying my bare body across the red rocks for an hour or two, sunning myself like a reptile. My hairy legs hadn’t seen the light of day since July. Driving to Alaska abruptly ended my summer and thrust me into a cool, rainy fall for three months. My southerly migration offered a second chance at sunny days. 

Red ridges rose from the landscape in every direction, glowing golden in the afternoon sun. I had been driving nonstop for five days and was aching to stretch my legs, so when I saw a sign pointing to trails, I hit the breaks and turned on instinct, not knowing where I was or where I was going. Singletrack mountain bike trails crisscrossed the red dirt through a vast network of public lands. The sign said these were BLM lands—the Bureau of Land Management—which, unlike national parks, are open to dogs. I pulled off in the first turnout when I saw a Jeep track angling toward the red cliffs a mile away. I changed into spandex shorts and a t-shirt, noticing just how hairy my legs were. I laced up my running shoes, harnessed the dogs, and clipped them each to a bungee leash on my waist belt. Joined at my hip, we spilled out the side door of the van onto the fine desert dirt. I locked the door, clicked my stopwatch, and shuffled my stiff body down the dusty double-track, stopping and starting as the dogs sniffed. 

The rutted four-wheel-drive track ended on a bluff and I dipped down to join the singletrack of a bike trail in the direction of the red rock cliffs on the horizon. It had been decades since I’d set foot in the desert, and I’d never done it with dogs. The wild freedom of a new trail elated me. For the first time since leaving home, I didn’t have to worry about spooking a grizzly bear around the bend. Maybe there were mountain lions in the canyons, but I’ve read about a lot more grizzly attacks this year than cougar encounters, so I’d take my chances. Passing a pair of female bikers on my ascent assuaged my fears, until I came across a hoof, skull, and vertebrae in the middle of the trail. I pulled the dogs away from it and kept moving. 

The trail climbed through the juniper up a series of rock outcroppings. At a junction a small sign with a map showed me where I was, and I realized I could turn right and climb switchbacks to the base of the red rock cliff. When I reached the wall of rock, I lay my hands on its smooth sandstone, warmed by the sun. I craned my neck upward at the rounded rocks topped with hoodoos, the strange eroded spires characteristic of the Southwest. The cognitive dissonance of three weeks ago hiking to the toe of a glacier and now two-thousand miles away pounding my sneakers through the red desert dirt made me shake my head in disbelief. 

I skirted the sandstone cliff until I discovered that I could scramble up the angled backside to the top, thanks to some ancient feat of geologic uplift. I tied Baxter and Laney to a juniper branch and used my hands to pull myself to the summit of the cliff I’d marveled at from a mile away. From here, the van was a tiny speck across the valley, perched on the side of the road. Behind me, the red ridge dropped into a basin of water shaped like a reservoir, its banks reaching up old stream beds like tree roots. Across the horizon the landscape folded into shades of red, orange, and yellow, the compressed and uplifted remains of Triassic beaches and Jurassic dunes. One of the mountain bike trails was named Dino Trax, and on my way out I met a family with young boys who said they’d seen actual dinosaur tracks on their hike.

The sun, the trail, the warmth, the endorphins, and the endless horizon brought me back from the brink. I wanted to howl at the sky like a wolf, but stopped myself for fear of attracting actual wolves. I looped back to my van on the Donkey Flat Road and saw some people camping down a dirt road. They informed me that there were several pullouts further down where I could park for the night. I stretched my sore limbs while the sun set behind distant mountains, then pulled my rig into my own private campsite tucked into the side of a hill overlooking the backside of the cliffs I’d climbed. I sat outside as the cloudless sky filled with stars in every direction, and I watched the crescent moon descend and disappear behind the silhouette of red sandstone peaks. Then I spotted Cassiopeia, my favorite constellation, the tiny question mark in the sky only visible on the darkest nights.

From the Arctic to the desert, I point my compass ever southward, angling next for the Baja peninsula in Mexico. This trip has taught me that I’m more solar-powered than I realized, and my physical and mental health depend not only on the warmth of the sun but on the outdoor adventures it makes possible. In coastal Alaska I met a woman walking in her rain slicker and rubbber boots, carrying a can of bear spray, who wouldn’t want to live anywhere but the temperate rainforest. As much as I enjoy moss-draped trees, I can’t endure the endlessly gray skies. When the sun refused to shine, I drove until I found it.

