INTRODUCTION The year I turned thirty, I was teaching in Ohio, and as was my habit, I went home to Minnesota for the summer break. My sister Kristi was getting married. Just for fun, Dad drove three hours south to meet me in Minneapolis, because I wanted to look at campers, and when you live in northern Minnesota you do things like drive three hours just for fun, and we worked our way up through the various RV dealers along Highway 10 north toward my hometown of Nevis. We finally ended up in Backus, at the Scamp factory, where they make the small, bulbous fiberglass campers that I'd wanted for years, maybe even half my life if I wanted to count back. Scamps are one of several kinds of lightweight molded fiberglass campers, and somebody once told me that the cult of Scamp is just as annoying as the cult of Apple: once you get one, you can't stop talking about it, and you never go back. You're Scamp for life. They're not wrong. But things felt different that summer. Maybe it was the cliché of my approaching thirtieth birthday in October. Maybe it was something about turning thirty cutting down on people asking when I'd get married or have kids, convinced I'd change my mind as my thirties approached, but I'd still say I might find Mr. Right, but he's still going to have to live next door. Maybe it was that our concept of family and what that looked like was changing, all in good ways. Kristi married Mike that summer, they'd bought a house, and my young- est sister Kim moved in, the three of them creating an in- tentional community based on the idea that if and when Kim partnered, he'd move in, rather than her moving out. My tight-knit family was getting tighter. When my niece was born, I was incredibly grateful for Skype collapsing the distance between Ohio and Minnesota, even as Kristi's dog would look at my face on the screen, then worriedly look under the table, wondering where the rest of my body was. My parents moved down to the Twin Cities when they re- tired to be a much closer part of their grandchildren's lives instead of retiring to the Cabin in northern Minnesota as they had intended. We were still close, but there's a dif- ference between visiting family and being close enough to show up for dinner on a whim. And I was still in Ohio, or Nebraska, or North Dakota, and not there. Through my twenties, it was clear just how much the world is not set up for solo people, not emotionally or logisti- cally. I came to dread the singles' table at friends' weddings, the kids' table at the California Grandparents' house, even as Kristi and Mike were permitted to sit at the adults' table because they were married and I wasn't, even though I was two years older. There weren't enough people at home to need a kids' table, so it was strange to be separated from the older generations until I'd achieved something I didn't know I was supposed to be pursuing. Everything about the world told me my life would only have value once I married, once I had kids, once I grew up, once I settled down. By the time I turned thirty, I was really tired of it. In August, back in Ohio to start a new school year, I found my perfect Scamp for sale in Cleveland and within a few days, it was sitting in my driveway. In the years before the Scamp, working toward what it meant to be a solo woman in the world, I started trav- eling alone to Ireland, because travel--and solo travel specifically--helped me question these ready-made narra- tives that were so loud in my twenties, the expectations of marriage and children and the life I was supposed to lead, because that was just how it was done. What I loved most about those early-aughts trips to Ireland--about learning how to travel, why I wanted to travel, why I wanted to travel alone, why movement itself felt important--was no- ticing where my instinct to say yes faded into no and where no expanded into why not? Traveling alone is a thing apart, though, and traveling alone while female is another thing entirely. On my study abroad in 2000 when I was twen- ty-one, without any of those skills in place, I brought a huge hiker's backpack so comically big and heavy that I couldn't lift it into the overhead compartment by myself, with two giant suitcases that barely fit in the trunk of the taxi that would take us from the bus station to student housing. It was my first real lesson in self-sufficiency, in the style and determined enthusiasm of a toddler: I need to do it by myself. When I returned in 2005, my pack was half the size. In later years, I've gone even smaller just because I like the challenge. But a solo woman traveling has been handed a Holly- wood-ish story framework, established tropes of how a woman traveling alone must be afraid, or lost, or brash, or a lesbian, or not a lesbian, or stuck, or unable to change a tire, or sexy while skillfully changing a tire. The travel journey required of women--as popularly presented--must be away from a love interest, toward a love interest, toward healing, away from a toxic environment, presumably toward a fuller understanding of identity. So many of these stories are stories of escape, of being in search of oneself or rediscovering oneself, but none of those applied to me. I went alone, back to Ireland, for the simple reason that I wanted to. What was I waiting for? A very good question. I certainly didn't travel to go find myself because I'd never lost myself. It seemed an inherently silly proposition. I wasn't traveling in search of my identity or my place in the world because my family had already built that. I knew who I was, and I knew who I was in the context of my family. Who I was as an individual, I'd constructed that with my own hands, with the tools in my Craftsman tool bag that had been a gift from my father. Last New Year's, he handed me a set of small Crafts- man screwdrivers and said, Santa forgot one. I grinned at him. Do they come with fully functional legs so they can sprout and walk away from my tool bag, or do I have to install them myself?