Past and Present Merging on the Road to Anywhere

"As travelers age, we carry along ever more journeys, especially when we cross through a remembered terrain where we become wayfarers in time as well as space, where physical landscapes get infused with temporal ones.  We roll along on a road, into a town, pats a cafe, a hotel, and we may hear stories and rising memories.  Then our past is got with feet, and it comes forth: There, I met her there.  Or, That's the place, that's where he told me about the accident.  Since each day lived gets subtracted from our allotted total, recollections may be our highest recompense: to live one moment a score of times."

William Least Heat-Moon: The Road to Quoz.

I'm driving through a circuitous mountain pass, tight switch-backs, sharp drop-offs--and I remember cruising through the Great Smokeys on the back of Mike's Harley, six years ago, and winding up in Gatlinburg, where we danced at some little roadside cabana, as In Love as teenagers. 

I'm driving down Route 66 on this trip, and I get a whoosh of memories of these same roads fifty years ago: once with my Uncle and two cousins in a red convertible, later with my parents and Bob in a 1962 blue Pontiac.  Time collapses and I can hear their voices in the front seat, and I am a passenger again.  We are singing in the car.

I'm driving through places that remind me of places we traveled in a blue Volvo in the 80s after our house fire, pulling a pop-up trailer.  It was the summer before Will's first grade year, and Day was about to start high school. They are talking in the back seat, and I'm eavesdropping from the front passenger seat.   Those ten weeks, those 26 states, stretch out in memory as the happiest of times.  Day is drawing in her notebook; Will is planning to pan for gold at the next river.    

Any trip takes a traveler through what I call "emotional currents"--just hearing a snippet of a song or getting a whiff of a particular scent can evoke a strong emotional reaction: physical landscapes are indeed infused with temporal ones.

I never know which me I will be around the next bend: daughter, lover, mother--or even some version of myself I haven't met yet.  Unfamiliar landscapes bring out all one's former and present selves,  reviving the past in ways that are both haunting and exhilarating.