A Brief Interlude

I’ve been trying to blog on and off for several years now, and I keep getting caught in these endless boom-and-bust cycles:

Phase One: Blogging is awesome. Everything is great. I have more ideas than I know what to do with, and I’m super-excited about writing. My blog is going to be the best blog in the history of blogs, writing, and generally every other form of technology ever invented by human hands. Life is good.

Phase Two: Oops, looks like I missed a week. No big deal… I’ll just update a couple days late, since I need to come up with something to write about anyway. Everything will be fine. I can do this…

Phase Three: Blogging sucks. For one reason or another, I haven’t written anything in weeks. I have no good ideas. No wonder nobody reads this stupid thing. I have dishonored the ancestors. I should delete my blog. Then I should set fire to my laptop. Then I should turn my back on civilization in shame, go live in a cave somewhere and never betray the written word again.

Phase Four: Rinse and repeat.

Maybe I’m setting my standards too high, trying to crank out publication-grade stuff every single time. I just can’t decide which is more important: writing consistently or writing extensively. Any suggestions?

New York to Oregon: Final Thoughts

(This is the final post in an eight-part series about my cross-country road trip from New York to Oregon. You can find the rest of the series here.)

My hitchhiking trip is over — but in a way, I’m still on the road.

Going to Portland was a break with the settled life I was leading before the summer of 2010. I’d lived in upstate New York for 23 years: born in Poughkeepsie, raised in Binghamton, educated in Ithaca. My whole existence occupied a sphere of about 200 miles. I traveled, but my mailbox was always in that same bubble.

Not anymore.

I’m back in Binghamton for the time being, but I’m not staying for long. No way am I settling here. Soon I’ll be moving — probably to Denver, possibly to Chicago, maybe to some other place I haven’t yet considered — and moving again after that. South America, Sweden, Istanbul, Dharamsala… there are a lot of lives to live in a lot of other places. Portland was just the first stop on an extended itinerary that may well stretch on for years.

It seems like a lot of people in my generation are on the same kind of open-ended ticket. Most people probably aren’t afflicted with a globe-tripping addiction like mine, but nobody — nobody — I know seems sure where they’ll be in the next two years. For those of us who tumbled out of college and weren’t handed a career with our diploma, the next destination is wherever they’ll hire us, wherever the rent’s cheap, away from our family’s basement — anywhere, anywhere but here. We all seem to be throwing darts at a map one way or another.

But that’s too grim a picture. In my first post of this series, I wrote a lot about that almost desperate uncertainty keeping my generation from settling down — which is not to be ignored, but also shouldn’t be the main reason. A better reason to postpone settling down is the sheer wealth of opportunities that living in a virtually globalized society gives us. We don’t have to settle for selling shoes in our hometown just because it’s the best job in 100 miles: with the Internet, we can find jobs on five continents, selling shoes or otherwise, without having to do so much as put on pants.

My trip, if anything, was a small-scale exercise in the travel opportunities technology has given us. Think about it: if I’d done the same trip ten years ago, I would’ve been taking a lot more on faith. I would’ve walked blind into almost every city I stopped in. The simple fact that I knew where I was going to sleep most nights, courtesy of CouchSurfing, took a great deal of risk out of the experience. The Internet allowed me to get information and make connections that I otherwise wouldn’t have had available, minimizing uncertainty, leaving less up to chance — which, in the end, considerably reduced the risks I took. Ten years ago my trip would’ve been an arduous series of best guesses and Hail Marys; instead it amounted to a pleasant stroll across the country to visit friends I’d already met. I might not have taken the chance otherwise, missing out on a wealth of experiences and perspective.

So it was with my trip, and so it is with life in general. Our opportunities are no longer limited to a single town, a single state, or, hell, a single country. We can make connections and open doors all over the world. We can build whole lives for ourselves in places we’ve never been while we sit in our pajamas.

I feel like I’m rambling. Am I rambling? There was a point I was trying to make…

Right, yes. So.

For my own part, I’ve wanted to explore long-term travel for as long as I can remember — since I was 11 years old, if not younger. This trip was intended as an initial test-run of whether I could do it. Now that I know that an unsettled life is not only realistic, but in a lot of ways easy, it’s almost impossible for me not to pursue it while I can. That’s where I’m headed now.

