On the road

I've spent much of my twenties in transit, or somewhat-in-transit, or otherwise in a transient place. I collect memories from the road and file them for later. Here are a few, compiled for you.

I got dog poop on my shoe at a rest stop just over the New Hampshire border. The last stop on a nine-hour drive and what did I have to show for it? Rings under my eyes, an aching back, dog poop on the heel of my favorite white shoes. The road weathers a person — whether a lifetime on it, or just a day.

I turned 29 at the beginning of December. Sometimes I feel as though I’ve spent my twenties on the road. I know this isn’t entirely true. But if I cannot place those years on the road, then where else to put them? Where else have they gone?

I have inhabited eight states since I was twenty-two. To be fair, two of those states (Oregon, California), I spent just a handful of months in, and many of those states (Massachusetts, Illinois, New Hampshire) I inhabited for just shy of one year. And yes, I have lived in places with doors and keys and addresses that I give my grandmother when she asks where to send that year’s birthday card. And yes, in one of these places (Brooklyn) I lived for three whole years!

Still, as one’s twenties go, mine have felt particularly uprooted. And for this, I have few regrets (although with the addition of just one letter, “few regrets” turns into “a few regrets,” which is also true).

The first time I took to the road for an extended period of time, I was twenty-two years old — just graduated from my cushy liberal arts college, trying to make something of the nothing I had suddenly become. At the time, I had fancied myself some modern Jack Keroac. I had just read Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. I had just read Steinem’s My Life on the Road.

“I’m sick of institutions!” I would tell anyone who would listen (I’m still not entirely sure what I meant). I was obsessed with sustainable agriculture. I was obsessed with feminism (however narrow my definition might have been). I wanted to work on different organic farms and write about the stories I encountered, especially those of immigrant women farming the land. I knew that women from all over the world were leading the way in sustainable practices. I did not know the first thing about journalistic ethics or the care required when telling a story so different from my own.

Instead, I left my college town in Iowa and traveled west in my mother’s old Acura, two duffel bags stacked in the back. I worked on different farms and slept in spare anything’s — bedrooms, couches, sheds, renovated school buses. I narrowly escaped one-too-many threatening encounters — the kind that involved men with beer bottles and loud voices, remote campsites, and alleyways. Two months in, I wore fear like drugstore hair dye — slipshod and fluorescent, people knew it before they knew my face.

So, when I reached California, I rented a room in a suburban development outside of Davis. The houses, all drab and identical, the color of desert sand. This one, owned by a thirty-something woman with two chihuahuas named for sports teams, and an admirable kindness extended towards the young woman sleeping in her spare room. I got a part-time job at a local running store to pay for the lodging. I would volunteer, not live, on organic farms. I wrote about the folks I met and things I saw. I opened my laptop in diners, coffee shops, and public libraries. It was not quite the vagabond existence I had hoped for, but it was something. I knew no one in Davis, California or the surrounding area. All I knew was that I wanted to be a writer. I had a car, a dwindling checking account, and no real commitments. I lasted three months. Then, I got a temp job in Boston. I took to the road again.

Over the last six-and-half years, I have collected a litany of scenes and scraps from my life on the road. In keeping with the theme of transit and transience, I have derived some informal rules for myself. These scenes must have come from times when I was in-between places, or recently arrived in a place. I could not have felt too settled! One of the most enjoyable parts of this project was editing paragraphs I wrote when I was twenty-two years old, extending a hand to an old version of myself and finding her so embarrassing, but also kind of endearing. Anyway, here are a few of them — not at all like Kerouac; a far cry from Steinbeck; lacking the profundity and chic, oversized glasses characteristic of Steinem. But some sort of travelog, nonetheless:

Eugene, Oregon, 2018

In Eugene, I slept on the couch of an herbalist. If, in slumber, I leaned too far to my left, the cushions would sink at a diagonal, pulling my unconscious body towards the floor. At three in the morning, I awoke to the sound of crickets outside the double doors. A nuzzle of black fur. A cat named Mortimer, pawing and climbing his way towards me. As he settled on my chest, our breathing slowed to the rhythm of the dehydrator that shriveled blackberries at our feet. Together, we drifted back to the dreams we half-remembered. We awoke when the crickets sang again.

In Eugene, I harvested blackberry leaves and mother’s wort beside the herbalist. We sampled berries as we worked. The gloves, barely free from our hands by the time solid crushed to liquid on our tongues.

In Eugene, the herbalist strummed her guitar for me. The lyrics asked me what one says before they say I love you. I told them, I don’t know. I told them, ask the blackberries. The Herbalist and I shared stories, a plate of tempeh bacon, a bottle of red wine.

In Eugene, I paid ten dollars for a chair massage from an old woman at a farmers market. Celestine wore a sunkist orange tunic and a long, silver braid. She kneaded my shoulders. She kneaded my neck. She told me I reminded her of Venita, the teenage cousin who listened to Stevie Nicks and smoked cigarettes out the car window. She told me she had wanted to be like Venita when she grew up. Well, are you? I asked her, as I swung up to leave, like Venita, I mean? Her eyebrows furrowed, her green eyes milky with thought. Oh honey, she told me, I’m not yet grown.

Hood River, Oregon 2018

In Hood River, I slept in a renovated school bus. It lay parked on the peach orchard at which I lived and worked for one month. The orchard owners were gentle and soft-voiced, less than a decade my senior, though countless years wiser it seemed. They stocked the camping fridge with fresh produce and salmon from across the river, invited me to markets, and taught me how to change the oil in my car. The other workers were dirt-caked and wild-eyed — in love with the road or escaping trappings they could not name. So was I.

