Sarah Hepola's Blog, page 4

Uncertain, Texas

A few years ago, I threw my clothes in the bright green suitcase with the broken zipper, slung my guitar in the back seat, and drove to Uncertain, Texas. I had searched for cabin get-aways within a few hours’ drive from my home in Dallas, places like Broken Bow and Beavers Bend and Turner Falls, but my eyes kept sliding back to a picture I’d seen of Caddo Lake, all the cypress trees dripping with Spanish moss and gothic vibes. When I discovered the cabin was in a town called Uncertain, Texas, I was sold. Sometimes our adventures choose us. Uncertain, Texas — here I come. 

I was working on my first book, but I had hit a wall, or at least lightly tapped it. I became convinced the only way I could move forward was to hole myself up in a cabin in the woods and write furiously and unimpeded. If you are a writer, or have seen one on TV, perhaps you’re familiar with the old “cabin the woods” fantasy, wherein our tortured creative type disappears into nature, Thoreau style, and bangs out pages of surpassing beauty, owing to the writer’s distance from the corrupting influence of, say, Home Depot and In-N-Out Burger.

My father was confused. “But you live alone,” he said. “Why do you need to get away to write?” 

I explained to my dad that the cabin had no wi-fi. No cell signal. I would be gloriously unreachable.

My father, again. “But wouldn’t it be easier to turn off the phone and wi-fi in your own home?” 

Long sigh. OK, technically all this was true. But but but: A cabin in the woods. Also, I suspect there was boy drama. I can’t remember the specifics now, but based on my history, I was probably wanting to do one thing, and knowing I should do another, and tugged helplessly between those two poles, with a voluminous text thread to prove it, and I wanted to get the hell out of that place, so I bolted to a retreat where the outsides matched my insides. I felt haunted, so I chose a place that looked haunted. I was ambivalent, so I drove to Uncertain.

The name Uncertain, Texas, comes from the town’s location on the border with Louisiana, as though the land itself can’t decide which state it’s in. If “Uncertain, Texas” sounds like the name of a novel that get turned into a movie starring Tommy Lee Jones — well, I was already writing passages in my head as I drove down a path of hippie trailers and quirky cabins with wind chimes and wooden roosters. I was staying in a rustic studio with a Murphy bed that pulled down from the wall. The place had no stove, no microwave, so I mostly ate peanut butter sandwiches. The bathroom had this stray bottle of Silkience shampoo, a brand popular in my youth, and the name was so evocative of a million TV ads starring luscious blondes and their cascading locks that I thought it might make a good title for a nostalgic young-adult tale about growing up in the Eighties. So there you go: Less than an hour at the cabin, and I had my novel-turned-film (Uncertain, Texas) and my YA book (Silkience). When it grew dark, I walked to the end of the pier and laid on the wooden planks to look up at the stars. I kept hearing this line from a Rhett Miller song: Everything is going to change. Isn’t it strange?

the canoe at my cabin

I got very little writing done the next day. You knew that was going to happen, right? There was so much pressure! I had a meltdown the day after that, because I literally stared at the same three sentences for several hours, and then the third day I strummed the guitar till my finger pads hurt, and I took the canoe out on the water, and then I walked under the cool shade of the spooky cypress, consulting them about my various romantic dilemmas, and I drove to a neighboring town to eat something other than peanut butter sandwiches, but I got caught in one of those torrential downpours where you literally cannot see in front of you for a few beats as the windshield wipers shuttle back and forth, so I pulled over to the side of the road, and I cried. 

There is a kind of exhaustion that’s like a door opening. I don’t know why it happens this way: Sometimes you have to let the doubt and insecurities and procrastination devour you before you can flick them to the side, and do the thing. The next day, I wrote for twelve hours. Furiously and unimpeded. When I was done, I had the first draft of a tough section in my book, one that took place in a Paris hotel room, and I laid down on the floor and stared at the ceiling fan for a long time. And then, I drove to town and sent a text. 

On my last day, the woman who owned the cabin stopped by to see how I’d enjoyed my stay. She was one of these laid-back artist types wearing a white cotton tunic and a long knotted necklace. I asked her what kind of people came to Uncertain, and she said oh, you know, people who are looking for something, or people who are running from something, and I laughed, and I told her I was probably both. 

