The trip is in T-minus 41 days, and I’m panicking.

Immediately upon re-reading that sentence, I’m struck at how ineffectual it is at communicating the full magnitude of both “trip” and “panicking.” The trip, also currently known as “Road Trip to Insanity, 2009” is a 7-week, 10,318-mile (and counting) voyage through the United States. In my car. With all three of my kids. With most nights spent in a tent, as opposed to the nice HoJo in a nice suburb.

As if that weren’t enough, another single mother, New Slang Philosopher, will be coming in her vehicle and with her two kids (who are 7 and 4). This component is a bit like the vital piece of information given at the end of a reality-television show stunt. Like “you are going to climb this mountain with your bare hands, in under 3 hours. And…you’ll be followed by a pack of carnivorous goats!” Or something.

This may explain my current state of panic, which has manifested itself in several ways. One of those ways is me purchasing many camping items (water bottles and a newish tent and sleeping bag and a Swiss Army knife, as well as books on camp recipes and all manner of how to get by in the outdoors). And if it were just purchasing items, I’d not even raise an eyebrow, because who in America, I ask you doesn’t react to panic with purchasing sundries?* But for the past week, I’ve found myself laying in bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking what the holy fuck did I just sign myself up for? I’m filled with worry. I worry about bears and mountain lions and black widows in the desert, though those are pretty easily mitigated and planned for. But I also worry about men in scary vans and drifters and teenagers starting massive bon fires, and I’m worried about New York City, which we’re spending a week in, and what happens if I lose a kid on the subway, or what if I get hopelessly lost in Chicago, and what about New Orleans and all the crime there, and, come to think of it, I’m really not that tough, though maybe I can kind of fake it, but what if something, some terrible thing, happens to us?

When I think of safety, of protecting us from those things that would do us harm, I think of how unusual it is to be a single female traveler. It’s sometimes frowned upon, and often begins stories that end with rapes or some grisly manner of death. Once, when I was 19 and headed to my boyfriend’s house across town, my father pulled me aside and in a serious tone told me how I needed to lock all the car doors before leaving. He told me that if anyone came up to the car, I should run every red light and either get to my boyfriend, or back home. In other words, I needed to get to a man.

I wasn’t about to drive through South Central L.A. In fact, it was simply downtown Bakersfield at night, a place where, perhaps it wasn’t the best idea to walk through alone, but was certainly not dangerous to drive through. For months, though, when I took the car to my boyfriend’s house, I locked every door, carefully checked my mirrors for predators, as though one was waiting for me, behind the old movie theater that still showed classics on Thursday nights, or in the A&W parking lot.

My dad’s fear was eventually funny, a point I reminded him of whenever I did something particularly “daring,” like the time I drove to Valencia (which my dad said was “driving to Los Angeles” and implied there might be some gang bangers hiding in those lovely suburban homes or that Six Flags Magic Mountain). I’ve long known that to take a long trip, as a woman and as a mother, is something I’ve needed to do, that I’m entirely capable of. I also believe wholeheartedly in not making decisions based solely on the lowest common denominator factor, or, in this case, based upon the fact that the world harbors some ends I’d rather none of us meet. But as I’ve planned this trip, as NSP and I have discussed routes and excursions, I’ve come to realize that I’ve breathed in society’s, and my dad’s, beliefs that women are easy targets, and weak, and it is therefore unsafe for women to travel alone. And by alone I mean “without a man.” At the same time, I know that if I’m smart and relatively careful, the kids and I will be fine. I know, too, that there’s no way to counter every “threat,” and it’s hard to know where to draw a definitive line between being reactionary and being smart.

But I’m still afraid. I walk some invisible, curious and barely logical line, where I worry for our safety while, at the same time, roll my eyes whenever anyone tells me how I might stay safe on our trip. Double this when a man tells me, in that authoritative way, how I need mace or pepper spray, or how I should lie to everyone that I meet that I have a husband. I think of feminism and culturalization and the myth of feminine frailty, and I think about how much stronger so many men are, physically, than I am, and I’m stuck.

While I’m trying to deal with these fears I harbor—some, perhaps, more legit than others—I’m, also dealing with the fact that, holy Christ, the kids and I are going to be together for 7 weeks straight. 7 weeks. 7 weeks, a good portion of which will be spent confined in a tent or a Subaru. And, despite the fact they seem unrelated, I’ve come to see both fears as tied together. If I’m a good mother, I think, the kids and I won’t fight. We’ll have a wonderful time, and the summer will be highlighted by trips to The Met and Gettysburg, and to eat BBQ** in Kansas City. But if I’m a good mother, how can I also be an adequate protector? The two seem completely opposed to one another, set on the opposite ends of a spectrum. I’ve navigated it before, navigate it in some way every day, but never to this extent. I’m stuck between the demands of two gender roles, and having to fulfill those, and knowing I can’t, and knowing that I won’t, that I truly don’t want to. In some ways, this trip is about my life as a single mother, the choices I’ve made, the things I’ve let go, the costs it has had on all of us.

Which might explain the nightmare I had last night. In it, I’ve managed to navigate us through the US, past winos and abandoned houses, through labyrinthine subway systems, along roads dotted with maple and highways lined with beach and seaweed. But, at the last moment, I cannot find the final exit, the one that leads down the familiar road, the one hemmed in blackberry brambles, the one that leads home. I want to read this not as a cautionary tale, but rather as emblematic of some great change that will come as the result of such a journey. I’m well aware of the literary device of "the journey," I remember Odysseus and Huckleberry and all of them, really.  And I know that the whole concept is of the device is that the people traveling change.  That's the idea.  I'd be disappointed if we didn't.  But I’m also, at this point, afraid of what might happen, of how the four of us, our fierce and fragile family, might be forever altered.

And yet, I’m already packing our bags.

*tm


*Okay, so Ralph Nadar doesn’t. But besides him, who, I ask? Who?

**Thing One and Thing Two may decide not to eat BBQ, but I’ve tried to convince the herbivores that they must at least try beef in the beef state.