How To Cure Road Lust

You wake up with it, dream it, wrangle with the steering wheel when Carlita Willa the Third tries to get away (she loves side roads and badlands). She’s healthy for a ’91 Camry, and ready to go.

You need to stay home. You have a body to heal from years of abuse and neglect. You have unwritten memoirs of your last road trip, solo, twice around the country in a pewter-silver Dodge van. You have Commitments and Decisions To Make and, most of all, a life that needs to be examined, alphabetized, given large doses of cod liver oil and ExLax to rid you of all the …well, you know what ExLax invites.

You plug your ears when the call comes again, relentless and seductive. You beef up your to-do list, hide the powwow schedule you printed from the Internet, put Ancient Indian Ruins and Directory of National Wildlife Preserves back on the bookshelf and Peterson’s and your binoculars out of sight.

You reconsider. You pack. You get two new maps from Triple A—Indian country, your favorite chart of all time, and one of the U.S. Willa, if cars can be said to smile, grins. She steers you off the freeway at the first exit. She knows a tree-lined secondary road, and you’re on your way.

Photograph of roadside by Luna Zeffer