The End of the Road

For a long time I had the idea that one day I would write a book about this trip and call it The End of the Road.

It was an incomplete idea, but it seems to me we are, culturally, at the end of a metaphor when it comes to The Road.

I had the idea that you could trace a thread from tales of the road when it was a trail (Journals of Lewis and Clark, etc), to when it was a dirt road (Laura Ingalls Wilder all the way through to the Air Conditioned Nightmare), to when the highways appeared (Kerouac), to avoiding the highways and going back to the two lane road (Blue Highways, et al), and then finally I could close it out somehow with my own tales of life of the road (waves hands vaguely). The end of the road.

The kind of sweeping generalizations I’ve sketched out sound good if you don’t bother to think critically about them. In the end the only thing I salvaged from the idea was the title. It hung around in my head. A metaphor waiting to happen. I knew there would be an end. Everything has an end.

Then a few days ago I was watching an old episode of Anthony Bourdain’s television show. He went out to the high desert of California to hang out with the musician Josh Homme. Homme takes Bourdain out to what Homme calls the end of the road, but then Homme says something I thought was perhaps the most road-worthy thing I’ve heard: “Here we are at the end of the road… which, it turns out, isn’t a bad place, it’s just where they stopped building road.”

This prosaic statement feels apropos for our own end of the road moment here. A few weeks ago we packed the bus away and have no plans to travel in it again. We bought and have been building out a school bus, which will replace the Travco for us. The Travco finally got too small. It was time for something else and we all felt it. We were ready to move on, end of the road or no.

Sometimes the end of the road is just where the road stops.

And, no, I don’t know what we’re going to do with it. Most likely we’ll sell it. I have no time frame for that, but if you’re interested, email me.

We had originally planned to leave here this fall in the school bus, which I have been working to build out as a comfortable home since we bought it back in April.Unfortunately Lyme disease derailed that plan a little, which is part of the reason we rented the cabin (the other being that we wanted to experience a northern Wisconsin winter).

We moved into the cabin with only the bare essentials. Clothes for the winter. Cast iron skillets. Kitchen knives. Pillows. Camera. Notebooks. It was kind of a larger scale version of that thing they tell you to do to see if you should get rid of your stuff: put it in a box and seal it up and if you haven’t opened it in six months you don’t need it. We’re using the bus as a giant box. When we’ve needed something, we’ve gone to get it, but honestly we haven’t needed much.

We settled into the cabin pretty quickly. The kids took the upstairs loft area for themselves, there’s a big open area below and then a bedroom and bathroom down the hall. In that sense it’s very similar to the bus, mostly one big open space.

These cabins are quite popular in the summer, but relatively few people come around in the fall. The first weekend we moved in there were some people in the other cabins around us, but that traffic tapered off quickly and we pretty much have the place to ourselves. We’re still right beside the lake, with an even bigger beach now. And I won’t lie, the view of Long island and the tip of Madeline Island is much nicer than Ashland (which is the view from Memorial Park).

It’s very quiet here. I can hear the road sometimes when I’m around the cabin, but down by the lake there’s nothing but the lapping of water on the shore. The dog and I go down to the lake shore and watch the sunrise in the mornings. Although sunrise is quickly receding to later and later in the morning. Soon we will be walking to the lake shore in the dark if we keep getting up at 6AM.

There is a certain full circle feeling for me, being back in the cold, the long nights, it reminds me of when I lived in Massachusetts years ago, which is where I first started publishing this website (the first entry is dated September 12, 2003). Memories come back as the leaves tumble down out of the trees. I remember the way the world would turn to a kaleidoscope and then it all would bleed away and be replaced with a colorless world of snow. Black and white, shades of gray. Midday sunshine that does nothing to warm you. Long winter nights.

I think most of all of sitting at the small table by the window in the kitchen, drinking coffee in the mornings, watching the snow drift down, knowing I would soon be walking across town in that cold stillness, the magical quiet of the world in snow. As my head chef and mentor used to say, “there is no bad weather, just bad clothes.”