Most mornings, I ran seven miles along country roads, past the farm workers that padded neighboring orchards, their flatbed trucks filled with peaches. I fell asleep to the sound of wind rattling the peach trees. When the sun set, the peaches looked like luminaries. Peach perfume doused the summer air. Bites of peach when I was hungry. Oregon was on fire and so was California, but I seldom read the local news. For that month, I knew only peaches.

Peaches, I learned, will tell you when they’re ready. There were steps to this communication, like dialing a number on a rotary phone. Press your thumb against the curve. Wait until it’s soft – but not too soft. Pull it down if it’s ready. Leave it be, if not.

What else to say? I was there, and then I was gone. I slept in a school bus, and then I did not. I had planned to leave after a month, and so I did. I swept the bus of all dregs of me. Packed peaches for the road. Changed the oil, filled the tank. Wildfires dotted the highway, so I adjusted my route. A circuitous thing — two full days to reach California.

The road still felt like a promise, and I assumed I’d find beauty at every turn. But I was merely a child, and I can see that now — twenty-two with eyes wide as stone fruit. The world was mine to pick, to sink my teeth in at will.

Now, I’ve aged a bit and realized: I should have listened to the peaches. I wasn’t ready to go.

Massachusetts & leaving it, 2018-2019

My car was towed during my first week in Boston. The culprit: a postponed street cleaning, no sign on the road. Later, my neighbor would relay the events to me — how the tow truck had lumbered down the street like a vengeful beast, hungry for any morsel it could claim. It had gobbled up every car in its wake — the Sentra, the Subaru, the Acura — one by one. How innocently I had sat in my office in Cambridge, dumb to the feeding frenzy taking place in Medford, my fingers clacking at keys.

It was just after Thanksgiving, and the streets adorned haphazardly in sparking lights. A stuffed Santa Clause sat in the window of a diner down the street, his spectacles askew. I took an Uber to the towing center, for I was new here (I would always be new here) with no close friends to call. At the front desk, a man with a wiry, silver beard handed me a ticket.

“$300 dollars?!” I exclaimed. I quickly tallied the numbers in my head: rent, utilities, groceries, car insurance, my meager pay at the nonprofit, my train ride to work. 300 dollars was a fortune, and its weight settled in my eyes.

“Merry Christmas, sweet–haht,” said the man, chuckling jollily. “Here’s your present.”

Boston ate me, the way Boston does. In the cost of a simple, black coffee. In cars, cutting off the bike lane before throwing their doors ajar. In ceaseless shouting on the street. A stolen bike. A strained back. A fractured shin from too much pavement running. My leg, locked in a stiff boot. When the Bruins lost the Stanley cup, my neighbor released profanities like fireworks into the night.

When my contract ended, nine months later, I left for Chicago. I planned to take my time, cut the trip in three days. Only, I couldn’t distance myself from salt water fast enough. I couldn’t take my foot off the gas.

At a motel in Rochester, NY, a middle-aged woman with blushed cheeks and auburn hair handed me a tube of toothpaste. She waved my debit card away.

“Take as many as you want, sweetheart,” she said. “And enjoy your night.”

“Merry Christmas, sweet-haht,” I whispered into the late-August air.

When I stepped outside, my legs felt unreliable. Wobbly, as if they’d been running for some time. I kicked a sneakered foot against the pavement. I brushed my fingertips against bare thighs. I needed to prove to myself that I was solid, material, that I’d made it out alive.

There are so many more…

…where that came from. But I don’t want this newsletter to become offensively long (maybe it is already). I think I’ll save some for later, another time. I’m not entirely sure what all of these fragments mean, or what I’m trying to say about movement, though I have some ideas. I’ll excavate them further some day — pull in scholarship on transience and movement and uprootedness, and get to the why of it all. But for now, I’m simply collecting and editing these moments, letting them sit on the page.

I also recognize the privilege inherent in the fact that I chose to flee — again and again. The entitlement of such autonomous movement is not lost on me, especially when we’re seeing a historic rise in forced displacement and refugees, globally. So many people don’t get to choose.

Recent Roundup (what I’m thinking, doing, working on)

I did some local reporting on Maine’s abortion funds, for the Maine Monitor. Abortion funds provide funding, and often gift cards for travel and related resources, to people seeking abortions. Their costs (and often their donations, too) have jumped since the overturning of Roe V. Wade. If you are interested in learning more about abortion funds, or donating to an abortion fund in your state, please visit the National Network of Abortion Funds.

I’ve been enjoying tinned fish; Trader Joe’s soyrizo in pasta sauce; wild Maine blueberries, but frozen; winter trail runs with my spikes and sweet doggo, pulling at the reigns; the novel The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer; the collection of poems, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity by Alexis Pauline Gumbs).

Thank you for reading. If you want more like this, as well as updates on my published writing and reporting, please subscribe below.

You can find me on the internet at emmamzimmerman.com. You can find my publications there, too. I have a book coming out in 2026. It’s called Body Songs, and it centers my personal story of Long Covid recovery, spanning outwards to research and reporting on the brain’s role in chronic illness, the legacy of hysteria, the weaponization of the “mind-body connection,” and how all of these factors keeps sick people sick. If you really like my work (thanks!), you can become a paid subscriber of this newsletter — but I won’t love you any less if you don’t.

-Emma