Domestic Left #42: Going solo

Learning to travel alone

My first proper solo travel, as opposed to just me getting from one place to another by myself, happened in the summer of 2010, and almost by accident. I dropped the kids off with their grandmother in Colorado for a week and headed down I-25 to New Mexico, a state I had never before set foot in. The ostensible rationale for the trip was organizational — as a member of the Vermont Workers’ Center’s coordinating committee, I was going to spend a few days visiting with and learning from comrades at the Southwest Organizing Project in Albuquerque. But I was also keen to visit Santa Fe, which held a treasured place in my bohemian imaginary (stemming largely, I think, from my high school girlfriend’s unfulfilled desire to go to St. John’s College, with its great books program), and also Los Alamos — I had recently watched a DVD recording of John Adams’ and Peter Sellars’ opera Doctor Atomic, which had rekindled my pre-adolescent interest in the romance of physics and especially the Manhattan Project.

I-25 is a liminal drive, with the Rockies rising on one side and the Great Plains stretching out on the other. I had been to Colorado many times before, but always to the mountains, a wonderland and playground to which Denver simply served as a portal.

Driving south along the interstate with no one but my CDs to keep me company, I took in the sprawl of Colorado Springs, and the massive military installation of Fort Carson, named after Kit Carson, the scout who played a central role in the country’s westward expansion and who participated in and directed numerous massacres of Native Americans.

South of Colorado Springs is Pueblo, a small industrial city known as the “Pittsburgh of the West.” It’s home to the first integrated steel mill west of the Mississippi, which was built in 1882, was owned and operated by the notorious Colorado Fuel and Iron Company for much of its existence, and employed over 6,000 workers in its heyday. From 1997-2004, over a thousand members of the Steelworkers union engaged in an epic seven year struggle — a strike that then turned into a lockout — which I read about regularly in the pages of the People’s Weekly World during my first decade in the labor movement.

I-25 slices right between the mill and the neighborhood of Bessemer, which takes its name from an early industrial process for producing steel. Bessemer is full of small homes, presumably once full of steelworkers who would walk to the mill before the interstate was built. It features one of the weirdest exits I have ever seen on a limited-access road: the highway sprouts an exit lane, which makes a sudden sixty degree turn and within maybe 200 feet becomes, simply, one of the cross streets of Bessemer. (Google maps tells me it is Minnequa Avenue, and that a block beyond the exit lies Powder Keg Liquors.) Two blocks south, Aqua Avenue makes an equally sudden, even sharper turn right onto the interstate. But I suppose for people used to working in a steel mill, taking their lives in their hands on the American highway system probably seems like child’s play.

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From 2015 through 2020 I saw a therapist somewhat regularly; or, more accurately, two therapists: one in Vermont, who I stopped seeing when she moved to Virginia, and one in Pittsburgh after I moved there in 2017, who I stopped seeing when the pandemic hit. (Initially, my insurance did not cover “telehealth.”)

In retrospect, I’m not sure how helpful it was, but one thing that my Pittsburgh therapist told me will always stick with me. I was struggling with boundaries of various sorts, and, in a rare instance of sharing about her own personal life, she told me, “Sometimes, I just tell my wife that I am going to go camping by myself for the weekend. That I love her and will be back on Monday, but that I just need some time for myself right now.”

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Smartphones were still fairly new in 2010 — the iPhone was only three years old and I didn’t acquire one until the following year at the earliest — and so I was navigating using a Rand-McNally road atlas, and taking photos with a point-and-click digital camera (which, apparently, I felt safe operating while driving). My plan had been to simply drive I-25 all the way to Santa Fe, but during a pit stop at a visitors’ center in Raton I made an abrupt decision to get off the interstate and drive the two-lane US 64 up into the mountains.

I can’t really recall what precipitated this decision. Perhaps it was the memory of my father’s fondness for driving small roads, inspired I think by reading William Least Heat-Moon’s 1982 memoir Blue Highways.

I grew up in Kansas but both my parents were from the East Coast; summer vacations, more often than not, involved packing our family of four into a station wagon and heading east to visit friends and family from Washington, DC to New Hampshire. I remember a vague, occasional tension between my father’s desire to drive small roads — through, say, horse country in Virginia, where I remember him expecting to find “bistros” — and my sister’s and my desire to just get where we were going as soon as possible, so we could get out of the goddamn car.

