What were your most epic road trips? Did profound mishaps occur? Did you end up stranded? Did you lose yourself in daydreams in the passenger seat? Did you find yourself in a rest stop so far away from home that you wondered how you got there and who you are? Maybe a favorite singer called into your ears. Maybe you spent the journey with someone (human or animal) who is gone. Maybe you gazed out the window, your mind transforming shapes into supernatural forests, cities, or spirits.
I love Mary Biddinger’s poem “Sugarstack, Skybaby” and how the speaker transforms an industrial landscape into an occasion to name and rename something:
Everyone had a favorite smokestack on the horizon.
Gave them sexy names like cigarette, loverboy.
Sometimes the magic of looking is the magic of metaphor: of naming and renaming. And sometimes journeys really do feel mythic, Homeric, even if we’re stopped in traffic on I-95 and not wandering in the sea. Yet, there is always an interior journey, isn’t there?