What’s the longest trip you’ve ever taken?
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I’ve traveled around the world. Japan, Korea, Hungary, Belgium, Iraq—just to name a few. I’ve crossed oceans, walked through places where I didn’t speak the language, and spent time in countries most people I knew had only seen on television or found on a map.
So when someone asks about the longest trip I’ve ever taken, you’d think I’d start somewhere overseas.
I don’t.
The trip that comes to mind is the one I took with my baby brother.
We started in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with a load, a truck, and a whole lot of North America waiting in front of us. From Michigan we headed west through Twin Falls, Idaho, then up toward Washington, through Issaquah, before turning south through Eugene, Oregon. From there we worked our way down the California coast through Anchor Bay and San Francisco. Eventually, we turned east again, crossed the country toward Knoxville, Tennessee, continued to Jacksonville, Florida, and finally made our way home to Illinois.
Nearly six thousand miles, give or take—and that’s before counting all the wandering that happens between the dots on a map.
I’d traveled through some of those areas before. Several times, in fact. But there was something different about experiencing them with my brother. Places I’d stopped noticing became new because he hadn’t seen them yet.
Of course, before the trip could teach me anything profound about brotherhood, America sent us a moose.
Somewhere around Lolo Pass, we encountered one standing in the middle of the road.
At least I’m calling it a moose. It was large enough that neither one of us felt compelled to climb out of the truck and request identification.
It just stood there.
Looking at us.
My brother suggested that I honk the horn.
I’d heard somewhere that startling a moose was one of those ideas that sounded reasonable right up until you actually did it, so I decided we weren’t in that much of a hurry.
We waited.
The moose stared at us.
We stared at the moose.
Eventually, it walked toward the truck.
Now, there’s a considerable difference between seeing a large wild animal somewhere off in the distance and having one decide to come over and inspect you personally. It came close enough that the moose and I made eye contact.
Have you ever stared into the eyes of a moose?
It’s a humbling experience.
There I was behind the wheel of a machine capable of hauling us and our load thousands of miles across a continent, and suddenly none of that mattered. Not the engine. Not the horsepower. Not the steel surrounding us. That animal stood there looking at me as though it understood something humans periodically forget.
In the grand scheme of things, we aren’t nearly as powerful as we think we are.
Eventually, the moose decided we weren’t worth further investigation and wandered off.
My brother never got to honk the horn.
We continued west.
Then my brother saw the Pacific Ocean.
He’d never seen it before.
I had.
The moment he realized we were approaching the Pacific, he started babbling about everything he’d always wanted to do when he finally saw it.
I rolled my eyes and kept driving.
He kept talking.
And talking.
Eventually, I realized that if I wanted any peace whatsoever, I was going to have to stop the damn truck.
The moment we stopped, my baby brother took off toward the water like a child.
I stayed behind because I had paperwork to do. Somebody on this expedition had to pretend to be a responsible adult. I pulled everything out, settled in, and attempted to get some work done.
I didn’t accomplish much.
Instead, I watched my brother play in the Pacific Ocean.
I’d seen the Pacific before. There wasn’t anything particularly new about it to me. Water. Waves. Horizon. Beautiful, certainly, but familiar.
Watching him changed that.
Maybe that’s something that happens to us after we’ve been around awhile. We see something enough times and eventually stop seeing it. We recognize it. We know what it is. We file it away with everything else we’ve already experienced.
Then somebody you love encounters it for the first time.
Suddenly, you’re looking again.
So I sat there with my paperwork mostly forgotten, watching my brother play in the Pacific like he’d been waiting his entire life for that particular moment.
Then he bent down.
I watched him scoop up some water.
Before I could determine what the hell he was doing, my brother took a big drink of the Pacific Ocean.
There are moments when an older brother should intervene and offer guidance.
There are other moments when experience is the finest teacher available.
He came running back toward me coughing, sputtering, and spitting water.
He looked at me with genuine betrayal.
“It’s salty.”
I stared at him.
Then I looked at the largest body of salt water on the planet stretching behind him.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s the ocean.”
Sometimes traveling with your baby brother allows you to rediscover the wonder of the world through his eyes.
Sometimes it allows you to discover that apparently nobody ever explained the ocean to him.
We kept moving.
There were more miles, more stops, more conversations, more problems, and more than a few things that didn’t go according to plan. What started as a long haul became one of those trips where the road seemed determined to see exactly how much bullshit two brothers could absorb before one of them finally said enough.
