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There is that moment in time when you know everything is about to go horribly wrong. It’s that feeling that comes just after the doctor tells you something unimaginable, or when your car starts sliding on the ice, or when someone looks at you and you realize they are choking. It’s when you realize that all the terrible things that happen in the world actually could happen. They do happen. And they are happening to you.

* * * * *

Thursday, May 17th. We are going down a 10% grade (think very, very steep). The bus will not stay in first gear – it keeps kicking up to second, forcing me to use my brakes. Each time I push on the brakes the air pressure drops, and drops, and drops.

Suddenly my foot is flat against the floor and the brake will not stop us. I bring my other foot over. Now I’m pushing as hard as I can on the brake with two feet, pulling on the steering wheel to try and leverage my weight.

“Can you stop?” Maile asks me, a tremor in her voice.

We are only going ten miles per hour, but that is increasing, and soon we will be going much, much faster. I look up at her quickly. I don’t say anything. I just shake my head, no, and try to push the brake harder. Nothing. Ahead of us the road curves to the left. Beyond the road, a thousand feet of air and rock and evergreens. Beyond that, the town, like a tiny model village. Far beyond that, more snow-capped mountains.

We are driving through the Teton Pass, 8472 feet above sea level. And our brakes no longer work.

* * * * *

Thirty minutes before that, we climbed the Teton Pass, amazed by the view. The mountains’ peaks, a harsh mixture of rock and ice, split the clouds. Warnings of a 10% grade didn’t alarm me, although they would be almost double the highest grade (6%) we had encountered up to that point.

We stopped two or three times on the way up to let the bus’s engine cool. The angle of the road began to unsettle me – creeping along at 5 to 10 miles per hour up that mountain, sometimes it felt like the bus could simply stop and coast backward. Eventually we made it to the top.

The view was like nothing we had seen on our trip. The mountain, over 13,000 feet up (5,000 feet above us), was covered in evergreens, a hearty, rugged color broken only by the rock faces of cliffs. I didn’t look forward to the trip down the mountain, but I determined to keep it in first gear and ignore anyone behind us who got upset about our tortoise-like pace. They would just have to deal with it.

I like to keep my posts at around 500 words, so I’m going to continue this one tomorrow. To all of those folks who posed questions to me last week, I hope to have a post with the answers by Friday. Thanks! (And if you’d like to ask me anything about our trip, go HERE and leave a question in the comments.)

Nevada contains inconceivable stretches of wilderness. Salt flats and brush and distant, crumbling mountains feel endless, like some kind of blue funk you can’t quite shake. But there is also something serene about mile after empty mile – a peaceful longing that makes me want to pull the bus over, buy 1000 acres for $6,000 (as the signs offer), and build a small shack in which to spend the rest of my days.

There is something the opposite of serene when you see the bus’s temperature gauge creep upwards on every uphill stretch. There is an internal tension, a focus of will power, a determining that the small red needle will not move any further. And then it does, creeping up over 200. 205. 210.

Then the red light blinks on. The bus shuts off. Since it is impossible to coast to the side of the road when you’re going uphill (at a snail’s pace to begin with), you put on the parking brake, the four-ways, and turn off the engine. Parked in the right hand lane of a two-lane highway.

And there you sit. Sixty feet of vehicle. You might as well drop a mobile home on I-80.

* * * * *

I have many responses to things going wrong. Sometimes I run around like the proverbial chicken, bouncing from one possible remedy to the next. Sometimes I sulk, entering that endless wasteland. Sometimes I lay awake at night, my brain on overdrive. Worry is usually the fuel on which all of these responses feed.

But when the bus overheated, there was one thing we could do: wait.

We waited as the tractor-trailers flew by, shaking us with their passage. We waited as tiny cars we had passed some time ago whirred along. We waited.

So often I try to busy myself to avoid the waiting, and in that busy-ness I miss so many of the things I could have learned, had I embraced the wait. I miss out on life by filling it up with artificial distractions.

After the diagnosis.

After the rejection.

After the failure.

Then, something beautiful: in the midst of the waiting, and the pain, and the disappointment, I find something. Maybe it’s just a small yellow flower growing in the shade cast by a rock. Maybe it’s another way forward. Maybe it’s a different opportunity.

Or maybe it’s an unopened container of coolant in the belly of the bus.

Sam is troubled in his sleep. He rolls from one side to the other on the couch in the bus’s back bedroom. The dim light we leave on for him lights up only one side of his face, the way the sun lights up one side of the moon. Always one side.

He looks like he might cry. His face crinkles up. Then he’s okay, again, having found some elusive peace. He rolls over.

My love for you comes easy
And it lingers very late
I’ve trouble sometimes to find where it hides
but it always shows its face

The next morning Cade climbs up in the passenger seat with a silly grin on his face. He talks to me for 60 miles about Lego castles and the true state of ninjas in the world. Then, when he runs out of questions, he realizes he is hungry and retreats to the back of the bus where he promptly body slams his 2-year-old brother.

Maybe in a deep dark canyon
or underneath the stars
lying in the deep deep grass
My love roams far

Abra points out every letter “A” on I-80 from Reno to Wells, both inside and outside the bus. That’s 250 miles of A’s. Enough said.

Roam far
Roam far
Lying in the deep deep grass
Love roams far

Lucy gently ushers the younger two into the short hallway on the bus and organizes a play time. They laugh and shout and call her “Sissy.” She uses a schoolteacher voice to stop their fights. She smiles peacefully and is a good sister to them.