--because it's a running joke for our tools to sprout legs and walk away so that we can never find them. Dad grinned back. They come ready to go. Fantastic, I said. There are two types of stories common among families: one tells the story of movement away--from pain, from a life unwanted. The other is the movement toward--curios- ity, adventure, making a name, separating yourself from an established story and figuring out who you are outside of it. There's something compelling about bone-deep curiosity as a reason for leaving and going elsewhere. There's a reason why the Odyssey is a story that can be retold on the streets of Dublin or in the banjo twang of O Brother, Where Art Thou? The best of these stories are roads on which we can write our own experience. When I started to question the path I'd been on and how it had created the person I saw in the mirror in the morning, it felt natural to keep taking steps backward even as my desire for travel moved me for- ward. One step leads to another step, something the ancient Chinese philosophers knew well, though I'd be surprised if they had a road trip in mind. Maybe they did. Five years later, two days after my thirty-fifth birthday, my Minnesota grandmother Phyllis died, and suddenly our family lost a bright guiding spark, a founda- tional force. My grandfather Kermit had passed away in 2006, and our family of Minnesota Babines + my moth- er's parents, a solid little family of seven now reduced to five, was shrinking in ways that felt deeper than simply the loss of two people who were responsible for much of how our little family functioned and what we valued. Now they were both gone: Gram, who would recite the first stanzas of James Russell Lowell's "The First Snowfall" every time it snowed, and Grandpa, who taught us how to know how old a white pine is by counting its rings of branches. Gram had left my sisters and me a little money, and it seemed prudent to save it for something important. You should take a trip, my sisters said at some point that winter. I could, but it feels frivolous. Why? they asked. Gram loved to travel. She would have loved to see you use it for that. I guess that was true, even though it felt like I should save it for a rainy day. I'd been in grad school living on a pittance of a stipend, so spending money of any sort felt vaguely wrong, but because of my financial situation, I'd barely used my Scamp for a couple of years. If I were going to go on a big Scamp trip, where would I go? What would be a good use of this money that's suddenly made things possible-- something that would make Gram look at me, smile that proud smile, and nod her head like she would do? I decided to point the Jeep and Scamp in the direc- tion of my father's family, east toward Nova Scotia and the Canadian Maritimes. That's where the Babines, who were French-Acadian, came from back in the early days of Acadie in the 1620s, before le Grand Dérangement in 1755, when the English deported more than ten thousand French Acadians from the place they called Acadie, dumped them on ships bound for anywhere else, and the British renamed it Nova Scotia. I didn't know if this trip to Nova Scotia would turn out to be anything more than accumulating miles and new souvenir keychains, maybe discovering an affection for some geographically specific food that would spark nostalgia every time a certain pattern of weather crosses my day, but I think there was a part of me that didn't care which way I went, because I just wanted to do something. I was feeling restless about staying put too long. As the family historian, I spend a lot of time wondering about the stories we can tell, the ethics of storytelling, of family secrets, of family pain, things that are not exactly secret, but things we choose not to talk about anyway? For some it might be an intellectual question--or not even a question at all--but for me, it's a really important question. The storyteller, the family historian, holds immense power and I feel the need to be careful, because stories aren't neu- tral. What I do with them will echo. As I planned the trip, I taped quotes from W. Scott Olsen above my computer as I calculated miles and stopping points: "There is a pull to the universe, an insistent some- thing that calls us out, then across. On the road, there is always the chance that the world will be unmade for us, then remade larger," and "What do we want from the viewed sur- face of the earth, from the way the earth rises and falls away, or doesn't? What do our hearts tell us we need from the shape of the land?" It felt good to read--and be reminded-- that I didn't need to go elsewhere, to more important places, to know something true and real. Growing up in rural northern Minnesota, the only radio stations we could get were country and it felt good to sing along to our stories and lives, lakes and trees and dirt roads and Brad Paisley's "Ticks" and Dixie Chicks' "Wide Open Spaces" and Lit- tle Big Town's "Boondocks," music