In two days, she is 17 hours, 47 minutes and 1,193 miles from home. In a car she’s owned less than two weeks. On a trip aptly named “Grand Canyon or bust.” Not exactly the terminology that sits well with a mother’s heart, but this is what I’m trying to tell you: not much sitting for Sophie girl. Dimly this spring I’ve been aware…. In between the Italy planning and the Italy executing and the travelling girl coming home, and the all-occupying sub job and then the last-man-standing Covid that blew through the Burk Motel…I’ve been aware of this trip. She mentioned it maybe once while we were pounding pavement in Rome. I might have heard something about “road trip” while we hustled along the cobblestone streets and narrow sidewalks of Florence. Over my shoulder, still walking, looking straight ahead so as not to step blindly into the busy city streets…Oh really? “How ’bout that?” mused my maternal instinct.  A trip across the country, where? (The mother of all dumb questions comes with the daughter of all stonewalling) Who with? And When? Two weeks–Wow! What’s that? Camping? Of course, yes, okay–backcountry camping…??! Ok, great. How ’bout that. 

Sophie, who has never appreciated the parental grill ‘n’ drill, releases very little information–as if there really isn’t much to share, after all. As if the thing, whatever it is, could be strung together oh-so-casually and happen, or be abandoned just as easily. Like a teenager trying on outfits before going out, the options splayed across her bed. i dunno mom… i dunno…. It’s pretty much a standing joke–er, arrangement–between us. Whether it’s true or not, whether it’s tenable or not, girl likes it to be like this: I go where the wind blows. Yes, she did. She did say that to me one day when I was all but fed up with lack of plan and communication. Since then I have had to be content with the wind. Yes, I backed off. You bet I did. But I do say funny things like, “Will the wind be blowing you home anytime soon?” Or, “Do you suppose the wind could blow you in for dinner tonight?” Which is quite a mouthful to get out while you are biting your tongue. Later, when we are only days away from this thing, I can’t help it. Maybe u dunno, but I DO. NEED. TO KNOW. For goodness sake, girl. All the technology in the world at our fingertips and I am not allowed to know the next step? So I send the dreaded mom text–inquiring moms want to know. What comes back to me is so Sophie I should be the one to smack me in my own head: a complete itinerary of campgrounds she has scoped out, including backup plans and back up to the back up plans in case–well, in case there are wildfires gone wild or like, half a the oldest park in America has washed down stream after flooding. (Or is that Yosemite?) That sort of thing. That’s. My. Girl.

The day I am supposed to take her shopping for gear I am wide-berthing her since I’m pretty sure I have Covid. School’s full of it these last few weeks. Will and I, the minority maskers, keep at it, dodging the statistics left and right. But I think it got me. Still, I promised her a shopping trip as a subliminal pledge of support. I don’t want to fall victim to that myth of the young adult those other schmo parents indulge in: just because they’re not telling you doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. And this one’s is a-happening. Out my little quarantine window I watch them in the side yard, Bill and Sophie outfitting the Subaru for its maiden voyage: a homemade plywood bed frame that fits neatly over two large plastic storage bins that my credit card found at Walmart without me. Loaded up with all the essentials: a cast iron skillet, a battery powered fan, little tub of “o-how-i-wanna-shower” wipes. Bug spray and Will’s trusty “How to build a fire you can cook on” instructions I found when I was cleaning out the desk. I’m both amused and worried that this made the cut. They are as prepared as prepared can be. Nevertheless, the idea of college women in state parks back country camping fills me with fear and dread. I’m sorry, college girls. They are “women” when they’re safely holed up in the library at 2 pm on a Sunday studying for exams, or doing their laundry with a buddy. They are “girls” everywhere else and especially after 10 p.m. I don’t fear the four legged so much as the two. So we load her up with bear repellent (really, there is such a thing) and pepper spray. Practically interchangeable for all the animals out there. For me, Sophie’s adventurous undertakings balance in my heart between deep pride, “lookatus” Facebook posts and “wha’dieverdotoyou?” introspection as to why exactly she blew out of here so determinedly. Must have been the wind.

But about that tracking App. She keeps taking it off her phone and installing it again. Taking it off and putting it. Back. Just after her 18th Sophie removed the Life360 we’d all been enjoying right up there with our sliced bread. Something she had lived with unwillingly through her high school career, her aversion completely out of proportion to the personal cost, in my opinion. But it was 2020. “Mah-m. There’s no where to go anyway mom, what are you going to do? Stalk me to the upstairs bathroom?” For us, Life 360 was full-circle trip into parental over-management. Our people don’t pre-date cell phones but they do know a world pre-tracking, which has made it difficult to sell the benefits of monitoring. Surely you’ve seen that hysterical meme: “What your mother is thinking when you don’t answer her texts” and then the three photos: (1) a car flipped over in a ditch, (2) a girl up to her neck in quicksand and (3) a kid being put bound and gagged into his own trunk. We tee-hee about this at the dinner table but the mom in me is too ashamed to admit: that’s exactly what I’m thinking.  Still, for the wanderlust set with their feet loose and free fancies, anything that smacks of being known and figured out is all bad. A reign on their independence parade. Sophie especially–wheels up before the ink even dried on her license. It was she begging me at 14 to “drive home” down our street after nighttime swim practice, her long hair still piled in a towel, in braces and fleece pajama bottoms, both hands clamped to the wheel with the seat scooched up so her Crocs could reach the pedals. She didn’t learn to drive so much as live to drive, and the dismantling any electronic “big mother” apps that watched her was just part of her coming of age. Her independence was–and still is–inextricably linked to her AWOL.

