It's Personal
May/June 2008

Road Warrior
How a mother/daughter roadtrip turned into a lesson of a lifetime By Kristin Knight

The elderly couple driving their RV through the heart of the Yukon Territory probably saw innumerable wildlife: bears, moose, caribou—you name it. But I guarantee you they weren’t expecting what they saw coming out of the town of Beaver Creek. In fact, I’m sure they were having quite the lovely time when my mother flashed them. Full on. On purpose.

With one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding my laugh-tired stomach, I almost crashed the car. These poor people had no idea of our silly road game. They had no idea we had been driving for 36 hours, the last two without seeing another soul or even a sign of civilization. Really, all we wanted was a little human interaction, even if it was only the reaction we were looking for. Apparently, we found a way to amuse ourselves amid the monotony of a 2,600-mile roadtrip.

After the fifth time I forced Mom to use cruise control instead of her usual carsickness-inducing driving method, I was sure it would be smooth sailing from there on out. Of course, she never officially passed her driver’s exam, but that’s a whole other story.

Unsurprisingly, my mom’s life was just as out of control as her driving skills. She was a 57-year-old retired attorney and ex–vice president of a global corporation, a type A workaholic who suddenly had such an overwhelming amount of free time she resorted to sending her four college-age kids baked goods in the mail. In addition to overusing the oven, she was overthinking each little detail of her home life. She dwelled on the smallest glitches in my dad’s good-natured personality, agonized over former co-workers’ opinions of her, and acted like a total drama queen. This was not my mother.

So why did I ask her to accompany me on an epic, automobile-confined journey consisting of five straight days of highway? To my surprise, I never once found myself asking that question.The truth is, Mom is a badass road warrior, and she ended up being the best partner in crime I could imagine. The road opened her eyes to a world beyond her recognition. As most people’s do while driving for long periods of time, Mom said her busy mind replayed parts of her life.

“Things I did but should have done better, accomplishments that went unrecognized, successes I should have shared, things that distracted me from whatever it was I was meant to be,” she said.

As we rounded a bend in the road after hours of not seeing another human being, a huge mountain loomed before us.
“I have never seen such immense beauty before,” Mom said. We pulled to the side of the road and emerged from the car. “This scene is like something I’ve seen only in the movies, like the camera sweeping through the mountains in The Sound of Music, but this is real and so, so immense, so daunting,” she said. “I suddenly feel so small, so insignificant.”

After soaking in the view, we climbed back into the car. Mom waited for her mind to turn back on and start rehashing her past or troubling over her future. “All I can do is replay this incredible moment,” she said. “I realize how little I am; and if I’m so little, so are my problems.”

It was the kind of humility I know intimately and even relish, the kind I feel in the pit of my stomach every time I’m engulfed by a landscape larger than humanity’s expansive grasp—in Colorado’s Never Summers, on Jackass Pass in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, on Saint Joseph Peak in the Montana Bitterroots, in so many wild places where pieces of my heart have floated out of my open mouth and away, away forever. And here was Mom, feeling it for the first time, losing a piece of her heart to beauty and the open sky and growing because of how inconsequential her life’s banalities really are.

“I’m just going to sit back, relax, look out the window, and become part of this beautiful, peaceful world,” she said. The wild land did for her what I’ve always relied on it to do for me. Its giant, jagged peaks dwarfed her problems. Its monstrous glaciers scraped away the heavy material layers life has wrapped around her shoulders. There she is again, my mother, Kathleen, just the woman she had always been but, somehow, brand-new.

We saw a glistening, tan-snouted black bear gallop off the road. We saw wild buffalo and bighorn sheep. We saw wide, braided rivers winding through valleys as big as our imaginations. In the Yukon a sea of taiga was a puddle at the foot of the formidable Wrangells. And that brings us to Kluane Lake and Desolation Bay in the Yukon and two hours of not seeing a single other person, car, or sign of human life. Utterly bored, we sped as fast as possible over gigantic frost heaves and shrieked like children when we caught air. And then that poor, unsuspecting old couple. I’m not sure if the pair ever saw Mom’s pair. I’m not sure if they reacted at all. But in the end, it’s Mom and me, driving down the long road to realizing our humility and finiteness, laughing our asses off.