“You should come back,” she said. 

“I will,” I said, and I drove out of Uncertain for the first time, but maybe not the last.

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Modern Romances

I was wandering around an antiques store in Checotah, Oklahoma (home of Carrie Underwood) when I came across this magazine.

$10,000 in cash prizes. Love at 40. OK, I’m listening.

I’d never heard of Modern Romances magazine, but I picked up the copy, which was sheathed in protective plastic, and I searched for the issue date, March 1939, and the cost to me for buying it. Three dollars, a number that almost exactly matched my curiosity.

“This looks interesting,” the woman behind the register said, as I placed it on the glass counter.

“Doesn’t it?” I said.

“Ten thousand dollars was a lot of money back then,” she said, taking off her glasses to inspect closer.

“Love at forty,” I said, perhaps betraying a bit too much curiosity. “Maybe I’ll learn something.”

“Probably something sexist,” she said, sliding the magazine into a plastic bag, and we shared a laugh, and I headed back into to the crisp late January afternoon and got back on the highway. Lest anyone suspect the world hasn’t changed, please note: The gray-haired lady at the antiques store in Checotah, Oklahoma just made a gender critique.

I bought the magazine because modern romance is a theme of the memoir I’m working on now. The book looks back on past relationships with men, but also with my troubled relationship with my own body, and in conversation, as well as on some mornings when I hunch over my laptop in the pre-dawn, I have struggled to explain how these two themes converge. A writer will search for clues on any surface. Maybe, I thought, cracking open my Modern Romances magazine at a diner down the interstate where I ordered an old-fashioned malted, I’ll find an answer here. 

The cover story turned out to be about Edward, the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated the throne for Wallis Simpson, a stirring love story to be sure, but not one with much relevance to me. I was briefly sucked in by a juicy confessional written by a woman who seduced her sister’s husband (Headline: “He Was Hers, But –“). The font was tiny, though, and the story went on and on, and eventually I began scanning the magazine for ads instead.

Ads are silly in any era, but ads from the early 20th century targeted to women are in a special category of ridiculous.

I found three laxative ads, right on top of one another. At first I was like, what was going on with American women and their bowels in 1939? Then I remembered back to my high school days, when girls trying to lose weight would eat laxatives. A brand named Olive Tablets touted itself as “the laxative of beautiful women.” Then there was this ad for a chewing laxative called Feen-a-Mint.

Of course, women didn’t only want to lose weight. They sometimes needed to gain weight.

It struck me how often men appeared in these ads. They offered approval or disapproval, they dispensed pills and love. It had been less than twenty years, remember, since women had gotten the vote. You couldn’t do much without a man in those days. Doctors gave diagnoses to your husband. Men bought the houses and the cars. Bars remained largely off-limits to women until the 1970s. The Seventies! It’s a constant source of amazement for me — how reduced our perimeter was once.

So the ads were ridiculous, yes, and it was hard not to cringe at the body shaming and flimsy emotional manipulation. Nobody will ever love you if you don’t buy this ointment. And yet, I couldn’t help wondering if the little girl who grew up amid the Madonna videos and the fad diets of the Eighties, and the woman who got sober in the era of yoga pants and mindfulness, isn’t still operating out of some of these core anxieties. I have enough beauty products in my bathroom right now to start my own Sephora. I bought two Keto cookbooks at Whole Foods last week. I order my body lotion from Amazon because I’ve become so enamored of this one coconut scent. And maybe all of this marks me as a capitalist tool, but maybe it’s also because these anxieties haunt us in any era. That we are not enough. That something is wrong with us. That we could get what we wanted, if only this, if only that. What a beautiful fantasy: That we could BUY our way into happiness. That dress, that house, that man.

I tossed the magazine in the back seat of my car, and headed to Arkansas, where I was visiting a friend. I’d brought zip-up boots and my butter-smooth leather jacket for the theater Saturday night, but it snowed so hard the show was canceled, and I hung around her cozy place in hiking pants and a big rainbow sweater.  A couple days later, I stopped in Checotah on the drive home, but the door to the antiques shop was locked. Lest anyone suspect the world is changing too fast, please note: The entire town of Checotah, Oklahoma, is closed on Sundays.

