(Sorry about the retroactive posting!  This happened on 6/11/14)

There was a tiny moment of panic as we turned onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. What are we doing?  I’m sure the panic was even more so for Margaret, you know, leaving the place she grew up and had lived most of her adult life.  I was just going on vacation, and would be returning to my apartment, job, and friends at the end of August, regardless of how it all  worked out.

It’s funny, I’ve moved around a bit.  But always out of desperation or fear.  I moved to Texas because I had to go to college and the University of Dallas was the only place that accepted me.  There wasn’t a lot of choice involved in that.  But, I’ve never considered that a bad thing.  I’m not great at making choices that are good for me, and left up to me, I wouldn’t have gone to UD.  I was supposed to be there, it was a key to the plan for me, and so God simply took away all my other options so that I followed the only path available to me.  I’ve always thought it was pretty nice of God to make that so easy for me.  But the moves since then (from Dallas to DC, from DC to Portland, from Portland to DC) were not so much the natural progression of one phase of my life into another, but rather the wild flailing of a person trying to escape.  So while I could sort of imagine what Margaret was going through crossing the boarder from Maryland to Pennsylvania, my own experience wasn’t the same.

I hope someday it can be.

You see, the moment I saw the sign “You Are Leaving Maryland” I took a deep breath for the first time in I don’t know how long.  I could feel the difference, as if there had been someone sitting on my chest who’d suddenly decided to take a hike.  I knew it wasn’t just relief that a long school year was over, or excitement about trying something new.  It was a confirmation of what I’d suspected for a long time and hadn’t been ready to admit.

I don’t belong in DC.  And I never will.  Because I don’t want to.

While I love my friends, my job, and some of the advantages of living in the DC metro area, I do not love it there.  The culture tends to be frantic, self-involved, and shallow.  And I see those traits creeping across myself, peeking out in places I don’t want them.  I feel vaguely uncomfortable no matter where I am or what I’m doing, in a way that has no better explanation than “I don’t belong here.”  Every so often I am overcome with a sense of being smothered, a burning desire to run in the night with no explanation to anyone.  I start researching the most un-DC places that I could move and the feeling eases a bit (but never passes entirely) and I chock the whole thing up to stress.  But even when I think as clearly as possible about my future and settling permanently in DC I am always aware of the feeling of wrongness inside me.  I mean, FFS, I’ve lived there a total of almost 5 years, and in my mind it’s still an experiment.

Sitting next to Margaret I realized that I want to be able to leave DC in the next 3 years, and to leave it with her sense of purpose, rather than my own sense of fear.

The sun followed us through Pennsylvania.  Aside from a stop for lunch, a picnic in a parking lot, we didn’t really stop in the Keystone State.  I admit, I was a bit concerned by the signs every few miles along the road that said “FALLING ROCK.”  Why, exactly, was the rock falling all over the place in this state?  Should I be worried that we’d be hit by rock falling from nowhere?

We weren’t hit by any falling rock.

Nor in Ohio when when we crossed into it.

After some prompting from Margaret, I kind of figured out how to find a campsite online, and managed to make a reservation.  Seriously, I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for, or asking about when I called these places.  And then I managed to get the address wrong, so we drove around the same couple miles of Akron Ohio for almost an hour.  “Learning experience” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

But we made it eventually, to Portage Lakes State Park.

The campsite we were assigned was a bit buggy, wet and soulless, so Margaret investigated the other sites, since we were almost the only people there, and picked a slightly more scenic spot.

 

Sadly, there was nothing we could do about the fact that it had rained that day and the mosquitoes were having a party.  When Margaret pulled the small bag about the size of a croquet set out of the back of the car and announced that from it would spring a tent that would shelter us both, I has the overpowering desire to cry “bullshit!”  But really, what was I going to do at that point?  Of course, the tent fit us both and Margaret was very patient showing me how to set it up.

We were eaten alive by the mosquitoes, due to the damp and lack of proper firewood we never got much of a fire going, and the were fucking huge spiders in the port-a-potty.  I’m pretty sure it was a textbook example of what people call “immersion therapy.”