(Almost) 24

When the Grateful Dead reflected in their timeless highway anthem Truckin’ on “what a long, strange trip it’s been,” they probably didn’t have my 24th lap around the solar system in mind, but they might as well have. It’s a funny thing; I don’t usually feel birthdays this hard. For most of my life, the years have slipped seamlessly into one another, going out like the tide. This round, though, was different. The days were starkly branded by change and almost glowed, tangibly alive in a way that my time spent in school never was. When I close my eyes and picture last April’s fledgling version of myself, I think, She has no idea what’s coming.

Just before my birthday in the spring of last year, I thru-hiked an 80-mile trail in the Appalachian Mountains of North and South Carolina in what would turn out to be more than a yearlong farewell to the woods that I love. I ended up turning 23 on a five-acre chunk of limestone in the Florida Keys, surrounded by brand-new coworkers and an aquamarine ocean that stretched to Cuba before me. The next few months - all blinding sun and pouring rain and plastic fins and rusty golf carts and endless mangroves - feel now like a fever dream. At some point that summer, I went through a lengthy breakup more draining than anything I’d yet known. The tropics heighten everything, and emotions are no exception. Despite the heartbreak, I finished my SCUBA certification, drove a catamaran for the first time, went bridge jumping, dissected sharks, helped the Coast Guard search for missing tourists, and learned how to make proper Jell-O shots. Mostly, I remember the lingering sunsets sprawled out on the dock, all limbs and fishing line and dripping hair, my eyes strained for the legendary green flash. If the Keys were a chapter, they’d be short and damp, lemon and lime.

The hours in the bathwater ocean had me hooked, and in August I collected my bikinis, booked it home on I-95 North, and then headed to Southern California for a new teaching job in the Channel Islands. The water there was different, deeper and darker and much, much colder. It was the wildest, most remote place I’d ever lived, and I had to learn for the first time to differentiate between tongue-twisting natives like California sagebrush, coyote brush, black sage, and black mustard. I reluctantly and with much drama became a nearly hypothermic ocean lifeguard and, later and more enthusiastically, an official Catalina Island naturalist too. I loved the plants and the people enough to sign up for a second season, with a short winter break of East Coast family, friends, and a hell of a pandemic spike in between.

And then it was January, time for the month-long cross-country odyssey in my mud-dusted, crumb-spattered Honda Civic to get back out to the lonely lump of oceanic plate I call home. My roommate Brooke and I spent just shy of 27 days zooming across interstates to get from Maryland to California by way of Florida, Texas, and Nevada. We sweated in the Louisiana cypress swamp, scrambled with chained boots through Colorado snow, and twirled on the salt flats of Utah. We saw what felt like everyone I’ve ever met - friends from high school, college, internships, workplaces, study abroad, backwoods adventuring - and met strange folks in laundromats, hot springs, and ski lodges. One early morning, an elderly man with a Bud Light but no teeth told us to take Route 40 out of Texas, so we did. An older woman I’d met backpacking blended us three flawless margaritas in her turquoise-tiled Albuquerque kitchen, and when Brooke later got food poisoning from an all-you-can-eat sushi bar in Reno (why did we think that was a good idea?), my former coworker went above and beyond as a hostess and let this teary, nausea-addled stranger sleep in her very own bed. Along the way, I worked on a reverse guest book of sorts. Any person with whom we spent a night signed and dated their name in my leather-bound journal and answered the same prompt: What makes you happy?

Perhaps it’s just a product of who I spend time with, but the scrawled responses were funny, thoughtful, and sometimes tear-inducing. One entry early on simply read, “Sunshine.” “Meeting beautiful souls, laughing with family and friends, reconnecting through the years, being part of a community of Good People, making these memories,” said many. “Wiping but there’s nothing there,” wrote another in the midst of a list of other small morsels of happiness like great oranges and successful first-try parallel parking. The guest book ended up turning into a crowd-sourced love letter of sorts, to seasons hot and snowy, relationships old and new, mourning doves and modern medicine and everything in between. Among the bullet points and paragraphs, I taped blurry Polaroids, creased lift passes, and all 16 cents of our combined Reno casino winnings as physical mementos of the string of places we briefly called home.

The journal now lies next to my island bed, and as my birthday approaches once more, I find myself often reaching for comfort within its pages. I sometimes feel homesick for those that I’ve known my whole life in spite of my coworkers that I’ve grown to appreciate deeply in these last few months. No one told me how hard it was to be in your early twenties, confronted suddenly with a great big world and the daunting task of blazing a path through it blindfolded, but the handwritten entries remind me that it is the simple things, and especially those we love, that matter most. In June, I will roll my swimsuits once again into my grandpa’s battered old suitcase and head to the coast of Maine to continue teaching, this time on a sprawling farm. I believe that we ride currents through life and that they curve and intersect when and where they please. Singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter put it best: “Life is a gift from the great unknown, and our task is to receive it.” This year, a period of intense warmth and transition, I have held on tighter than ever to that idea.

As I hover yet again on the edge of change, bidding farewell to my 24th lap around the sun, I can’t help but wonder what the Grateful Dead will have to say about me this time next spring, as I cross the finish line of my 25th and continue into the uncharted. Hopefully it’s something good.

A surfer in Santa Monica, CA, against the sunset on my final night on the mainland this February.