I don’t have an ending to this. I didn’t find my answer, but maybe I found clues. Looking at all these ads reminded of a line Don Draper once said. “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell pantyhose.” I loved Mad Men. I miss Mad Men. Don Draper was so good at knowing exactly what other people wanted. But when it came to what he wanted — he was just as lost as the next fool.

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A hideaway in the mists of cyberspace

In the spring of 2001, I decided to start my own website. Actually, I decided to quit my job at the Austin paper, travel to Ecuador to learn Spanish, and also start my own website, where I planned to share stories of my adventures. I didn’t like the idea of spamming my friend circle with long email rambles. I preferred building a hideaway out in the mists of a still developing cyberspace for anyone who cared to visit. 

I had a name for the site. Sounds Like Heffalump. Blogs were so new that the word blog had just been coined, and many of the ones I followed had wink-wink titles like this.

“Hmmm,” my friend said. 

“It’s a Winnie-the-Pooh reference,” I explained. “My last name, you know — sounds like Heffalump.”

“I get it,” he said, drawing out the words in a way that suggested perhaps it should not be gotten. He had another idea. “What about Sarahhepola.com?”

Just my name? But that was so boring. So unprotected by the modesty curtains of irony and cleverness. 

“That’s why I like it,” he said, and eventually, he persuaded me to this simpler tack. OK, fine: I’ll just be me.  

I bought sarahhepola.com, which, in a stroke of luck, had not been purchased by the two elderly women in Minnesota who share that name. I began scribbling stories, and posting them to the blog, and though there is nothing particularly special about writing online, seeing as how it employs the same 26-letter alphabet as writing for print, there was something very special about writing in that far-flung hideaway out in the mists of cyberspace. See, now we understand that when you write on the Internet, EVERYONE can see it. But back then, the opposite logic applied. Back then, if you wrote on the internet, it was like maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe nobody could see it. Or what about this: Maybe the only people who could see it were the people you WANTED to see it.

I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed writing as much as I enjoyed writing for that early blog, and I don’t think I’ve ever been less aware of who might or might not have been paying attention, and I am convinced those two things are related. I needed both audience and deniability: To believe everyone was reading, and nobody was.

Seventeen years have passed since then. Seventeen years. If this blog were a human, it would be preparing to go to college, listening to Ariana Grande, and lightly sneering at my ignorance of YouTube personalities. (I have no idea what seventeen year olds do. Is this right?) In that swath of time, I watched blogs rise and fall, replaced by a social media landscape where everyone gets their own reality show. I watched the advent of anonymous comments, which rolled like Panzer tanks over the intimacy and goodwill that arose on the early first-person web. I watched the economic floor drop out of my profession. I will leave it to the historians, and the hot shots over at the Atlantic, to determine whether the Internet is good for us, or bad for us. (OK, but: It is clearly both.) Let me just say it gives me no small pleasure to still be around, and I am deeply relieved not to be saddled with some twee Nineties bullshit like SoundsLikeHeffalump.com. 

Today I launch the new design of SarahHepola.com. The site was designed by the amazing and indefatigable Bill Webb, and it has new features — including a deep archive of published stories, a FAQ, information on Blackout translations, and a blog that I have been quietly adding to for several months. (I also plan to resurface old stories from that early blog that I took off-line years ago, although for now, the blog only dates back about a year.) Blogs are so out of date now that writing on this site has felt new. Post a picture on Instagram and your phone starts strobing with instantaneous feedback, but writing on a blog is quiet and lovely, a bit like climbing into a far-flung hideaway out in the mists of cyberspace, and happily typing away for a while. 

Thanks to the photographers Allison V. Smith, Elizabeth Lavin, and Brandon Thibodeaux for allowing me to use their photos. And thanks to anyone who bothers to read these things. I write them for you.

