INTRODUCTION

The year I turned thirty, I was teaching in Ohio,

and as was my habit, I went home to Minnesota for the

summer break. My sister Kristi was getting married. Just for

fun, Dad drove three hours south to meet me in Minneapolis,

because I wanted to look at campers, and when you live in

northern Minnesota you do things like drive three hours just

for fun, and we worked our way up through the various RV

dealers along Highway 10 north toward my hometown of

Nevis. We finally ended up in Backus, at the Scamp factory,

where they make the small, bulbous fiberglass campers that

I’d wanted for years, maybe even half my life if I wanted to

count back. Scamps are one of several kinds of lightweight

molded fiberglass campers, and somebody once told me that

the cult of Scamp is just as annoying as the cult of Apple:

once you get one, you can’t stop talking about it, and you

never go back. You’re Scamp for life. They’re not wrong.

But things felt different that summer.

Maybe it was the cliché of my approaching thirtieth

birthday in October.

Maybe it was something about turning thirty cutting

down on people asking when I’d get married or have kids,

convinced I’d change my mind as my thirties approached,

but I’d still say I might find Mr. Right, but he’s still going to

have to live next door.

Maybe it was that our concept of family and what that

looked like was changing, all in good ways. Kristi married

Mike that summer, they’d bought a house, and my young-

est sister Kim moved in, the three of them creating an in-

tentional community based on the idea that if and when

Kim partnered, he’d move in, rather than her moving out.

My tight-knit family was getting tighter. When my niece

was born, I was incredibly grateful for Skype collapsing the

distance between Ohio and Minnesota, even as Kristi’s dog

would look at my face on the screen, then worriedly look

under the table, wondering where the rest of my body was.

My parents moved down to the Twin Cities when they re-

tired to be a much closer part of their grandchildren’s lives

instead of retiring to the Cabin in northern Minnesota as

they had intended. We were still close, but there’s a dif-

ference between visiting family and being close enough to

show up for dinner on a whim. And I was still in Ohio, or

Nebraska, or North Dakota, and not there.

Through my twenties, it was clear just how much the

world is not set up for solo people, not emotionally or logisti-

cally. I came to dread the singles’ table at friends’ weddings,

the kids’ table at the California Grandparents’ house, even

as Kristi and Mike were permitted to sit at the adults’ table

because they were married and I wasn’t, even though I was

two years older. There weren’t enough people at home to need

a kids’ table, so it was strange to be separated from the older

generations until I’d achieved something I didn’t know I was

supposed to be pursuing. Everything about the world told me

my life would only have value once I married, once I had kids,

once I grew up, once I settled down. By the time I turned thirty,

I was really tired of it. In August, back in Ohio to start a new

school year, I found my perfect Scamp for sale in Cleveland

and within a few days, it was sitting in my driveway.

In the years before the Scamp, working toward what

it meant to be a solo woman in the world, I started trav-

eling alone to Ireland, because travel—and solo travel

specifically—helped me question these ready-made narra-

tives that were so loud in my twenties, the expectations of

marriage and children and the life I was supposed to lead,

because that was just how it was done. What I loved most

about those early-aughts trips to Ireland—about learning

how to travel, why I wanted to travel, why I wanted to

travel alone, why movement itself felt important—was no-

ticing where my instinct to say yes faded into no and where

no expanded into why not? Traveling alone is a thing apart,

though, and traveling alone while female is another thing

entirely. On my study abroad in 2000 when I was twen-

ty-one, without any of those skills in place, I brought a

huge hiker’s backpack so comically big and heavy that I

couldn’t lift it into the overhead compartment by myself,

with two giant suitcases that barely fit in the trunk of the

taxi that would take us from the bus station to student

housing. It was my first real lesson in self-sufficiency, in

the style and determined enthusiasm of a toddler: I need to

do it by myself. When I returned in 2005, my pack was half

the size. In later years, I’ve gone even smaller just because

I like the challenge.

But a solo woman traveling has been handed a Holly-

wood-ish story framework, established tropes of how a woman

traveling alone must be afraid, or lost, or brash, or a lesbian,

or not a lesbian, or stuck, or unable to change a tire, or sexy

while skillfully changing a tire. The travel journey required of

women—as popularly presented—must be away from a love

interest, toward a love interest, toward healing, away from a

toxic environment, presumably toward a fuller understanding

of identity. So many of these stories are stories of escape, of

being in search of oneself or rediscovering oneself, but none

of those applied to me. I went alone, back to Ireland, for the

simple reason that I wanted to. What was I waiting for? A

very good question. I certainly didn’t travel to go find myself

because I’d never lost myself. It seemed an inherently silly

proposition. I wasn’t traveling in search of my identity or my

place in the world because my family had already built that. I

knew who I was, and I knew who I was in the context of my

family. Who I was as an individual, I’d constructed that with

my own hands, with the tools in my Craftsman tool bag that

had been a gift from my father.

