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Marking the Miles


The mile markers along the turnpike are not important. If anything, they are a blur to ease the burn of my eyes as the hours of my drive tick by. I don’t need them, or the hovering green road signs, to tell me where I am or what exit to take. And even though I still carefully type the destination into the GPS, the drive between where I am and where I want to go is ingrained in my memory. Where I want to go is just under four hundred miles on a singular road and about seven-and-a-half hours away. 

I am driving back to Ohio for the first time this year. My parents are hosting Thanksgiving dinner and there is a bevy of cousins, aunts, and uncles planning to fill the house. Like in past years, some of us will spill out of the dining and living rooms and into the kitchen and basement and out onto the patio and gazebo. Others of us will lean onto cars in the driveway or sit in them to get away from the noise. Us cousins will eventually sneak away and take shots of vodka and moonshine and toast to hopes that there will be days like this more often. 

I’ve liked and commented on so many posts of family gatherings like this and others at the local Elks club and been envious of the way my family clings to each other and smiles into the camera. I think if I’d just made different choices, I’d be there too. Maybe if I hadn’t moved away for love or on a whim. Or if I’d taken a beat before I made decisions that would alter not only my life but theirs as well. Perhaps if I made this drive more often, the hopes we swallow along with the shots would come true. Maybe it is nostalgia that makes me crave sitting in those small bars and restaurants that hold multiple generations because there is nowhere else to go back there. Maybe I could be pressed between their bodies, making the memory timeless.

It would be easy for me to look into the past and justify why this nostalgia is just as dangerous as it is enticing. I’ve been away long enough that anything looks like a dream, blurred over and smooth, like the mile markers. The danger lies in the distinct possibility that once I return I will long to be away again. Maybe I will suffocate or buckle under who I think I am supposed to be there. 

I am my grandfather’s granddaughter in this way, trying to shake away the weight of the world by wandering and returning and wandering again. A trucker for as long as I could remember, he was the father of ten children and one of the freest people I’d known. My remembrance of him is not richly detailed. There are no real memories of him outside of holiday gatherings and those days I stopped by the house with my mother when she chatted with my grandmother. But he was always there on the fringes. I knew him in that way, like something shimmering on the horizon. Most of my solid memories of him are the same. Him in a white t-shirt and work pants, dozing or just waking in a recliner or on the sofa after returning from a transport. Always tired but with a slight smile on his lips—like he’d enjoyed being out in the world but now it was time to return to rest and reconnect. I say he was free because he had the best of both worlds. My grandfather, Timothy Horne, was anchored to the world solidly. He knew there were responsibilities, but he also knew he could hop into the cab of his truck and hit the road while seeing the land and sky stretching out before him. 

In the early morning, a few days before the Thanksgiving travel rush, the toll road stretching across Pennsylvania is quiet. The land and sky are stretched out before me now. In the back of my SUV, my overstuffed suitcase slides back and forth, startling me now and again when I forget it’s there and not directly behind my driver’s seat as it normally is. Next to me, scattered on the passenger seat, is my travel bag, filled with chargers, devices, and essentials I plan to use but never do when I am home—a laptop, a Kindle, AirPods, notebooks, pens, books, and to-do lists. It is always wishful thinking that I will take the burdens of one city and transport them to another only to bring them back again untouched. 

I’d left Philadelphia around 6 a.m. to beat the traffic that snarls I-76 heading out of the city toward Valley Forge, even deeper into the state I’ve called home for nearing a decade. The drive is already long and the higher the sun rises the more cars pile up to form a string of seemingly endless staccato brake lights. If I time it correctly, I can escape the crowds that clog the road to get to the King of Prussia shopping mall and all the luxury goods it houses.

The sun was still tucked behind the trees when I pulled onto the road, the air chilly and whistling through the partially rolled down windows. And now the wind is still cold against my cheeks as the sun settles above the horizon. The icy feel of the wind keeps my eyes open as the turnpike continues to unfurl into back-to-back mountains drilled through to make tunnels and sharp curves sloping back down into valleys. This drive is routine to the maternal side of my family. Most of my mother’s six brothers took after their father and became truckers or auto mechanics. Those who didn’t became obsessed with cars or drove buses and vans for churches and businesses. Still, my grandfather and his sons rarely took the toll roads, preferring the free routes that snaked through little towns that looked like ours. Where they could become semi-regulars at local diners and see something other than endless construction. Next to the turnpike, I can catch glimpses of cars on the local roads slicing through the trees–all headed in the same direction, taking different paths. 

