It seems to me that one of the most addictive aspects of travel is the way everything exists in the present.
You meet people. You like them. You are friends.
The road, which brings with it all the intimacy of a freshman dorm, throws you together, and at least for that moment, you feel completely bonded.
But it doesn’t mean you’ll stay in touch. On the road there are no obligations.
So how is it that despite the intensity of the connections, there are people you never see again—while others stay in your life forever?
I’m not wise enough to know, but in the case of my friend Michelle, our meeting seemed so eerily predestined that every time I tell the story people shake their heads and say “No way.” To which I reply, “Way.”
Michelle and I met in the parking lot of a motel outside of Phoenix, Arizona. She’d come from New York; I was there from Los Angeles.
We had come to join with others from around the country to build and maintain trails in the Superstition Wilderness in Tonto National Forest. (At the time, the idea of spending one’s vacation volunteering was so unusual that CBS News did a profile of our group.)
I didn’t know anyone in that parking lot, but it seemed to me that the friendliest face belonged to a young woman standing near me. So I struck up a conversation.
That was Michelle, and by the time the group had hiked into the wilderness, the two of us were fast friends. So fast that we kept in touch, even when the trip was over.
So fast that for years we flew back and forth across the country visiting one another.
So fast that I went to her wedding in Cincinnati and stayed with her parents.
There was something about our connection that made me feel so comfortable, so relaxed and so close to Michelle. Every time we’d talk on the phone we’d say, “I wish you lived next door.”
Fast forward a decade or so. Michelle has just had her second child. She calls to say her family will be in Palm Springs to celebrate her mother-in-law’s 70th birthday. Could I squeeze in a visit? Of course I can. This is Michelle, after all.
So I drive out to the desert, and while I wait in her in-laws’ condo for Michelle to put her children to bed, I strike up a conversation with her mother-in-law.
She mentions she’s from upstate New York. “Really,” I say. “So are my parents.”
She tells me she went to high school in Albany. “Really,” I say. “So did my dad.”
She tells me she went to Phillip Schuyler High. “Really,” I say. “My dad went there, too.”
Knowing my father is several years older than her I add, “Chances are you don’t know him. His name is Sandy Simons.”
All the blood drains from her face and she says, “I almost married your father.”
She’s stunned. I’m stunned. Here sits the woman who could have been my mother.
Michelle’s husband could have been my brother. And somehow this whole weird, wonderful connection started in a motel parking lot in Phoenix, Arizona in the shadow of the Superstition Mountains.
My dad and Michelle’s mother-in-law are back in touch now. They’ve spent hours catching up on the 50-plus years they both spent happily married to other people.
Marveling at this, I’m led to this conclusion:
The road is funny. It puts people in your path with whom you share the most intimate kind of connection.
And then they disappear. Or not. Some are fated to be there forever—generation after generation.
By Jamie Simons for PeterGreenberg.com.
Read the story that started it all: An Eskimo Showed Me the Way. Check out some highlights from the rest of the Grateful Traveler series:
