“Houston, we have a problem”, said Didi; which means elder-sister in Hindi. In this case, MY elder sister, was in the passenger seat while I was driving our 2000 Dodge Neon. We were on the Interstate I-80 somewhere in the middle of New Jersey. It was 1st of July 2004 and we were in the midst of another big move of our lives. Over the past several months & weeks Didi & I had packed up our lives on the east coast in favor of Los Angeles; the city of angels. We had arrived in America 4 years earlier as Software Engineers but with the dream of becoming “Sister-Directors” and we had decided it was time to pursue that dream for real. So we had packed our belongings on an ABF truck that was on its way to LA separately from us, while we were on our own cross country drive from New York to Los Angeles; our journey through America, from sea to shining sea.
A 2-week journey that spans the length of a country; especially a country that you had arrived in just 4 years earlier and barely knew anything about, requires careful planning. Especially as you consider that this journey took place when Google barely existed. Cell phones were rare. And Social Media wasn’t even a gleam in the eye of Mark Zuckerberg. Didi and I had slogged together for weeks researching and calling motels across the country making reservations. We had saved all that information including the driving directions from Point A to Point B for each day in the one laptop we shared between us. We did have a printed sheet with contact info for all the hotels but everything else was in our laptop – which we had intended to charge on our journey through an inverter that was meant to give 120 volts AC from the cigarette lighter socket on the car. With teary eyes, we had said Goodbye to our life on the east coast and embarked on the journey. 2 hours later we had stopped at a gas station on I-80 and now we were back in the car to resume. I was ready to drive and was waiting for Didi to boot the laptop again so she could give me the directions to Pittsburg. But the laptop failed to boot. Entirely.
Houston we had a problem – not as big as the astronauts on Apollo 13 of course, but a pretty big one. We went through the customary stages of grief – denial; trying to boot the laptop over & over in hopes it will somehow resuscitate, anger; after all this effort how on earth could this be happening on the 1st day of our trip?, bargaining – come on laptop, just work once so we can make essential notes, depression – we are doomed, this entire journey is doomed, and eventually acceptance. Having learnt our lesson – never to trust technology exclusively – Didi pulled out an old paper map which we did carry in the back of the car. We could at least make our way to Pittsburg and figure out way around the city & to our hotel later.
And so we did. We reached Pittsburg. We bought a city map. At the hotel, we begged & were allowed to use their computer to make paper notes for the driving directions for the next couple of days. We did the same for every city we stayed at – relying on paper maps, our hand-written notes and some good-old asking for directions from strangers – who were almost always curious, friendly and kind. Our journey took us through the heart of America; in Pittsburg we saw the old steel mills that fueled American capitalism, and in St. Louis Missouri we saw the most impressive 4th of July fireworks. We visited majestic national parks – Yellowstone, Ziii-on, Bryce and Grand Canyon, and we saw cities shaped by the hand of man such as Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. Those were some of the places we had hoped & planned to see.
And we got lost – a lot. That showed us the America we hadn’t planned to see, the America we didn’t know existed, the America that shook our immigrant naiveté. For example, there was the time when we were stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and I asked for directions from the Caucasian couple filling their tank in the car next to us; they looked at us with disdain and refused to answer; that told us there were American towns where residents didn’t like brown people. And there was the time when a bunch of Caucasian guys in their 20s standing outside a hotel called us “maid service”; racism at its best! And there was the time when we lost our way through South Dakota and instead of Mount Rushmore National Memorial ended up at Crazy Horse Memorial – which gave us a lesson in American history so stark, so brutal & so unlike the America of our imagination, it shook us to our core.
It is almost exactly 20 years since I undertook that journey. There have been other times in my life when I have lost all direction and had to improvise. I even lost my co-pilot when Didi passed away from cancer not long after that cross-country trip together, and for a while I lost all bearing. I had to learn to navigate by my own internal compass – aided sometimes by memory, sometimes by little bits of paper on which I wrote & which were my sustenance, and sometimes by asking for & relying on strangers’ help.
The journey we undertook was nothing like the journey we had planned or imagined. It was by getting lost that we found something – something precious. At the end of our journey as we stood in front of the Pacific Ocean, I knew I had barely scratched the surface of the country I now called home. But also that in order to love anything completely, one must have the courage to learn & tell – the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. For it is the darkness that gives depth & meaning to the light.
The journey I had planned was a journey through America, it took getting lost for it to become My American Journey.
Swati Srivastava is an immigrant and a multi award-winning writer, director, and voiceover artist. A filmmaker & storyteller, Swati turns ideas into experience. She is also an environmentalist and an immigrant to the United States. She can be reached via Linkedin and swati@TiredAndBeatup.com