that celebrated the place where we were, rather than the allure of elsewhere. I've lost a lot of interest lately in contemporary country music with women turned into objects and cruelty wrapped in patrio- tism, preferring instead to turn on blues, or bluegrass, from Trampled by Turtles to I'm With Her to Wailin' Jennys and Red Molly and let those strings set fire to the air in a way that clears everything from here to the horizon. It feels good to sing your place in the world sometimes. With different colored highlighters, I marked locations on the map from my family tree--Halifax, Yarmouth, Grand-Pré--and then worked my way backward while also working forward. At some point my lines would meet in the middle. Leaving Minneapolis, Thunder Bay, Ontario, seemed a good first-night stop, being about six hours away. There weren't any good places to stop between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, so I resigned myself to an eight- hour drive. Sault Ste. Marie to Driftwood Provincial Park in Stonecliffe, Ontario, then onto Quebec City, Quebec. From there, Fredericton, New Brunswick, en route to Fundy National Park, where I'd spend a couple of days be- fore heading up to Prince Edward Island. I wouldn't expect to encounter anything Babine until I left Prince Edward Island and headed for Halifax, but it seemed silly to get that close to Anne of Green Gables and not visit. I'd spend about ten days in Nova Scotia, then to Kennebunk, Maine, where the Babines settled for only a generation and a half before the family split and my great-grandparents headed for California. It would take me about four days from there to get back to Minnesota. There are stories of women traveling, but few of them are road trips. We have early travel narratives by ship, tales of settler women making their way across the Great Ameri- can Desert in wagons, and countless stories of walking. The road story of women is worth telling--and the camping stories of solo women equally so. Camping alone is the only time I have to be what feels like fully myself, fully immersed in the solitude I seem to need to function best. When I tell people I camp alone, so many wonder if I get lonely, but the truth is that I almost never am. I might text wish you were here to my family, and it's just as easy to text friends a pic- ture, and that seems to satisfy the need to share a moment with another human being. I'm alone, I'm solitary--but I'm not disconnected. My connections to people and the world are vibrant and strong. I just like coming home to an empty house where I can recharge my social battery in peace. It feels deliberate and methodical, the way that I never pursued permanent partnership or kids, and while I'm not opposed to partnership, the act of changing my mind would have to include significant effort. I have a house, a job, and a full life. He's not competing with other men to be with me, I'd think--he's competing with me, and I like my life just the way it is. Even if our decisions are based in a unique worldview, we make our choices out of curiosity, or stubbornness, out of external societal pressure. Sometimes I do things purely out of spite because I'm a Scorpio, but I also think there's a certain kind of stubbornness that is less obstinate and more just a function of immovability, the work of simply never changing course, and getting where you want to go simply because you never considered another option, never considered that the thing would not happen. It's a kind of stamina, the work of constructing a life by playing the long game, which requires a certain kind of emotional and mental endurance. It's not stub- bornness, but that's the closest language I have. The Scamp fell into this mindset too. I couldn't be talked into buying a camper that would sleep two or more people comfortably or that would fit a dog I didn't have. I always wanted the Scamp, way back at the beginning, back when we'd occasionally see them when we went camping when I was young, and it never occurred to me to choose a different camper--or even that I wouldn't have one at some point in my life. It was a kind of inevitability that didn't feel so much stubborn, as of course it is. If Mr. Right ever showed up, we'd renegotiate the camper situation--in the meantime, I wasn't going to live my life for somebody who may or may not ever exist. Even then, I might still keep the Scamp and go camping by myself. When I'm at home, wherever home is, and the Scamp is parked in the driveway, sometimes I'll go out there, close the door behind me, lay down on the bed, and just take a deep breath. There's something elementally comforting about the interior shape of this tiny camper, how it feels so much larger on the inside than it does from the outside, something I as- sume has to do with the curved shape. When the world is just a little bit too much, I discard the shell of my house and take on the shell of the camper and let it form the physical barrier between me and the world, especially in times when what holds me together feels fragile, my skin feels thin, when my self feels like you could see through me. It's not a matter of spending time in the camper to remember who I am, but rather a matter of being reminded of the deliberate choices I've made to live my life the way I want to. Excerpted from The Allure of Elsewhere: Chasing Landscapes, Family, and the Road Ahead--One Woman's Tiny Camper Adventure by Karen Babine All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