Last New Year’s, he handed me a set of small Crafts-

man screwdrivers and said, Santa forgot one.

I grinned at him. Do they come with fully functional legs so

they can sprout and walk away from my tool bag, or do I have to

install them myself?—because it’s a running joke for our tools

to sprout legs and walk away so that we can never find them.

Dad grinned back. They come ready to go.

Fantastic, I said.

There are two types of stories common among families:

one tells the story of movement away—from pain, from a

life unwanted. The other is the movement toward—curios-

ity, adventure, making a name, separating yourself from an

established story and figuring out who you are outside of it.

There’s something compelling about bone-deep curiosity as

a reason for leaving and going elsewhere. There’s a reason

why the Odyssey is a story that can be retold on the streets

of Dublin or in the banjo twang of O Brother, Where Art

Thou? The best of these stories are roads on which we can

write our own experience. When I started to question the

path I’d been on and how it had created the person I saw

in the mirror in the morning, it felt natural to keep taking

steps backward even as my desire for travel moved me for-

ward. One step leads to another step, something the ancient

Chinese philosophers knew well, though I’d be surprised if

they had a road trip in mind. Maybe they did.

Five years later, two days after my thirty-fifth

birthday, my Minnesota grandmother Phyllis died, and

suddenly our family lost a bright guiding spark, a founda-

tional force. My grandfather Kermit had passed away in

2006, and our family of Minnesota Babines + my moth-

er’s parents, a solid little family of seven now reduced to

five, was shrinking in ways that felt deeper than simply the

loss of two people who were responsible for much of how

our little family functioned and what we valued. Now they

were both gone: Gram, who would recite the first stanzas

of James Russell Lowell’s “The First Snowfall” every time it

snowed, and Grandpa, who taught us how to know how old

a white pine is by counting its rings of branches.

Gram had left my sisters and me a little money, and it

seemed prudent to save it for something important.

You should take a trip, my sisters said at some point that

winter.

I could, but it feels frivolous.

Why? they asked. Gram loved to travel. She would have

loved to see you use it for that.

I guess that was true, even though it felt like I should

save it for a rainy day. I’d been in grad school living on a

pittance of a stipend, so spending money of any sort felt

vaguely wrong, but because of my financial situation, I’d

barely used my Scamp for a couple of years. If I were going

to go on a big Scamp trip, where would I go? What would be a

good use of this money that’s suddenly made things possible—

something that would make Gram look at me, smile that proud

smile, and nod her head like she would do?

I decided to point the Jeep and Scamp in the direc-

tion of my father’s family, east toward Nova Scotia and the

Canadian Maritimes. That’s where the Babines, who were

French-Acadian, came from back in the early days of Acadie

in the 1620s, before le Grand Dérangement in 1755, when the

English deported more than ten thousand French Acadians

from the place they called Acadie, dumped them on ships

bound for anywhere else, and the British renamed it Nova

Scotia. I didn’t know if this trip to Nova Scotia would turn

out to be anything more than accumulating miles and new

souvenir keychains, maybe discovering an affection for some

geographically specific food that would spark nostalgia every

time a certain pattern of weather crosses my day, but I think

there was a part of me that didn’t care which way I went,

because I just wanted to do something. I was feeling restless

about staying put too long.

As the family historian, I spend a lot of time wondering

about the stories we can tell, the ethics of storytelling, of

family secrets, of family pain, things that are not exactly

secret, but things we choose not to talk about anyway? For

some it might be an intellectual question—or not even a

question at all—but for me, it’s a really important question.

The storyteller, the family historian, holds immense power

and I feel the need to be careful, because stories aren’t neu-

tral. What I do with them will echo.

As I planned the trip, I taped quotes from W. Scott

Olsen above my computer as I calculated miles and stopping

points: “There is a pull to the universe, an insistent some-

thing that calls us out, then across. On the road, there is

always the chance that the world will be unmade for us, then

remade larger,” and “What do we want from the viewed sur-

face of the earth, from the way the earth rises and falls away,

or doesn’t? What do our hearts tell us we need from the

shape of the land?” It felt good to read—and be reminded—

that I didn’t need to go elsewhere, to more important places,

to know something true and real. Growing up in rural

northern Minnesota, the only radio stations we could get

were country and it felt good to sing along to our stories

and lives, lakes and trees and dirt roads and Brad Paisley’s

“Ticks” and Dixie Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces” and Lit-

tle Big Town’s “Boondocks,” music that celebrated the place

where we were, rather than the allure of elsewhere. I’ve lost

a lot of interest lately in contemporary country music with

women turned into objects and cruelty wrapped in patrio-

tism, preferring instead to turn on blues, or bluegrass, from

Trampled by Turtles to I’m With Her to Wailin’ Jennys and

Red Molly and let those strings set fire to the air in a way

that clears everything from here to the horizon. It feels good

to sing your place in the world sometimes.