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The woman who thought about every detail right down to the waterproof king-size blanket for the bed, which has kept dog pee and wet dog and shower water and dog drool and an entire spilled Brita pitcher from getting onto the sheets and the mattress. The woman who researched and ordered and put together a hundred things to make this van a home. The woman who did this so quickly and efficiently and with such focus and dedication to the idea of making it to Alaska before the end of the summer.

The woman who kept dreaming of life on the road and spent years trying to figure out how to make it happen, first starting her own business, then buying an Element, then seeing a Roadtrek parked outside the carpet store in Vermont on the way home from the fertility clinic and becoming obsessed until she owned one a month later. The woman who started writing about all of it.

The woman who consolidated her retirement plans just in time to cash them out, and figured out how to get a $10,000 credit card loan and create her own car payment for five years. The woman who knew she would rather have this 1999 camper van than a new car. 

The woman who put a stake in the ground for her dream. The woman who held a torch through all the stress and grief and pain of infertility and said “If I can’t have a child, I will do this instead.”

The woman who knew it was time to go; who blew up and got fed up until there was no other option. The woman who listened to her rage. The woman who listened to her heart. The woman who had the courage to take everything she had an a lot she didn’t have, put all her chips on the table, and go all in on her dream. 

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The woman who spent a month packing the van, then burst into tears when she finally pulled out of the driveway, turned the corner, and lost sight of her home and her husband, knowing deep down that she might not be back for a very long time. The woman who feared she would be back before she even got started. 

The woman who white-knuckled a 24-year-old van for 5000 miles, through Biblical storms and gale-force winds and smoke that obscured the sun. The woman who watched a coyote and a lynx and a black bear and moose and a caribou and a herd of bison cross the road in front of her while she drove hundreds of miles without passing a gas station. The woman who drove from her house in New Hampshire to the Arctic Circle in 16 days. 

The woman who made it to Alaska and collapsed. The woman who let herself crumble so she could rise from the ashes again. 

The woman who hiked alone in grizzly country and squeezed through an ice cave beneath a glacier and slept on the side of the highway alone night after night after night, even as it rained and poured and then temperatures dipped below freezing and snow started to fall.

The woman who brought her two dogs along and treated them like her children, waking up to snuggles and kisses and belly rubs every morning, listening and tending to their needs, running trails and climbing mountains and throwing balls along rocky beaches.

The woman who dove into a glacial lake with icebergs floating in it, then camped next to the ocean to watch surfers and belugas ride the bore tide. The woman who got stuck for weeks in the van in the rain with two wet dogs, and feared the sun would never shine again. 

The woman who learned to change a tire and check the oil and jumpstart the battery and has so far done two of those three things on her own. The woman who got a new battery installed when the jumpstart didn’t work.

The woman who took herself out to dinner at a theater pub and saw Hamilton on Alaska Broadway after not leaving her house for three years. The woman who woke up to nightmares about her dog and her family and her life, day after day. The woman who went to bed with her jaw and her throat and her chest so constricted, so tense, so painful that she couldn’t sleep. 

The woman who showers every night by rolling up the hallway rug, opening the bathroom door and pulling a curtain around a track in between the refrigerator, the toilet, and the bed, then unplugs the drain in the floor and sprays her body clean. The woman who sometimes goes three or four days without showering. 

The woman who didn’t see stars for a month because it was always light out, and welcomed them back under one of the darkest skies she had ever seen. The woman who was so afraid of the dark that she stargazed standing in the safety of the steps to the side door of the van. The woman who stayed up all night to look for the northern lights even though she never found them. The woman who wonders every minute of every day what the future will bring, and holds space for all the possibilities.

The woman who spent an entire morning in bed sobbing for the children she will never have, and apologizing to them over and over and over, and contemplating what she would sacrifice if she were given a second chance. The woman who can’t imagine being anywhere else but here, next to this glacial lake beneath these snowy peaks under this starry sky waiting for the northern lights to come out.

I admire her courage, her strength, her honesty. Her fearlessness and her willingness to do the things she is most afraid of. Her vision and her commitment to follow it even when it doesn’t make any sense. Her sense of adventure and her trust in her intuition. Her ability to laugh at herself and her circumstances, even when she steps in her dog’s poop and doesn’t realize until she climbs into the van. Her trust that there is a beautiful life waiting for her, and she is on a quest to find it.

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I admire the woman I was last year, six months ago, last month, a week ago, yesterday, and today. The woman who lost five babies in three years and then committed to a new dream. 