Here’s the heart warmer. (That is, you can warm it if you can revive it because this next bit stopped it.) After she was attacked at UVA last fall, the full array of watcher/tracker apps came flying back into use. Yes, we got the 2 am call. No meme nightmarish enough. Late night in the driveway/parking lot. Two men in a car. No mom, not frat guys. Men. Approached them. Chased them. Police called. Searched the premises. Banging on doors, all through our house, mom, and most of the girls were dead asleep. Oh please. Not that word. It’s a vocabulary of terror, and she is still pretty shaken, transferring most of it, I pray, through the phone lines such that her parents will be rattled and sleep deprived for months. You know before I tell you where to find the Dad in this story. Ordering up an arsenal of personal protection devices and driving out to Charlottesville for weeks afterward alarming her place like a safe house. As for the Mom, she got what she wanted. Short of the world getting its act together, which is what I really want, I got the Sophie dot back on the grid.

Since that time I haven’t really looked at it. Ok I haven’t looked at it a lot. Ok, much. Okay some. This mama. Love/hate with her helicopter, I have raised them to be independent as I was. Word on the street is the day in 1982 my mom came home from the grocery to a note on the kitchen table: rode my bike to field hockey practice, home by dinner. What?! In the small country town I grew up in, the regionalized high school was 14 miles away. On main roads through a gorge with no shoulder. And this was in the days before bike helmets.  (I’m sure they existed, like seat belts, but sure enough when I got in my first car wreck two years later I wasn’t wearing one of those either) So off you went. You did stuff. You saw stuff. You lived stuff. Life 365. This is the old-school living I want in theory for my peeps. Or I wanted. Emphasis on theory. Because now instead of “life lessons” we have crushing disappointments, bodily harm, terror and pure evil to contend with. I’m not supposed to ease up on my watch for that, am I? Used to be it was an just idiom, some figure of speech about standing down a moving train for your children. Nowadays you could get that opportunity just dropping them off at school.

This summer, however, this mama bear is releasing her to the real bears. (I really did buy bear bells for their backpacks but she made me return them. MOM! No, mom. I don’t wanna be the dork. oh i dunno…better dork than dinner? ) The first day was hard. Mainly because I’d been so distracted by finishing the school year, getting and kicking Covid, taking on a French kid, all those routine starts of summer. So I didn’t really register what all was about to transpire. Then (frankly) I didn’t want to know. (Have you seen my blessing anywhere around here? I can’t find it…seem to have misplaced it…) Yes. They really are. Four college friends really are going to load up a car Soph bought last week and drive it across the country, tent camping out the back of it all the way. How do I know? Because they’re already gone. Kissed me in the driveway at seven a.m. and set off to retrieve her travelling companions in Charlottesville, leaving me wavering between two options: cold half-cuppa of the kitchen table or chase her down the road with breakfast. Did I dig out all the stuff she asked for? Did I impart anything of wisdom? Did I check off her list of provisions, make sure she’s got everything critical? Quick quick I licked an envelope with $100 in it and slipped it into the glovebox. Emergency hotel room? Tow truck? You never know. Coming out of my Covid stupor at almost the exact moment she departs I let off breathing and thinking so I can double up on the praying. Praying that’s the one thing she didn’t pack. 

Keep in mind, by “list of campgrounds” I mean–like, it’s more like an Amazon wish list than a set of confirmed reservations. Apparently you can’t squeak into a national park without advance notice, and no surprise, the free campgrounds they’ve Googled are mosty full. Several of their destinations are without an established postal address. For these I am given the geographic coordinates. Handy. Still, the “c u in 10 days” way of doing things really ain’t cuttin’ it for this mother’s heart. I check the dot, rocketing west on Route 40, bound for freedom and a hardwon me-dom, and I pray all the mercies. Mainly trying to make peace with the unknowns. Gone girl. But that night, what to my wondering eyes. Evidently, the dad and I are on the receiving end of the same raw intention and can-do that created this whole trip to begin with. And each night after that, about the same time, we get a text–where she is, where they’ve been and a few photos from the day. First night, Tennessee, 8:49 pm. “not enough service for photo but we are at a free campsite run by NPS in central TN. Lots of nice campers around and trees for our hammocks.” Ok that’s wonderful. Bill and I are giddy. We made the cut for those in the know. Then, the next day, instant TMI: “in TN we have seen turtles, rattlesnake, turkeys and armadillos.” Huh. How ’bout that. SO glad one of those is singular. Shoulda sent her with snake bells. Next day, 11:32 p.m. New Mexico. “made fire. friends r impressed with Will’s instruction sheet.” Too funny. This is a fully typed and detailed DIY for starting a campfire composed last summer for her training run in the Smoky Mountains. Quickly I check my handy “list of campgrounds” old-school Sophietracker for Day 4. “You at Arroyo Secco?,” I ask. “no we ended up paying for an established campground because there are wildfires that closed the other ones.” Oh right, established campground. As opposed to all those off-grid, snake infested campgrounds with zero cell service, staffed by sasquatch and filled with axe murderers. And on fire. Of course I check the Insta and FB to see if they got more than I did, but mostly there is radio silence–product of two things: poor reception in whatever remote area they are camping in, and the full engagement of–well, life. You try cooking a meal start to finish on a campfire built from scratch (in a desert), then set up camp before dark–all after a 650-mile drive–and see how much spare time you have to sit around on the gram. 

