"It's Time": A Turning Point, and Realizations in the Snow

The Long Way Around to Finding My Way Back

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The Tetons had yielded little more than a scant glimpse of their majesty, but I reluctantly accepted that I would have to be content with that. As the light began to fade, I set off in search of a place to stay. Half an hour down the road, the town of Jackson was surprisingly nice, but touristy. And whenever a place caters to tourists, room rates tend to get pricey. Everything available anywhere nearby was over $100 for the night, many of them double that or more, and I just wasn’t willing to pay that.

It was already almost dark, but still fairly early in the evening. I decided to try my luck across the state line in Idaho. I pulled over next to a row of busy restaurants and used one of my trusty apps to find an inexpensive hotel in Rexburg, just outside of Idaho Falls.

Perfect. If my GPS was right, I could be there in about an hour and forty-five minutes.

It was just above freezing in Jackson, and a cold, almost icy drizzle was falling. The streets reflected like dark mirrors, the lights of various restaurants and shops refracting back through a soft, Gaussian blur from the pavement.

I followed my GPS instructions and quickly found myself heading north out of town. I didn’t even question the route until I found that I was climbing a steep hill, and realized, with sudden alarm, that I was heading for another mountain pass. I switched over to my car scanner app, and saw the coolant temperature rising dangerously just as I began to smell the same acrid burning aroma I had outside of Buffalo. This time, I didn’t wait. I immediately pulled over. I was not going to be able to continue up this hill. I wasn’t far outside of town, but I’d already lost cell service again. I couldn’t look up a different route, so I did the only thing I could do: I turned down the hill and headed back into town.

When I finally picked up a signal, I tried to find a new route, but the GPS was determined to send me over the mountains. I pulled up ChatGPT. I told it the situation, and said I needed it to find me a way around. It said the main route was the one I’d been on, through Teton Pass, but that the grades were definitely way too steep for poor little Evie. It offered me a way around, through a town called Alpine, Wyoming, a ways to the southwest. It would add nearly an hour to my trip, but it would get me there safely.

I quietly cursed, but punched in Alpine. The threat of blowing the head gasket made this detour necessary, so complaining about the extra time it was going to take wouldn’t help anything. I was tired and getting cranky, but I was going to have to make the most of it.

I headed back out of town on my new route, into the darkness of a rural route under a starless, moonless, overcast night sky. By now, it was beginning to snow again, little icy flakes smearing under the windshield wipers, stretching every source of light into a diagonal smear. I’d come to realize over the course of this trip that after 47 years of perfect eyesight, I’ve finally hit the point where close-up text and images have gone a bit blurry, but that wasn’t the problem here. The visibility was just poor. To add to the fun, signs warning about both elk and moose crossing were posted at regular intervals. I hadn’t seen a moose since the summer I’d spent in Idaho before college, but I knew they were no joke. You have no idea just how big those beasties are until you come upon one on the side of the road, standing head and shoulders above your car. And full-grown elk aren’t exactly lightweights, either.

The road in front of me looked like this, for hours:

It was a long drive.

I arrived in Rexburg a little after 9PM, and checked into my hotel. I unwrapped the cellophane from one of the supplied clear plastic Solo cups in the room and poured a generous slosh of bourbon into it from the bottle I had in my duffel bag. It had been a long day, and I hadn’t eaten a single actual meal. Just some snacks and coffee. I needed to find food. There was an Applebee’s on the other end of the parking lot, and though I had no fond memories of the place and had avoided it for twenty years in lieu of better options, it was going to have to do. I was parked for the night, and I had no intention of driving around looking for anywhere else to eat.

I grabbed a seat at the bar and ordered a light beer and a steak. These days, a steak doesn’t cost that much more than a burger, and it’s usually a lot less salty and more filling. The bartender, a young man in his late 20s, was also the manager of the restaurant, and I appreciated his friendliness and competence.

After some banter, I decided to speak my mind.

“You’re too smart for this job,” I said to him between bites. “What are you going to school for?”

I didn’t have any indication whether he was in school or not. I just guessed. He looked at me with a hint of surprise in his expression, but he quickly recovered.

“Physical therapy,” he replied.

I knew it. There was no way this guy was permanent retail bartender material.

We chatted a little. He was Mormon, did his missionary work years prior, had a wife and two kids. Solid guy, you could just tell by talking to him. Punching way above the weight class of someone managing a hotel-parking-lot Applebee’s.

This was the only human interaction I’d had in the past 24 hours, so if it seems trivial to mention it here, it isn’t — at least, not for me. These stolen moments — in gas stations, restaurants, on the trail of some park — are my only connection to people in the real world while on the road. They’re grounding experiences. They remind you that you’re human. They help you to see the way you might come across to others, who don’t have all the baggage of a shared past.

I finished my meal, wished him well, and headed back to my room. I looked for something to watch on cable, but was quickly reminded that there’s a reason nobody uses cable anymore. Hotels without streaming services feel like dinosaurs these days, like the old motel signs you’d see along the roadside advertising color television in every room.