She got me to Alaska. She is still going. Her dreams and her confidence are growing, day by day. This feels like the beginning not just of a new chapter but of a new life.

I’m so glad she took me along for the ride.

I can’t wait to see where we will be tomorrow.

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It was August 1992, and Chris had been living in the Alaskan wilderness on his own since the end of April, when he’d hitched a ride to the start of the Stampede Trail with Jim Gallien. Jim had pleaded with Chris to wait until later in the spring to embark on his Thoreauvian experiment, then offered him his own rubber boots and sandwiches when Chris insisted he must go. Jim snapped a photo with Chris’ camera as the 24-year-old shouldered his rifle in the open tundra at the end of the Stampede Road. “I NOW WALK INTO THE WILD” were Chris’ iconic parting words to civilization, penned to his friend and former boss Wayne Westerberg on a postcard of a polar bear. “IF THIS ADVENTURE PROVES FATAL AND YOU DON’T EVER HEAR FROM ME AGAIN I WANT YOU TO KNOW YOUR (sic) A GREAT MAN,” he told Wayne, acknowledging his acceptance that following his dream could lead to his demise.

We know Chris’ story in detail because journalist Jon Krakauer followed the breadcrumbs of Chris’ travels in the early 1990s, culminating in a 9,000-word Outside magazine article in 1993. Krakauer’s voluminous research then spilled over into his 1996 book Into the Wild. The tale caught Hollywood’s attention and became a feature film in 2007, starring Emile Hirsch.

I discovered the book Into the Wild in 2007 when I was a first-year PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, toiling 18-hour days through 500-page academic treatises on environmental history. I don’t remember how I fit in pleasure reading; maybe during the winter break, feeling trapped and overwhelmed by the demands of my first semester and longing for escape? I was captivated by the story of this young man (I was just 27 at the time) who, upon graduating Emory University in Atlanta, had given away his $24,000 trust fund to Oxfam and set out on a two-year odyssey across the North American continent. Within a few weeks, Chris ditched his car, burned the rest of his money, and went on foot, hitchhiking and train-hopping his way through the American Southwest, then illegally paddling a kayak all the way down the Colorado River to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. He made his way to South Dakota, where he found work on a grain farm with Wayne Westerberg to save money for his final push to the Alaskan frontier.

I’d always had an insatiable wanderlust, even as I dutifully worked my way to a 4.0 GPA, graduating valedictorian in high school and then summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in college, with a double major in Environmental Science and International Studies and minors in Biology, French and Spanish. I longed to escape after I graduated, but I had already been accepted into a master’s degree program at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. I finished my senior honors thesis on “The Sustainable Development Paradox” the summer of 2002, and the following week I reported for two more years of intense classes at Yale. 

I indulged my wandering heart for 10 weeks in the fall of 2004 after I finished my master’s, driving cross-country with my high-school sweetheart who would become my first husband, but it wasn’t the wilderness quest I’d imagined. We spent long days in the car driving from one national park to the next, viewing wildlife and scenery out the windshield in bumper-to-bumper traffic, then posting up for the night at a series of cheap motels watching MTV on cable. After 10 weeks and 10,000 miles, we returned home with empty bank accounts to live with our parents and find jobs. After that trip, I only made it two years in the so-called “real world” before returning to academia for my PhD, where I could live in the world of ideas instead of the world of offices and spreadsheets and 30-minute lunch breaks.

But after I’d survived another semester of the academic grind, more intense than anything that came before it, Chris McCandless had my attention. His parents had expected him to enroll in law school after he graduated Emory, but he had other plans. Alaska, the last frontier, called to him. Its whisper had become a roar, and he pursued his goal with single-minded fanaticism. He wanted to get as far away as he could from the weight of expectations—his parents’ and society’s—and live a free life, depending on nothing but the land. He fancied himself “AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD,” according to a personal manifesto he carved into a piece of wood. He even gave up his name, introducing himself to those he met in his travels as Alexander Supertramp, or just Alex. He had no address, no phone, no contact with his estranged family. His story was uncovered because Wayne Westerberg happened to turn on the radio and hear a report of a deceased young man discovered in the Alaskan bush. He suspected it was Alex, and he notified the authorities and told them what he knew.