I keep my hands steady on the wheel and sing loudly along with my Junk Drawer playlist to keep my mind from slipping too far into regrets and fear. For the moment, the B-52s “Love Shack” is on repeat. It’s fitting, I guess, even if it is not planned. I won’t try to assign some greater meaning to the lyrics or their possible connection to me heading down a highway just as the opening line in the song sings out. If you see a faded sign at the side of the road that says fifteen miles to the Love Shack. What is important is the energy that it gives me as I bop my head side to side, singing louder and louder with the band until the song rolls into its end and starts all over again. I try to keep things light just like this as I travel—thinking about what I will eat first, how the sound of trains will lull me to sleep, what it will be like to playfully karate chop my sister just to touch her and sink into how much I’ve missed her. What I don’t want to remember is how Philadelphia has been both a blessing and a curse. Amid the long afternoons strolling the halls and exhibits of the art museum and the many dinners and drinks I grab with friends, I am left with this: I am alone, cleaved from everything I know, and it was by choice. I am left with this: a single stretch of turnpike is all that separates me from a life I again yearn for, but the distance feels like a million miles. 

There is no amount of singing or road markers that can make me really forget this. But I can’t explain to myself, or rationalize why I’ve let eleven months slide by without making this drive. Or why nine years have passed with me longing to be on that parallel road, free and headed home. If I am honest with myself, it all comes back to pride. Some measure of pride drove me away, so determined to prove something about my strength and capabilities that were never questioned by anyone other than myself. Pride, far too often in my life disguised as freedom, has always come back to rear its head. 

When I left for college, my grandfather found a car for me and offered to buy it. A pale green Buick Century that matched the white one my mother had. I hated it and refused to drive it because it wasn’t cool enough. I didn’t care that it was a good car. What I knew was that I was wiggling my way out of the grips of childhood and heading into the murkiness of adulthood on my own. I wanted to decide things for myself and that car, no matter how much he tried to sell me on it, wasn’t a part of the plan. Homesickness hit me like a ton of bricks a few weeks later and for the rest of the semester my mother and father paid another student to bring me home each Friday afternoon and return me safely to campus forty-eight hours later. I couldn’t survive forty-five minutes away and I’ve come to think my grandfather knew this was on the horizon. By sophomore year, his offer of the car had disappeared, and I ended up in a rickety one whose axle broke while driving it. The 1986 Ford Tempo, with a red velour interior and silver paint, was markedly uglier than the Buick my grandfather tried to gift me. It barely survived the semester, but the freedom it offered me was more valuable than longevity. I was one of two people in my friend group with a car that year and it was a point of pride that I could be the one who moved us from trapped on campus to wherever our hearts led us to go. 

I suppose my refusal to take that car was only the first step in a long journey of independence that eventually tipped over into isolation. Maybe he knew I was beginning to see that being free of everything except myself was the best path and knew I needed an anchor just like him. He offered what he could, a way to reverse course and come back home when I needed to, and I’d ignored it for something that only appeared to be better. 

When my grandfather took ill, I fretted from a distance. I could pretend from far away things were okay. I could ignore the signs he was taking no more loads on the open road. Instead, he was caged, just as I feared, in a nursing home facility to receive the care none of us could truly give him. Kept abreast of his condition via phone, I waited for a signal that it was time to head back to be there for the end of his life. I was living in New Jersey by then, and the drive I am now taking seemed twice as long. I’d yet to figure out the rhythm of it. I’d toyed with taking the free routes he frequented but never quite felt comfortable passing through them with my out of state plates and printed directions. When the call finally came, I made the drive along those parallel roads in a rented car, holding back tears of shame that would appear again and again as more of those I loved died and still I stayed away. 

Somewhere along these same highways and byways, my grandfather’s ashes have floated on the wind and rested amid the gravel and dirt. When he passed in 2010, his sons took the remains of him and left parts along the rest stops and roads he frequented as a trucker. For my entire life, and most of the lives of his children, he drove over the road and short haul routes moving whatever products that needed transport. It was fitting that when he died, they returned him to places that made him feel free. Five years after this death, when I floated away again, I did so recklessly—packing a single carload of items and setting off toward the city I thought would give me back a sense of self. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know how to navigate the city’s public transportation. I had never parallel parked outside of my driving test or known that I’d soon be kicked out of my illegal apartment and onto the sofa of one of the only people I knew in the area. 

