notes on preparation

Every time I get ready to leave home for a while, I learn something new about how to prepare better.

One thing stays certain: how you prepare is what matters. What comes with you, and what you leave behind. Those two decisions, made in the quiet before the wheels turn, end up shaping the whole trip more than almost anything that happens once you're moving.

I've learned that out navigating the world myself. But I've also learned it from characters in stories — real and imagined — who each stepped into the unknown carrying something different, and were defined by the choice.

Four ways to pack a life

Steinbeck loaded a truck camper with more than any man could use in one trip. Pages of it. A thing for every version of a day that may or may not come—a full workshop against a world he couldn't predict. He was older by then, and the abundance reads less like fear than like a man who'd learned exactly how many ways a day can go sideways and decided to answer all of them at once.

Kerouac carried almost nothing. A bag, and the belief that the road would handle the rest. It's the opposite wager: that the less you bring, the more room there is for the trip to hand you what you need. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the road is generous. The gamble is that it won't always be, and you've built no margin for the day it isn't.

Andrew Evans left with something new for its time—a smartphone, and a way to broadcast word from anywhere on the map. Not more gear, exactly. Different gear. A choice about what kind of trip it would be: connected, documented, sent home in real time. The tool didn't just come along; it changed the nature of the going.

And a boy named Brian was handed a hatchet by a mother who couldn't have known it'd be the only thing standing between her young son and the wilderness of the north woods. He didn't choose it. He didn't curate it. It was pressed into his hands, and then circumstance made it everything. His whole survival ran through a single object he had no say in.

Three of them chose. One was handed his. Some carried more than they'd ever need. Some not nearly enough. Some by intention, some by accident. And every one of them met the unknown in the exact shape of what they were carrying.

That's the thing I keep circling. There's no clean line between over and under, prepared and reckless. There's only the calibration — and what it costs you when you get it wrong.

The same price, paid two ways

Here's what I've come to believe, and it's the whole spine of this: too much and too little cost you the same thing. They just take it from you differently.

Carry everything, and you spend the trip tending the pile. Sorting, securing, maintaining, stepping over. The gear becomes a second trip layered on top of the first, and it asks for your attention constantly.

Carry nothing, and you spend it solving for what you don't have. Improvising, worrying, working around the gap. The absence becomes its own kind of full-time job.

Either way, your attention is somewhere other than where you are. And attention is the entire point of leaving. You don't drive across a country to spend it managing a bin of supplies or bracing against the next thing you forgot. You drive across a country to be in it. Both failures—the glut and the void—pull you out of the exact thing you came for.

I know this because I've paid the second price myself.

Five years ago, west

Five years ago Sonya and I drove west, searching for the Pacific.

We bought an old camp van and hacked a few sheets of plywood into a bed platform. It was simple, and it worked. It carried us nearly ten thousand miles—to the Olympic rainforest in Washington, the rocky Oregon coast, the towering magnitude of the redwoods in California. Landscapes I'd been imagining since I was a kid, finally in front of me at full scale.

I was twenty-six. More intent on venturing far from home than on the practice of preparation—and I think that was the right instinct for that era. There are lessons in taking a leap and trusting the fall, and some of them you can only learn on the way down. The lack of preparation wasn't only carelessness. Some of it was skill I hadn't built yet. Some of it was energy I didn't have to spare. And some of it was just being young enough to trust the fall without checking what was under me. I don't regret any of that. It was the right trip for the person I was.

But we'd prepared less than the trip would ask of us. The van was old, and I spent more of it bracing against what might go wrong than standing in the landscapes I'd crossed half a country to see. The van never actually left us stranded — but for stretches, I wasn't really there.

That's the lesson. Not that I'd prepared wrong—that what I'd left unprepared kept pulling me back from what we'd come to see. I'd stand at the edge of something enormous and old, and half my mind would already be somewhere down the road, running the list of what might break next. The redwoods were right there. I was somewhere else.

Preparing differently

So this time I'm preparing differently.

Not more. Differently. Less like a chore to rush through, more like a practice that pays off en route. I'm savoring it—and in the savoring, I'm solving problems before they get the chance to pull me out of the moment.

That reframe is the whole shift. When prep is a chore, you do the minimum and hope. When prep is a practice, it becomes part of the trip rather than a toll you pay to begin it—and you start catching the small things early, while they're still cheap and quiet, instead of out on the road where they get loud.

John at Colorado Adventure Vans hooked me up with some recycled windows, which will make a rainy day in the van a good deal more livable. I noticed my tires were low on tread — fine for a dry Colorado summer, but not for whatever the weather turns into out east — so I replaced them before I had the chance to worry about them. That's the practice in a sentence: not insurance bought against catastrophe, but small worries retired ahead of time so they can't follow me down the road.

There's a dog this time, too. Benjamin Franklin—Benny—along for his first big trip. Which is its own lesson in preparation: you can't pack your way to a calm animal in a moving vehicle, you can only practice toward it. Some readiness isn't gear at all.

What it's all for

Immersion. That's what I've learned I'm really seeking when the cabin fever becomes too hot.

Not just the pretty views—time where the motion of everyday life can drop into the background, until all that's left is entirely where I am. Where the reality around me can fully engage my senses. The cold of a morning before the sun clears the ridge. The particular quiet a place makes when the everyday finally goes still. To be so far inside where I am that there's nothing left keeping score.

Preparation is the practice that buys that. It isn't insurance against disaster. It clears the head enough to just be here. When the small daily worries are already handled, they stop occupying the front of your mind, and the place you traveled to finally gets to come forward and fill the space.

Choosing the path of less was never the same as choosing nothing. That's the distinction it took me five years and ten thousand miles to feel in my body. Nothing was never the answer, but neither was carrying everything. The balance between them isn't something you find once and keep. It's something the recognition of it being a practice keeps teaching you, trip after trip, because the right amount keeps moving as you and the road both change.

The trip ahead

This route runs east. Colorado to Chicago first, for my brother's wedding. A little Wisconsin, then Michigan for another wedding—good friends tying the knot under fall colors. A few slow days at a cabin on Lake Huron. Then to Toronto & around Lake Ontario along lake Erie to the Northeast, for family time and one more wedding. Nearly two months in transit, the van filling the gaps between, as summer turns to fall.

I don't know yet what this next one will teach me. There are lessons waiting in it I can't imagine from here. That's the point. That's why I go. Every time you leave home, you meet the unexpected. Which is why how you prepare matters—not because there's a right answer, but because choosing what to bring, and what to leave, is what makes the trip your own.