Chris’ wilderness experiment wasn’t a failure. He hiked 20 miles along the Stampede Trail in spring snow, and forded the Teklanika River downstream from where I am now camped. He discovered the old Fairbanks city bus, which had been dragged into the backcountry in the 1960s and served as a stopover for hunters. It had a wood stove, a dusty mattress, and a bucket to collect water from the nearby river. Chris made this his base camp, and for the next two months he hunted small game, foraged wild plants, read Thoreau’s Walden, and explored the surrounding wilderness. 

By July he felt satisfied with his experiment and his burgeoning survival skills and longed to return to civilization and regale his new friends with stories of his adventures. Chris packed his bag and hiked out the way he came. But runoff from the surrounding mountains had swollen the Teklanika River, and Chris didn’t dare cross the raging torrent. He returned to the bus to wait out the river and attempt the crossing again in a few weeks. 

Unfortunately, game grew sparse in July and August. Chris relied more heavily on foraging plants he identified from a field guide, but it was difficult to tell some of the edible ones from the poisonous ones. He became gaunt, adding notches to cinch in his belt buckle with each passing week. He rationed the last of the bag of rice he’d packed in April. By August, he was starving to death, too weak to attempt escape. 

On August 13, 1992, Chris pulled out his camera for a farewell self-portrait, holding a note he penned in all-capital block letters: “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD, GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!” This was the last day he kept a journal. He marked the next five days with a number and a blank line, until he died in his sleeping bag and parka on the cot in the bus on Day 113: August 18, 1992.

It is now August 18, 2023, and I’m sitting in my van at the Teklanika Campground in Denali National Park, 15 miles upstream from where Chris crossed the river in April and failed to cross in July 1992. I am struck by the irony that his base camp at the end of the Stampede Trail was surrounded by national park land to the north, south, and west; that if he’d had a map of the area, he would have seen that he could follow the western bank of the Teklanika River and intersect the park road in just a day’s walk. He wasn’t that far into the wild. Just 15 miles due south of Chris’ base camp, tourists sporting Denali hats and t-shirts rode in tour buses back and forth along the park road, snapping pictures of moose and grizzly bears, then returning to posh hotels just outside the park’s gates to wine and dine and tell tales of their adventures. 

Chris didn’t know this because he didn’t have a map. He didn’t know where he was, and probably didn’t want to know. It would have spoiled the romance of it, and his image of himself as a rugged pioneer exploring an unknown frontier. 

For the past 31 years, many Alaskans have dismissed Chris McCandless’ life and death on the Stampede Trail. They see him as just another kook from the lower 48 who thought he could live off the land in one of the continent’s most harsh, unforgiving environments. They resent the hubris of an inexperienced outdoorsman going into the bush to hunt and forage, not knowing how to bag game or preserve meat or distinguish the poisonous berries from the edible ones. In Chris’ defense, he was learning by doing; he was a student of the land and its vicissitudes. He was following a dream, but more than that, he was pulled by a calling to shed the trappings of civilized life. According to his wood-carved manifesto, Chris viewed his Alaskan odyssey as “THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDE THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION!” 

To Alaskans, he may have been a yahoo, but in Chris’ mind, he was a revolutionary, journeying to Alaska to “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” as Henry David Thoreau had done nearly 150 years earlier on the shores of Walden Pond.

Like Chris’ Alaskan homestead, Thoreau’s Walden retreat was an imagined wilderness. Trains traveled the pond’s shore day and night, bringing people and goods back and forth to nearby Boston. Like Chris, Thoreau didn’t own his homestead; he was invited to stay there by his friend and literary mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. But these two young men (Thoreau spent his 27th and 28th years at Walden) shared a philosophical and aesthetic idealism that made them both iconoclasts and icons, eschewing careers, money, and family for the call of the wild. 

I’ve tried to read Walden a dozen times, since my days in my college dorm fantasizing about escape. At Yale I even took a course on “Wilderness in the American Mind” where it was assigned reading, but I barely made it through Thoreau’s dense and heady prose. The most I got out of the book was on an afternoon in July 2018 when I visited Walden Pond for the first time and sat on its crowded, sandy shores with the book in hand, then floated face-up, arms outstretched in the emerald water like I imagined Thoreau doing. “Fuck civilization,” I said to myself, surrounded by hundreds of fellow pilgrims and revelers.

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I’ve brought a similar sense of idealism and irony on my road trip to Alaska. My pilgrimage to this wild place was inspired in no small part by Into the Wild, sharing Chris’ dream of getting as far away from society and expectations as possible, seeking solace and spiritual healing among the rugged mountains and forests. The film is the only movie I enjoy watching over and over again. I used to pull out the DVD on a second or third date when I was single to gauge my suitor’s reaction to the idea of living an unconventional life. Seth passed the test, and has since watched it another dozen times with me, in all the moments I yearned to sell my house and get rid of everything I owned and hit the road.

