Hormonal Highways
It’s been driving humans to perform some of the most extraordinary and foolish behaviors in our long history. The desire to be with the person you care about and love are often found at the root of our most illogical and irrational actions. As a 21-year-old guy who just graduated from college with no serious plans for my future and dealing with raging hormones, I focused on figuring out the answer to one question, and one question only. I didn’t care about having a job in June during one of the most beautiful seasons of the year. I wanted to see my girlfriend. I just had to figure out how to end up in St. Louis incidentally. Then people wouldn’t think I had lost my grip on reality. For the first time in my life I had a specific goal for a trip: I wanted some action after not seeing my girlfriend for six weeks. I ended up learning that this desire only played a partial role in the ensuing weeks.
The road trip started without any specific goal other than heading towards Niagara Falls for a weekend trip. As I would soon realize, this trip didn’t have one definite goal. I wasn’t solely going to St. Louis to see my girlfriend, or driving to new cities to explore the viability of me living there in the near future, or meeting up with family and friends, or just taking in the sights. It ended up being a combination of numerous motivations, but something that helped get my motor going was a feeling of separation and loneliness. I wanted to reconnect with people who were extremely important to me as well as living the exciting life only travel can provide.
Niagara Falls was in the state of New York so it didn’t seem that ridiculous to head there for a weekend trip. What I soon realized was that New York is a very large state. The 440-mile drive from my home in Long Island to Niagara Falls was one of the most painful traveling experiences in my life.
I had just arrived from a ten-day trip through Israel experiencing ungodly temperatures that averaged over 100 degrees Fahrenheit daily. I had trekked through the Negev Desert in southern Israel staying overnight with the Bedouins helping prepare their meals, riding through the desert camelback, and climbing mountains to watch the sunrise. However, as I sat stuck in gridlock traffic along the Palisades Parkway, 400 miles away from my destination the desert seemed infinitely less frustrating. Somehow, New York City traffic had expanded outwards for 50 miles as it took a painstaking four hours to drive the first 100 miles of my trip. The drive seemed equally unbearable to my 12 hour bus ride over dirt roads from Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the Thai border, where an elementary-sized school bus was filled to maximum capacity with 20 strangers and the air conditioning didn’t seem to work which made the 90 plus degree heat seem even more agonizing. If I was able to move my legs in that bus, or even change seating positions, that would have made the drive somewhat more relaxing but my body was stuck in an immobile position. The bus driver also seemed to have a knack for finding every pothole in Cambodia as my traveling partner and I managed to survive the most turbulent and patience-testing trip of our lives. I kept reminding myself of these challenging times I had experienced over the past few months as I sat in the drivers seat going nowhere, but nothing seemed to make the New York gridlock enjoyable.
Eight hours later I collapsed on my hostel bed in the small town of Niagara Falls, New York with one certainty in mind – I sure as hell wasn’t going home any time soon. Visiting Niagara Falls was identical in purpose as so many of my past trips had been – I wanted to see something new.
The water crashed on the rocks hundreds of feet below creating a thick white foamy discharge and a calm-inducing mist as I walked along the New York section of the Falls. I snapped my pictures, crossed over to Canada for the breathtaking views, and called it a day at mid-afternoon after running out of things to do and see. Like so many of my previous trips, my guidebook led me from sight to sight and city to city, and ended up being a good disguise during this section of the trip as I made my way from Niagara Falls to Cleveland to see my best friend from college, Chris, claiming to my friends and family that Lonely Planet suggested I should stop by Cleveland before heading to Detroit.
The road trip never had one set goal, or purpose, and if there was any unifying feature to the entire 5-week trip it centered on not having to return to New York and enter the reality of the post-college life. Road tripping provided a deep sense of freedom, individualism, and power over my life. I knew where I wanted to go, and what I wanted to see, and whom I wanted to be with. New York provided nothing other than confusion, unemployment and a large tag that read, “Bum.”
Cleveland’s most redeeming feature is that Chris lives there. Driving through it’s heavily industrialized downtown, and silent streets helped me realize that an alternative goal of the road trip was not only to determine where I’d consider living, but also where I wanted to stay far away from. Cleveland was a city that fit into the latter group.
When I arrived in Cleveland I quickly realized that I couldn’t really go home. I was even further from New York, and more importantly, closer to Chicago than I had been since my time in school at Kenyon in the Amish Country of Ohio. I had a plane flight scheduled from New York to St. Louis the next week, but knew that I could always cancel my ticket and use the credit on a future flight. My main concern was realizing that if I drove to Chicago I was setting myself up for driving down to St. Louis, and although this was an exciting realization I was also concerned that I was losing my mind.
My heart started beating at a much quicker pace, and adrenaline ran through my veins as I departed the next day from Cleveland en route to Chicago. I had already been on the road for four days and was almost 1,000 miles from my family and closest friends and was heading to a city that solely represented failure in my mind. I had interviewed a few times during the school year in Chicago but was unable to land any position, and as I made my way into Chicago’s commercial Loop, the realities of the challenging job market and unemployment racked inside my mind. Even though my heart and body was in a state of elation realizing I was a few hour drive from St. Louis, I meandered my way through a city that reminded me of the challenges that lay ahead in my life.
Walking around the Loop, frolicking through Chicago’s Millennium and Lincoln Parks, basking at its beach and checking out the Frank Lloyd Wright neighborhoods removed any doubts I had to whether or not I should consider living in Chicago, as I instantly fell in love with the city and what it offered. There was shopping galore along the Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue, and bars aplenty on Division Street. Most importantly, the city was celebrating its annual Restaurant Week as I sampled the local cuisine without having to spend a fortune. The clear blue sky and radiant sun made Chicago seem as if it were an offspring from the Garden of Eden, and for that week I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else in the States. Unexpectedly and without any warning I had fallen madly in love with Chicago.
I found myself prancing through parks, and sighing along the beach, and feeling hopelessly romantic when I suddenly realized that a much more passionate and tangible love was only a few hundred miles away.
Perhaps I desired to see one of the most beautiful natural sights this world has to offer in Niagara Falls, or maybe I felt compelled to re-hash old memories and create new ones with Chris. I could have wanted to expand my knowledge of my country walking through the streets of one of its greatest cities in Chicago, or maybe I just wanted to satisfy my urges in St. Louis. I stopped trying to label the road trip with any particular goal because as I had learned from all my previous trips around the world - what I may want to achieve or see in the beginning of a trip may radically change once I’m on the trip. In each passing city I experienced drastically different feelings, but I’d be foolish to not admit that I hit the road for the same reason as always: I was passionately in love with moving and experiencing new things, and hell, I was 21 years old and was in serious need of a good time, even if it was 1,000 miles away.
Tags: Travel Writing Class
