Alyson Gagne

Or, The Importance of Cutting Yourself Some Slack in the Midst Of Slow Motion Disaster

If I have learned anything from eight months of constant travel during a global pandemic, it is the value of flexibility. Sometimes things just don’t go your way, and when they don’t, there’s nothing you can do but learn from it, work around it, and forge ahead. Something else that I’m still working on learning is that when these things do happen, and they will, it’s also ok to cut yourself a little slack.

When I left Utah, as much as I enjoyed it, I was ready for a change of scenery. I love the desert, but I wanted to look at a tree again. I made a brief detour into Nevada and then decided to head to the lush green hills and crystal rivers of Oregon.

And then the entire state of Oregon caught on fire.

It felt like just a couple of days before I was supposed to drive there, Oregon was suddenly overcome with wildfires that caused massive evacuations and closed down huge parts of the state. Suddenly making that my next stop was no longer an option.

It wasn’t like this was the first time this trip had been severely derailed (Hello, Mississippi!) so I am no stranger to shifting my plans. I still wanted to go to the Pacific Northwest, but if Oregon was going to be off the table, I figured I could at least go to the not-currently-ablaze upper corner of Washington State, to the Cascades and the Olympics. After that, I could do something I’ve wanted to do for years, and take the coast highway from the very top of Washington state down the whole West Coast. That would bring me back to Santa Barbara to visit my friends before continuing on to spend the fall in the Southwest. The whole plan was very tidy and convenient.

To get myself from the bottom of Nevada to the top of Washington, I decided to take the long way through Montana. That way I could see Glacier National Park – something I had attempted to do on two previous occasions and I just hadn’t made it work. So, I’d finally get to see Glacier, I’d get to enjoy some Montana wild west cowboy time, and then I’d continue on with my very clever plan to skirt around the edges of the PNW back to California.

I was actually quite looking forward to my time in Montana. I had some very grandiose images of what it would be like. I thought I’d be, like, riding horses and fly fishing with a young Brad Pitt, ya know? Or at the very least, like, smoking a joint on the prairie while John Mayer played an acoustic guitar against a backdrop of rugged mountains.

Instead I got this:

Those aren’t clouds – that’s smoke. The fires that were by that time destroying the entire west coast were producing a quantity of smoke so enormous that it was blotting out the sun hundreds of miles away in Montana. The air quality was so bad that I could barely go outside at all. I don’t think I saw the blue sky even a single time.

Here is a graph of the air quality over time in Missoula, where I stayed. The first arrow shows the day I decided it would be a good idea to go to Montana. The second arrow is the day I arrived in Montana. You can imagine my chagrin at this turn of events.

I try to persevere in the face of adversity, so I attempted to find things to do despite the unbreathable air. I went birdwatching once very briefly, and on another occasion I visited this cool Buddhist shrine called The Garden of One Thousand Buddhas. But mostly, I just sat in my hotel room drinking local beers and gazing mournfully out at the toxic haze.

I also spent a lot of that time agonizing over what to do next. I still wanted to continue with my second week in Montana to visit Glacier, I still wanted to make my way to Washington, and I still really wanted to do my west coast trip. But no matter how many times I clicked refresh on the AirNow page, the smoke that was ruining my time in Montana was also hovering over all the other places I wanted to visit and it showed now signs of abating. This is a screenshot of what the air quality in America looked like:

Which is especially bad when you consider that this is the rough course I had planned to take:

No matter how I looked at it, it just didn’t make sense for me to stick to anything remotely resembling my existing plan. Anything in that whole corner of the country that wasn’t actively on fire was rendered unlivable by the oppressive air quality. I couldn’t do anything while I was in Montana, and I couldn’t get to the places that going to Montana was supposed to get me to. I had driven a thousand miles to get to Montana and it had all been for absolutely no reason at all.

