Road Trip

    There's something magical about a long road trip.   I say this with some caveats as one would not be apt to think this if one were doing it for a living such as long-distance truckers or regional salespeople whose life is pretty much dependent on driving as a profession; and admittedly, I remember as a child being rather horrified at the thought of a long drive vacation with my parents (and bored as it eventually came to fruition), even as we were given free-reign in the back seat, all happening at a time and in a world without seat belts, planting ourselves as kids onto the top "shelf" by the back window, stuffed and waving to the cars behind us as foolishly as the dangling arm of a puffy jacket crammed into the same spot.  No idea what the accident rate was back then but cars were built of thick steel in that era, gas was cheap and somehow through it all most of us managed to survive.  To those of you scratching your heads at this image, one has to remember that this was an age without much entertainment in cars other than a simple AM radio built into the dash, one with scratchy coverage at best and usually blasting an imperfect sound through its one cracked speaker.  Channels were few and parents often listened to news or country music or religious programming, anything that kids basically didn't want to hear, all filtered through the haze of smoke wafting through the car like wisps of a Harry Potter curse seeking its destination.  Air conditioning?  That was destined for another point later in life, when you had grown up and could now feel free to roll down your window at will, those of you who remember what "rolling down a window" actually meant.  

    But that was then.  As Garth Brooks' wrote, "don't blink, life goes by faster than you think," and suddenly here my wife and I were driving on another such a trip in a rented car with more gadgets than I could have even conceived, from satellite navigation to satellite music coming from a dash panel that showed everything from how many more miles we could travel to moving the positions of the many speakers and their sounds with a slide of the finger.  Suddenly the long drive became quite enjoyable, the two of us marveling at the amount of land sprawled out before us, the sparse trailer or home that would occasionally appear in the distance causing us to wonder what it was doing there, what did the people who lived there do, and how did they get food or gas or feed their dog?  Ah well, the car zoomed on, such ponderings vanishing as another hour passed then another and soon our minds were back on the scrolling scenery.  This was desert country of sorts, the remnants of what was once a vast ocean, the rock formations and deep vistas actually quite easy to re-imagine as such, the drive allowing to you to drift away to another world of the past, filling the dry landscape now before you back to a time with an ocean of almost angry crashing waves and unimaginable life underneath.

     For us, this was an almost necessary getaway, the word "escape" sounding a bit too harsh even if proving to be a bit more descriptive.  Once again the role of caretaker was taking a small toll on us, and I say small since we both knew that in the big scene of things there were far more people with a greater justification for such an escape.  This was evident as Scientific American Mind made the subject the cover story, the latest research dropping off some interesting data.  Here are just a few of the almost-numbing bits of reality coming from the U.S.: the estimated total number of caregivers is nearly 44 million, with over 60% of them being women many of whom will give up work and end up living in poverty in their old age; in that time such women will lose an estimated $324,000 in earnings with male caretakers losing about $50,000 less all due to adjusting their jobs to meet their caregiving needs; the average length of taking care of another is about 25 hours weekly and typically lasts for 4 years; 40-70% report "clinically significant symptoms of depression; a quarter to half of this group (will) meet the diagnostic criteria for major depression."  Yikes!  But the other side of the coin showed that 81% of caregivers reported "gains" such as spiritual and personal growth.  And it was in reading this article of new research that my wife and I found ourselves nodding our heads.  Certainly we were facing a period of burnout as well as growth, the good and the bad, as they say.  And thus this drive trip was being done nearly guilt-free.  We needed to return to ground zero if only to reestablish our base, to return to a point of seeing where we had started, how far we had come, and where we were now.  It was important to step back now and then and "...see the big picture and find meaning and pride," as the article quoted the successful Caregiver Intervention program at New York University, "a multipronged program that includes referrals to support groups and mindfulness programs." 

    And suddenly here we were, not only driving the nine hours to reach this point in the desert, but actually immersing ourselves into the hikes and rocks that dwarfed us, that humbled us with both geologic time and enormity of size.  We were in Sedona, an artsy place that we had heard about but had never visited and little did we know that what we would find there would be more than we expected, a cold beer becoming almost as welcome as being able to get out on the trail and pretend that we could get lost.  We were no pioneers or native Americans struggling just to survive; but in a way we were, at least at this point.  Perhaps that was supposed to be the point of it all, the realization that we had to face our frailties as well as our strengths, our past as well as our future, that we could pat ourselves on the back as caretakers even if we felt that we were being knocked to the ground, that there were still many things that we both did not understand, and that we were not alone in this journey. We needed only to look at the rocks, those towering red cliffs that had once held an ocean at bay and were now dazzling yet another audience with their layered colors, cliffs that were once strong and had housed many of our type in caves and dwellings that were now little more than weakened arches of sandstone, caves that were so high up that they were difficult to see with our naked eyes.  This had all happened before, and would probably all happen again, only now we were no longer children in the back of the car but rather adults in the front.  Where we would want to go from here was our decision...we had indeed comes a long ways, but we apparently still had a long way to go.  But now it seemed that what waited ahead just might turn out to be a rather pleasant journey.