And at some point, I drifted off to sleep.

In the morning, I woke up fairly early, with a thought clearly in my mind: “It’s time to go back.”

I’d been deliberating over whether to continue since the car trouble started. Between the storm that was closing roads and one of the people I was going to meet in California telling me it was a bad week for a visit, I was starting to see the circumstantial evidence piling up. I go through open doors. I push firmly but not excessively on closed ones.

But this was more than that. It was like my subconscious mind had been chewing on this and had finally reached a verdict while I was sleeping. I made a note of it, and headed to breakfast.

Part of the reason I’d decided to stay in this particular hotel was that reviewers said it had decent food in the morning. In 2025, when an omelet costs a minimum of $15, a complimentary breakfast that includes any edible protein is a steal.

I got eggs, bacon, and potatoes with peppers and sausage. I poured a cup of coffee into a paper cup, but it smelled so acrid, so utterly unpalatable, I decided not to take even a single sip. A colorful machine on the counter had an assortment of juices, and I chose one with a guava-infusion. It gurgled and splashed into my child-sized disposable cup, looking like a thimble in my large hand. I downed it with one gulp, then refilled it halfway again, the fruity concoction doing its level best to wash down the mediocre food.

I needed to decide what I was doing. I could keep heading West from Rexburg, but I could not guarantee a direct route to the coast or any of the national parks I still wanted to see that wouldn’t lead to more car trouble. If you’ve never seen a topographical map of the United States, you might not understand the problem, but this should explain it:

I had a powertrain warranty from my dealer back in North Carolina, but I didn’t know if I could use any portion of it out here. And even if I could, it would mean more hotel stays, more restaurant food, and an even more delayed return trip. It was also later in the season than I’d planned to be in this part of the country. I’d spent more time with friends on my way out West than I’d planned. Out of curiosity, I looked at taking I-90 back East, and saw that the route now had a marker on it that said, “requires chains.” Snow was definitely becoming a problem, especially at higher elevations.

I made the mistake of not having brought a paper atlas with me — which is a very old-fashioned but immensely reliable thing to have — so all my reckoning was done looking at tiny maps on my phone. Somehow, I’d gotten it in my head that Idaho falls was close to the interstate. And maybe it was. But when I entered Chicago in as my destination, just to get pointed somewhere I thought would take me down to I-80, I somehow wound up taking backroads and state routes for quite a while before realizing no interstate was coming up. When I looked again, my next closest destination with interstate access was Rock Springs, in southwest Wyoming, just north of the state line dividing Utah from Colorado. I was on a phone call for a good chunk of the early leg of the drive, and not paying close attention to where I was going. I had just been following the GPS while looking out the window at some truly breathtaking scenery, which had me well and truly distracted. Before I knew it, I’d crossed the state line and was out of Idaho and heading East.

It was a gorgeous morning. A light blanket of snow coated everything, and the sun was still trying to squeeze some light through a thick blanket of storm clouds. Between the mountains, the snow, and the sky, it was easily the most beautiful day of my trip thus far. Still, there was a certain sadness in it. As the miles wore on, I became increasingly convinced that even though I hadn’t reached my goal of making it to the Pacific coast, the thought I’d awoken with was probably correct: it’s time to go back.

The universe, God, destiny — whatever it was, something seemed to be giving me gentle nudges, and in my solitude on this leg of the journey, I had decided that the best thing I could do was to remain open to them.

But I hate leaving a journey unfinished.

Unable to commit myself fully to a path, I made the decision to follow the route I was on all the way to Rock Springs. I saw I could pick up I-80 there, which would allow me to make the final decision on whether to go East or West. Part of me still had Oregon, the Northern California coast, and the Redwoods in mind. Enderts Beach, just south of the Redwood Forest, is my mental happy place. It’s where I go in my mind when I want to find calm. It had stood, in the back of my mind, as the ultimate destination; the sort of metaphorical touchstone that would tell me I had reached the end of the outward leg of the trip.

I still remember that spot, at sunset, from my visit there with my family in 2017. Sometimes I dig up this old video and give it a watch, but the scene plays pretty frequently in my mind without the help:

On that same trip, we hiked into the Grove of the Titans, my kids and my wife linking hands and stretching out their arms to measure the base of one of the biggest trees any of us had ever seen:

I thought about taking I-80 straight to San Francisco, and meeting with a couple of guys I know there. I pondered taking an afternoon there and grabbing some of the best dim sum available outside of Hong Kong.

But another, less wistful part of my mind told me that I had already done what I’d come to do. I didn’t need another couple thousand miles and another week or two of experiences.

I needed to start putting my life back together using what I had already learned.

I couldn’t say with certainty that I had secured whatever MacGuffin of wisdom I had hoped to attain on this trip, but if I had to guess, I’d gotten fairly close. I had, in a more profound way than I could have reasonably expected, begun a real rediscovery of who I am, independent of any other person or relationship or external expectation.

