When I was little, I would wake up very early on Saturday mornings and watch cartoons in the living room while my family slept. But first, the construction would begin. I would take the sheet from my bed and push two corners between the tightly packed books in the bookshelf that sat diagonally across from our large console television in our tiny living room. The front two sheet corners would be draped over the arm of the sofa and recliner on either side, leaving an opening for access to my own personal little hideout. My tent. I furnished this space with my stuffed animals and a few pillows and snuggled in to watch morning TV through the crack between the sheets. Sometimes I closed the opening and imagined I was invisible to anyone passing by; I used a flashlight to light my abode, looking through picture books in the early years, and then as I grew older, reading for hours, undisturbed in my protected and quiet small world.
I had forgotten about these Saturday morning tents until I took a writing workshop about ten years ago. The prompt for one session was, “Draw a special room or space from your childhood.” Without thinking, the floor plan for my childhood living room and a drawing of my tent flowed from my pencil. My bedroom, which I loved, and the neighborhood undeveloped lot where I played for hours with my friends around two old apple trees didn’t get a moment’s thought. While drawing, I was overcome with a warm feeling of coziness and protection, of shelter from the outside world.
Some form of my childhood construction has been with me through my life…sometimes physical, at other times cerebral in nature and symbolic. I love rooms with low ceilings. Grand, high spaces in a home? Keep them and give me the smallest bedroom in the house while you are at it. My garden floor brownstone apartment in Brooklyn was a tiny jewel with low ceilings and small rooms that gave me a hug each day when I got home from work. I love snowy days when the world seems to magically shrink and a blanket of white and silence envelopes me. I always pick the “snug” or alcove to enjoy my food and a pint at a British pub. Window seats and I are friends and even books serve as my tents in a more cerebral way…focusing and enwrapping me in their other worlds of people, relationships, and stories.
And now? On this road trip?
I was in the Chicago Art Institute last week and saw a special exhibit of the Spanish surrealist painter Maria Remedios Varo’s work. A happenstance stroll into a gallery brought me to an abrupt stop where the first painting on display greeted me. It was all about the journeys we take, of the spiritual, metaphorical, and geographical kind. It was about my tent.
The painting, “The Caravan,” depicts a luminous multi-sided vehicle with interior windows and a staircase, and a mysterious figure guiding it in a land hard to discern. Varo described this whimsical structure as a “true and harmonious home,” adding, “inside it are all the perspectives and it moves happily from here to there.” The painting is said to incorporate elements of infinity…the staircase that goes to unknown parts, the arched ceiling, the dramatic perspective of doors in the distance, rendering a tiny space infinite in possibilities.
It struck me immediately, looking at this fantastical structure, that the Blue Car is my caravan, my tent, on this road trip. Oh, the similarities aren’t immediately apparent; on first glance the Blue Car has no magical interior features…not a mirror on the visor, a seat warmer, or cruise control. But just like my childhood tent and the magical worlds I explored from its safe confines, the Blue Car represents the infinite possibilities I face each day. Where will I go? What will I see? How long will I drive? What will I eat? I have many decisions to constantly make on this road trip. Decisions to be made alone, which can be easy and also difficult and exhausting. But I have my tent…the space that is mine and that is a constant along these traveled miles as I explore the infinite choices in these United States.
I especially like the small and cozy size of the Blue Car—it envelopes and protects me. Ironic, I know, for a car that has no airbags, no advanced safety features, and is so small that I feel like a speck as tracker trailers speed past me on the highways. So small that I still, after three weeks on the road, come out of my hotel in the morning and often feel a pit in my stomach when I don’t immediately see the Blue Car in the parking spot; it’s just too small to be seen next to the pickup trucks and SUVs until I am up close.
Perhaps this is why this trip seems so natural. Or more likely, it is a combination of things including being at an age and a point in life that has taught me that fear is a barrier to joy. I know as well as anyone that bad things can and will happen. But they can happen whether you stay home or not. They can happen whether you worry or not. If you fill up those spaces between the bad and sad things, the catastrophic things, with fear, you have crowded out the room left for joy. And laughter. And wonder. This understanding has made it easy to answer the queries people have about this road trip of mine. The most frequent are questions about doing this trip alone, about the advanced age of the Blue Car, and about its small size. Where will I fit my stuff? What will happen if/when I break down? Am I scared or will I be lonely traveling alone? Yes, all those things can occur. And so what?
As I write this, I am thinking that I may be my own tent at this point in my life, my own shelter and certainly my own resource. The ability to envision or utilize a shelter, to create a security blanket– whether metaphorical or physical–can be transformative. This ability creates those infinite possibilities from tiny spaces, from seeming nothingness. But I will admit it’s also nice to have some help, to have something familiar around. I like to think that the Blue Car serves this purpose…its history and sheer fun factor provide a little extra boost on this crazy journey of mine. It is the incarnation of that long-ago sheet in the corner of my childhood home; its windshield is my window into the world, its wheels transport me to unknown lands and new experiences. Not unlike my peeking at the TV through the crack in my tent “front door” at the age of four or reading a new Nancy Drew mystery under the sheets with a flashlight at the age of ten, except now the scene I see is real and I chose to be in it.
I don’t think I am alone in my tent constructs. I think we each choose to journey through life with some version of a shelter or security blanket at various times. When my children were young, they carried stuffed animals with them on our trips…a bunny, a dog, a monkey. In this way, each had his or her own personal traveling companion to share the experiences and perhaps quell a bit of the anxiety of exploring the unknown…new places, new people, new food. For some I know, a camera is the trusty and familiar companion. And for many, perhaps the most common security blanket of all is the cell phone…a tie to the familiar, and also a protection from feared boredom or encounters with strangers. I am now curious about others’ tents…of the strategies and tools they use to navigate the world. It seems natural to me that these constructs, both physical and otherwise, change over the course of our lives, helping us adapt to our growing experience and knowledge, and new circumstances.
For now, I am in the comfort of my Blue Car world. I will tell you though, that when I reach the California coast and finally cruise south along the PCH, I have a spot reserved in a gloriously outfitted tent in Big Sur with a “front door” view of the Pacific Ocean. And I will look out over the water at sunset from that tiny space and ponder infinite possibilities.
Susan Silberberg, mile 193,040
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