You can count the constellations
or the wolves as they howl
Count my love for you if you want to
Won’t do no good anyhow

Roam far
Roam far
Lying in the deep deep grass
Love roams far

* * * * *

Italicized words are from the song “Roam Far” by Jake Lewis off of his album Location, Location. Simply amazing album, folks. Check it out HERE.

Three questions for you today – leave your responses to any or all of them in the comments section:

1) What is your worst road trip experience?

2) Ask a question, anything related to our trip, and I’ll answer it later in the week.

3) What’s your favorite brand and flavor of ice cream? (We’re kind of obsessed.)

We prepare to leave the small campground outside of San Francisco. The old couple from the neighboring RV comes over to our bus to talk. The wife is direct and assertive and eager to say that when she first pulled up and saw we had four children, her heart sank. But she gushes over the kids, collecting their names and ages like butterflies to pin on a board, saying over and over again how well-behaved they are, how she can’t believe the HOURS they played quietly at the picnic table between our two vehicles.

Her husband stands quietly behind her, tossing one-word interjections into the conversations (disarmed grenades). She mostly rolls her eyes at him or waves her hand, as if he is a pesky fly. They watch as I hook up the van. They wave as we drive away, though we’ve only spoken to them for about five minutes.

The mountains of California shed their houses as we drive up and east. Altitude: 2000 feet. The trees grow tall and straight, cedars or pines or some other evergreen. In the distance we see snow-covered peaks.

Today
You were far away
And I
Didn’t ask you why
What could I say?
I was far away
You just walked away
And I just watched you
What could I say?
How close am I
to losing you?

Sam, our youngest, only 2 1/2 years old, is our scenery buff. When the bus is still he terrorizes us with his sticks and his loud, growling shouts of “Show yourself, Red Rackham!” But when the bus is moving, and we wheeze up into the mountains, and Maile and I start shouting for the kids to come and look at the amazing sights, he is the first to come shooting up the bus aisle, launching on to the sofa or the booth, staring out the massive windows.

Long after the other kids lose interest, he sits there, arms resting on the narrow window will, nose pressed up against the glass, constantly imploring me to take some dirt road or to get closer to the edge of the bridge. Every mountain is a ‘cano (volcano). Every narrow river stream is a waterfall. In other words, he lives in a perpetual state of amazement, enraptured by this journey we so bravely take through a land of volcanoes and waterfalls.

Tonight
you just close your eyes
and I just watch you
slip away
How close am I
to losing you?

We stop close to the peak – Altitude 7200 feet. The shadowy ground off in the evergreens is covered in an icy layer of snow. I can only imagine how deep the snow must have been at one point, if small drifts of it have survived to see this 70-degree day. Massive rocks bigger than our bus poke through the ground like broken bones. Whispers whisk through the trees, secrets I can only know by following them into the shadows.

I take in a deep breath of the cold air and walk back to the bus, leaving those secrets to be discovered on some other journey.

Hey
are you awake?
Yeah, I’m right here.
Well, can I ask you
about today.
How close am I
to losing you?
How close am I
to losing you?***

We descend back to earth. We stop at a truck stop, where we will spend the night. I step out of the bus for a breath of fresh air. Some sort of beaming light at the back of the bus attracts my attention. I walk toward the west, toward the mountains we have just crossed over.

It’s the sun, dropping down behind the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Great clouds of dust billow around us.

***The italicized words come from The National’s song, “About Today,” a staple on this trip.

I’m writing this on Sunday night in the bed at the back of the bus. It’s peaceful in here: the three oldest kids are in their bunks with the occasional complaint about an early bedtime; Maile is writing at the front of the bus; and Sam just crawled into bed beside me, sucking his thumb and turning his blanket around and around and around, looking for the corner where the label sticks out.

Monday, the day you’re probably reading this, represents a rather momentous day for us: for the first time in three months and over 5,000 miles, we head east. Our trip began back in February when we headed south down the east coast, meandered through the southeast in March, drove west through Oklahoma and Texas in April, then cruised north up the California coast.

But on Monday we head east.

* * * * *

So many feelings surface as I consider heading east: relief that the trip is almost over; dread that the trip is almost over; excitement to see what the next few months will hold; fear about what the next few months will hold. Heading east means returning to friends and family, a community that we miss and the place I grew up. All good.

But this adventure, in its messiness and its fast pace and its immediacy, sometimes allowed me to overlook the everyday, pressing sorts of big picture issues I’d rather not be thinking about. Such as the fact that my current projects end in June. Such as the fact that right now we do not have a home. Such as the fact that we’re not sure where we will end up. Such as the fact that our travel expenditures have exceeded our budget by a good bit (thanks, diesel prices).

Returning home from such an adventure means laying aside the exciting for the practical, the unexpected for the everyday.

But I’ve concluded that this, also, is a good thing. The adventure, while it lasted (and continues to last for the next month), has broken many areas of my life down to their most basic elements, and then allowed me the space and time to build those areas back up. My marriage. Being a dad. Writing. Mile by mile, I’m reconstructing myself.

* * * * *

So tomorrow we head east. It’s hard to believe. There isn’t a whole lot that I can tell you about what my life will look like in a month’s time. Where we’ll live. What I’ll be doing for a living. But as I write those words, I realize that whatever does happen will simply be a continuation of this grand adventure we’ve been on, and I’m okay with that.

Better than okay – I’m eager for it. I’m eager to live this life. Just about anything is possible right now. I’ve decided to let that fill me with a sense of anticipation, and not a sense of worry.

Thanks in advance for traveling with us down the home stretch. You all have been such great traveling partners. Time to head for the sunrise.

What did the end of your latest adventure look like? How did the transition back into normal life go?