A re-connection to my core self had emerged — the inner child who had spent his whole life twisting and straining and shrinking and re-shaping himself and performing, all in his constant search for approval and acceptance and love.

He needed to learn that he was going to be OK even when he was all alone. Even if it really didn’t feel that way.

Without consciously making the choice, I had noticed that at some point over the past six weeks, I’d stopped talking down to myself. I had stopped telling myself I was worthless and deserved all the bad things that had happened in my life. I had stopped believing I was a monster with a more or less good heart who just kept messing everything up. I had stopped repeating my frequent, self-protective mantra: “It doesn’t matter, I don’t matter, nothing matters.” And strangest of all, I had stopped all of these self-destructive behaviors without making any effort. They just… disappeared on their own.

In their place, new realizations were forming:

I am not my anger.

I am not my fear.

I am not my brokenness, or my wounds, or the weird quirks of my brain and nervous system that make me complicated and anxious and sometimes rather difficult.

I am just…me. A man who had been hurt quite a lot as a young boy and became fearful and defensive and angry — not because I wanted to be any of those things, but because I was trying to protect myself from more pain. Just because I didn’t know how to shut those behaviors off didn’t mean they told my whole story.

I am more than just the sum total of my failures or worst moments.

I have long failed to see the good in myself, but I am coming to recognize that I am smart, capable, funny, curious, passionate, talented, filled with a sense of wonder about the world and the universe we live in, and driven by a deep need to find meaning — and when I can’t find it, to make it myself. These are not unqualified gifts, but they do matter in the picture of who I am.

And perhaps one of the hardest realizations of all: I do deserve to be loved — not because I’m perfect, but because I’m human. I don’t deserve to be abandoned, not because I haven’t made mistakes, but because I care about becoming better. I also feel love, but need to be better about both expressing it and receiving it. For me, love was something that I had always craved, but which never felt safe. Confusing love with conflict or turmoil or rejection — all symptoms of wounded attachment — is one of the biggest challenges I must learn to overcome.

What had gone wrong in my marriage was certainly in large part on my shoulders, but it was also not the whole story of my life. Even if I can’t fix it, I will not be defined by it.

I had even begun, over the course of this odd little trip, to entertain the idea that maybe God was real, even if he was maddeningly imperceptible and unintelligible, and that maybe he actually did love me and was looking out for me this whole time.

I wasn’t sure of this, by any means, but as I’ve said before, the series of events that methodically stripped away everything that ever mattered to me in sequential succession over the previous four or five years felt like more than just coincidences.

They felt like design.

I felt like a home that had been purchased, thinking it was loved, only to recoil as its owners tore down every wall and ripped up every floor. To the home, if homes could feel, such a brutal denuding of self must feel like destruction. Like a total undoing of self. But it is only when the craftsman painstakingly begins rebuilding that gutted frame that the home could be made to truly become all that it was capable of becoming.

And so, I chose to see myself as a work in progress.

It was time to take authorship of my own story, instead of letting it be written by others — even others whom I love. Whether God was doing this remodel job, or life was, or even if all of this was just some wishful form of pattern-seeking in the noise of suffering, I knew that it would be the only framework that could make it all make sense.

So I had to see to it that the story became as real as I could make it be.

These thoughts were somewhat inchoate that day, driving through the snow-dusted landscape, but there were growing fragments of realization scattered throughout my mind, forming connections with each other, becoming a more unified whole with each passing day. I proved to myself one moment at a time that the good, decent, caring, friendly, capable version of me was more than just a mask I wore so people would like me. And the me that had done a lot of shitty, hurtful things was the survival mode version of me, the little boy locked in endless fight, flight, or freeze, whose coping mechanisms may have helped him survive when he was small, but they were now hurting him and those around him.

This wasn’t a whole, healed version of me I’d found out here. It was the blueprint for how to start building him. I still had a long way to go — literally and figuratively. I still had to figure out how to live as the full man I am capable of becoming, irrespective of whether anyone else accepts me or not.

The road to Rock Springs felt like it dragged on forever. At the same time, as I spent the miles deliberating my decision, it didn’t feel long enough.

And then, suddenly, I arrived.

I stopped for gas. I got a little bit of food and something to drink, and sat in the parking lot of the gas station as I ate, looking out towards the highway, trying to will myself to see what was next.

I searched within, and assessed what I found there — or more to the point, what I didn’t. The call to keep the odyssey going had fallen silent. The wistful thoughts about the West Coast felt more like the quiet echoes of a quaint nostalgia than a mission.

The call to return and face what this next, unfamiliar version of my life was going to look like, on the other hand, had grown stronger. I missed my kids. I missed any semblance of normalcy. I was homesick for a home that was no longer mine. But if I couldn’t have it back, it was time for me to figure out how to start building one of my own. At least for now. Who knows what the future holds?

My hesitation having at last vanished, I drove out to the interstate, and started heading East towards Cheyenne.

Little did I know that some of the hardest days still lay ahead.

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