Sometimes there is no word. Those days are longer. I look up her little dot a couple times to reassure myself, do the math, match it to the itinerary she gave me. Wow–they made it to Jackson Bay. Oklahoma. That’s wait…what?–1,122 miles! On Day Two. Or, they’re headed for Carson National Forest and are still 317 miles away at 8:30 at night. Or, wait a sec–they started the day in Granby, CO and are still driving?? Clearing Topeka, KS at 9 p.m. and still driving. Sometimes, like the rattlesnake, it is TMI. I don’t dare text or call so long as the trusty dot is moving across my screen, Sophie behind the wheel no doubt, as focused and determined as the middle school swimmer propped up in my driver’s seat so many years ago. I watch her little dot and wonder if it is reliable. I pray for it to keep sailing along Route 70, or I pray for it to stop and set up camp, and at all times I pray for its safety. I match it to where my itinerary says she is, or should be. A couple times those stomach-lurching words stare back at me: no location found. Those are the hardest moments of all. That’s when my heart gets very, very clear on the difference: I don’t need to know where in the world you are to know you are well in the world. And when eventually it pops back up, mine is a private euphoria as I do parents what everywhere have done since that first cry changed their lives: Rejoice, and worry. Marvel, and pray. Weep with the most shameless relief and gratitude for their child’s place in the world and know for a fleeting instant the magnitude of his love.

The summer I was ten, I was the youngest traveler on a retrofitted school bus bound for the Golden Gate Bridge, camping out and back for six long weeks. It was a grade school principal who dreamed up the mother of all field trips and ran it several summers. Field Trip ’77. I still have the mimeographed itinerary. He taught us to roll our sleeping bags the most space-efficient way to fit 25 of them in the back the bus, took out a couple seats to install a cookstove and luggage rack, assigned us work crews and made us keep journals. Forget cell phones. Forget GPS or tracking, forget any of that but for a CB radio (our handle? “Yellow Submarine”) and a roll of quarters for the payphones. But we were kids who’d never seen that much pocket change and would just as soon buy a Tab out of the campground vending machine than call home. Even stranger still, we sent and received mail. It was a part of our trust in a world that literally laid in wait for us to reach our well-timed destinations, the poise of a more reliable world when it was busy being our oyster. We had six planned mail drops, one per week, where students could receive letters and care packages from home–and did. Today, the idea stuns me. Just imagine something like that coming through in our “modern” and “connected” world. I can’t even get mail on time at the end of my driveway. Anyway, today we have lost hope in pearls.

Maybe this is why Sophie’s sojourn gives me a whole new meaning to “collect call.” You go, my girl. You make this world into one where things like this are still possible. You can see the undertones of victory here. Because it is. In an overstructured, over tasked and certainly over expected world, you step into the wind and just see…. you….just….be. The God who made it, the wind the stars and the subject of every snap you’ll take or send on this trip, that One will carry you safely home. I can take my eyes off the dot because I know… He never will. So on the last day of school, when I am already feeling euphoric and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, I get a text that tops it–a single stunning photo of the striated desert mountains range, rust red against a blue sky behind and four sunburned faces in the foreground, grinning wide in the Arizona sun. “We Made it!” They made it. Four days in with twice that to go and they have arrived. My love and admiration for her top those peaks and fill the canyon. Funny how I rejoice without doing any math at all: she is at this point furthest from home and closest to my heart. 

While she is gone, I switched out my “Best Epic Inspirational Movie Soundtracks” with Sophie’s Spotify and a playlist she calls “mountain man.” No surprise, every song is about coming or going, leaving, yearning, rolling tunes that are not for the sedentary at heart. I get twitchy just listening to it. And for a second I can see her, can see them, a Thelma and Louise meets Starbucks and REI, streaming down the highway with an endless sky over them and the empty  desert highway laid out ahead. And in in this moment, I too, can feel the wind. 

From the song “Angela” by the Lumineers:

Godspeed, my Sophiegirl. C u in 10…where the road and sky align.