When I was a kid, I admired the old-fashioned images of running away. I knew that if I ever struck out on my own, I would need a kerchief and a stick. Bundle my necessaries and hoist them up, strap on my boots, and off I might go.
I lived in a little southern Illinois town with my nose pressed against a window. I hated second grade, with its D’Nealian script, phonics dittos, and dodgeball. I kept my eyes open for red kerchiefs and the right stick.
I even imagined what my route would be once I got my toothbrush tied up in that kerchief. I would walk along Virginia Street, up the hill and past all the cul-de-sacs, til I hit Prairie Street. Going right would take me to the City Hall, the Boys & Girls Club, the tiny post office with the little sponge for dampening stamps.
But left on Prairie wound past fields and woods. Left on Prairie meant blackberry vines and sledding hills and the barn with baby goats. To the left I would go, if I would go.
I’ve graduated from the stick-and-kerchief idea, but I still daydream about needing only the smallest bag. “I can travel light,” I say boldly, but don’t believe me. I pack books the way a hypochondriac packs medicines, and for some reason, I also take a half-dozen pairs of shoes. “You never know what you’ll get into,” I tell myself. So even though I’m content to keep the clothing commitment low, the shoes multiply.
I no longer consider journeying on foot either, but I do have a vision of a bare boxcar, dimly lit. And there I could sit, cross-legged on the floor, wearing fingerless mitts against the chill of the car, clacking away at a typewriter, and drinking coffee from an old thermos. I don’t imagine anything else in the boxcar, but let’s be honest. There’s probably a stack of books and a cluster of shoes in the shadows.
What is it about running away, about going just to go? Maybe it’s the call of pure anonymity: no one knows you, so you can be anyone. Anyone at all. Whenever I feel trapped in my own skull, I want to take to my heels (or to the train) to become a stranger again. A stranger to everyone, and hopefully, in some good way, to myself. To surprise myself again, shock some deep truth out of me, dislodge a vein of something vibrant.
Part of the thrill when I was a kid was in making the map for leaving. I remember drawing out Virginia Street, trying to copy its curves, as well as all the landmarks. Where we found the dead snake, where the creek ran, the house with the yappy dog.
What is it about maps? They make the unfamiliar tangible, but they also—for me, at least—scramble the familiar. With that bird’s-eye-view, they simplify and reduce, associating new things with each other. The creek is a blue-crayoned scribble (never mind that the creek runs brown), the hill flattens out, houses shrink into squares, the street wobbles as a wave of gray lines.
Right now I’m trying to reconcile a spring-feverishness in my mind, an itch for open roads, with the fact that I can’t go anywhere at the moment. I want a break from the familiar, but does that have to mean leaving? Or maybe, does it mean making a map? Mark it up with X’s, saying You are here, or Are you here?
Does it mean becoming a tourist, right where I am? Getting lost in the alleyways of my own town and mispronouncing the names of streets. Taking tours with the historical societies and learning local legends as if they were famous history. Investigating the downtown cemetery with the same care I might give Pere-Lachaise.
And maybe it means deciding that there is a new self in the immediate vicinity if I choose to go find it. Invoking that dandelion seed of the heart, ready to blow away on the first breeze and sprout up somewhere else. Maybe it means shedding all the ways of thinking and all the routines I’ve grown tired of, and set out to find fresh ones.
I’ll come marching back feeling awake, with a fistful of maps… and maybe a kerchief and a stick.
Jenn Langefeld graduated from Calvin in 2006 and charged into a life of full-time novel writing. She is currently working on an exuberant, adventurous trilogy for middle grade readers. She writes under her great-grandmother’s name, Lucy Flint, and blogs about making a lionhearted writing life at lucyflint.com.
