Drive Me Wild: A Western Odyssey
By Christina Nealson
Wildwords/CreateSpace: Paperback, 220 pp, $14.00
Reviewed by Annie Dawid
“Ever since I was a little girl I’ve had a special relationship with trees. The one time I ran away I ventured two blocks (it felt like miles at the time) and curled into the fetal position between the protruding roots of a giant oak. Now I joined the spirit of Buddha, who meditated under a tree and sought wisdom.”
Finalist for the Colorado Book Awards, Drive Me Wild, Christina Nealson’s memoir, offers the reader a chance to join the author on a mind/body journey across the great West. Other reviewers liken Nealson’s story to William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley.
On this travelogue, however, we travel 21st century style, in an RV with Nealson and her husband, Jay, who ditch the accumulated material goods of their lives and leave what Twain’s Huck Finn sneeringly labeled “sivilization” to roam the landscape, both inner and outer, metaphysical and literal.
Nealson asks a giant, old-growth ponderosa for wisdom on this journey she has undertaken. “Old One, survivor of hellacious wind, wood gatherer’s saw and the square teeth of voracious elk. Grandmother, what the hell am I doing?” With humor and irreverence, Nealson tackles the new set of difficulties she has brought upon herself by deciding to leave the mundane world of home mortgage and debt behind. After a moment of silence, the tree responds: “You must write what is given.”
Thus we have this chronicle – Nealson’s reflections on a journey, like all important journeys, into the unknown. Recalling Odysseus, who must find his way home after the Trojan War – a return trip lasting ten years – we come to understand what home can mean, whether it is stationary, a traditional hearth, or the contemporary version on four wheels, rolling down America’s freeways.
“How can you do it?” asks a close friend, “How can you walk away from the things you love?” But Nealson explains, “I have loved every place I ever lived, just as I have loved every lover who shared my flesh. Love had little to do with whether I stayed.” The sudden death of a friend, a writer also in her 50s, inspires certainty. “Ellen’s death was much more than a sign to Jay and me. It was a profound call to live now.”
Whatever cliches of recreational vehicle living the reader might harbor, they will be dispelled shortly, as they are for Nealson and her husband. “I wondered when we’d cross the line between vacation and life.” It requires $140 to fill the gas tank. The vehicle is difficult to maneuver. People give them funny, sometimes nasty looks, just as she and Jay had once done from the vantage of their bicycles. Always poking fun at herself, Christina writes a note to her husband at the wheel: “I used to make fun of ‘em. Now I am one of ‘em!”
A tick-hunting excursion on the author’s body turns to unexpected lovemaking. The death of a great aunt demands an unplanned trip home to Iowa, where Nealson contemplates the differences between her long-married parents in their long-inhabited home with her own choices: “Together over 60 years, they had lived a novel. Their daughter Christina, on the other hand, had lived a series of short stories.”
Indeed, the chapters in Drive Me Wild resemble segments in a short story cycle. Quick and to the point, each reveals various moments in a character arc stretching over the map of Nealson’s five-year travelogue. Every story needs conflict, and one gets the hint early on that Nealson’s marriage might be led into crisis. Without revealing too much, the reader can move forward on that hunch.
“Christina … I want to stop RV’ing.”
My blue eyes met his as I gulped for breath. “Stop … forever?”
The life of travel will ultimately not suit all spirits, even those attached at the hip for over a decade. Although the narrative ends mid-travel, one is promised more in the book to follow, a snippet of which is appended. Soul Unzipped will be Nealson’s follow-up.
