The quintessential experience of the United States has got to be the road trip. From the caravans of Conestoga wagons to the stagecoaches¹ to the railroads and finally to the automobile, the feeling of forging your path into the unknown has been burned into the psyche of those who live here in a way that’s unique.² It’s an infectious feeling, all those possibilities out there just waiting for you to craft a new destiny for yourself.

The thing is, I hate driving. And the classic Americana road trip cemented in the public mind by On the Road and (Get Your Kicks on) Route 66 is largely dead, killed off by the Interstate Highway System. In the ’50s it took ten days to cross the United States by car. Today you can do it in three. All those motels and diners and tourist traps that used to do brisk business alongside the highways are now neatly bypassed at 65 miles-per-hour.

I’m here because, in the aftermath of my father’s stroke last year, we’ve decided they are going to have to stay in New York with my brother.³ That means their house — what was my house for my teenage years — is going to have to be put up for sale. My brother mentioned all this to me back in March, including the fact that there was going to be a car trip from New York back to Cleveland to do at least an initial cleaning and a meeting with a realtor. Along with my father. And my brother’s six-year-old son. This was already sounding a lot like a tragicomic play from the heartland when my brother happened to mention it was scheduled over Passover, I assume for maximum emotional damage.⁴

So I found myself in a car featuring three generations of the Bergstresser family, on my way to clean out my father’s house. It’s an eight-hour drive from New York to Cleveland, which isn’t particularly exacting but is still a lot, especially with a child in the car.⁵ We didn’t make great time. We left a little after 3:30pm on Wednesday and between traffic in Manhattan⁶ and a slow stop for dinner we were barely an hour into Pennsylvania before we needed to stop for the night. We didn’t stop for interesting tourist attractions, we didn’t stop for memorable meals,⁷ we just went as fast as possible to get there and went as fast as possible to get back.

But that’s what highways in the United States have become. You can still find your way off them for the old routes — it’s possible even now to drive the remnants of Route 66 — but it takes a lot longer and you really need to put the effort in. It used to be the journey was an important part of the trip, but the with the advent of the interstates⁸ the way you get to your destination is all but forgotten, merely the dreadful bit you need to endure before you get to where you’re going. And as someone living their life on the road, I can promise you that’s almost exactly backwards. You spend far more time getting places than you do being there. You should take some time looking around while you’re on your way.

It’s typically a weird experience returning to the town where you grew up. It’s particularly so if you’re visiting to empty out the house where you used to live. What pushed this whole thing into surreality is that I haven’t lived there since the ’90s, my mother died shortly after I left, and so much of what was packed away at that time remains for me to stumble upon all these decades later. My father never was one for decorating or cleaning or even for using much space beyond the bedroom, the kitchen, and the living room.⁹ The rest of the house — my bedroom, my brother’s room, the guest room, the parlor, the basement, the sunroom — has largely remained untouched since then.

We needed to shred the thousands of pages of financial material scattered throughout the place.¹⁰ And we met with a realtor to start the process of selling the house. But I mainly needed to sort through the flotsam of my life and decide what needed to be kept. And that’s a heartbreaking task. I went through this once before, going through everything I had in New York before I started traveling. But that was mostly accounting for the last decade of my life. This was vastly more encompassing.

Humans do a lot of weird things and one of them, I’ve always thought, was to construct our identities through objects. These are my clothes, we think. Or books, or furniture, or punk rock posters. Sometimes they’re aspirational; who hasn’t bought a jacket because they wanted to be the sort of person who would wear it? Sometimes they’re advertisements, the way a framed diploma brags about your credentials on your behalf. Sometimes they just acquire a totemic value by virtue of being there throughout your life, like a battered wooden spoon you picked up at a garage sale that somehow survived the last five times you decluttered.

