Laws of the Dark Trance, 68th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Castor): An article in last weekend's New York Times was titled Road Trips That Changed Their Lives. The title alone, much less the recollections of the various contributors, triggered a lot of memories.

It's been a while since I took an epic road trip. Once a year since the covids ended, I drive from Atlanta up to Knoxville, Tennessee, an unremarkable, three-hour trek mostly along interstate I-75 that scarcely qualifies as a road trip, much less a life changer.

Back in the first two decades of the 2000s, I used to make more-or-less annual trips from Atlanta down to the Georgia coast - Savannah and Tybee Island, or Jekyl Island,  or St. Simons. The default route was on interstate I-16, an amazingly boring stretch of flat, straight, featureless road, where the only real adventure is staying awake long enough to complete the drive. I prefer getting off the highway and driving the backgrounds through the small Georgia towns of Cochran and Eastman, McRae-Helena, Lumber City and Hazlehurst, and Baxley, with its surprising nuclear-power plant. By the time I get to Jesup, it seems like a city after all those small towns. 

But those were simply summertime diversions, and hardly qualify as change-my-life road trips.

My last epic road trip was probably in 1993 driving from Pittsburgh to Atlanta. I was moving, changing jobs (or at least offices), I was in transition, so you can argue that it changed my life, but the change was more in the destination than the journey itself. However, I did take in part of the Blue Ridge Parkway for a portion of the trip which was impressive and memorable.

In 1990 or '91, I took a road adventure from Albany, New York to the town of Percé on the tip of Canada's Gaspé Peninsula and back again with four friends from work. It was a four- or five-day trip and did contain some adventure, exploration, and discovery. It may not have been a life-altering experience per se, but it was far more than a simple commute to some vacation spot. In fact, it wasn't a vacation at all; our purpose was to attend the annual field trip of something called the New England Intercollegiate Geological Conference.

One of my more epic road trips was in the early-mid 1970s from northern New Jersey to Indianapolis. Indy wasn't even the original destination - we had set out for central Illinois - and my traveling companions when I got back weren't the same as those with whom I had left. My car made it only as far as central Pennsylvania before breaking down and we hitchhiked most of the rest of the way. (it was the 70s). Along the way, we were arrested and jailed for hitchhiking and vagrancy, at one point found ourselves set up with a free dorm room at Case-Western University for some reason, and took part in two separate rock festivals. An epic, an odyssey, but I was still the same person I was when I had left. 

My real, truly life-changing road trip was back in 1969. Three of my best friends and I got one of our fathers (not mine) to drive us cross-country on a camping and hiking adventure that took us from Long Island to central Texas and even down into Mexico for one day. From Texas, we travelled the Gulf coast to Pensacola, and from Pensacola eventually back home to New York. Six weeks, our summer vacation. On the trip, I learned how to really read maps, not just connect-the-lines routing, but to infer the look and feel of the landscape and the quality and nature of the countryside. To this day, studying a map to me is almost like virtual reality. Cartomania. Girlfriends have learned that if they want to distract or silence me, all they have to do is hand me a map. 

We camped at almost two-dozen sites, we hiked, we caught turtles and snakes and lizards and even bought home a pet armadillo that we caught in Texas. We watched the first moon landing on a portable t.v. in a bayou in Louisiana. We met some girls in Corpus Christi, we saw segregated water fountains in Alabama, we watched scissor-tail flycatchers in Oklahoma. We visited LBJ's ranch on the way to see the Alamo and netted a soft-shelled turtle in a nearby pond. 

That road trip did change my life. My interests to this day in hiking and backpacking, in wildlife and natural sciences, all trace back to that trip. It's no wonder that by the time I got to college, I became a geology major.

I've long wanted to thank that one father for giving up his summer plans and driving the four of us across the country. But I never got that chance and sadly, the last time he saw me, I was deep in my punk adolescent rebellion phase. I've always wanted to tell him that the trip did indeed change my life and for the better, and I owe no small part of who I am today and what I've achieved due to his guidance behind the wheel. Thank you, kind sir.