Two weeks ago I was in New Hampshire. Again. I’d never been to the state until this February, and now I’ve gone on three trips to the North Country. It pulled at me the first time, and I knew it had something to do with the dreams of my younger self. Blanketed evergreens and hidden lakes. Winding roads and maple syrup. This is the land I wanted in my youth. It is the life I tried to create my first go around.
    Picture this: I sleep in half-finished cabins with caulk and insulation peaking out from the gap between the ceiling trusses and the subfloor, with warped bathroom baseboards and iron-stained sinks from where the water drip never stops. I visit houses with plans for garages, gardens, and chicken coops. I talk with people about to buy land and make their dream house their new life. And I get sucked in and think I should do the same. But then I realize that I’ve done it already.
    When I was in eighth grade, I petitioned all four of my parents to go to Farm School. This would be high school--with cattle milking and hay hucking thrown in. It was in Iowa, there would be outhouses, and I could wear Carharts every day. I was convinced I was the next Laura Ingals Wilder/Annie Oakley… until my parents got in my way and sent me to a college-prep Episcopalian school instead.
    As an emancipated woman of 19, I walked away from my upbringing and forged my own version of Farm School. I went for the whole kit: a strawbale house I built, my own version of Manly (my ex-husband, 12 years my senior), even an elderly town doctor. I topped it off by working at Williams Sanoma one holiday season so I could get a price break on the ever important matching crème brulee set and Le Cruset 14-quart roaster. I composted, collected gutter run-off for landscaping, and had a professional window-washing squeegee so as never to spoil the mountain views.
    And then I walked away from all of it.

    New Hampshire is lush this time of year. The vastness of it all pulls at me. Reminds me of what I used to want. Makes me want it again. On the phone, outside of a shop on the main street of North Conway, NH, I told my friend Victoria that maybe I would just chuck it all, move to the northeast, and start a lettuce farm.     
    “Okay, then what?” She said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Let’s put it another way,” she clarified, “how long, exactly, after you started your lettuce farm will you have written a book about lettuce and be on a lettuce tour?”
    
    For the first three years after I graduated from college, I casually omitted I’d even attended an institution of higher learning. Back in college, I’d completed every assignment I’d ever had a week before it was due, and then suddenly I was living in the world of the chilled out mountain people—I was trying to be one of the chilled out mountain people—and I was not going to blow my cover. I was going to make it work.
    Across the mountains from where I was in Estes Park, was Telluride, Colorado. Telluride has the highest rate of divorce in the state—usually due to couples who move there looking to get away from it all and then realize that once away from it all what they really wanted was to be away from each other. Do we all have this fascination with being more remote? Think that it will save us?
    

    I leave New Hampshire and get on a connecting plane in Baltimore. I am surrounded by successful investment bankers with Armani suits. and just like that, I want my own peony crepe ensemble and everything that goes with it. I do not make sense, even to myself. And maybe I am not enough in either of these worlds because I am trying to be in both of these worlds.
    When I started dating again, post-marriage, I had a friend give me advice I’m still not sure I understand. Just because someone likes you, he said, you don’t have to like them. If I can picture myself in a half-finished cabin with an Oscar De La Renta dress in the closet, am I supposed to make that my goal? What if I can picture everything? Then what? The best I can figure out is that it’s time to acknowledge the person on the would-be lettuce tour. That certain things are bound to come with me wherever I go. Besides, a lettuce book is not such a bad idea, really. Most everyone eats it, right?

I’m home in Boulder for the next five days, three days longer than I have been in town for three months. I’ve been looking forward to this week for a long time, but when I drove into town last night I felt empty instead of relived. I’ve become addicted to the road. The travel creates a sense importance. I need to be places, need to talk to people. Now I am just at home doing laundry.
    I wonder if I could do anything, if I just started doing it. And this is not about the skill, but more the tolerance. What can we get used to?
    A few weeks ago in Houston I was careening down the highway at 80mph and getting passed on each side of the 7-lane highway at 12:30 pm on my way to a hotel. The dome light in my rental car was out, and I used the slight glow from my dying phone to illuminate my directions. In the middle of it, instead of saying I was over it, I was trying to figure out if I could do it. But it really does not matter what you can do. It matters what you want to do. Or it does if you have the luxury of having the time and the resources to make changes from one to the other.
    I’m traveling around the country, at the tail end of the initial tour push. Along the way I am seeing everyone from my past, and just now figured out that beyond reconnecting with old friends, I am also trying on alternate versions of myself. There is the urban planner with his pediatric neurologist wife, the entrepreneur, the stay at home dad, the public defender. We all started from the same point. I know I’m lucky to do this. I’m lucky to do a lot of this. But it’s also incredibly tweaky to your head. Because after trying on every pair of jeans nothing feels good anymore and all you want is to just get out of the dressing room.
    And so I come home. And I did it even before Boulder. On Friday, my friend Sarah picked me up in her dying Previa Van at the end of the Commuter Rail outside of Boston. I sat on the floor in the back and realized I was breathing differently for the first time in weeks. I like to make things difficult for myself, always have. At one point I was supposed to go to the University of Chicago for college and the reasons I decided that this was the right choice were the following: everyone said it was the socially hardest place to go to school in the US, that it was impossible to have a life there, and that the academics were insane. Great, I thought, I am in. I will go and prove that I can do that.
    But proving that I can make it from the financial district to Lowell with 130 lbs of luggage is really not proving anything. I didn’t do this in my twenties, back then I was building a strawbale house on 4.5 acres bordering national forest land. When I left that house and that life, I thought I might have missed out on something else, that I might have wanted to be in central Boston or Miami, or that I should have been. But what I’ve come to figure out is that I might be in the right place after all. I get off the plane in Denver and think yes, this is home. But it only became home once I started going away.
    Choices are intoxicating. For all of us. Almost everyone I have visited with says the same thing. It’s like we try to limit them and augment them at the same time. I’d like to think that at some point we just chill the hell out and live them. Or that I will.

One week into a four-week road trip in my van and my homing devices are already firing. Like it or not, I seek out the same things each time I travel: wifi zones, pedicure providers, and… raw food?
     Yesterday, on the hunt for a quick off the highway snack I end up at Veggie De-Lite. Home of Massaged Kale. Raw is clearly the new cooked, but even for me, a girl from Boulder, De-Lite is over the top. It’s everything I wanted as a 21-year-old vegan and everything I don’t, but think I should, a decade later.
    For those who are wondering, massaged kale is, according to De-Lite’s Wednesday prep cook: “Kale that has been lightly massaged with lemon juice and olive oil, usually for 3-5 minutes.”
    “Massaged?” I clarify.
    “With your hands.”
    I must still look confused because he then adds, “Or my hands.”
    When I still look confused he says “Massaged. With hands.”
    “So you massage instead of cook?” I ask.
    “Exactly.”
    “Indeed.”
    I tried some. It’s nice. Lightly lemony, softer, almost pre-chewed from its massage.

I must secretly want massaged kale in my life because otherwise I would not keep finding my way to these odd bastions of alternative living in the middle of the Vegas (# 1 in growth, #2 in foreclosures). I’ve lost count of how many trips I’ve done here in the past dozen years, but I can tell you I’m starting to wonder if I know this land of extremes better than the landscape of my childhood. I can find my way to the laundromat, movie theater, post office and secret Thai restaurant, but worry I would no longer be able to find the sledding hill of my youth. Does memory overlap or run out of room? Will I know now where to find massaged kale but not the creek where the one-claw crawfish lived under a cotton candy colored rock? Maybe as a writer I worry more about these memories and their space and longevity. Maybe massaged kale is the new crawfish.

When I was a kid, skiing was more important than anything in the world. I’d wake up and suit up in hand-me-down red racking pants from my cousin Mark and a pink puffy jacket from last years sale rack and hit the slopes. I was a terror and learned early that you could win every impromptu race if you were just brave enough not to turn.
    In the past few years I’ve kept my skis in storage as I attend to other sports and obsessions, but this year the illogic of my lack of skiing is making me reconsider my decision. I’m in Jackson Hole, WY right now where there is 18” of fresh and more on the way. Two days ago I was in Steamboat with the same. North Conway, NH, Durango, CO, Ouray. The biggest snow years, everywhere.
    And me with no skis.
    Or, not the kind most would use in these conditions.
    What I do have are my skinny skate skis, circa 1994. I am not a good skate skier. I am not even somewhat good. In fact, I’ve recently realized that I don’t want to learn how to get better, because I don’t want to have to get better. My inefficiency translates to brutally hard workouts in short amounts of time. I rarely glide, go out when conditions are at their worse, and don’t use wax. This blissful state of ignorance, I know, will not be tolerated for much longer. But while it is here, I gladly strap my poles on wrong, catch an edge on my pole point, and go down. It’s been a while since I was so willingly bad at something. I wonder how long I can keep it up?