Every year when June rolls into July, some part of my nervous system starts looking for Interstate exits, and I do not mean this metaphorically, although perhaps I do because the older I become the more difficult it is to separate the actual road from the one that has been unspooling inside me since 1986, that long ribbon of asphalt and possibility and bad coffee and improbable miracles and the certainty that somewhere beyond the next exit ramp there would be music, or friends, or a circus, or a field, or a dog, or a broken transmission, or Jerry Garcia himself sitting quietly at the center of the whole strange wheel asking us all, quite gently, just how much freedom remained in America and whether we intended to use it.
July has always felt less like a month and more like a tuning fork struck somewhere deep inside the rib cage, because the body remembers before the brain does, and somewhere around the end of June my internal compass begins spinning wildly, looking for truck stops and ticket stubs and glove compartments full of maps that no longer exist, wondering where the circus is setting up this year, where the bands will bandaloop, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, whether there is coffee at the next exit, whether there is pie, whether there is a field nearby where tired travellers can throw down sleeping bags and look up at the stars and ask one another the really important questions, such as where did the dog go and who has jumper cables and is there an extra ticket and when exactly did we all decide that strangers were dangerous.
The Grateful Dead taught me one version of America.
The parking lot was an experiment, a temporary city appearing overnight on asphalt and empty grassy fields and grilled cheese and optimism, a place where money occasionally mattered and occasionally disappeared altogether, where miracle tickets materialized from thin air and somebody always seemed to have an extra sandwich or an extra blanket or room in the van, where your transmission could fall out in Indiana and a garage owner would stay awake all night teaching you how to repair your own car while his wife fed you dinner and you slept in a cornfield beside the garage listening to the stalks whisper like the Pacific Ocean, and where eventually you discovered that gifts do not come with strings attached, that miracles are often folded inside free tickets, that somebody stops when you are broken down, that somebody shares what little they have, that somebody teaches you how to repair the engine instead of repairing it for you, and that no matter where you go, there you are.
The Oregon Country Fair taught me another version. Same song, perhaps, but a very different verse.
You entered through the gates and somebody hugged you and stamped a peach on your arm and said, in one way or another, welcome home, and eventually I tattooed that peach onto my own skin because some religions require baptism and some require communion and some simply place a peach upon your arm and send you wandering through the trees with music and art and children and ice cream and impossible ideas about how human beings might live together if they chose kindness over commerce and curiosity over fear, and somewhere beneath those magnificent fir trees you begin to understand that home is not a place at all but a practice, something we make for one another, something we carry, something we offer.
In the between times, I found another temporary city in the desert, and what it taught me was not terribly different from the parking lot or the Fair. Build the city yourselves. Bring what you need. Share what you have. Somebody always runs out of water. Somebody always loses their camp. Somebody always breaks down. Somebody always sits beside somebody else beneath impossible stars on what feels like a truly impossible precarious piece of art and says, “I’ve got coffee. Tell me what happened.”
The band plays its final song. The parking lot empties. The Fair does a final sweep. Jerry dies. The dust doesn’t stay. The map disintegrates in the glove compartment.
This is what I have been talking about all along.
The maps.
Not the maps on our phones. Not the blue dot telling us exactly where we are every moment of every day. I mean the old maps. The Rand McNallys folded into impossible shapes and stuffed into glove compartments until the creases finally split. The state lines and county lines and interstates and back roads and roads that simply ended in gravel and dust and faith.
My maps.
The weathered notebook that always traveled beside me, filled with health food stores and diners willing to make grilled cheese after ten o’clock and pay phones that still worked and the woman in Eugene with the extra couch and the basement in Ohio that somehow held all of us and the garage in Indiana and the kitchens where we could always make more sandwiches and fill our coolers with ice and beverages before heading back out onto the road.
The attic in Pittsburgh where a gaggle of filthy hippies once landed and laughed until morning and where years later, after the roads had bent and folded and delivered me back there carrying an entirely different version of myself, somebody I loved quietly helped put me back together again.