My departure for Alaska three weeks ago may not have been quite that dramatic—the house is rented on Airbnb, with my clothes still hanging in the closet and folded in the dresser—but I made it here after driving 5,000 miles alone in my camper van, and Seth flew in Sunday night for two weeks for our belated honeymoon. We spent our first two days together driving the remote Dalton Highway to the Arctic Circle and back, then headed south from Fairbanks for our camping reservations in Denali. As an afterthought on our drive, I turned on an audio tour of all the major Alaska highways that I’d downloaded to my phone before I left. It was the tour narrator who alerted me that we were about to drive past the fabled Stampede Trail; that the actual bus where Chris McCandless lived and died had been airlifted to a museum at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (we had camped in a University parking lot the night before); and that the replica bus that Emile Hirsch inhabited while filming the movie had been donated to the 49th State Brewery in Healy, Alaska, a small town on our way to the park.

Seth and I peeled our eyes for signage to the Stampede Trail. We had just about given up and thought we’d missed it when I spotted a green street sign for Stampede Road, just like any street sign in any town in the U.S.. Ever the tourist, I jumped out to take a picture and then asked Seth to drive us to the end of the road, where according to my map, the Stampede Trail started. The road climbed on pavement and then gravel to about 2,500 feet in elevation, then turned into a four-wheel trail just south of Eight Mile Lake. It was drizzling now, but we hopped out of the van and took a few photos at the spot where I imagined Chris shouldering his rifle, donning his rubber boots, and waving goodbye to Jim Gallien. I wore my brand new black-and-teal t-shirt that said “I Crossed the Arctic Circle,” and smiled big with my arms outstretched. 

We repeated the ritual down the road at the brewery in Healy, where my breath caught in my chest as I walked through the wooden gates of the property and laid eyes on the rusty green Fairbanks city bus number 142. We were the only ones there when we arrived, and after a few snapshots of me outside the bus, stepping onto the bus, and peeking my head out the window of the bus, I took some time to reverently survey the interior. It was brown and rusty and dusty, with an “Enter at Your Own Risk” sign hanging from a chain on the door. I snapped a few photos. But I stopped in my tracks when I realized what this replica contained: ringing the walls of the bus was a timeline of Chris’ Alaskan adventure in his own words and images. Chris’ family had provided laminated photocopies of his hand-written notes, post-cards, and journals and the photos from his camera that were developed posthumously, outlining day by day his experience on the Stampede Trail. 

The book and movie had included small snippets of these words and images, but here they were laid out in chronological order for me to drink in. Much of it was material I’d never seen before, even being a fairly fanatical fan of the story. As my eyes moved from one framed placard to the next, I hung on Chris’ every word and picture, from his hopeful yet foreboding missive to Wayne and his shotgun-shouldering departure image taken by Jim, to his self-portraits in and around the bus, pictures of the game he killed and berries he harvested, and the “DISASTER” of killing and failing to properly preserve a moose, which he described as “ONE OF THE GREATEST TRAGEDIES OF MY LIFE.” 

On July 5th, after his failed attempt to leave, Chris wrote: “RAINED IN. RIVER LOOK IMPOSSIBLE. LONELY, SCARED.” His journal consisted of one-or-two-word entries on a single sheet of paper every day for 113 days. He recorded “DAY 100! MADE IT! BUT IN WORST CONDITION OF LIFE. DEATH LOOMS AS SERIOUS THREAT. TOO WEAK TO WALK OUT, HAVE LITERALLY BECOME TRAPPED IN THE WILD.—NO GAME.” Most of the next two weeks were marked with blank lines, indicating either that he’d found no food or had no energy to write. The final day, 113, is numbered expectantly, then left blank; no line, no last word.

In his days of desperation, Chris penned a letter for help: “ATTENTION POSSIBLE VISITORS. S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU, CHRIS MCCANDLESS, AUGUST ?” This is the first time in his travels that Chris had used his real name.