I was profoundly frustrated and at a loss of what to do next. I considered attempting to persevere on to Glacier, but the air there was so bad that I didn’t think I could safely enjoy it. I considered going directly back to Santa Barbara to stay with my friends for a while, but with the covid lockdowns I probably wouldn’t really get to see any of them anyway. I considered Colorado instead, but Colorado was also on fire and/or under smoke. I could go back towards the East, but that would take me in the opposite direction that I wanted to go in, and I could barely find any places to stay in any of the areas I’d be interested in visiting.

Which is something that has slowly dawned on me as I have forged ahead through this year: that over this time, rental properties have become more and more scarce, to the point that it’s now nearly impossible for me to find a place to stay anymore. It makes sense, I suppose: six months into national quarantine, people are sick to death of staying home, and at the same time a lot of us aren’t tied to a physical office anymore. Suddenly the number of people doing what I’m doing, for short or long periods of time, has skyrocketed. Now the abundance of private rentals with kitchens and wifi that I had been living in all year were being snatched up by every other untethered Millennial and Zoomer in America.

Now, in the places where I can find rentals available at all, I can no longer find any for more than a few days at a time. I’m now jumping between places every week or sometimes less. There are so few Airbnb’s available that I’m mostly staying in hotels at this point, which means that all of my meals are now coming out of a microwave or a restaurant. It’s also way more expensive – the six days I spent in a hotel in Montana cost me nearly as much as I spent on a whole month in a lakefront cottage in Arkansas.

What this has meant for me is that I’m moving constantly, I’m living much less comfortably, I’m eating much less healthy, and I’m spending a massive amount of time and stress just on finding places to stay. At the beginning of this trip, finding my next place took me probably about an hour from the moment of deciding on a destination to having a reservation. Compare to my week in Montana where I spent probably a good two to three hours every single day looking through Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com, Hotels.com, and any other options I could think of, just trying to find some place to go next. It was exhausting.

I say all this not to make anyone feel bad for me or anything, but rather to say that it was a wakeup call for me to check in on myself, and to give myself permission to take a break. By the time I got to Montana I had been traveling for eight straight months – during a once-a-century pandemic! I had been living out of suitcases, out of my car, moving to new places every few days to few weeks. Because of the virus I had been doing it in near-total isolation. And I had been working full time the whole time. And now, I was living in pretty much constant stress over my housing and the direction of my trip. I was tired – and once it dawned on me, I realized just how true it was, and how long it had been true for.

At first I was very reluctant to admit this to myself – in fact I spent an entire evening beating myself up over it. I finally mentioned it to a couple of friends, and they both told me what should have been obvious to myself: that it’s ok to take a break. What a revelation!

So that is what I have decided to do. I cancelled my second week in Montana (which means I STILL haven’t been to Glacier!) and started heading east. I’m now spending a couple of weeks making my way through the upper Midwest . I’ll get back to New Hampshire by the middle of October and then I’ll probably just hang out there for the rest of the year.

I’m actually really looking forward to it, because it will be the most time I’ve spent in New England since I moved to California. It will be both my first fall and my first Thanksgiving I’ve spent at home in five years. I’ll get to spend some quality time with my parents and help them with some stuff in their lives. I’ll get to actually spend time with my friends there, rather than the passing visits we’ve had the last several years. I’ll get to meet my friend’s new baby for the first time. But mostly, I’m looking forward to doing nothing at all!

Sorry to get all earnest here, but I do want to be honest about my experience. I just spent most of a year traveling across the country, seeing more things in eight months than most people do in a lifetime. It has been incredible and fun and life changing, but it has also been exhausting and at times even a little bit lonely. I’m trying to teach myself that it’s ok to cut yourself a little slack sometimes.

I do intend to get back out there again, assuming the housing situation gets a little less dire. I’m not sure exactly what my plan is quite yet, but I’ll figure it out eventually. At the moment I will enjoy the last leg of my trip back to New England and then I will enjoy some rest.

In the meantime, I hope everyone washes their hands, wears a mask, and stays excellent to each other!