Going West

In a few days, my family and I will begin what may be our last long trip together, a car-camping journey to the west coast of the United States and back to Georgia. The kids are adults or nearly adults: our son will be a senior at the University of Texas this fall, and our daughter will be a senior in high school. Maybe we will take more long trips together, but as the children grow, one realizes that the time one can expect to spend with them is increasingly limited. Living only an hour's drive from Austin at the time, we then left our son in Texas to move to Georgia. He has proven to be very self-motivated, getting involved in clubs and activities that suit his science and engineering-tuned mind, but I miss the time we would have spent together had we stayed nearby. Having grown up in a family that remained in the same area for six generations, I realize too clearly what one loses in our very mobile society. I am the only one of my siblings to live out of the state of Texas (from Louisiana to Minnesota to Georgia), and, frankly, I am ready to move on now, having lived only two years in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Some people, I think, have a tendency to wander. Perhaps I am one of those.

This tendency may explain why I hold on so fiercely to tangible connections to the past. I have kept over the years all the letters my friends have sent me; every year I send Christmas cards to friends and family from whom I haven't heard in years and from whom I really never expect to hear. And my husband's family: Lord have mercy--we have letters going back to the mid-1800s. Those people kept everything, from letters to photographs to advertisements from magazines to recipe clippings.

As we prepare for this journey West--or, rather, as I prepare, for I'm the organizer in our family, the one who plans the route, the places to camp, the attractions from which the rest can choose to experience--I think of all those ancestors who traveled west before us: the original Abraham Dugast who headed across an ocean from France to the New World; the descendants who traveled south and west to Louisiana when the British were so unfriendly; the Scotts and Coles and Deweeses and Bentons who migrated across the country from Virginia and Alabama and Delaware and North Carolina. Something propelled them west, a similar something that produces this restless spirit in myself. Oh, I know what it's like to be a part of a community for generations; for twenty years I stayed in the same place where generations of my family had lived. Even today, years after leaving my home, I long for that kind of connection, but it's never occurred again. Instead, I drag my restless body from state to state, and behind it? journals and letters of all I have ever loved.

I am tempted, sometimes, to burn it all. But I can't let go. Maybe someday I'll meet my Death Valley and leave all I've loved beside the wagon-rutted roadway. Until then, well, it's westward ho and a stagger as I drag my past behind.