The post A hideaway in the mists of cyberspace appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

A far-flung fort in the mists of cyberspace

In the spring of 2001, I decided to start my own website. Actually, I decided to quit my job at the Austin paper, travel to Ecuador to learn Spanish, and also start my own website, where I planned to share stories of my adventures. I didn’t like the idea of spamming my friend circle with long email rambles. I preferred building a fort out in the mists of a still developing cyberspace for anyone who cared to visit. 

I had a name for the site. Sounds Like Heffalump. Blogs were so new that the word blog had just been coined, and many of the ones I followed had wink-wink titles like this.

“Hmmm,” my friend said. 

“It’s a Winnie-the-Pooh reference,” I explained. “My last name, you know — sounds like Heffalump.”

“I get it,” he said, drawing out the words in a way that suggested perhaps it should not be gotten. He had another idea. “What about Sarahhepola.com?”

Just my name? But that was so boring. So unprotected by the modesty curtains of irony and cleverness. 

“That’s why I like it,” he said, and eventually, he persuaded me to this simpler tack. OK, fine: I’ll just be me.  

I bought sarahhepola.com, which, in a stroke of luck, had not been purchased by the two elderly women in Minnesota who share that name. I began scribbling stories, and posting them to the blog, and though there is nothing particularly special about writing online, seeing as how it employs the same 26-letter alphabet as writing for print, there was something very special about writing in that far-flung fort out in the mists of cyberspace. See, now we understand that when you write on the Internet, EVERYONE can see it. But back then, the opposite logic applied. Back then, if you wrote on the internet, it was like maybe it didn’t happen. Maybe nobody could see it. Or what about this: Maybe the only people who could see it were the people you WANTED to see it.

I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed writing as much as I enjoyed writing for that early blog, and I don’t think I’ve ever been less aware of who might or might not have been paying attention, and I am convinced those two things are related. I needed both audience and deniability: To believe everyone was reading, and nobody was.

Seventeen years have passed since then. Seventeen years. If this blog were a human, it would be preparing to go to college, listening to Ariana Grande, and lightly sneering at my ignorance of YouTube personalities. (I have no idea what seventeen year olds do. Is this right?) In that swath of time, I watched blogs rise and fall, replaced by a social media landscape where everyone gets their own reality show. I watched the advent of anonymous comments, which rolled like Panzer tanks over the intimacy and goodwill that arose on the early first-person web. I watched the economic floor drop out of my profession. I will leave it to the historians, and the hot shots over at the Atlantic, to determine whether the Internet is good for us, or bad for us. (OK, but: It is clearly both.) Let me just say it gives me no small pleasure to still be around, and I am deeply relieved not to be saddled with some twee Nineties bullshit like SoundsLikeHeffalump.com. 

Today I launch the new design of SarahHepola.com. The site was designed by the amazing and indefatigable Bill Webb, and it has new features — including a deep archive of published stories, a FAQ, information on Blackout translations, and a blog that I have been quietly adding to for several months. (I also plan to resurface old stories from that early blog that I took off-line years ago, although for now, the blog only dates back about a year.) Blogs are so out of date now that writing on this site has felt new. Post a picture on Instagram and your phone starts strobing with instantaneous feedback, but writing on a blog is quiet and lovely, a bit like climbing into a far-flung fort out in the mists of cyberspace, and happily typing away for a while. 

Thanks to the photographers Allison V. Smith, Elizabeth Lavin, and Brandon Thibodeaux for allowing me to use their photos. And thanks to anyone who bothers to read these things. I write them for you.

The post A far-flung fort in the mists of cyberspace appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

Change

The post Change appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

Change

I started getting low around the holidays in my 20s, probably. Something about feeling spat out from the optimism of childhood. It’s almost charming to me now, how early I started feeling old. I liked holidays parties, of course, with their cranberry-colored cocktails, one endless glass of red wine, a little dose of amnesia to make me forget I was faltering. December was all drink, drank, drunk, and then New Year’s Day was staring me in the face, with its promise of new beginnings, self-improvement, purity. This year, it’ll be different.

