14—One Week Before Departure

December 18, 1998.

Anxiety crawled over me like ants. 

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” I told my therapist.

“Just go,” she said. “Have fun.” 

“Fun?” I snapped. “Fun is for people who can afford vacations. I thought I was supposed to be on some big damned quest.”

This woman who was more annoying to me than anyone I knew stopped scribbling notes, set aside her big yellow tablet, and looked me square in the eyes.

“Just what is it that you want from life?” she asked. 

“Magic,” I quipped sardonically.

“Magicians are merely masters of illusion,” she observed then looked at her watch.

Time was up.

As I was leaving, she patted me on the shoulder.

I wanted to slap her.

•••

Later over lunch, my friends kept referring to my trip as “the grand adventure.” Easy for them to say. I mean, on Christmas Day, there they would be—safe and merry in their lovely homes, snugged up with their significant others, surrounded by family, and secure in their jobs. And there I’d be—a small, fifty-six-year-old woman with no prospects setting forth with two disgruntled cats for a month alone in a dank cabin by an inhospitable sea. Why hadn’t anyone even tried to stop me? 

This wasn’t a quest. It was an act of precarious and escalating delusion.

•••

Back at my apartment, I phoned my father in Pennsylvania. Dad had always despised and even feared travel. What’s more, he’d started warning me as early as first grade that my “nonconformist notions” put me on a “collision course.” Clearly, he’d been right. 

Surely Dad would support my decision to accept reality and finally do the sensible thing. 


“Don’t be silly,” he said. “Go. Have a good time.” And for emphasis, he called back five minutes later to say he was going to have his bank to transfer the cost of my cabin from his checking account to mine. An expression of his faith in me, he said. 

Well, wasn’t that just dandy. Now if I didn’t go, I’d be wasting his money, not mine. 

Tears filled my eyes. I sat down on the floor by the sofa where the cats laid curled up as usual: cd on my right; Mitts to the left.

“A quest?” I asked them. “A quest for what?” 

No response.

My cats, unlike my human friends, never failed to sense even my slightest apprehension. So why were they now so unfazed? Maybe I wasn’t really depressed. Or delusional. Or even anxious. Just cowardly—afraid of what was calling me.

The truth was I’d recently received a small and completely unexpected monthly inheritance. By combining this income with an early retirement and living frugally, I would never again have to work another day in my life. Trips like this one remained a luxury I could not sensibly afford. But now here was this gift from my father. A way, it seemed, was been laid for a new direction. But where would it lead?

•••

As I relaxed, so did the cats. For several days all was well until a trip to the car wash revealed that the camper shell on my pickup leaked. I purchased two blue tarps for protecting my laptop; notes for the book I was going to write; a carton of books to inspire the effort; my containers of vegetarian staples; medical and emergency supplies; and a suitcase with ensembles of wool, fleece, and Gortex for every damp occasion.

Around noon on Christmas Eve, I was feeling swept up in a wave of panic when I heard a knock at the door. Ah ha, someone had finally come to talk me out of going. But no. It was my former partner who smiled, held out a gift bag containing a variety pack of Ghirardelli hot chocolate mixes, and wished me well—hardly the act of one forlorn over the recent withdrawal of my frustrated and anguished affections. 

That did it. By mid afternoon, the truck was packed and ready to go. 

Just before dawn on Christmas morning, I steered the old burgundy pickup out of the parking lot with the cats sitting sphinx-like in their carriers.

As the truck curved around the expressway, the mountain known as The Sleeping Indian lay haloed in the first hint of the new day. Once the Old One floated into morning on shadows of violet and rose. Now the mountain lay stiffly on geometries of asphalt and concrete. 

Back in the days when acts of evil remained largely untroubled by contradiction, Las Vegas was just a gaudy strip down the middle of the valley. Now, the Town of Cards twinkled across the valley like a fallen galaxy.

Leaving the desert felt like a betrayal. What had I done to save it? Nothing. Perhaps when I returned from the edge, I would know how to redeem myself. But for now, we hummed along the interstate into the unknown—the lost soul, the MITTStical, and the civil disobedient.

Next: Through the Rainbow