I’m a transplant. Growing up as an Air Force brat meant my family uprooted every couple of years and moved to a new place. New schools, new friends, new geography. Although I was born in Japan, we stayed only 6 weeks after my arrival before pulling up stakes for Virginia. (I should tattoo “Made in Japan” on the bottom of my foot just to prove I was there.) After that, it was Florida, South Carolina, then Florida again before finally landing in Tennessee for high school upon my father’s retirement.
Starting high school in the small-town South was cultural whiplash. As the new kid, I talked “funny” (too fast, no accent), didn’t get local references (turn left where the old hospital used to be–huh?), and found it really hard to make friends with people who’d not only known each other since kindergarten but had a good chance of being related to each other. Enter my new best friend: the only other person in the county who’d moved in from Elsewhere. She commiserated with me when we couldn’t understand the lingo (what the heck was a hosepipe and why was it ruint?) and reminded me I wasn’t weird just because I “wasn’t from around here.”
Maybe it was this scratchy-wool-sweater discomfort that gave me a restless urge to wander. Or it could be that just after my parents finally got all five of us out of the house and on our own, they bought a camper intending to travel and explore together. Not a year later, my mother had passed away from cancer and the camper sat unused and vacant in the driveway. Once I was married with two children, the unquenchable wanderlust descended with a vengeance. I remembered my own rambling childhood, exposed to different people in different places, and I wanted my children to experience the same, to embrace the new kids that moved in and to find other people interesting and worth knowing.
As soon as our youngest was out of diapers, we took off for the West Coast and the Golden Gate Bridge. We had to wait til then because I have an innate fear of traveling with very small children. My mother had told me repeatedly how I had screamed and wailed in her arms for the entire flight from Japan to the US. She recounted the feeling she had that the resentful passengers who glared at her were plotting to throw her off the plane, midair. I would just be asking for karmic payback if I tried to travel with an infant (sorry, Mom). Our children, then 6 and 3, did great–fate was kind to me. We began to deliberately pay our business pharmacy bills with credit cards in order to rack up air miles. Since Tennessee is fairly centrally located (it borders 8 other states), we took long weekends and holidays and drove to nearby states to explore.
It didn’t take long to realize we had actually been to quite a few states, mostly in the Southeast. We decided to set a family goal to visit all 50 before the kids left for college. That gave us 10 years from the time we started to reach our goal. We tacked up a big map of the US in my son’s room and began sticking pushpins into each new state we visited. We got creative, taking an Amtrak sleeper train from Atlanta to D.C. once. Family and friends became waypoints. We visited family in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Florida. We saw friends in Minnesota, Delaware, New York, New Jersey, and Mississippi.
As the kids got older, our travels usually included something educational. We followed the Freedom Trail in Boston, explored the cliff dwellings of tribes in New Mexico, toured Frank Lloyd Wright homes and learned about architecture, and saw the 9/11 memorials in Pennsylvania and New York. Long, tedious car trips transformed into an appreciation for the incredible varied landscapes of America. Our country truly is America the Beautiful: coastlines, mountains, deserts, lakes, plains, powerful cities and sleepy country towns. We touched anemones in Oregon tidepools, marveled as Hawaiian lava ran into the ocean, and outran sudden prairie hailstorms in South Dakota. Our nation’s national parks never failed to delight. We hiked through Bryce and Zion in Utah, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Denali in Alaska, and the Smokies in Tennessee.
Along the way, whether it was Route 66 or US-1, we sampled clam chowder, fresh beef, and once, quesadillas made from Cheese Whiz that made us laugh until we cried because they were so terrible. Our kids were intrepid travelers, expert packers. It became second nature to navigate airports and hotels, to find their way with a map in a new city. They witnessed how to handle mishaps on the way–we once broke down in the middle of the Mackinaw Bridge in Michigan–and they filed away memories. Unexpectedly, I found that there’s a comfort in having a home base. Having been raised with shallow roots, it’s been a pleasant surprise to actually sink deep in one spot and nestle in. Each time we returned home from a trek to Elsewhere, it was good to hear the familiar cadence of people’s speech (slow, with an accent) and to know that I actually know where my town’s old hospital used to be.
Two years ago, we reached our goal, checking off the last state when we crossed into North Dakota. We had a celebration in the middle of nowhere, the only witnesses a couple of cows and a cloud of black flies. We snapped a picture by the “Welcome to North Dakota” sign, and I gave a private, silent high-five to my mom, who would’ve liked to have seen North Dakota (despite the flies).
