I wasn’t looking forward to a roadtrip Ohio from Colorado alone. But in July 2020, it had been over two years since a family storage unit had been set aside for me after the sudden deaths of three family members.
Episode 1 – Roadtrip documents what seems like a short 3-minute trip whose footage was collected without a thought about a YouTube channel. I have a few pictures, but some of the footage I took with the radio on includes audio for which I don’t have a license…like Anne Murray singing how much she wants to write me a love song.
If the channel ever hits it ginormous, maybe we can license it for a throw-back Thursday “Roadtrip Uncut” episode. It’ll be great.
The first bit of footage is at the storage unit with my friend, Kristin, recording me opening the unit. Coincidentally, it was Kristin with whom I was estate sale shopping in 1997 and found the first set of 1,000 letters. (See chapter “One More” in Running to Thousand Letters.) Also coincidentally, the unit was two lefts and a right from the setting of the first chapter “West” of the book. How that happened is a longer story.)
As I opened the unit, not remembering everything, I was anxious about whether I’d rented a large enough U-Haul. I recalled the Korean chest that I played with as a child while visiting my grandmother, Helen Hemlin Cooke. I recalled photos in a bin. But I had not remembered the letters. A bin contained hundreds of letters between Helen and others. Later, I’d learn 600 of them were between her and her husband, Charles Cooke, during World War II. They were both writers on the staff at the New Yorker magazine making them not only great writers, but also prolific. Opening those letters felt, and still feels, daunting.
But, I’ll not get too far ahead of the story here. I felt guilty about leaving our border collie Scout in Boulder, so I didn’t linger in Ohio last July. And, at that time, there was still uncertainty about what we did and didn’t know about the virus.
Back in the car toward Colorado I drove, thankfully, without issue. For my overnight, I parked in between two ginormous (word of the post) trucks at a truck stop and slept listening to thunderstorms rage as only they can across the United States’ midwestern plains. They’re so rare in Colorado that I didn’t want them to end. Why is it that steady rain is so soothing?
Yet, driving at 50 miles per hour due to the far oversized trailer was old and I was “smelling the barn” prematurely the next morning. By the Colorado border, I was done with driving and didn’t even bother stopping to take a selfie standing in front of the Welcome to Colorado sign. I just drove right past it, hopeful that was the last time I’d make that drive. Finally, I arrived home to Mr. Scout. Neighbors helped me unload the trailer, then Scout and I hit the trails just in time for a leisurely sunset hike.
I had no idea it would be six months before I returned to the contents of the storage unit.
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