So Many Possible Lives

May 24, 2015 to May 29, 2015

Sunday brings us to the shores of the Atlantic in Virginia Beach. There we meet up with Erin and Kevin, two friends of Kristen's that she has known since she lived in South Florida years ago. Instead of driving all day, sleeping in the parking lots of truck stops, and eating at restaurants with portions sized for more for livestock than people, we go to a college neighborhood and eat good pizza and drink good beer. We sit around in an air conditioned apartment and watch movies. On Monday we sleep in before heading to the waterfront and climbing aboard a boat full our tourists that takes us out into the ocean. There the smell of salt fills our heads, the dorsal fins of dolphins shoot up out of the water when they come up to breathe, and we look out on the thousands of holiday weekend tourists laying out on the beaches that look like little shapeless specks against the glow of the distant sand. After the long haul across the country in a slow-ass van it's a break we very much need.

Tuesday and Wednesday send us up the coast of Virginia, through Maryland, and into New Jersey. There in the southern suburbs of New York City we spend a few nights with Ryan and Ale, two more friends of Kristen's who came into her life during her time in Florida. They have two young daughters — two-and-a-half-year-old Cayla and six-month-old Eliana. It's a look into a life that I know nothing about — a life of diaper changes, dollhouses, minivans, preschool report cards, bedtime stories, and the kind of routines that have to exist to keep the forward motion of a household of four people from grinding to a halt.

It makes me thankful I haven't yet had to face the challenge of buying a home that's at the same time affordable, not too far from work or from family, has a yard for the kids to play in, sits within the boundaries of a good school district, and doesn't have some sort of fatal structural flaw that will send it crashing to the ground three years down the line. It makes me wonder if I have within me the selflessness it takes to become a good parent. It also makes we want to one day experience the kind of unbounded love and devotion for a child of my own that it's so clear Ryan and Ale have for their two little ones.

Thursday morning we drive the van into Manhattan. I'd heard a lot of stories about how there's no worse place in America to drive than Manhattan, that it's all speeding taxis and honking horns and drivers yelling at you from out the window of their car. It turns out none of those things matter, because there's so much traffic that nothing happens at speed greater than six miles per hour.

We head to Manhattan to meet Agnes, who Kristen met while going to school at UCLA. Agnes also has a new baby, a rounded little six-month-old girl named Ryland. The five of us get together on this sunny early afternoon in Madison Square Park. The walkways are filled with joggers, dog walkers, office and construction workers, mothers, nannies, school groups out on field trips, and the homeless. Every bench is taken and so are most of the patches of grass. It's as far away from the rural back roads of America as we could have found ourselves.

As we sit in the shade along one of the main paths, a guy of about thirty walks up to us. His girlfriend stands a few feet away.

"Excuse me," he says. "Could you please take a picture of us?"

I'm volunteered to do it. As the guy and his girlfriend position themselves in front of the grass and trees with the top of the Empire State Building rising up behind them, I try to set up a good angle for the shot using the mobile phone he handed to me. They might not have that many pictures of themselves from this trip; I want to make sure I get this right. But only a few seconds after I start clicking the shutter release button I notice that the guy is dropping to one knee. It takes a moment for my mind to process what's going on, but soon enough it gets there. Holy shit, he's asking her to marry him. I take picture after picture after picture, hoping like hell that at least one of them will come out great, so that these two strangers will have some kind of record of one of the happiest days of their lives.

The whole thing takes less than thirty seconds. After a few seconds with her hands held over her mouth in shock, the woman says yes, and the crowd of about fifteen people who happened to be in this exact spot at this exact instant break out in a round of applause and the happy engaged couple gives them a modest smile and a wave to say thanks. I have to explain everything that just happened to Kristen and Agnes because the two of them were so locked into their conversation about the finer points of menstrual cups that they missed it all.

Heading away from New York City I think about the people we've spent time with over the past five days and how different their worlds are from mine. I also know that my life at age thirty-two could be like any of them. It wasn't that long ago I had a good life in an apartment in the suburbs. When I was younger I thought I wanted the hard work and high energy that comes with Manhattan or Brooklyn. Had other events fallen a different way I could now be a father to a pair of daughters. All of it makes me think of my favorite passage from one of my favorite books, The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

There's no way to know if the path Kristen and I have chosen is the right one. There are so many possible lives we could have lived, together or separate. But we're here now; we made the choice to go after what we wanted. We're both so proud of that.

Our last day in transit brings with it a series of frustrations that turn the morning and afternoon into a race against the clock. We don't get moving until later than we wanted. It takes longer to clean out the van and drop it off in storage in New Hampshire than we thought it would. The rental car isn't ready when we try to pick it up. There's never enough time, never a stretch longer than about three minutes where I go without wondering if I'll miss the 3 p.m. shuttle bus and have the privilege of spending the next seven hours sitting alone in the Bangor International Airport waiting for the next one while getting fat on Cinnabons and drinks from Orange Julius.

But the aggravation of the previous ten hours starts to fade as soon as I step down out of the bus and start heading through the near-empty campground to find Kristen and Walter. In its place there grows a sharp sense of excitement and the realization that we're here, that we don't have to worry about driving anymore, and that we start cranking tomorrow. With every step my mind further fills itself with thoughts of what it's going to be like to spend another summer cycling across America, this time with the woman and the dog I care about most traveling just in front or behind me.

We take an easy walk around the campground in the shadows of oaks and pines and maples, all with the green and health and vibrancy of life that make late spring the best time of year to be outside. When we reach a broad lawn, Walter rolls around on his back, twisting and grunting with eyes wide open, all of it in response to what could only be pure joy. Kristen and I feel the same; we just do a better job of holding those feelings inside.

Across the street from the campground sits a small white building that's half shack and half restaurant. It serves lobster. The shuttle driver recommended it; said he was going there tomorrow. And I can't help but think that I'll regret having traveled all the way to Maine without eating some proper local-caught lobster, like the experience would be somehow diminished if I didn't. This is how we come to return to our tent in the late evening with a paper bag that smells of butter and holds food so fresh that a wide puff of steam rises out when I pull its sides apart.

When I look inside I find an eyeball staring back at me.

"It's a lobster," I say.

"Yeah?"

"It has eyeballs."

Kristen looks in the bag for herself.

"It has barnacles," she says.

I'm not sure what I was expecting. But instead of a lobster tail that's ready to eat I see an entire one and a quarter pound lobster, intact aside from the fact that it was boiled alive ten minutes earlier. As we inspect the claws and mouth and antennae of the prehistoric-looking thing that sits on a cloth napkin in the middle of the tent floor, it also dawns on us that we have no proper way to break through the red-orange armor that stands between my dinner and me. This is how we come to spend our first night in Bar Harbor cracking open a lobster using the pliers of a Leatherman multi-tool and feeding the scraps to one very happy Westie.

With my hands slick from the residue of drawn butter, I lay back on my air mattress and breathe in deep through my nose. Around us it's the day's last bird calls, the chirps of crickets that we haven't heard in such numbers since leaving Australia back in March, and the shock and awe of our own backfiring. Walter sleeps at Kristen's feet with his chin resting on her right ankle. Even though the map says that home lies more than 4,000 miles to the west, the satisfaction that comes from feeling the evening turn into night from the simple comfort of our tent in the woods of Maine makes it seem like we're already there.

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