Drive Fast, Take Chances

Drive Fast

Take Chances

By Savannah Hanson

Photography by Elizabeth Parkin

Published on ROVA ADVENTURE Magazine Issue 36 April/May 2023

In the summer of 2021, I hit the road with my best friends. We were desperate to leave our hometowns and find ourselves. The road gave us more than we could have dreamed, and I've been wondering ever since.

	Life on the road is exposed. Home is everywhere and nowhere at once. Life on the road reveals what is truly necessary to survive and it’s a lot less than consumer culture has led us to believe. I find that the less I’m tied to material things, the more connected I feel to the spirit of life. It is simultaneously horrifying and exquisitely beautiful to experience such freedom. Life opens to you when you open  your soul.

We were three girls, with three months worth of our lives, stuffed into a 2015 Ford Edge (from now on referred to as Baby), with less than three days to get from California to Tennessee.

We would drive the entire 2,300 mile stretch straight, taking shifts, only stopping for gas, the occasional strange roadside attraction like; the largest pyramid in the United States (a Bass Pro Shop) and the Grand Canyon.

This entire journey was a grand whim. The little snow that the Central Sierras received that winter melted quickly through spring. I was as adrift as anyone would expect a young river guiding art school graduate to be and just as blithe. I dreamed of guiding rivers in Costa Rica, Argentina, New Zealand, maybe even Norway. But COVID had made international travel completely irresponsible and inappropriate, so why not the middle of nowhere Tennessee? I knew of the Ocoee River and that their season would last through October.

So I sent an email to the manager of Ocoee Adventure Center and she said to be there by July 3rd.

With the vaguest of plans I announced to my family and friends that I would be up and leaving to go to Tennessee. How?  When I told my friend Elizabeth the news she immediately responded, “I’ll take you!” I rest my faith in these Elizabeth moments in the universe.

Elizabeth had just quit her job as a bird keeper at the Fresno Chaffee Zoo with the intention to pursue her purpose in photography. She had been playing with the thought of a long road trip which would give her the time to process the massive life change she had just made and the environment to reconnect with her passion. She’d drop me off in Tennessee and then go see New York City. Another friend, Charity, would join us too, only to guide for a month or so. I tried to stay awake for as long as I could while Elizabeth drove the first shift behind Baby’s wheel. We had left the hazy, smog-covered orchards and sierras of our hometown in California’s Central Valley at around 7 pm. Charity was already fast asleep in the back seat when I must have drifted off, sometime around 4 am, despite being so full of hope and excitement. Without so much as realizing that I had fallen asleep, I awoke to a dream: a carnelian glow.  We made it to the edge of the Grand Canyon on the verge of dawn. Rushing out of Baby to the rim, I was made manifestly aware of the significance of this vision to my road ahead. I'd had no idea we would pass the canyon on the way to Tennessee, certainly not at golden hour on the first morning of this wild journey. To any person, the Grand Canyon is a site of great majesty and mystery, but as a young river guide obsessed with literature on America’s Southwest it felt like my soul’s true home. The desert is everything beautiful and essential they say. With only about 15 minutes to stare into that deep, enchanting greatness before we’d have to hit the road, I knew I was exactly where I was meant to be, and that I would be back.

In a mad dash, we made it to Tennessee. It was lush and green and rain like I’ve never seen before. Elizabeth would stay, New York City would wait. The rafting company, OAC, happened to be in need of a photographer, and our souls needed this rainforest. Together, Charity, Liz and I shared an 8x10ft plywood and tin bungalow. We rafted during the week and every weekend we'd road trip somewhere new: Dollywood, Nashville, the unclaimed baggage store in Alabama. We touched the Atlantic for the first time. We explored together as much as we could before Charity flew home in August. Elizabeth and I stayed, fell for Tennessee strangers, until the leaves began to spark with the fiery colors of fall. It was October. Rafting season was over.

It was time for us to mosey back to California. No matter how sweet those Blue Ridge mountains were, we knew that we simply could not feed our souls if we settled in Tennessee. The night that we left, we bought a pack of clove cigarettes and cried and screamed and puffed along to 12 hours of punk rock en route to New York City. We knew we had to get as far away from the Ocoee as possible to tempt our hearts to remember the thrill of complete freedom and to not wander back to the loves we left in the Cherokee forest.

We made it to a Walmart in Pennsylvania somewhere near the New York border. A neurotic mess of grief, freedom, gasoline and nicotine, I didn’t even bother to set up Baby for bed. I just passed out in the driver seat for a few hours to let the sun rise and then drove straight into Manhattan. I’ve guided class IV rivers and rappelled waterfalls; nothing has given me as much stress as naively meandering into the heart of Manhattan at rush hour. Two hours of panic passed, marked by blaring horns, storming pedestrians, deranged bicyclists, and nowhere for Elizabeth to pee. Finally we found a parking garage across the street from Brooklyn Bridge to house Baby for the day and we took to the subway.

Relaxing among the eccentrics and academics of Washington Square Park we scrolled Instagram to discover that in just a couple of hours, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, National Geographic filmmakers and huge inspirations of ours would be in Central Park to present their film, Meru. I think the light of the Grand Canyon shone from my cheeks; we were certainly on the path of our souls. We watched the film, and that night we slept peacefully, in Baby, beneath the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge in the City of Dreams.

I believe that our inner lives reflect our outer, and when you’re really in tune with yourself, life will show you why it’s a miracle. It’ll also make you and Baby break down in an upper class suburb of Connecticut to get you to address all you’ve been ignoring. If there is anything worth knowing that I’ve learned on this journey, it is that everything is going to be Okay. In the comfort of that knowledge and the idyllic streets of Connecticut in the fall, we took the opportunity to have a proper emotional breakdown. We had suffocated our anxieties about the future, and our heartache from Tennessee, with long mileage and loud music. After wailing and anger and frustrated outburst, we felt restored. We sought advice from a mechanic friend and went to O'Reilly's Auto Parts and fixed Baby ourselves. Time to move on.
 We stopped in Boston (we’ve always wanted to say that “we went to Harvard” without technically lying) and happened to be in town the night that one of our favorite bands was playing. We breathed in the cape of Maine. We took a detour to Niagara Falls after a laundry night dinner. We endured 19 degree nights in Colorado. We got swindled in Vegas. We ate cans of beans in laundromats, empty deserts and at rest stops. We hardly showered. We listened to poetry and played our music loud. We made it back to California, though neither of us stayed for very long. Invigorated with the spirit of adventure, Elizabeth moved to Alaska to pursue Wildlife Adventure photography. I went with my Tennessee lover to be a ski bum in Colorado.
Taking chances to move in the direction of your dreams will pay off in wonderful and unexpected ways. Four months ago, Elizabeth, Baby and I reunited again on the edge of the Grand Canyon. This time, we’d been invited by our manager from the Ocoee River to spend 19 days in its heart, rowing 225 miles of emerald, turquoise waters. (Yes, we road-tripped to get there.) This whimsical mad dash to Tennessee gave me the love of my life and it allowed me to see my best friend floating down to a lifelong dream. Life on the road has distilled my courage and faith. I’ve lived with so little and traveled so far that I can hardly separate the foot on the gas pedal, the wind through a bird’s wings or the rhythm of the river from my own heart.