What I had was myself, an internal job transfer, and the hope I could make a life on my own. All of that was stacked upon the same need for freedom I inherited from my grandfather. It may have manifested in a different way. His as decades of leaving and returning. Mine as leaving and longing from a distance, even if the path back was clear. Philadelphia was like a beacon. It was a city I’d spent time in but never fully experienced. My uncles spoke fondly of Philadelphia for its energy and the ability to find exactly what you needed when you wanted it. The city shone among the ruin of the life I was leaving—divorced and emotionally broken—like an oasis. When my marriage dissolved, I returned to Ohio to piece together my heart. That nostalgia that drives my need to go home lasted three years before I grew restless. So, I applied for jobs and transfers without telling anyone. I got into graduate school in London, but Philadelphia won out. I could get lost there, I thought. I could transform into some greater version of myself that was strong enough to do just about anything. I pushed myself into dating. I pushed myself into trying to make friends. I pushed myself to believe I need only answer to myself. And for a very long time, I lived under that illusion. But when I dated locally, nothing ever lasted more than a few months. I found myself attached to men who lived in different states so I could have it all—a sense of intimacy with lots of room to disappear when things got too close. I made a few friends but held the vast majority of people I met at arm’s length for the same reasons. And it may have taken years, but eventually I came to know that the freedom I sought didn’t require me to be alone. 

Back on the road, semis hog the right lane of the turnpike like a makeshift train—their loads gently swaying in the breeze high atop this mountain. All of us in cars try to push the left lane faster and faster just to switch back over before a state trooper appears. I hit a burst of speed, eighty-plus, to keep up with the pack and a mile or so later I am back in the slower safety of the opposite lane—a smooth seventy-five miles an hour on cruise control so I don’t get stopped. There’s me and then another small SUV, full of a family of four, that takes turns leading and following until we lose each other when it pulls off onto one of the rest stops. 

There are four of us in my immediate family. My mother, father, sister, and me. We are a unit that texts each other daily, like morning declarations of love. We send memes and videos culled from social media. My father and I bond over Netflix and movie recommendations about aliens and history. My sister and I trade videos like baseball cards, Instagram Reels from her and TikTok videos from me. My mother sends the most voice texts and all of us randomly video chat from our respective homes. What I’ve missed in these years I’ve been away are the daily occurrences of being there physically. I can’t touch any of them–it’s like they are floating just out of my grasp, just out of reach. Drifting from the common road like that other vehicle. 

The whip of my tires meeting the road builds in a tunnel of sound, as if it’s picking up speed even if my foot is steady on the pedal. Maybe it is all an echo—one in my head and one out in the real world. My life echoes too, because it is empty sometimes. In all the hustle and energy of my life, there are times my heart is so very quiet. I travel the country for conferences and workshops and stare out of train windows on my way to writing weekends. There are always notifications and emails to answer just as my calendar rarely has a week without a deadline. None of this has much weight or importance when the day is over, and I am alone in the quiet and darkness of the life I’ve built. 

My heart yearns so much to be filled with what I’ve given away to be alone in the city, proving that I can stand on my own two feet, lying to myself about how this is freedom. I keep my SUV between the lines until in the short distance the light on the other side of the tunnel beckons. It changes from the amber rush of the overhead lights to the brightening sun of a November morning. I used to hold my breath until I emerged on the other side of these passages, but today I can only concentrate on the straightaway ahead and keeping between those lines. Outside the tunnel the air swirls with the first snow I’ve seen this season. It’s becoming harder to see now because of the cluster of cars kicking up slushy rain and salt and flakes. Intrusive thoughts tell me one slip on the black ice, and I’d go careening off the side of the mountain—crashing into the valley of houses and businesses below.

I guess this careening out of control makes sense. It’s how I’ve made most of the major decisions in my life. It’s how I moved to South Jersey eight years before my current home. There was a blizzard that time too along with another single carload of possessions, my last paycheck, and a man waiting for me on the other end of the drive. Four years after that crash landing, I made the drive in reverse with another hastily packed car, a broken heart, and a worried family waiting for my return. 

While I was still in college, about two years removed from the Buick Century, I became the proud owner of my second car. This one, a bright red coupe with a sunroof, was the physical manifestation of what I thought I wanted. It had speed and a powerful engine that would last for years, and I bought it myself. I could go where I wanted when I wanted, as long as I had money for gas. I worked three jobs at times to avoid asking for help from anyone. No matter how hungry I was or how I had to scrape together the money to put a few dollars of fuel into the tank, I was free. I drove everywhere with the windows down and the sunroof popped, flipping through the book of CDs on the passenger seat without taking my eyes off the road. 

