Go West, Young Woman!

Next week will mark thirty years ago that I packed up my belongings in a red 1976 Mazda 626 (great car) and drove across the country (alone) to a place I had never seen before (Reno, Nevada.) I had friends to stay with, but no job. I had enough money for about six weeks, maybe eight weeks if I stretched it. A couple years later, I moved to California and I've been here ever since.

To say I was naive is putting it mildly. I was born and raised in a small town in western Pennsylvania, and had been to Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky. Maybe a couple other states in that part of the country. I'm not sure. On the surface, I was following God's Will For My Life, as I saw it at the time.

Under the surface, I had been discontented for a long time. Knowing that there was more out there for me, wanting to find it, wanting to see it, wanting to do it. I felt at times like I was going to suffocate in that little town, although it is quite common that people who are born there, live there for their entire lives and die there, quite happily knowing that they are home. Even deeper under the surface was the as-yet-unrealized need I had to put miles between my mother and me so I could heal. It was my opportunity, and I seized it.

I was twenty-four years old. It's kind of crazy, a girl that young all by herself, driving west. But it was crazy in an exciting kind of way. I took Interstate 80 the whole way, stopping each night well before it got dark. It took me five days. I was careful to have my car serviced before I left, and I drove safely and took care of myself. But as I think about it now, there were no cell phones, no way to get help, long stretches of highway with pretty much nothing. I guess a lot of bad stuff could have happened, but it didn't. An April blizzard in Nebraska with a tractor-trailer jackknifed on the highway meant that I stopped for the night in Omaha instead of Lincoln as planned.

Whenever I get scared of new things, of stepping outside my comfort zone, I think of the 24-year-old me. Driving along I-80, in a little red car with white seats, singing at the top of her lungs. Knowing that there wasn't anything particularly bad about where she was, but being sure there was something better out there.

She gives me courage, that young woman who was afraid, but didn't let fear stop her. She's still inside me. And you know what? Sometimes being afraid isn't bad at all. Sometimes it's exciting.

Susan

With apologies to John B. L. Soule.