On the Road Again

Last week, when I stood on the platform waiting to take the train east out of Lancaster, I felt like a country boy heading to the big city. And maybe I was. When you grow up running through endless cornfields at dusk and stomping through creeks in the heavy heat of summer and exploring the haunted corners of hay mows while off in the distance you hear your mother calling you in for dinner, it kind of sticks in your blood.

I’ve made that trip to the city many times, but there’s still something exciting about the train pulling slowly away from the station, gathering speed, the rhythmic clack clack clack along the rails. Each stop announced in the crackling overhead speakers, the shuffling of new passengers boarding, the slow easing away. The cars filling up as we get closer to Philadelphia, then New York.

Coming up out of Penn Station in New York City is like nothing else: the smell of hot dogs and piss and diesel, the sunlight glaring down on you, reflecting off the high rises. People, people, people everywhere, from a thousand different places, ten thousand different skin tones and hair colors and every one a story. That’s it, that’s the feeling: it’s like coming up into an ocean of stories.

The view from the train on the way from NYC to Connecticut.

But on that trip last week I didn’t get out at Penn Station—I continued on to Bridgeport, Connecticut, to meet with a client whose memoir I’m helping to write. We spent two days in his office, going through files, searching for stories. I recorded him talking about his expedition to the Antarctic in the late 50s, growing up in the New York City suburbs. We didn’t even stop for lunch.

On the second afternoon, he had a driver take me to LaGuardia Airport so that I could fly to Denver, Colorado, for a different sort of work. Four days spent there with a team of people I’ve grown to love, in the shadow of mountains reminiscent of Tolkien’s Misty Mountains.

We worked, and we stayed up late talking and laughing, and we even spent a retreat day sitting quietly in the high desert, the mountains off in the distance. I wrote in my journal, pages and pages, and read some of Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward:

So now we move toward the goal, the very purpose of human life, ‘another intensity…a deeper communion,’ as Eliot calls it, that which the container is meant to hold, support, and foster.

Have I finally reached that point in my life, when striving is not the goal, when I’m not so much looking off into the distant future but sitting in the here and now?

I want to be in that deeper communion.

The view from Whisper Ranch outside Boulder, CO.

But there is one thing about traveling that I love the most, and that’s returning home. I find it hard to come to terms with how much I love and hate being on the road—it’s a tension that’s hard to reconcile. I love seeing new places, spending time with new people. I love to feel the movement of miles under my body, to know I’m being transported.

But, gosh, I miss home, and it’s all about the people I have to leave behind. Returning to my crew is always sweet.

Maybe what I love about being away is that I get to rediscover being home. Again, from Richard Rohr:

It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again—but now on a new level…A sheep, a coin, a son are all lost and found in Luke 15, followed by the kind of inner celebration that comes with any new “realization” (when something has become real for you)…Falling, losing, failing, transgression, and sin are the pattern, I am sorry to report.

Yet they all lead toward home.

And so, in that way, I found myself returning through the Baltimore Airport, walking out into the warmth of a late spring day, crossing lanes of traffic to where Maile sat in the car waiting for me, a smile on her face.

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