I must have quit booze a dozen times on January 1. Quit for a month, quit for 15 days. Or the classic unquantifiable: I’ll cut down. Usually that meant I’d cut down for an evening or two, but soon enough I’d be raring to go again, glass filled to the brim. What resolution, now? Change is hard, and change is rare, and it usually doesn’t happen with a flip of the calendar. What I’ve learned is that change comes when you’re ready for it. Change comes because the cost of staying the same gets too high. I didn’t quit booze in June 2010 because purity and self-improvement recommended themselves so strongly to me. I quit booze because drinking got so bad. There is a saying in recovery, I’ll leave it here in case anyone needs it: When the pain outweighs the fear, change happens.

Today there are things I’d like to change. I wish I spent more time outdoors. I’m more disconnected from people than I’d like. I wish I were better organized, paid my bills faster, but I got bored just typing that sentence. What’s amazing to me is that I don’t feel some gripping need to change myself each January 1. The calendar flips, a new start. I hope for things. But this year, it’ll mostly be the same.

And then, it won’t, because each year really is different. Usually in ways that defy prediction and resolve. I will meet some new person. I will encounter some new idea, the universe will swerve off-course, I will write a sentence or two that might shimmer when I hold the words to the light. We live in uncertainty, knowing only that change is constant and stubborn at once. Still, and nonetheless: Happy New Year.

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The slow and uncertain process of filling it in

The road back from a road trip can be a drag. I’d taken three luxurious days to drive out to West Texas, drawing a crooked line to the left corner of the state, but I was returning to Dallas in one long afternoon, a mostly straight line along the bright blue vein of an interstate. I’d planned a few stops to stave off boredom. A breakfast-taco joint near the Fort Stockton train station. A Brownwood cafeteria with killer chicken-fried steak whose entryway hung with photos of high school football players gone pro. And then there was the Penny Grave.

I learned about the Penny Grave on TripAdvisor, which led me toward a site called Texas Escapes, which is how I ended up taking an hour-long excursion off US 67 to a desolate spot in Comanche County. The trek would have been much faster if I hadn’t gotten lost, wandering down three unmarked gravel roads before finding the right one. Even my GPS was growing skeptical. Like, maybe turn here? Nothing but abandoned shacks and empty roads around here.

I think about stretches like this when I hear about the overpopulating planet. No room, no resources, people on top of people. That’s city life, but country life? Miles and miles to stretch your legs. I have driven across the U.S., and it is filled with wide open spaces, abandoned by everyone but animals and stubborn mesquite trees. I’m fascinated by the secret worlds of empty pastures.  Does nothing happen here? Does everything?

The Penny Grave is the supposed gravesite of a three-year-old pioneer girl who died on the trail in 1870. No backstory, no context, but the sad tale goes that she died here and so was buried here. Over the years the site became a beacon for people passing through, who began to place pennies on the gravestone in commemoration. “You will never see anything like this again,” read one review I’d found online.

I grew up in Texas, complaining about the heat, and the conservatism, and why on earth my mother would not give us cable. But I was so far removed from the state’s real brutality, its squinty eyes and parched thirst. I spent my adolescence tucked away in an air-conditioned living room watching sitcoms, snuggled in blankets even during the summer months. I own two pair of cowboy boots, one red and one turquoise, and I bought both in a vintage store in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles — that’s how Texan I am. Even my cowboy boots come from someplace else.

But driving across the state, and wandering off the well-traveled corridors, has placed me closer to the past. Imagine this trip in a covered wagon; I can barely manage it in my 2013 Honda. How tough and unsparing such a journey would make a person. Hard to believe anyone was ever nice back then. I often think of Larry McMurtry lines when I’m driving through the Great Plains. This one about the pioneers, from his book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: “They did stare into the emptiness and start the slow and uncertain process of filling it in.”

I was about a mile and a half on the gravel road when I spotted what had to be the Penny Grave. A pile of white rocks and random keepsakes by the side of the road. I had imagined something slightly more, well, grave — but this being America, and this being Texas, the site was surrounded by empty Coors Light cans, plastic flowers, and stuffed animals that had been soaked by rain only to bake again in the sun, their fur acquiring a slick, matted look. A teddy bear in aviator sunglasses holding a large wheel in his hand dominated the pile for no reason I could figure except that someone thought it looked cool. I found it tacky, but then again, maybe the aviator bear was exactly the kind of symbol a three-year-old girl would choose for herself. Once, when I was three, my mother let me dress myself for preschool, and I chose a sequined leotard I’d nicknamed Sparkle Plenty.

