“How are you paying for this exactly?”
“But like, what side are you really on?”
“How does your father/boyfriend/husband feel about what you’re doing?”
These questions come from all angles, no matter where I’m at in this journey. They come when I’m interviewing people in small businesses, working at coffee shops on rainy mornings, and chatting with strangers over beers in the smallest of dive bars in the smallest of towns. They come from people who are curious, from ones who are well meaning and generous, from ones who are skeptical or shaking their heads, the thought of “what a millennial” reverberating around their brains without even exiting their mouths.
But nothing is ever asked as regularly as: do you feel safe? And how could you feel safe on the road?
When I started this project, I felt unabashedly—and naively—safe on the road. I don’t think I could’ve set out for months on end without a small feeling of invincibility, which was largely buoyed to my youth and inherent privilege in this undertaking. I drove off from my parents’ house in Brookfield, Wisconsin with more anxiety about where this road would lead professionally than whether or not someone would take advantage while I was gone.
Then Kentucky happened; my tent was vandalized, my space violated and a handful of belonging gone into the mystery hands of someone else. I stood, legs shaking, staring at the aftermath of my only constant on this road, unable to wrap my head around the violation that prickled through my veins like an antagonistic versions of butterflies in the stomach. Wasps, perhaps, of my emotional world.
That night, when I walked to my secured room at a Days Inn, I eyed every person I passed with suspicion. That man on the balcony, leaning against the rail with his smoldering cigarette, what was he going to do to me? The father walking down the passage with two kids, would he try something after they were tucked in for the night?
It sounds ridiculous now, and completely adverse from the crux of this project: most people are good. But I left the road and spent the week back home, under the radar and floating through space like a ghost. I didn’t touch the project for two full days.
Getting back on the road, I tried to find my footing, re-discovering my confidence like when my niece took her first, shaky steps. I took precautions I never considered before: I didn’t stay places where the cell phone service cut in and out. I started renting more and more AirBNBs, much to the chagrin of my wallet. I looked at strangers with more skepticism rather than the promise of new friends.
Now, weeks have passed and I’m still waiting to feel “safe” again. I’ve camped less than six times, citing cold temperatures in New England instead of the reality: nights in my car meant staring out the window at overhead lights with my heart pounding in my throat, my own Cracker Barrel-parking lot version of Sleepless in Seattle. Minus any Tom Hanks romance.
I feel resentful that I still feel so violated. I am angry that something so senseless could take so much away from me.
Things that previously had not phased me, like the group of whitewater rafting guides who unintentionally boxed my car in while camping at a National Forest, now become the object of my anxiety. The question is less, is there a story here? And far more, what could this person do to me? I can’t help wonder if I’d feel this quietly threatened if any part of me—the fact that I’m young or I’m a woman, for instance—was different.
Now, when people ask me if I feel safe on the road, I try to answer truthfully: yes, most of the time, but not always. I approach the road much differently than before.
I’m tangibly aware of the risks I’ve taken by being on the go; I weigh the gamble versus “doing it for the story” more consciously. I’ve reigned in my Midwest niceness and the oversharing that comes from a large, Catholic family upbringing. I remind myself that the cost of an AirBNB is priceless in terms of my safety—even if it means eating a few more granola bar lunches along the way.
But I also can acknowledge that while the risks amplify moving every few days, there were also inherent risks living in Chicago, where I spent the past two years before starting this project. Senseless crime happens everywhere; that’s what makes it senseless. Overall, I know that I’ve been remarkably lucky.
All I can do it be careful, be mindful—and move forward.