With different colored highlighters, I marked locations

on the map from my family tree—Halifax, Yarmouth,

Grand-Pré—and then worked my way backward while also

working forward. At some point my lines would meet in

the middle. Leaving Minneapolis, Thunder Bay, Ontario,

seemed a good first-night stop, being about six hours away.

There weren’t any good places to stop between Thunder

Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, so I resigned myself to an eight-

hour drive. Sault Ste. Marie to Driftwood Provincial Park

in Stonecliffe, Ontario, then onto Quebec City, Quebec.

From there, Fredericton, New Brunswick, en route to

Fundy National Park, where I’d spend a couple of days be-

fore heading up to Prince Edward Island. I wouldn’t expect

to encounter anything Babine until I left Prince Edward

Island and headed for Halifax, but it seemed silly to get

that close to Anne of Green Gables and not visit. I’d spend

about ten days in Nova Scotia, then to Kennebunk, Maine,

where the Babines settled for only a generation and a half

before the family split and my great-grandparents headed

for California. It would take me about four days from there

to get back to Minnesota.

There are stories of women traveling, but few of them

are road trips. We have early travel narratives by ship, tales

of settler women making their way across the Great Ameri-

can Desert in wagons, and countless stories of walking. The

road story of women is worth telling—and the camping

stories of solo women equally so. Camping alone is the only

time I have to be what feels like fully myself, fully immersed

in the solitude I seem to need to function best. When I tell

people I camp alone, so many wonder if I get lonely, but the

truth is that I almost never am. I might text wish you were

here to my family, and it’s just as easy to text friends a pic-

ture, and that seems to satisfy the need to share a moment

with another human being. I’m alone, I’m solitary—but I’m

not disconnected. My connections to people and the world

are vibrant and strong. I just like coming home to an empty

house where I can recharge my social battery in peace.

It feels deliberate and methodical, the way that I never

pursued permanent partnership or kids, and while I’m not

opposed to partnership, the act of changing my mind

would have to include significant effort. I have a house, a

job, and a full life. He’s not competing with other men to be

with me, I’d think—he’s competing with me, and I like my

life just the way it is. Even if our decisions are based in a

unique worldview, we make our choices out of curiosity, or

stubbornness, out of external societal pressure. Sometimes

I do things purely out of spite because I’m a Scorpio, but

I also think there’s a certain kind of stubbornness that is

less obstinate and more just a function of immovability,

the work of simply never changing course, and getting

where you want to go simply because you never considered

another option, never considered that the thing would not

happen. It’s a kind of stamina, the work of constructing

a life by playing the long game, which requires a certain

kind of emotional and mental endurance. It’s not stub-

bornness, but that’s the closest language I have.

The Scamp fell into this mindset too. I couldn’t be

talked into buying a camper that would sleep two or more

people comfortably or that would fit a dog I didn’t have. I

always wanted the Scamp, way back at the beginning, back

when we’d occasionally see them when we went camping

when I was young, and it never occurred to me to choose a

different camper—or even that I wouldn’t have one at some

point in my life. It was a kind of inevitability that didn’t

feel so much stubborn, as of course it is. If Mr. Right ever

showed up, we’d renegotiate the camper situation—in the

meantime, I wasn’t going to live my life for somebody who

may or may not ever exist. Even then, I might still keep the

Scamp and go camping by myself.

When I’m at home, wherever home is, and the Scamp is

parked in the driveway, sometimes I’ll go out there, close the

door behind me, lay down on the bed, and just take a deep

breath. There’s something elementally comforting about the

interior shape of this tiny camper, how it feels so much larger

on the inside than it does from the outside, something I as-

sume has to do with the curved shape. When the world is

just a little bit too much, I discard the shell of my house and

take on the shell of the camper and let it form the physical

barrier between me and the world, especially in times when

what holds me together feels fragile, my skin feels thin, when

my self feels like you could see through me. It’s not a matter

of spending time in the camper to remember who I am, but

rather a matter of being reminded of the deliberate choices

I’ve made to live my life the way I want to.