There were two gravestones covered in pennies. One read, in a shaky font that appeared to be index finger dragged in wet cement, “Who is the little girl, age three?” The other was neatly chiseled by machine, the kind of headstone you’d find in a proper cemetery: “Little Girl Age 3 Name Unknown Died 1870 Moving West.” I pulled out my wallet, fished out a few pennies, and placed them on the pile.

Look, I don’t know if she’s really there. I find it unlikely that a random gravesite has endured for 150 years. And why? And how? I find it far more likely that a story began in a saloon one day, and a legend grew out of it, and kept growing and growing. But for whatever reason, travelers like me have been making this pilgrimage to the middle of nowhere for years, paying tribute to some anonymous spirit, some idea of loss and hardship, a little girl who died on the way from here to there.

The day was searing hot, late July close to 3pm, and I was wearing jeans and a tank top and flip-flops dusty from the short trek across the road. I did a tree pose on either side, bare foot braced along inside of my knee, to sweep my feet clean of gravel, and then I tried to stand solemnly for a moment paying my respect. To who? To what? It was hard to be serious with that silly aviator bear staring me in the face.

Three years old. I used to work at a daycare in college, and my favorite ages were three to five. You can watch their personalities blossom, but they still want to cuddle. After seven, I’m done with them. Earlier than three, I’m not sure what to do with them. I volunteered in the newborn ward of the city hospital, and I was embarrassed that I didn’t know how to swaddle the babies, but later I realized the mothers didn’t know either. Nobody knows how to do something until they’ve done it.

I heard a sprinkler system kick on. That was weird. Who was watering this empty pasture? At this blistering hour of the day? But there it was, the percussive tschk-tschk-tschk. That loud steady rattle.

Wait a minute.

I backed away from the grave slowly, one dusty flip-flop at a time, my eyes sweeping the perimeter for snakes that never did show. Whatever was lurking in those mesquite trees, whatever was buried under the pile of rocks, had issued a warning to trespassers, and I took heed. My heart was a high pitter-patter as I got back into my car, where no rattlesnakes could reach me, casting a nervous glance in the back seat to make sure I was alone, and then I barreled home, to my air conditioned carriage house with no cable but Netflix and Hulu and Amazon Prime.

You never know how to do something until you’ve done it. You never learn a place until you go. I am a lousy Texan, but I am getting better.

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You were right about the stars. Each one is a setting sun.*

Last July, Texas Highways magazine asked if I had anything to write about, well, Texas highways. Oooh, I did. At least, I had an idea for a trip I’d like to take — out west, where the stars burn so brightly in the sky they look like pinholes punched in black velvet. (A line I used in the story I wrote, btw). I spent three days driving toward the squiggly perimeter of the state that runs alongside the muddy Rio Grande near Big Bend national park, serious no-man’s land where a woman like me can finally find some peace.

Read about my adventure here. This is how our story begins:

“One sunny morning in July, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday, I slide into the driver’s seat of my car and head south. I pull onto the highway, a map of Texas in the passenger seat, like an ancient rune from a time before GPS, and I watch as the billboards turn unfamiliar and disappear. Big-box stores and strip malls turn to metal silos, oil refineries, and  wheat fields.

I wonder if such a small act of freedom will be unfathomable to future generations. You know, when robots have taken over and no one actually drives anymore, and we all just plug into the cloud of immersive reality or something. I wonder if stories like this one will sound as impossibly ancient as the pioneer wagons did to me when I was growing up in the ’80s, flipping through old-timey Westerns on the couch with a sleeve of Ritz crackers in my lap. Long ago, little girl, there was a thing called a road trip, and brave Americans took to the interstates in a machine filled with gas and good guesses—not because they had to, but because they could.”

* the headline is a quote from the Wilco song “Jesus, Etc.”

