Julie and I took a road trip to Oregon last week, where we ate unfamiliar foods, took long walks on the beach, deepened friendships, and listened to the first six hours of an eight-hour novel before we realized Julie’s phone and our stereo were only intermittently compatible. It was our first time away from home for a while, and our road trip became a kind of practice road trip—two days getting there, a day and night in Portland, four days on the coast, two days getting back, lots of places left unvisited. It was too much driving, and not enough sitting, beach-walking, laughing, conversing, wandering through parks, eating and drinking.

Watching sagebrush go by, listening on the hour to the invasion news, and not finding out how a novel ends does not spring to mind as rich, vital living, but when you look back at the tedious spaces between events, you realize they contain meaning, too. If your vision of heaven includes eternity, it also needs to include the dull and predictable, and if you’ve ever crossed three hundred miles of Eastern Oregon desert, the skills you acquired while staring at all that emptiness will come in handy in the first aeon or two.

 

It was my fault that we came home early. The day we left, we forgot our rapid tests for Covid, and that started a little mind-worm about what else we had forgotten. I had turned off the power to the well and set the wall-furnace thermostat to fifty-six degrees. I had packed enough clothes for any eventuality, including formal dining and mountain climbing. I had checked the temperature in the crawl space, which was forty, well above freezing. I had checked the stoves and made sure all the doors were locked.

It’s a routine I’ve followed when we have gone on long winter trips. We’ve been gone as long as ten weeks and everything has been fine when we’ve gotten back. But this time I started worrying about our house. A cold snap was predicted: the coldest temperatures all winter, in late February, of all times, when the days are getting longer and the winds of spring beginning to stir. I began to think about the furnace failing, the pipes freezing, the furnace flue falling apart due to the 2020 earthquake, and finally, the house burning down. I took to calling our answering machine, getting the recorded message, and then found myself imagining our phone, miraculously intact, sitting in a pile of ashes and crumpled roofing.

I Googled “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” and found things far more awful than anything I had ever imagined. It was small comfort. I pictured going through our house, room by room, and asked myself if there was anything I couldn’t live without. I came up with nothing. I reminded myself that since this house was built in 1988, it’s been left alone for long stretches every winter and everything’s been fine.

Nothing worked. Every night I would wake up, heart pounding, feeling like I was about to die. I’d turn on the laptop and read the headlines, which didn’t help, either.

Eventually the adrenaline would wear off, and I’d go back to sleep, exhausted by catastrophe.  I’d wake up in a fog, but after enough coffee, Julie and I would venture out into a world where it was safe to leave home, at least until the next time the clock read 3 a.m.

 

The world is an unsafe place. That’s a fact hard to ignore. I’ve told Julie that I was an anxious little kid who became an anxious adult. It was perfectly logical to be that way in a world of hydrogen bombs and polio and Bull Connor’s dogs and cars with no seat belts.

I’ve also said that anxiety can be lived with. You focus on the things you can control, not on the things you can’t. You get plenty of exercise, you eat right, you find people to love and you try to do good things for them. You ignore any feelings that you’re the main character in your story. You survive losses and work through grief and deal with the idea of death. You do work you can be proud of. In circumstances where you can’t make the world a better place, you can at least leave it be.

It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve learned to follow enough of this hard-won advice that no matter what happens from here on out, I will end up with far more happiness in my life than misery.

 

Anxiety can be a good thing when it helps you make your life mean something, when it keeps you from hanging out with people who would hurt you, when it keeps you awake in situations where you need to be awake, when it makes you value your ability to love and be loved. Let it get out of control, however, and it will make you the center of a universe that is out to get you. Every story will have you as a main character, and every story will end with the worst thing that could happen.

No one escapes it, at least no one who’s paying attention. Of course, one of the ways people cope with anxiety is by not paying attention, by blinding themselves to the world, by refusing to believe they have anything in common with the people who are dying of disease or war or poverty. Other methods of coping involve forcing other people to do what you’ve told them to do, screaming threats at school board members, refusing vaccinations, acquiring more money than you could ever spend, losing yourself in crossword puzzles, building vast houses, pretending your DNA is superior to someone else’s, or self-mutilation and psychosomatic diseases. These are poorly conceived solutions to poorly understood problems, and they almost always make things worse.

