Along for the ride

The sunset above Shenandoah Valley glows, with tangerine and lilac hues bouncing off distant clouds, a last glimmer of twilight before the night sky recedes into blackness pinpricked by distant stars. In the backseat, my black and white mutt Domino whines, anxious for a break as I steer on and off Skyline Drive to enjoy the stunning overlooks on our way to Matthews Arm Campground. We continue south on the mountain highway, following the spine of Appalachia through Virginia, one of the Eastern Seaboard’s most spectacular stretches of blacktop. After passing a few northbound travelers who apparently have the misfortune of needing to sleep outside Shenandoah National Park, it appears we have the woodlands to ourselves.

Fireflies flicker in the forest and I crack the window. Tears well up in my eyes, but it’s late July, and even above 2,000 feet the nighttime temps in Shenandoah rarely drop below 65 degrees Fahrenheit. So, it takes me a moment before I realize that I am about to start crying. 

For the past few years, the park has been a regular stop on my family’s annual migration to New England in our effort to escape the brutal heat and humidity of Houston, Texas, where my daughter Ursula has been raised. Loaded with hiking options as well as cascading streams teaming with native brook trout, Shenandoah is an enchanting natural playground; as it’s a rare national park which allows dogs on the trail, Domino loves it as much as I do. With Ursula heading to college, she has stayed behind to hang with her cousins while we return to Texas without her. 

I should have been prepared for the nostalgia. I am not. 

Roadtrips have been part and parcel of Ursula’s growing up, with America’s highways and byways providing a vast and ever-changing perspective on the world. Emulating Kerouac and other mythmakers, we have crisscrossed Texas east to west, from the Big Thicket to Big Bend, explored the Rockies, traversed the Great Lakes (Go Blue!), and beyond. Although Houston remains homebase, this peripatetic approach to parenting has given me plenty to celebrate: Not just for the way it recalls my own childhood—sacked out in the back of the station wagon, snarfing down ice cream at Howard Johnson’s, seeing the redwoods—but also for the endless talks we’ve shared with the windshield framing the road ahead. In this age of social media, there are additional rewards to sharing space during a long drive. I have learned to love Taylor Swift, and my kid can appreciate Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.

By summer 2020, Ursula was officially a teenager. We had adopted Domino, and even though we had made the drive years prior, with the pandemic it became a new family tradition to load up the car with camping gear and chart our course to Cape Cod. (On the Cape, thanks to the foresight of my late grandmother, we are lucky enough to own a modest beach cottage.)

Fast forward to 2025. Following Ursula’s high school graduation in late spring, we drove out of the Lone Star State for what was likely our final cross-country journey for the foreseeable future. With heat waves rising off the asphalt, we left behind the looping freeways of the “Petro Metro,” as Houston is sometimes known, and aimed the car towards Shreveport, Louisiana, and our campsite on the shores of Caney Lake in the Kisatchie National Forest. With 604,000 acres, the Kistachie is the lone national forest in Louisiana, boasting stands of timber where cotton fields and cane sugar were once cultivated. Along the way, we paused in Bossier for “stuffed New Orleans snoballs,” a diabetic’s nightmare combining shaved ice, syrup and ice cream. As Ursula dug in, the years fell away, and I saw only my tiny daughter. 

Presently, other ghosts visit me in Shenandoah, a place where we've stopped during many past trips. In the quiet of the night, with Domino snoring softly beside me in the tent, I am both alone and not quite alone, recalling encounters with Appalachian Trail thru-hikers in the park that helped inspire a seven-day backpacking trip Ursula and I took along the Georgia section of the AT. I remember spectacular hikes in Tennessee and West Virginia, gawking at waterfalls and exploring stone canyons, and the time we took a Father’s Day canoe trip. I doze off scrolling through these adventures in my mind, and it occurs to me that without these excursions, I would never have come to appreciate the American South. For most of my life, in fact—with the exception of Texas, where I have lived the past quarter century—a broad swath of the Southeast remained terra incognita for me. With my daughter on the cusp of independence, having hiked, paddled and driven thousands of miles, she and I have gained a keen understanding of the landscape, its culture and myriad barbecue styles. 

Back in June, after our night on Caney Lake, the next destination was Clarksdale, Mississippi, regarded as the birthplace of the blues. For those who don’t know the story, referenced in the recent Michael B. Jordan movie Sinners, this largely African-American community is the location of the famous Crossroads, where legend tells us the guitar great Robert Johnson sold his soul for musical immortality. It was scorchingly hot when we arrived, and we had to search a minute to find the reputed crossroads and Vic Barbieri’s metallic guitar-topped sculpture. After other visitors took their turns, I posed my one and only on the traffic island for a few pictures. With all this thinking about birthplaces and the blues, it hit me later that not just Ursula but the entire family will encounter a collective crossroads this fall.

At sunrise, I wake up in Shenandoah. With 1,300 miles to go before I will stand again on Texas soil, I breathe the cool mountain air, sip my coffee, pet the dog, and weigh what I might trade to keep my daughter nearby. The answer is simple: nothing. Sadness lingers, but I can dig that the only cure for the blues is the blues. Everything her mother and I have done since Ursula was born we did to help her find her way in this world. As she kicks the tires of imminent adulthood, we will stand back and trust her to discover her own fork in the road.