The post You were right about the stars. Each one is a setting sun.* appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

You were right about the stars. Each one is a setting sun.*

Last July, Texas Highways magazine asked if I had anything to write about, well, Texas highways. Oooh, I did. At least, I had an idea for a trip I’d like to take — out west, where the stars burn so brightly in the sky they look like pinholes punched in black velvet. (A line I used in the story I wrote, btw). I spent three days driving toward the squiggly perimeter of the state that runs alongside the muddy Rio Grande near Big Bend national park, serious no-man’s land where a woman like me can finally find some peace.

Read about my adventure here. This is how our story begins:

“One sunny morning in July, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday, I slide into the driver’s seat of my car and head south. I pull onto the highway, a map of Texas in the passenger seat, like an ancient rune from a time before GPS, and I watch as the billboards turn unfamiliar and disappear. Big-box stores and strip malls turn to metal silos, oil refineries, and  wheat fields.

I wonder if such a small act of freedom will be unfathomable to future generations. You know, when robots have taken over and no one actually drives anymore, and we all just plug into the cloud of immersive reality or something. I wonder if stories like this one will sound as impossibly ancient as the pioneer wagons did to me when I was growing up in the ’80s, flipping through old-timey Westerns on the couch with a sleeve of Ritz crackers in my lap. Long ago, little girl, there was a thing called a road trip, and brave Americans took to the interstates in a machine filled with gas and good guesses—not because they had to, but because they could.”

* line from Wilco, “Jesus, Etc.”

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Saturday in New York City

Last Saturday morning, I woke before dawn in the cozy loft bedroom of my friends’ Tribeca apartment. For mysterious reasons, I’ve been waking up early for the past two months, sometimes as early as 3:30am. I badly wish I could sleep longer, but I’ve also grown fond of these dim and hushed hours before the world stirs. I can be quite productive. I write, I respond to emails, I tap around the Internet. I drink one cup of coffee. Strong, with a splash of milk and the packet of Splenda that, despite my mother’s protestations, I have not stopped using.

But staying at someone else’s apartment made the coffee part tricky. The bedroom was tucked away in back and situated at the top of a narrow winding staircase that looked straight out of a children’s book. Every time I climbed those steps, I felt like I was entering Narnia.

The rest of the apartment, however, had a chic modern vibe. The design was an open plan, so the kitchen was within eye shot of the queen-sized bed, so if I were to use the Nespresso machine, with its insistent counterfeit grind, I would probably wake up the two people who had been generous enough to share their space with me. That was no good.

Shortly before 7am, I snuck out the front door and headed into the crisp morning of late fall. I reached into my purse for my wool cap, but I had misplaced it the previous day. The Uber? My editor’s office? Oh well. The sky was a soul-stirring blue. The garbage trucks inched along the curb, making their robot beeps. I walked over to a hotel called the Beekman, where I had eaten avocado toast the previous afternoon while seated underneath a large portrait of Edgar Allan Poe. The place was so blindingly lovely that I worried someone was going to kick me out, though the place was open to the public. I wasn’t some interloper, but it was hard to believe I could ever belong in any place so beautiful.  A vaulted ceiling stretched at least seven stories high, a long glass case was filled with ancient books, the velvet furniture was as handsome as it was comfortable.

“Do you have any coffee?” I asked a woman at the hostess stand in front of the restaurant, and she gestured like a game-show hostess to a silver carafe on the bar, alongside paper cups.

“Oh, I’m not a guest,” I said.

She shrugged. “Help yourself,” she said.

The place was empty except for two women wearing yoga pants and infinity scarves locked in an intense conversation in the far corner. I assembled my coffee, the splash of milk, the thwack-thwack of the Splenda against my fingers before I ripped the packet and poured the sweet white powder into my cup. I took a picture of the restaurant, with a rainbow cube-shaped backdrop of stained glass that was nothing short of breathtaking to me.

“I’m sorry to be that person,” I said to the hostess, feeling her eyes on me as I adjusted my phone to get a better angle. It still gave me a tweak of anxiety to take pictures when someone was watching. Everything, everything gave me performance anxiety.

“Do you want to sit there?” she asked, pointing to the table.

Oh. Yes I did. “But I’m not ordering anything,” I said. “I don’t want to be in your way.”