Apparently, our threshold was fairly high.
By the time we were heading toward Jacksonville to drop off the load, we’d already accumulated enough stories for one journey.
The road wasn’t finished with us.
It was late at night, and we were running in a cabover when the right steer tire blew.
If you’ve never experienced a steer-tire blowout in a truck, there isn’t much time for contemplation. One moment you’re rolling down the interstate, and the next several tons of truck have developed their own opinion about where they would like to go.
And it isn’t necessarily where you’re pointing the steering wheel.
The truck started knocking back and forth across the interstate.
I fought the wheel.
There wasn’t time to be frightened. Fear is a luxury that comes afterward. In the moment, there’s only the machine, the road, and whatever experience you’ve accumulated over the years telling your hands what to do before your mind has time to discuss it.
Correct.
Don’t overcorrect.
Hold her.
Keep the damn thing upright.
I remember being thankful for the hour. Traffic was practically nonexistent. Had cars been running alongside us, I’m not certain how differently that night might have ended.
Eventually, I got her under control.
We were upright.
We were still on the road.
We were alive.
Then came the fear.
My heart was pounding. My hands were still gripping the wheel while my brain caught up with what had just happened. That peculiar silence that follows something terrible settled over the cab.
Then, from the bunk behind me, my brother spoke.
“I knew you had it.”
I wanted to punch him in the face.
I’d just spent however many seconds trying to keep several tons of truck from killing both of us, and apparently my baby brother had been lying back there completely confident that Big Brother had everything under control.
But we were upright.
We were alive.
And I was too grateful for both facts to climb into the bunk and strangle him.
So I let it go.
Mostly.
Eventually, we dropped the load in Jacksonville and started working our way home.
By then, the schedule had become more of a suggestion than an actual plan. Somewhere among the miles, mishaps, repairs, delays, and everything else the road had thrown at us, we committed what our wives considered the greater offense of the entire journey.
We missed Thanksgiving.
They were pissed.
Understandably.
We had explanations, of course. Men on the road always have explanations. Some are even true.
None of them mattered much until we finally pulled into Illinois.
Then they saw my rig.
The anger disappeared.
My wife was the daughter of a mechanic, and she’d married one. She knew machinery. She knew trucks. There wasn’t much I could hide from her when it came to mechanical damage, and she didn’t need me standing beside the rig providing commentary.
She looked at it.
Really looked at it.
And whatever she’d planned to say about Thanksgiving became considerably less important.
Eventually, the rest of the family left to return to Michigan.
My wife and I were alone.
Then she asked me what happened.
So I told her.
Not the telephone version.
Not the we’re fine, don’t worry version you give the people waiting at home because there’s nothing they can do from hundreds or thousands of miles away except worry.
I told her what had actually happened.
The trouble.
The damage.
The blowout.
The moments when getting home stopped being merely the final leg of a trip and became something we had to accomplish.
She listened.
Being a mechanic’s daughter and a mechanic’s wife, she understood enough to hear what I wasn’t saying.
She understood how close some of it had been.
When I finished, she wrapped her arms around me.
And held on.
Not one of those quick embraces that says I’m glad you’re home.
She held me for a long time.
For once, I didn’t have anything smart to say.
I just stood there and let her.
I’ve traveled around the world. I’ve crossed oceans and borders and stood thousands of miles from anything resembling home.
But when someone asks me about my longest trip, I remember that ridiculous journey with my baby brother. Michigan to Idaho. Washington. Oregon. Down through California. Across the country to Tennessee. Florida. Then finally back to Illinois.
I remember a moose teaching me that human beings aren’t nearly as impressive as we imagine ourselves to be.
I remember watching my grown brother become a little boy when he saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time.
I remember discovering that he apparently didn’t know the Pacific was salty.
I remember fighting that steering wheel in the middle of the night.
And I remember hearing his voice from the bunk behind me.
“I knew you had it.”
Maybe that’s what remains after enough years have passed. Not the mileage. Not every highway number. Not every fuel stop or state line.
The people who shared the road with you.
The brother who trusted you enough to sleep while you were trying not to kill both of you.
The woman waiting at the end who understood, without you having to explain everything, just how fortunate you were to be standing in front of her.
After nearly six thousand miles, I finally made it home.
Then my wife put her arms around me.
And after that trip, I needed it.
Memoirs of Madness 