I realize that pulling stakes and resettling over and over might not be everybody’s slice of pie. But for the people in my generation who are agonizing about what they’re going to do with their lives, the news is still good: we’re living in a globalized society. We have the tools to make connections around the world. That gives us access to a wealth of options — both in our own country and every other. We can be successful doing any number of things in any number of places. All we have to do is pick one.

I’ll see you on the road.

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© Ryan Miga and The Nowhere Times-Dispatch, 2010. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Ryan Miga and The Nowhere Times-Dispatch with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

New York to Oregon: At Home in Portland and Heading Home Again

(This is the Part 7 of a seven an eight-part series about my cross-country road trip from New York to Oregon. You can find the rest of the series here.)

Portland will forever be linked in my mind with spandex-clad ‘70s German opera-mutant Klaus Nomi.

Bear with me. This’ll take some explaining.

New York to Oregon: The Last Ride and Crawling Into Portland

(This is the Part 6 of a seven-part series about my cross-country road trip from New York to Oregon. You can find the rest of the series here.)

The dog’s name was Woodle.

The dog’s name was Woodle, the driver of the minivan told me, because the door on the minivan could be closed electronically; when the door closed, it made a noise that sounded like “woo-dul, woo-dul, woo-dullll…”

Think about that for a second or two. The man named his dog after a noise made by his car. Let that sink in.

Then again, I guess it’s as good a way to name a dog as any other.

The driver of the minivan was a big, fat, shaved-bald guy with a bushy beard. His fleshy arms and legs were scattered with crooked tattoos, poking out of a ripped-sleeve T-shirt and shorts in spite of the coastal October chill. He was a bit scary. I had a few seconds of hesitation when he stopped to pick me up on the side of Highway 101 North. I only felt safe enough climbing into his beat-up van because — in spite of his “Booze, Bruises and Broads” outfit — he spoke with a Hannah Montana falsetto verging on a lisp. Woodle also seemed like a dog too happy to be owned by a serial torturer.

Besides — there was still a can of Mase in my right pocket.

New York to Oregon: The West Coast, Getting It Right, and One Monster-Truck Machine Gunner

(This is the Part 5 of a seven-part series about my cross-country road trip from New York to Oregon. You can find the rest of the series here.)

Hitchhiking is a lot like falling in love.

When you’re unlucky, it feels like you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life. You wait, smiling hopefully at every prospect that comes your way, deflating a little more with each person who passes you by. You might never find anybody who cares about you, wither and die right there, forgotten.

And then — suddenly — the right person comes along and picks you up. Everything’s brilliant again; the world is lit with a rosy glow; new possibilities are everywhere. It’s difficult to remember what sad felt like, even though it was only minutes ago.

Hitchhiking is like falling in love, and I’d been working through its equivalent “awkward teenager” phase before I got to California. My clumsy attempts at getting rides were like too many high school dances — the ones you remember with a wince.

New York to Oregon: Down and Out and Back Again

(This is the Part 4 of a seven-part series about my cross-country road trip from New York to Oregon. You can find the rest of the series here.)

The hands-down hardest part of my trip began when I left Denver.

Trying to catch a ride outside Barstow CA

As I mentioned before, there’s more art to hitchhiking than just finding a road and sticking your thumb out with a smile.This didn’t occur to me when I was planning my trip: the only hitching experience I’d had was in rural Canada, in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. I stupidly assumed when I hit the road for Oregon that the same approach would work in the States. Our flannel-clad northerly neighbors might have been less paranoid about hitchhikers, I thought, but I was still confident I knew what I was doing.

Wrong, wrong, very wrong. I’d planned my whole trip around catching rides on the interstates into and out of major cities — which, it turns out, is a perfect recipe for total failure.

New York to Oregon: Learning the Hard Way and the Kindness of Strangers

(This is the Part 3 of a seven-part series about my cross-country road trip from New York to Oregon. You can find the rest of the series here.)

Travel Journal Excerpt — Middle of Nowhere, TN — Day 7:

“Having my first serious doubts about this. What the [exp] was I thinking? …This is the first time I’ve allowed myself to consider that I may have bitten off more than I can chew. Tomorrow’s another day though. Maybe I’ll throw in the towel the next day – but not tomorrow.”

Things were obviously not going well.

I was stranded at a truck stop after a whole day spent trying to hitch a ride to Nashville. It was dark; I was camped alone in the woods about fifty yards away from where the truckers parked their rigs for the night. I’d convinced myself I was mere seconds away from dying horribly.