artistic impression of a Wyoming drive, somewhere around Pavilion

At the beginning of August, I took a road trip with my best friend to Wyoming, where we both grew up and where we both still have family. The last time I visited was in February 2016 – a very, very different time to visit than deep in the throes of summer. And I flew in for that trip, I didn’t drive, which is also a very different way of visiting a place. I haven’t actually made the trip by car since we first moved out to Oregon in the summer of 2000.

Our route took us through Jackson and the Tetons, which was a lovely way to come back to our home state. And a little surreal – I was a kid the last time I visited that area, back when it was a place regular people visited for a camping trip, not a place where the ultra-rich cosplaying as cowboys flew their jets in and out of. To say it’s changed a lot since then is an understatement the size of…well, Wyoming.

One might question our sanity for braving the Jackson/Yellowstone traffic at the height of summer and suffering through all the Darwin Award Semi-Finalists clogging up the road for a chance to pet the fluffy cows, but the scenery really is worth it. (And thankfully, although we got to see part of the buffalo herd cross the road – including a calf! – none of the tourists actually had a close-up encounter with one. No Darwin Awards were given out that day.)

After dropping my friend off with her family, I had a three-hour drive to get to my destination across vast high country with long stretches of nothing much (of the signs of civilization) in the middle. But I didn’t mind…I had some favorite music queued up and clear weather to enjoy the vista and was looking forward to seeing my mom once I got where I was going.

What I didn’t expect was for that part of the drive to churn up a whole tidal wave of thoughts and feelings. I’ve been through that area before, but it isn’t the part of the state I’m from so I don’t have a direct connection to it, I was just passing through. But the mountains along two horizons, the remote ruralness of farms and ranches spread across the landscape, and the wide-open blue sky is a singularly Western scene that makes every part of Wyoming feel like it’s all Wyoming. It was green for August, more yellow-green than the yellow-brown you’d usually see that time of year, and the road I was on took me past a few different bodies of water (not a common sight on a Wyoming drive). It was both familiar and foreign, a finished jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces not quite in the right spot, but only different without a distinction.

Somewhere along that drive, I realized that I was falling back in love with this place that hasn’t been my home for almost half my life. I’d never fallen out of love with it, honestly, but my love for home has been complicated, borne of being from and of a place where I’ve always known that I don’t fit but that still has imprinted itself deeply in the person I am. Loving a place is a hard thing – it sets a longing in your heart that never quite goes away, even when you know loving it will never mean you fit there.

But when you no longer have to do the complicated dance of reconciling where you live with where you belong, coming back to the place that made you is like coming home to a parent after the hardest years of your relationship have passed and you can just love each other. It’s a connection you need, even when you don’t think you do. And probably don’t understand just how much until you find it again, and realize the connection is rooted, steady, no matter how long you’ve been away. It was a beautiful kind of homesickness, a joy gift I wasn’t expecting, and its intensity caught me off guard.

Obligatory stop at Taco Johns for softshell tacos and potato oles

I’ve been back home – my home where I do belong – for nearly two months now, but there are still the lingering tendrils of that wild, windswept place reminding me that I’ll always be a person of two places. And perhaps it’s fitting that our 25th Oregon-iversary was a week after I got back. That’s what we call the day we arrived in Portland with our moving van and two cars and three cats and a terrified excitement for a whole new chapter of our life. What’s fitting about it, though, is that I’ve always marked that transplant anniversary in two parts: August 15th, the day we left Wyoming, and August 17th, the day we arrived in Oregon. I suppose I understood from the beginning that I was always going to be a person of two places.

It was a really great trip in so many ways, and I’m still processing it all. Thinking my thinky thoughts, as I tend to do. The road trip part – all the adventures and scenery and laughter and long talks in the car – and the visit part – the time with my mom, the being back after so long, the small moments that take on a different meaning and depth when you reach a certain point in your life.

Something quiet but substantial shifted for me over the course of this trip that I didn’t anticipate, like an earthquake miles deep that doesn’t wreak havoc at the surface but still registers on the seismograph. I’m still pretty tender about it all, honestly, and even just writing this has my heart in my throat and tears in my eyes.

I have literal pieces of Wyoming that came back with me. My mom sent me home with a half dozen very hefty* rocks and chunks of petrified wood from her rock garden, for my rock garden. Some were Granddad’s, some were hers, all with a story, and a connection, and an earth-memory of home. Now they’ll be literal touchstones in the place I belong, reminding me of the place I’m from when I need it.

*(And I do mean hefty. I had to put a limit on how many because I was afraid the rental car would bottom out if I let mom load me up with all the big rocks she wanted to send home with me. And that’s just the outside rocks! She also sent me home with a box of some of her inside rocks – smaller rocks and polished stones and crystals and fossils. These are the treasures of a family of rockhounds.)