But if your things are who you are, what happens when you throw them out? I have hundreds of artifacts sitting in that house: pinewood derby racecars from Cub Scouts which I built with my father, art work from friends in college, dozens of pulp fantasy novels I read as a teenager. None of these are really me, anymore, but they were once, and as foolish as it feels to keep them it’s actively painful to let them go. In one of the drawers in my bedroom there’s a small collection of stuffed animals. I don’t feel much attachment to them anymore. But there’s a small Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer which I got as a toddler and kept with me throughout my childhood. I considered packing it but instead left it for the cleaners to get rid of, my own personal Rosebud. I can give it up but I don’t know how to disenchant it, turn it back into a few meaningless scraps of cloth and stuffing.

Worse are the things of my mother’s. My mother had a particular arc to their life, starting from fairly modest beginnings. We moved when I was 13 to a much bigger house in the neighborhood, and one of the consequences of that was that virtually everything I grew up with moved with us. There’s a houseful of ’70s lamps and clocks and chairs which you can compare to the more modern ones from the ’80s and ’90s. My mother collected Lladró figurines, and I can point out the handful of figures that traveled with us and the more substantial assortment my mother bought after we moved. There’s paintings on the walls, the more modest ones we started with and the larger, brighter, more sophisticated ones my mother decorated with later.

A big reason for the move was that my mother started working full-time. That’s reflected in the paperwork my mother filed away; there was a drawer in a filing cabinet filled with instruction manuals and warranties for things we bought in the ’70s, exactly the sort of thing you might expect a newly married housewife at the time to be dealing with. That gives way to the minutes for PTA meetings and university transcripts¹¹ and school board elections, which itself gives way to employment contracts and 401(k) forms as my mother reentered the work force.

And then, inevitably, the files change once again. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after I left for college. There was a round of treatments, it went into remission, then returned with a vengeance, having metastasized. The files at this point are doctor’s appointments and treatment notes and pamphlets about chemotherapy. There are plans for a trip to England, which my mother was healthy enough to take, and plans for a trip to France the following year, which my mother wasn’t. There are no more files after that.

So what do you throw out? The answer, unbearably, is nearly everything. All the art, the furniture, the Lladró figures and the curtains my mother sewed and the set of formal china my mother bought for hosting book clubs and the Christmas cards my mother saved and the half-finished embroidery my mother swore to get back to one day … there’s no room for it, anywhere. I can’t keep it. My brother can’t keep it. At some point in the next few weeks someone is going to come by and haul it all away, sell what small portion of it they can, and chuck the rest of it into a landfill.

I took what I thought I could. There’s a small stack of boxes by the door ready to be put into storage. They contain two quilts my aunts made for me, a set of kitchenware including the cast iron skillets I hand-stripped and refinished, a couple Funko figurines gifted by a friend, and a complete set of 3^rd edition Eberron sourcebooks. I wanted very badly to take my mother’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Lladró statuettes, but I didn’t have time to box them up properly and I was sure they’d end up smashed on the other side. I left behind letters from friends, and books that were gifts, and photos from people I’ll never see again. I’ll no longer have all those things to anchor me to somewhere, to someone. That’s one less tether to cling to, out in the wider world.

We did find, going through all those files, a diary that my mother kept during that last year of chemotherapy. I gave it to my brother; I couldn’t manage to do much more than skim it. But I did see the place where the oncologist informed my mother that, at that stage, only 17% of patients survived for more than five years. The oncologist assured my mother that the statistics were often wrong, that they themselves had a patient who survived for almost eight years. My mother, in typical understatement: “That’s not even close to being good enough.”

I did pack one thing. My mother bought a wooden figure of the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. It’s not from either of the Disney versions, nor is it the Tenniel illustration I’ve got tattooed on my back. But it’s unmistakable, with its vest and pocketwatch. My mother liked it quite a bit, and so do I. It’s not even close to being good enough. It will have to do, all the same.