Next in the display along the replica-bus wall was the photo of Chris smiling and waving goodbye, holding his block-lettered farewell message. Tears filled my eyes as I read this hand-scrawled note and saw the photo of the white teeth behind his gaunt smile, the wild hair, the acceptance of death that had come with his deep-dive into life. On the back side of the paper where he wrote his final goodbye was a poem by Robinson Jeffers, ripped from the pages of a book:

“Death’s a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to the centuries
Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened nor troubled
And a few dead men’s thoughts have the same temper.”

And yet it is clear from Chris’ last words that he did not wish to die. In the Into the Wild book and the movie, the most memorable line was a note Chris scrawled in the margins of one of his books, perhaps around the time he decided to walk out of the wild in early July. It read: “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.” In his ascetic experiment, Chris came to the realization that his spiritual wholeness required the company of others. He had found a sense of community and identity in the offbeat friends like Wayne Westerberg who had taken him in like family and loved and accepted him for who he was, in contrast to the parents whom Chris felt loved him only in their own image, for who they wanted him to be, admonishing him to repress his quirks and longings.

I hadn’t set out to be a pilgrim at the altar of Chris McCandless’ story, if only because my trip has been so rushed that I didn’t have time to plan or research how my journey might intersect his, and because I imagined he would have been in a place so remote I wouldn’t have access to it. I was amazed to pick up his trail just 8 miles off the highway on the way to Denali, and in the front yard of a brewery just north of the national park. Were it not for the serendipity of my last-minute audio tour, I’d have driven by and missed my chance to connect with the figure who most inspired my trip. 

Before we left the bus at the brewery, I did as a sign suggested and pulled the rusty metal chair along the side of the bus, crossed my left leg over my right, put my hands on my lap, leaned my head back and smiled for the camera, reenacting Chris’ self-portrait when he discovered his new home on the banks of the Susitna River. I cringed at how kitschy this was, and how Chris would have scoffed at the idea of one person—let alone thousands of fans—coming to bow at the Mecca of his life and death. But I couldn’t help myself. There’s always that fan-girl flutter of the heart when we follow in the footsteps of our heroes. I was even more amazed when we arrived at our campsite a few hours later and I looked on the map, realizing it was on the banks of the same river that had sealed Chris McCandless’ fate; that if he had only walked here, he would have survived.

If Chris had managed to walk out of the Alaskan bush 31 years ago, he would be in his 50s now. I’d like to think that if he were alive today, he might be out here cruising around in an old van like me, reminiscing about the wild days of his youth. He might be the wild-haired guy at the next campsite, who I could join around a campfire and pick his brain for places to go and things to do. 

But would I be here today, on the banks of the Teklanika River in Denali National Park, if Chris McCandless had not died? Would the embers of my Alaska dream have ignited so fiercely if not for the wanderlust and romance of his story? Would this landscape have burned into my brain had I not spent the past 15 years driving through mountain landscapes listening to Eddie Vedder’s Into the Wild soundtrack, singing along to the lyrics “Have no fear, for when I’m alone, I’ll be better off than I was before. I’ve got this light, I’ll be around to grow. I will always be better than before…” or “Society, you’re a crazy breed. I hope you’re not lonely without me…”

I know only this: I am here, and he is not. Through no effort of his own, Chris’ life inspired thousands—perhaps millions—through Krakauer’s storytelling to slough off the trappings of civilization  and pursue their own authentic life, whether for a day, a weekend, a year, or for the rest of their time on Earth. His idealism and sense of adventure no doubt sparked the movement that is now #vanlife; the growing popularity of long-distance hiking and peak-bagging; the Millennial imperative to quit your day job and sell the story of your life on Instagram. Chris McCandless became a posthumous icon of how to live life outside society’s norms, much like his own idol, Henry David Thoreau. His story ended tragically, but it almost had to in order to spread his anti-establishment doctrine of simplicity. If he had walked out of the Alaskan bush alive, there would have been no book, no movie, no role model.

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On our way out of the brewery as we walked away from the bus, I overheard some probably-already-several-beers-deep guy grumble about that stupid kid who drove this bus into the wilderness and got trapped and died. I have never punched anyone in my life, but I almost turned around and slugged the guy for his ignorance and irreverence at the altar of my hero. I didn’t turn to look at him, because I wasn’t sure I could hold my tongue, or my fist. I kind of wish I’d let him have it, at least verbally, and defended Chris’ memory and the outsized influence of his life and death. 

I bet Chris would’ve gotten in a bar fight with the guy, and probably would have lost. But he won the philosophical argument by demonstrating the courage to live his ideals, even to his death. I think he’d be more than a little pleased that he inspired so many others to do the same.

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