She looked around her and stretched her hands into the open space. “If we get a party of 50 people, I might have to ask you to move.”

I laughed. The woman had closely cropped ginger hair and fine bone structure and a smattering of freckles across her nose. She had cool glasses that I think had red frames.

I evaluated the spot with my eyes now, instead of my camera. “I mean, having my morning coffee there would be like the completion of a dream I didn’t even know I had.”

She smiled. “We’re bored,” she said in a quieter voice. “Let me do this for you.”

People often ask if I miss living in New York, assuming the answer will be yes, but it’s not. I don’t miss New York, with its exorbitant rent, and lurching subway cars, and miserable weather in both summer and winter, and streets crammed with strangers and all-too-human smells. But I miss the people of New York. My friends, of course, but also the people you meet when you are going from place to place. New Yorkers are often described as rude, but that doesn’t sound right to me. In my experience, New Yorkers are generous, open, street-smart, and exceedingly helpful. But they are also crunched for time, numbed by noise, and indifferent to the chaos unfolding around them. They’re doing their thing. But every once in a while, you find yourself in a small private corridor with a New Yorker you have never met, and will never meet again, and you notice — how easy it is to connect.

“Do you want me to take a picture of you in that booth?” the woman asked, as I unraveled my wool scarf and placed it on my puffy coat in the space beside me.

“Oh no no no,” I said, though if I were being honest, the answer would have been yes, because I had this fantasy it would make an amazing author’s photo — me in front of that eye-popping backdrop — but I had only just woken up, no makeup, hair untamed, and the woman’s kind offer put me too closely in touch with my own ego needs. “Just sitting here will be fine,” I said, and she gave me a curt nod and left me to my coffee and my laptop.

It was my second and final morning in New York City. I had arrived late Thursday afternoon, in the middle of the first snowstorm of the year, and the city had been thrown into turmoil. No taxis at LaGuardia. George Washington Bridge shut down. Tales of people sleeping in their offices, trudging home though the snow from Brooklyn to Queens. I grabbed my Uber at a hectic meeting spot in a cold garage outside the airport with one-percent battery left on my phone.

“You have no idea how happy I am to see you,” I told the driver, as he placed my suitcase in the trunk of his mid-size black SUV.

“It’s bad out there,” he told me, sliding in to the driver’s seat.

“Let’s get to know each other,” I said, and he gave a good-natured laugh, but we did not get to know each other at all. I stared at my phone for the next two hours, listening to a podcast about human evolution, and he turned up the radio, which seemed to only be playing songs by Rihanna, which might suggest I don’t actually know which songs are by Rihanna. I have a long, rich history of bonding with my taxi drivers, but this guy didn’t seem into it. Maybe Uber drivers are different, less practiced in the art of professional conversation, or maybe it was his personality, or the stress of the weather. The guy gave off a vibe like: Traffic is so bad, please leave me alone with it. He avoided the highways, winding along the clogged back streets of Brooklyn as snow pelted the windows, and he dropped me off at the apartment after 120 minutes together with a long sigh.

“Finally,” he said. And I said, in a louder voice, “Finally.”

That car ride cost me nearly as much as my plane ticket. So no, I do not miss living in New York. Life is much easier in other parts of the world. But I do love New York. And I do love visiting from time to time.

I was close to finished with my coffee when my host texted. “We’re up! Where are you?” I told him I’d return shortly, and I gathered up my things. I left a tip I hoped was generous. The friendly hostess was still at the stand, and I introduced myself formally, placing out my hand, and she introduced herself to me. I told her I loved this hotel so much that I was making up excuses to visit. She understood, she said, she loved this place, too. I pointed to the spot where I’d had lunch the previous day, and the couch where I’d sat drinking a cappuccino once. I told her I’d never heard of the hotel before a few years ago, and she said, well, it’s only two years old. I said, wow, I don’t know anything about this place: Who Mr. Beekman is, or who built it, or why.

She said, “Would you like a brochure on the history of the hotel?”

Yes, definitely. She opened up a low drawer, and there, sitting on a stack of manilla pamphlets was something I never expected to see again. A black wool knit cap with rainbow stripes.

“My hat!” I said, and placed it snugly on my head again.

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