Long road trips are good for my soul for reasons I don’t fully understand.
Last week, my husband and I left Louisiana to head to El Paso, on the far western edge of Texas. With all the hubbub of flying, airports and missed connections, we decided to drive.
Driving all the way across Texas takes time. Watching the sometimes gradual and sometimes sudden changes of landscape helps me connect the dots between more than places on a map.
We’ve made the long drive from Louisiana to El Paso several times. When we’re heading west, I appreciate the way the skies get bigger and the horizon broadens. Expansive horizons make me calmer — like the world isn’t quite as hectic as it was when everything was crowding in.
On this particular road trip, my husband and I were driving toward a funeral for our beloved nephew. There was something cathartic in taking so long to get to El Paso — in watching the trees, landscapes and even the food shift along the way.
Maybe putting distance between everyday life and responsibilities helped, too. But maybe a road trip also helps create a more balanced perspective, as poet David Whyte describes when he writes about horizons: “Horizons between the known and the unknown are everywhere in our human lives, even when we refuse to lift our heads and our eyes to see them….”
Lifting my own eyes to see the sun — or even shielding them from the late-afternoon, low-hanging winter sun — gave me time to contemplate the known and unknown, especially the mysteries of grief.
In looking back at the trip, East Texas was still full of green and noise, like the chaos of the early days of grief.
West Texas was spare, honest and uncluttered. It reminded me of the way grief can strip life down to the barest of bones. You can’t hurry West Texas, just like you can’t hurry grief.
When we hit the mountains near El Paso, I felt like we were climbing to say goodbye.
We took our time to get to El Paso. We turned what could have been a brutal one-day haul into three gentle days — visiting with people we love and staying in surprising places along the way.
We stopped in Big Spring, Texas, a place we had never been — a dusty, overlooked town to many — but there we found a hotel with rooms as gorgeous as any I’ve ever seen. The Settles Hotel surprised me. It was like this little oasis of comfort and care. In the middle of a hard trip, that unexpected beauty felt like a kindness.
A room with a view at The Settles Hotel in Big Spring, Texas
So much of my adult life has been about proving that places that aren’t big, fancy cities can still be wonderful, and The Settles Hotel is evidence of that.
Looking out from our 10th-floor room in Big Spring gave me more time to consider horizons and be grateful for the chance to be there — and for the time and distance between where we were and where we’d been.
While I appreciate the wonder that is air travel, flying can be so jarring in the sense of walking into one place and stepping out somewhere completely different. Driving across the whole of Texas is the opposite of that.
Road trips are so good for my heart, mind and spirit. Every time, they remind me that we are small and the world is still vast.
I don’t know exactly why road trips help with healing, but this one did.
The miles gave our grief someplace to stretch its legs — and gave us a broader horizon to bear it.