It is not yet 5 am and I am awake in a finally nice hotel room in Woodbury, Minnesota. Jupiter is asleep across my feet under a waffled white bedspread surely bleached. Yesterday’s miles were long and the landscape was easy on the eye along route 94. I do not remember where I was when I began- oh Minot, North Dakota!- the terrain and lodging blur. What I do know about yesterday:

1. I traded bites of beef jerky with the dogs, which I bought at a gas stop called Love[ insert red heart here]- a chain that has little fenced dog parks and apparently offers hot showers as I heard numbers being called on the intercom as I circled the aisles until I found the jerky. I am on the path of truckers.

2. I stopped mid-forever at an endless will-again-be corn field and threw a ball to the dogs, again and again, at a safe distance from the road and took a disappointing video to try to share how very wide and gold it all was.

3. I listened to two three-hour episodes of JRE, one featuring Jordan Peterson to whom I will always grant a full respectful listen as well as leniency despite our diverging perspectives ( the overlap remains and his impact on me, my family, and students was profound). I was happily struck by their consensus that the “climate apocalypse” narrative is crumbling in the face of documented planetary cooling and a 20% increase in greening (so many carbon loving plants!). They parted with tender expressions of friendship and I nodded along having heard every minute of their hours upon hours of public conversation over the last five (quite critical) years. I found Jillian Michaels performative and didn’t stay long enough for Joe to border collie her into saying something unguarded and true. What cued up next was a beautiful surprise: Jeremy Renner (an actor turned philanthropist and author) and his story of putting his skull and bones and life back together after being slowly, consciously, and audibly pulled under and crushed by the tank-like tracks of a Snowcat at his home in Lake Tahoe one terrible snow storm a little over two years ago. He broke 38 bones and regarded his own eyeball on the snow. But he did not break his spine and he did not lose his spirit for living. Joe complimented him again and again on living such a purposeful and loving life before, during, and after the accident. I could hear both men, both fathers, choke up as they discussed how they love their children and how Renner’s love for his daughter made a full and spirited recovery the only option. He is a lovely example of a human living in beauty, despite terror, and he said to Joe that he will never again have a “bad day.” I believed him. His entire testimony was a sermon that worked on me for 100s of miles as I drove and drove and drove.

4. I had pointed toward a Whole Foods in Minneapolis imagining securing a proper meal and settling in early in a nearby hotel. The outskirts sprang into full on city and my hands gripped the wheel as Waze turn by turn guided me to a store without a parking lot. I will never leave my dogs on a city street locked in a car. So, now what? I quickly punched in the name of a pet-friendly hotel I had passed on my way into the city but it took me somewhere else and hotel after hotel did not take dogs and the last after a long wait in line with a lone clerk and sweet but screaming twin toddlers spinning a chair as I waited. Now what? I got back into the car, reassured Piper I would figure something out and called my son. Julian texted “ I am out [ with friends]! Do you need something?” I did. He facetimed immediately. His childhood friend, Larry, was at the wheel. I was doubly held. ( I have a hundred memories of Larry as a child, have watched him play baseball for years, and once helped him face down his fear of heights by riding with him on the ferris wheel at the Jamboree one May. He is the only one of Julian’s friends to have never called me by my first name). What I needed was a safe destination and to have that sorted as I kept driving east. Julian was on it. I added “ it needs to be safe and suburban. Not a city. See if there is a Whole Foods nearby.” " I got it, ma,” he texted. After so much open land and no familiar faces, then an actual city grid, then no-pet hotels and on our 11th hour in the car, the material hominess of Whole Foods had its desired effect, I entered and started to cry. I can do without creature comforts more than most, but the order and beauty of Whole Foods (notably when I travel), restore me. I understand what is on offer there. There is high art in the displays. I can choose a good apple, find almond flour crackers and a plastic container of prepared tuna. I can sit at a clean table near the cut flowers and look at the hotels my son selected for me nearby. “ Can you just call for me please?” “ Yes, ma.” Minutes later a confirmation code and a link for driving. I was less than a mile away.

5. It is now 5:55 and as I am on # 5 I will share that for a word girl, I keep letting numbers point the way through nowhere to somewhere. I thought I was going to attend a 7 am mass at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis. But as the “polis” was true to its word, I am now going to a 10 am service at the Cathedral of St. Paul (in St. Paul) which does have parking and gives me my first and only slow morning of any of my driving days. I have chosen three stopping points in a row that were at a 444 mile distance from my origin point. I will go lighter on miles today and book my hotel ahead of time. I will likely move Whole Foods to Whole Foods now. I do not care how that sounds. I am also moving Cathedral to Cathedral. And from podcast to podcast. I need the tethers of beauty and order as I move through terrain after terrain of unknown toward more unknown.

6. I delight in single-serve coffee in hotel rooms. I do not even enjoy the taste really- not with my options of white sugar and non-dairy creamer. But something about it feels personal and fun and ritualized and knowable and so, it too, becomes a ceremony for me while the rest of all of life proves forever wild.

Here is a link to the show and also the cover of his book.

Jeremy Renner