Escape!

Journal Entry #52

January 26, 2025

Friends, we are indulging in escapism — both literally and figuratively.

We left Ithaca in our van on January 3rd and have been on the road for about three weeks. At the moment we are camping in the Big Cypress National Preserve, a deeply quiet place, with egrets, herons and the occasional alligator as our neighbors.

We rolled out of a wildly different part of Florida yesterday— the beautiful Florida keys. we camped on Stock Island just east of Key West which was absolutely teaming with vacationers. The downtown revelry reminded me of a cross between New Orleans’ Bourbon St. and Nashville’s Broadway with a Floridian twist — palm trees, banyans, iguanas. All good fun, but in small doses.

I started writing this entry nearly three weeks ago. But, honestly, I have been struggling to complete it. I’ve scrapped a few sunny chatty drafts that didn’t feel right.

I have been distracted by the unfolding of what seems like an unimaginable onslaught of terrible news, accounts of our new president’s latest list of Orwellian decisions and the behaviors of the sociopathic Neo- nazi tech bruhs he has surrounded himself with. I am overwhelmed at how quickly our democracy is, seemingly, crumbling before my eyes.

We made our initial plans for this four-month road trip back in the early spring of 2024, long before we knew the outcome of the presidential election. We did know that we were going to be in Florida for the inauguration. So, after the election was over and the outcome was certain, we explored options for how to best spend this particular Inauguration Day. We decided we would make plans to be out of cell coverage and as far as away as we could imagine from all of the dark pomp and circumstance.

It was a splurge but we purchased tickets for a sea plane flight to the Dry Tortugas National Park, a speck of an island 70 miles west of Key West. It was a blustery and overcast day which added to our sense of solitude and escape. As we wandered around the abandoned fort and walked out to the furthest point of Bush Key, home mostly to migrating birds, looking for hermit crabs and marveling at the turquoise waters, we felt thankful to be quite literally sticking our heads in the sand — feeling blissfully unencumbered by the day’s events. We figured we had missed the worst of the speeches and heroic posturing of Trump on his day of triumph.

Dry Tortugas

Of course, we had no illusions- we knew things would get bad following January 20th. Still, we have been stunned by how spectacularly messy the past week has been. I don’t think I need to elaborate. I imagine you have been as disgusted and alarmed as we have been.

In van life, where you literally move to and live in new places every few days or so, the experience can be head spinning, change brings surprises and challenges both good and unanticipated (ask us about how we managed to keep our plumbing from freezing in 18 degree weather in Maryland on our way south!)

We enjoy playing it by ear— and don’t always know where our next port of call will be, what we will encounter, who we will meet. We enjoy the excitement of discovering what makes that next place special; this is the ultimate form of “escape” for us.

But our “escape” hasn’t quite translated into an “escape” from the weight of the events of this past week and, frankly, the heavy weight of the world right now.

Our phones bleep and blip with the latest headlines and we find ourselves sucked into the vortex of disbelief made more surreal by the fact that we might be looking at some absolutely spectacular sunset from the back of the van or biking along a sweeping palm-lined bay.

We have taken to trying to limit our exposure to the bombardment. We’ve put time limits on our screens to curb doomscrolling and turned off news alerts. We are trying to be present to where we are and what we are experiencing on this trip. We are aiming for self care here, and attempting NOT to spend all of our time agog and aggrieved.

But we have only been partially successful in our efforts. It is strange to have daily moments of joy, escape, beauty and wonder while we are on the road and yet hard even in those same moments to fully escape a sort of existential sense of dismay.

On our longer drives, we have found ourselves discussing the idea of a more profound type of escape, the question of what it would take for us to leave the US for a while and where we would go and whether it makes sense to assemble some framework of a plan to do this.

We are both struggling with this question, and the idea of leaving behind friends, family and community. We have aging parents and children who are just on the edges of adulting but not all the way there yet.

We also wrestle with what this type of more protracted “escape” would mean in terms of upholding our personal ideals. As I see it, resisting— that is, being a force for good and for change in whatever ways I can— is important especially at times like this. We aren’t sure we feel ready to leave this place to the proverbial wolves.

St. Andrews State Park

And so, for now, we carry on. We are taking it day by day. This evening, we pulled out our maps and plotted the course to our next destination— we have decided to work our way towards Montgomery, Alabama. But some of these larger questions and our longer term path forward is yet uncharted.

What we do know is that we have to keep seeking joy and goodness. This trip, in and of itself, is an act of resistance.