I was clever enough to know, before I even flew out, that I was going to need some serious recuperation after this experience. So I booked tickets for the Bahamas. It’s another country I haven’t visited, another experience I haven’t had yet. I ended up inviting my father along, since it’s one of the few trips I’ve taken that I think will appeal to them. That may be a mistake; I may have booked a short trip to Canada on my own afterwards as a way to recover after the vacation, just in case.

The Bahamas probably aren’t really my thing. I’ve never been particularly fond of beaches, or even of relaxation. But my nerves are seriously frayed and if I ever needed a break, this would be it. Wish me luck.

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Footnotes

¹ So called because you had to swap out the horses at regular intervals — in the United States about every 25 miles — thus you traveled in stages.

² I just read a book called Earning the Rockies by a historian musing about the legacy of the United States’ frontier, in all its good and bad elements. It makes the argument that the experience of being a frontier nation is integral to the way the people of the United States understand the world and their place in it. It’s pretty easy to see how that maps to the romance of the open road.

³ This may, or may not, be a semi-permanent solution. My brother’s lucky (or, perhaps, unlucky) in that they have an apartment in New York City that is, in fact, big enough for my brother, my sister-in-law, two kids, and my father to live. But it’s not that big.

⁴ I mentioned this to a friend who thereupon asked if I was Jewish. And I get the confusion, but no, I’m just a New Yorker.

⁵ Video screens have made the experience of driving better, at least if you’re comfortable plugging your kids in for the entire duration. But the real consequence is the pacing. Kids turn a 5 minute rest stop into a 20 minute one, and a 45 minute dinner break into one that can stretch to two hours.

⁶ The trip from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to the Holland Tunnel, a walk of about 30 minutes, can easily take an hour or longer to drive owing to traffic.

⁷ My nephew is at an age where actually finding food is a problem. They’ll eat cheese pizza and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and honey nut cheerios and hot dog buns. And all manner of candy and doughnuts and cake and ice cream. And basically nothing else.

We drove back in a single day on Sunday, and I had hoped to have one break in the drive where we could sit down and relax and eat some real food. But the Cracker Barrel we went out of our way to visit had a wait of 40 minutes — pancakes would have been an acceptable lunch — and there is nothing my nephew would eat at Olive Garden. Nor McDonalds. Nor Burger King. Nor Subway. We ended up at Sheetz, a convenience store chain with an extensive menu of fried foods and, ironically, virtually nothing I can eat. I ended up having a globby mayonnaise sandwich which may or may not have also had egg in it. My nephew had a hot dog, and mostly ate around the hot dog.

⁸ And, later, with widespread airline routes

⁹ It’s a four-bedroom house, bought in large part because my mother had dreams of hosting family get-togethers around holidays once my brother and I had graduated. It didn’t work out; my mother got sick shortly after we left for college, and never really recovered.

This left my father alone in a house that was far too big, which can’t have been great for mental health.

¹⁰ My father worked as an accountant, and there are stacks of paperwork throughout the house. Most of it is mail; any credit card bills or bank statements or medical reports would be opened, reviewed, and placed on some stack to be forgotten about. We think this habit rendered the office uninhabitable some time around 2015 at which point it spilled over into the dining room and, eventually, the living room.

This is complicated by the fact that those stacks sometimes contain actually important information. We found an unopened 2017 letter from a retirement fund that had only just discovered my mother died in the ’90s and trying to dispense the money, labeled “FOURTH NOTIFICATION ATTEMPT.” And, of course, there’s a lot of tax forms dating back 30 years which we’re pretty sure there’s a legal duty to destroy. And then sometimes we’ll find some odd physical artifact — I found an brand-new Steam controller still in the box which none of us can account for — and so it’s a meticulous process to go through everything.

¹¹ My mother was certified to teach English in Pennsylvania but had to get recertified — at ridiculous effort and expense — to teach English in Ohio. Which my mother did and then never ended up working as a teacher. When I asked about it, my mother claimed they had gone through the recertification process largely out of spite.