Shaking The Hell Out Of The Tree
A year ago this week I kicked myself out of the house. Twelve months later I'm still feeling the effect.
A year ago this week I kicked myself out of the house. Twelve months later I'm still feeling the effect. Here's what I learned: (cliché alert) sometimes you have to shake your own tree to get some different fruit.
This article originally published on LinkedIn July 1, 2022
Going into summer of 2021 I was stale. Really stale. Motel vending machine sandwich-stale. I was ground down by pandemic, social upheaval, work. It was a bad combo. I didn’t want to attend meetings. My creativity stalled out. My team was starting to pick up on the emptiness of my responses. Feeling the way I did, I knew I had to call a time out and change the play. ServiceNow encourages people to take time to take care of yourself. The trick is to actually do it.
I'm not afraid to admit that I’m originally from the Midwest. Most years around the Fourth of July I haul the family back to the Old Country for a visit. But this time, I just couldn't get myself excited. I didn't want to move. I wasn't interested in getting out of the house. And I certainly wasn't excited to hop on an airplane. Then it hit me: I'd drive. And, what the hell -- I'd do it alone.
I called my brother-in-law, who drives across the country almost monthly to run Ironman competitions. I asked him the best route from San Diego to Minneapolis. The answer back was immediate, "Are you kidding? Highway 50."
It wasn't until I said I'd do it that he added: "Loneliest Highway In America."
Loneliest highway? My stomach dropped. Sounded scary. Sounded risky. But, sounded like what I needed.
So at 8 a.m. on Friday, June 20, 2021, I zeroed the odometer on my 4Runner and headed out. I should mention that my 4Runner is my favorite non-human. Someone I consider a close friend. We've been everywhere -- through the desert, over rivers and mountains, up and down the coast, 250,000 miles worth. I've slept in it, eaten in it, gotten desperately lost in it, and actually gotten a heck of a lot of work done in it. We're tight.
Plot twist: I had decided to make the drive in three days. I’d leave San Diego early Friday and drive as much as I could stand to get to my folks house outside Minneapolis by late Sunday. In tech, we would call this an “accelerated timeline.”
That first day I needed to get from San Diego up to Fallon, Nevada. Eight hours, 526 miles. Getting out of SoCal had its usual traffic, construction, and combat drivers. But once I grabbed Highway 395 I was on my way -- out to the desert and up past the Eastern Sierras. Smooth sailing so far.
Late in the afternoon I left the town of Bishop, California, and headed north on empty highways. My situation started to hit me. I was really doing this. I was really getting out there. I quickly felt disconnected in the unfamiliar scenery. Already, I had spent more time out of cell phone range than I had in maybe five years.
Alone on the highway, with the sun heading down, nerves kicked in. Where was I? Why had I left home? Where was I going? The mind races and the body reacts when you replace your schedule and predictability with wide-open unknown.
I spent the long sunset hours going through wastelands of rock and dirt, finally coming to an impossibly green valley leading to my stop for the night. In just that first day I'd seen more sights than I’d seen in a year of being cooped up in my home office and the only person I could share it with was myself. It was just a taste of what was to come.
Saturday was my biggest day. Starting at sunrise, I drove across Nevada, across Utah, and across all of Colorado to Fort Collins -- about a thousand miles of driving. That day, under a limitless bowl of blue sky, I spent hours alone on lengths of highway that stretched far beyond what the eye could see. I would work my way up the pass of one mountain range only to get to the top and see five or six more ranges across the distance. I sweated it out across burning hot salt flats where the temperature hit well above 110 degrees, praying that my trusty 4Runner with all those miles on it would stay alive. I crossed wide rivers, saw abandoned farms, had short conversations at gas stops with people I’d never see again in this lifetime. I saw sites that made me realize how big, awesome, and haunting is the American West.
When I had been preparing for the trip, I had a vision of myself driving down the road listening to a lot of music, being entertained by an audiobook or a podcast, maybe stopping to take some photos at an interesting spot. These plans went out the window pretty fast. Once I was out there, with no other cars in sight and next gas station 200 hundred miles, all I wanted to do was eat up that highway.
I had wanted time to think and to clear my mind. I got more than I bargained for. My tree was being shaken.
The last leg on day two was Grand Junction to Fort Collins. By this time it was dark, raining, and I was heading over the mountains. It was a test to hang in there with the semis making that same trip because they had to. I missed two separate rock slides by just a matter of minutes. When I got to my hotel room at midnight, I had wobbly sea legs from so many hours bumping across the highways.
Sunday, another sunrise. Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota on the menu. As I watched the country roll by, the word in my mind over and over was "stupefying.” I don’t know why that came up, but it described how I felt seeing the size of the plains, the rolling hills of grass, the towns and rivers. I joined Interstate 90 in the Dakotas, happy to be in some traffic.
I made it to Medina, Minnesota, by 8 PM on Sunday having traveled exactly 2200 miles. I sat for a while, just staring out the windshield replaying in my mind what I'd witnessed in the last 60 hours.
Over the coming days, I'd reflect once in a while on the drive. At first, I just thought it was a cool accomplishment, a great way to see the country, maybe something to brag about. It wasn’t until months later looking at photos from my trip that I started to really realize how far out there I was -- both before the drive and during, both mentally and physically. The drive had challenged me. It had forced me to get with myself. What did I think about? Not much. There were a lot of thoughts churning in the back of my mind, but when I was driving I didn’t think about anything except that moment on that day on that road.
Looking back on it, I think the thing I’m most grateful for is just the fact that I pushed myself to do it, I got out of my comfort zone, and I had an experience that I can draw from.
Actually, let me correct myself. The thing I’m most grateful for is that my youngest daughter came with me on the drive back to San Diego. We got to see some of the same sites and many different ones that completely blew our minds. We drove through the third-poorest county in the US, showing us how our native people live; we saw natural landmarks, small towns and wide-open prairie; we had a long day in the desert that had it's own special brand of weirdness, as desert days often do. She did a lot of the driving so I got more time to look out the window. We had dinner every night and shared a hotel room and got up early and kept driving. Even now we can recall just with one word or two an experience that we shared.
The whole experience helped to clear my mind, refresh my viewpoints, see things a little differently. My recommendation: if you're feeling stale like I was, try something completely different. It might feel uncomfortable, maybe scary. But getting up and getting out can have more benefit than you might expect.
Shake the tree, see what falls out.