But one day, on my way to a party in Columbus, Ohio, the car broke down. Stranded on the side of the road, I called a tow. The tow truck driver was wild. He bounced us full speed down the backroads with the windows down while he sang some song I’d never heard, my little red car trailing behind us like a flag in the wind. Before long he was dropping the car into my parents’ driveway. My father met me at the door, ready to figure out the issue and get things repaired, but I didn’t care. I hitched a ride to the nearest Greyhound station and within a few hours was in a sweaty club with my college roommate and her hometown friends, staying until the lights came on and we headed to a nearby Waffle House. In the sweltering club, with a few drinks in my system, I forgot about the car broken and parked three hours away. I forgot about the disappointed look on my father’s face when I grabbed my bag out of the trunk and started making calls. As I moved my body to the music that night, I was exactly where I wanted to be. Fully grown and answering to no one. 

The drive starts to take its toll and I begin to think I should pull over because my hands are cramped from my grip on the wheel. I’ve been worried that the wind is pushing me too close to the shoulder or too close to the construction barrier between me and oncoming traffic. I may have inherited a lot of things from my grandfather, but an absence of fear is not one of them. I let go of the steering wheel with my right hand and crack and shake my fingers. Let go with the left–crack and shake those, too. I roll my shoulders and shimmy my body until I am no longer slumped in my seat but sitting tall with my spine fully extended. I tell myself that in another few hours I could be pulling into my parents’ driveway and walking into a house that smells like every holiday I’ve ever known–my mother’s pound cake and baking ham. But I am hot and tired and hungry and glancing at the ETA so often that I’ve chiseled this trip down to individual miles. 

I’m still putting miles between me and the empty apartment I’ve left behind when my phone rings through the speakers. My dad’s voice slips its way out of them and asks how far away I am. I tell him almost halfway and he jokes it’s the result of the trucker’s blood flowing in me from my mother’s side of the family. This is the same dad joke each drive. Every single time he says it, I laugh because if I wasn’t so anxious I’d push my SUV to nearly empty trying to make the drive in one shot. But the older I get the more I spread out the miles. And yet, hearing his voice pushes me to keep going. 

I stop to top off my gas tank, shake off some of the dust of the city, and get ready to plant my feet into the grass behind my childhood home. The miles tick away a bit faster now, whittling down the turnpike’s construction and curves. Another few hours and I’ll be at the end of the road. First entrance on and last exit off is always the plan for these drives. Then I’ll take the back roads just over the Ohio border and slow down to a residential speed. 

Off the turnpike, I pass the signs for Youngstown, Ohio—another destination I’d careened into with a packed car and too many dreams. Another city I’d watched in the rearview mirror when it didn’t work out or it was time to move on. Just like Camden and Akron and Kent and Millville and maybe now Philadelphia. 

I was away when my grandfather died and again when my grandmother passed twelve years later. My wandering and drifting have started to sputter because of this. Because of the guilt. Whatever freedom I’ve felt between the miles of house and home has started to dwindle. The distance has become too great to ignore. The distance of heart and body. What has started to churn deep within me is a desperation for a new path. One of those parallel roads again. This one runs beside my burning need to be untethered and my fear of staying away too long. I have a chance to accept my grandfather’s gift now. Not a car or advice on how to maintain them. I can accept the idea that some of us are a little more shallowly rooted than others, and that’s okay. Some of us are like maple seeds cantering on the wind–floating until they find a place to land and sprout. 

An hour out from my parent’s house, the world becomes familiar once again. I recognize the names of family farms dotting the small roads. I bounce over and see the political signage shift red from the sanctuary city in which I reside. The speeds rapidly drop. Fifty-five. Forty-five. Thirty-five. Twenty-five in the span of a mile until just over the rise of a hill a police cruiser is tucked behind a sign. There is no pack of cars to hide me, so I take my foot off the gas entirely and coast past him—glancing in the rearview mirror for what’s behind me instead of paying attention to what’s ahead. There is a story in there, I joke with myself. How I’d been so concerned about the past trailing me down the road that I paid little attention to where I was ending up. 

A few more miles and I end the route on the bright navigation screen. My heart, and the landmarks around me, tell me where I am. I make a right hand turn onto my parents’ block. My tires kick up a spray of dried leaves and gravel when I turn again into their driveway. The door is open, the glass slightly fogged from the heat of the kitchen just beyond it. I step into the warmth of the house, into the warmth of the smiles at the top of the steps. I am finally at mile zero, back where I belong.


 

Born and raised in NE Ohio, ATHENA DIXON is the author of the essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman (Split/Lip Press) and The Loneliness Files (Tin House). Her work also appears in publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and serves as the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press. She resides in Philadelphia.



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