the art of road tripping

work in process//22.

Happy Saturday, happy belated Fourth of July, and happy summer from Stony Lake! Work in process has been on the road for the past two weeks, en route to Ontario, hence the hiatus. Now I’m back with a post about how to turn the humble summer road trip into a DIY creative retreat. 

Yeah. You read that right.

Being cooped up in a car with your loved ones for 2,000 miles may sound like the definition of a creative hellscape—a prolonged state of soul-flattening monotony and junk food. But with a bit of strategic prep and a halfway decent attitude, you can transform your journey into a mini writing safari.

Think about it: You’re a captive audience with too much time on your hands. What will you do when you run out of shows to binge-watch, there’s only static on the FM dial, and you can’t bear another podcast about bio-hacking? Road tripping is like watching TV, only better—the scene whizzing past the window is constantly changing, and there’s no shortage of interesting characters, like a candy bag that never runs out of Jolly Ranchers. 

A driving retreat doesn’t take a lot of effort or accessories, and it only calls for five basic ingredients:

1. Car that runs + an extra driver, even if she is 15 and just got her license. 

2. Playlists—do not turn this into a Big Deal, your 13-year-old will make six before you cross your first state line.  

3. Notebook and pens

4. Computer and charger

5. Cooler with fruit, healthy food, and a few of your favorite treats

You can be on retreat while you’re driving or sitting in the passenger seat. You don’t even have to write. You can take blurry pictures through the bug-stained windshield. Record ideas on your phone (yes, your children will mock you). Shoot funny videos while someone else drives. Make a mental list of things you don’t want to forget—and things you do. Keep your eyes and ears open for the flashings. Everything you see, notice, think, or hear counts. Just put them in the hopper and watch them come out later as something different. 

We left Santa Fe early on a Thursday morning, hell-bent for Nashville, 1,300 miles away. We had to make it to Sperryville, Virginia, by Friday at 7 pm for my stepmom’s birthday dinner. Friends laughed at us like we were deranged. Nashville! It seemed impossibly far away, in a distant galaxy of the middle South. Our cooler was stuffed with supermarket sushi, cheese, crackers, cherries, peaches, Kombucha, little oranges, and dark chocolate bars. We vowed to stop only to get gas and change drivers. By noon we were across Texas, past the worst of the factory feed lots. Skirting OKC, we somberly googled the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Arkansas was one long downhill all the way to the Mississippi. I regaled the girls with stories of my three other cross-country road trips—each one a rite of passage—even as they were in the middle of having their own. 

Rushing turned out to be not the very worst thing. You’re better off having either unlimited time and zero restraints or almost no time at all. It's the middle where things get muddled and the mind goes dull. We could not afford to dilly-dally or stop to look at things. We had to speed-sightsee through the window. There goes the Mississippi—whee! We had to pay attention so we didn’t miss a thing. Did you see that ambulance-hearse? M screamed from the backseat. It was a 1960s-style station wagon ambulance with old-fashioned sirens stuck to the roof, the kind that you can put on and take off. 

We made it to just west of Nashville that first night. Never underestimate an ultra-runner’s stamina, I imagined telling my friends smugly. The landscape was changing. Less brown, more green. Less sky, more trees. We were driving through a space, not just flying above it. We added the country song “Fly Over States” to our playlist. We sped over the Mississippi to Paul Simon’s Graceland on repeat; we read up on the Lorraine Motel. We stopped for dinner in Little Rock and met a mountain biker who told us we were now in the nation’s fat-tire capital. 

The next day, Nashville. A snarl of highways that the 15-year-old navigated with impressive aplomb. She’d learned cruise control the day before; now it was urban rush hour! I scribbled in my notebook while she drove; my writing necessarily clipped so that I could look up approximately every 2 seconds to make sure we weren’t going to crash or be crashed into. 

Trucks stacked like sardines in a rest stop, sleeping. 

Rusty tractor graveyard 

Roadside tornado shelter in West Texas that looked like a Mormon church steeple

Natural landmarks named like haikus: Falling Water River 

Lists are one of my favorite writing forms because they are efficient and require little effort for the payoff. They hold up well, too. You don’t need to know what you were thinking or what was happening when you wrote Onion trucks, on I-40 somewhere in eastern Oklahoma. You could pen an entire screenplay off those two words, a man who drives onion trucks and cries the whole time. 

You can write a diary entry for every day you’re on the road. Day two: woke up in a Fairfield near Nashville after six hours of sleep, feeling like I’d napped in the dirt on the side of a trail. You can steal the first line of a poem from a billboard: Love Shack, exit 268. Candy Heaven, don’t miss it. You can invent scenarios for the family next to you at the motel breakfast buffet, the 13-year-old golf prodigy who swings a club in the parking lot with perfect form. 

The absolute one thing you should not do is judge anything you write while road-tripping. It does not have to be poetry, though it might one day become something like it. You just have to get stuff down. You’re collecting, like a squirrel storing up nuts in her cheek for the winter. Forage the crap out of the road trip, keep good notes, and go back to them whenever you need ideas. 

As literary forms go, it doesn’t get more classic than the American road trip. Each place you pass through is an opportunity to advance or deepen the narrative. Some destinations naturally lend themselves to flashbacks—driving west in 1992 with my mom, the wind in Kansas was so strong it almost blew the car door inside out—while others lead a story forward into an unfolding future. Plus there’s no better way to work on dialogue than when you’re trapped in a car with teenagers.

“Do they just, like, mow all of this?” the 15-year-old said in southern Virginia, gesturing to the grassy medians and shoulders. Blankets and blankets of green, everywhere we looked.  She shook her head. “Insane.” 

It was the first day of summer. The weather changed as we drove. At a rest stop, we stepped into a familiar wall of humidity—sweet, like long ago childhood summers. Instantly all the wrinkles shook out of my skin. We drove past the caverns my dad took my sister and me when we were little, to see the stalagmite shaped like a fried egg. “Luray Caverns Motel!” I yelled to no one in particular, pointing to a blur already behind me. Even the sign is the same!

Behind the wheel, the 15-year-old had begun to consider the lush medians with increasing suspicion. The trees are tall enough for cops to hide in.

A debate ensued: Trees in the East are nicer to look at, but I wouldn’t want to be in them. 

Our trees smell better and you can see out of them. 

The clouds here are flat and dull. Is this the sky you grew up with, Mama? It’s so murky. 

What do you think’s in a truck labeled “logistics?” I asked in Texas. Pencils and pencil sharpeners?

Puppies, laughed Maisy.

small-town somewhere

We pulled into my stepmom’s just before 7, shaking our heads with disbelief—not at the vast distance we’d traveled in such a short time, but at how small the country now seemed. We had crossed over from one side to the other. We'd seen it all with our own eyes. The trip would become something different for each of us, a beginning, a middle, and an end all at the same time. It was a story we’d retell for ourselves until all the best, and sharpest parts stood out. Like the scenery out the window, it would never stop changing.

Wishing you many brief flashings this summer!

xo katie