But mostly I remember my father’s, and subsequently our whole family’s, enthusiasm for Heat-Moon’s calendar rating system for cafes. (Heat-Moon contended that the quality of a cafe was directly proportional to the number of calendars on its walls.) Whenever we stopped anywhere to eat, we would obsessively count the number of calendars on the wall, then rate the food. At least in my memory, Heat-Moon’s system was pretty accurate.

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About 35 miles after it crosses I-25, US 64 leaves the plains and starts snaking up into Cimarron Canyon, which slows down the driving significantly. Fifteen miles into the mountains, you suddenly come across the Palisades Sill, spectacular cliffs of volcanic rock that have been worn down by the Cimarron River. They share a name with, and I believe have a similar geologic origin to, the Palisades Sill in New Jersey, which rises across the Hudson from Manhattan — but unlike those cliffs, these can only really be viewed from just below, a small pull-off between a two-lane road and a river, notated only by a modest historical marker.

US 64 leaves the mountains after Taos. To get to Santa Fe, you turn south on state route 68, which meets the Rio Grande at Pilar and follows it to Española, where you get on US 84. It was the first time I had ever been to the desert, unless you count being driven in a van between the Tucson airport and Kitt Peak National Observatory when I was in high school.

In retrospect, I kind of wish I had stopped and gotten out of the car to take it in. But I was new to traveling alone, and to be honest swooping down the canyons in a then-new car was breathtaking enough.

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I stayed one night in Santa Fe, and I have very little memory of what I did. I must have gone to the New Mexico Museum of Art because I have photos of its courtyard. I vaguely remember there being an exhibit on cowboy boots, their history, how important it is to get them properly fitted, etc. It was neither the first nor the last time in my life when I considered the possibility that I might purchase a pair and become a huge fucking poser.

Despite having an ambition to be a writer since at least my preteens, I had always studiously avoided taking one of the best pieces of advice offered to writers: keep a goddamn journal. And continued to do so until the fall of 2019 when, after my Pittsburgh therapist suggested it might be a good idea for mental-health reasons, I idly purchased a blank notebook in a Squirrel Hill bookstore.

I’ve been journaling more or less consistently since then, with the exception of the first year or so of the pandemic. I have found it, in fact, to be the best thing I have ever done not only for my mental health and for my writing, but also for processing and enjoying travel, especially solo travel.

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Following several days in Albuquerque learning about SWOP’s work, and a day-trip to Los Alamos, I trucked back up along I-25 to Trinidad, Colorado, a small city just north of the state border. Trinidad had seen better times, but it also had a fairly charming and walkable downtown with a coffee shop and some interesting shops and restaurants. I don’t remember how many calendars they had, or whether I even entered them to count the calendars.

I spent two nights in Trinidad. The day in between, I visited the nearby Ludlow Memorial, which commemorates the 1914 massacre of striking mineworkers and their families by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, assisted by the Colorado National Guard, and drove up into the mountains. But, as with Santa Fe, I remember little of what I did in Trinidad itself.

It would be half a decade before I developed the confidence to enter a bar and sit at a bar stool by myself, order a beer and maybe chat with the bartender, or allow myself to be drawn into conversation with other patrons — now one of my favorite ways to pass time in a new place. I was too embarrassed about being alone, not only in bars, but even in restaurants. I must have eaten in restaurants by myself for sustenance during this trip, but I only remember one, lunch in a diner-like place in Santa Fe where I had the best chiles rellenos of the trip (it had numerous calendars). Maybe, in keeping with my cheapskate nature, the rest of my meals were take-and-eat foods from grocery stores, like my lunch in Taos, or gas station pizza and burritos. I’m fairly certain I passed the last hours of the evenings in Trinidad drinking cheap beer alone in my cheap motel room.

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During the pandemic lockdown, I realized that one of the things I missed most intensely was the anonymous sociability of working in coffee shops or going to bars alone. And as soon as coffee shops began to allow people to sit in them again, I took to working in coffee shops more mornings than not, a habit which I have been able to maintain thanks to the post-pandemic relaxation of expectations about being in the office from nine to five.

One of the Substack newsletters I’ve been trying out recently, Jenna Park’s

Everything is Liminal

, had a nice post this past week about learning to sit in cafes and sketch. While Park’s essay is not about learning to sit alone — she is accompanying her teenage daughter who is working on college applications — her admission that “Sitting in a cafe with a sketchbook and a pencil while everyone around me types away on a laptop, including my own kid across from me, feels weirdly exposing” reminded me of my old feelings about, well, being alone in any establishment where one usually goes with friends or family or a partner.

Anyway, I made a vague resolution this year to travel more, and to write more. So here’s to more weirdly exposing in 2024.

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