Those were my maps. Not red states. Not blue states. Not electoral maps. My maps are made of people. The people who stopped. The people who stayed. The people who answered the phone. The people who wrote their numbers on the back of a ticket stub. The people who said, “Call me if you need anything.” The people who said, “If you’re ever passing through.”
I know this is why our Americas all look different.
Mine looks like parking lots and Oregon forests and dusty roads and kitchens full of soup and coffee and dogs and people making sandwiches.
Yours may look like a fishing dock off the coast of Maine. A church basement hosting an NA meeting somewhere in the Carolinas. Your grandmother’s porch with a view. A diner serving pie all night at Exit 141. A station wagon headed west. Or East. Or to catch a baseball game in an endless summer of baseball games. Pick-up trucks to pick up a stray dogs because they need a place to call home.
The shape of our America is the shape of our own hearts.
The maps are written there.
The lines still run from mine to yours and from yours to somebody else and from theirs to a frightened stranger standing beside a highway wondering if anybody will stop.
I really believe that is what the country has always been.
Not the lines we draw between ourselves.
The names we write beside them.
So, here we are. All of us together inside the largest and strangest experiment of them all.
America.
Somewhere, probably even right now, somebody is sitting beside a dark highway with their hazard lights flashing. Somebody is lost. Somebody is afraid. Somebody is wondering if anyone will stop. And somewhere else, perhaps only a mile away, perhaps at the next Interstate exit, perhaps sitting at a kitchen table drinking coffee, perhaps reading this very thing by the light from a cellphone at 2:13 in the morning somewhere outside Winnemucca somebody is already reaching for their keys.
We all have our roads. We all have our lines. We all have our maps.
And we all have our exits.
This is another thing the road taught me. You never really know which exit is yours. You pass hundreds of them. Thousands. Rest areas and truck stops and little towns with one blinking light and pie shops and motels and places you promise yourself you’ll visit someday, and then one day you find yourself taking an exit you never expected because your transmission gave out or your heart broke or somebody got sick or somebody died or somebody called and said, “Can you come?”
We ride with our hands on the wheel and our hearts beating in our chests and we simply do not know. We do not know if the next exit is ours, or the one after that, or the one two thousand miles down the road. That uncertainty is not the frightening thing. It is the reason for everything.
I do not know where my exit is, and you do not know where yours is, and America herself does not know where hers is, the whole point is simply how we choose to travel. Choose to show up.
We do stop. We share our sandwiches. We find the lost dog. We answer the phone. We write our numbers in the margins and on the backs of ticket stubs. We make coffee. We put our hands over our own hearts. More importantly, we put our hands on the hearts of others and ask, “Still beating?”
Babump.
Babump.
Still there.
This? This is what America needs from us right now. Not spectators. Not passengers. Not people standing beside the road arguing over the map while the engine overheats.
AMERICA is sitting there herself with her hazard lights flashing and one hand pressed against her chest, and perhaps what she is asking is exactly what every frightened traveler has always asked somewhere beside a dark highway in the middle of the night.
Is anybody coming?
Yes. We are. Because this is our country. This is our map. This is our heart.
The lines still run from my heart to yours and from yours to someone else’s and from theirs to a stranger sitting beside a road somewhere wondering whether anybody will stop.
And someday, though none of us knows when, we will each take our own exit. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe thirty years from now. Maybe somewhere we never expected. Maybe somewhere we’ve been driving toward all along.
So while we’re here — while the engine is still running and the coffee is still warm and the maps are still folded in the glove box and the names are still written in the margins and the kitchen lights are still burning and the hearts are still beating — we might as well show up.
We might as well keep each other breathing.
That’s it. That’s the whole assignment.
America needs all of us right now. Every last one. And if you call yourself an American — if you put your hand on your heart and mean it — then that means you.
So pull over. 💜
NAKEDJEN 