 

Julie and I got home late last night. We had stopped at our friends Tom and Ellen’s to pick up Juno, stopped by the Post Office to pick up the week’s mail, and had driven—too fast, I admit—into our driveway. The house and garage were still there, and I felt a surge of relief.

It was fifty-six degrees inside. No pipes had frozen. Everything was as we had left it. All my worry had been for naught. All that adrenaline had gone to waste when it could have been saved for tourists building campfires in the Sportsman’s Access in August. All that intuition could have been dedicated to situations where observation and logic might have been in the mix as well.

It was good to be home. It was good to see Juno. It was good to eat the Papa Murphy’s pizza we had bought in Emmett, and it was good to build a fire in the wood stove, stoke it carefully for the night, and go to bed in our own bed, in our own house, which was still there. We were still there, too, which was a bonus comfort. 

 

I need to explain a few things to my 3 a.m. self, mostly, but also to Julie, who would have been happier with two weeks on the road instead of one, and visiting all of the Oregon Coast instead of just a small part of it.

And maybe to you, Dear Reader. Sans drugs, you are almost certainly dealing with anxiety yourself. Although what I’m about to bring up may make you uncomfortable, it may help to see what I think went on in my brain that caused me to shorten our trip. At the very least—if you’re waking up at 3 a.m. and worrying—you will know that you’re not alone.

The first thing that happened was the dryer quit. Julie was washing sheets and towels and clothes prior to packing, and the last load was in the dryer when it wouldn’t turn on. A quick internet search revealed that a fuse had blown (a cheap fix) or the control panel had self-destructed (a new dryer). In any event, fixing it would have to wait until we got back. When appliances go bad, I want to fix or replace them now or yesterday. Otherwise, they haunt me at 3 a.m.

Also, this winter’s cold weather has made the front door hard to latch unless you pull hard on it. Same with the garage door. Same with the back door. We got on the road having closed the doors but I had forgotten to make sure they were latched.

About the forgotten rapid tests: we wanted to be sure we were negative for Covid before we visited anyone, so we bought tests in The Dalles and waited in a CVS parking lot until the tests proved negative, at least as far as you can prove a negative, and I already knew that’s not far at all.

Driving into Portland, we started seeing homeless encampments under overpasses and in vacant lots. The mess and tents of the homeless hit me hard, because they confronted me with a system that throws the poor and insane away like so much human trash. My first reaction was to look away, to deny any kinship to those people, which would have done a terrible violence to ancestors, friends, and my own God-given life. So I didn’t do that, but when you chose empathy instead, looking into a homeless tent village means that there but for the grace of God, go you.

Then the news: a factory fire. Inflation. A megadrought in the American West, overheating oceans, and vanishing glaciers. A shooting in Portland. Another shooting in Portland. Omicron subvariant BA.2. An Idaho gubernatorial candidate speaking at a white-supremacist rally in Florida. The obituary of an Idaho man survived by fifty-five great-grandchildren.

Tsunami zone signs all over the Oregon coast.

Then Ukraine. The threat of nuclear war. Putin as an insatiable vampire. Trump calling Putin a genius. Trump as an insatiable vampire. Everywhere, an unconscious and wild-eyed evil destroying everything it touches as it desperately seeks to escape looking in the mirror.

Then a certain amount of uncontrollable anxiety on my part. These things add up, and in the weird dark-hours economy of anxiety, the small things count as much as the big ones.

 

Tonight, we are having roast garlic chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, roasted garlic, salad with a garlic vinaigrette, and wine that will get better with garlic if there is such a thing. Tonight, we won’t worry about vampires.

Tomorrow, I’ll test the dryer fuse and order a new one if it’s failed, a new dryer if it hasn’t. I’ll work on the doors to see that they latch properly. I’ll get a couple of loads of wood in and keep the fire going.

In two days it’s supposed to rain here, which means that our anomalous cold snap will be replaced by an anomalous heat wave. The snow will slide off the roof and I’ll carefully and slowly shovel the deck on the north side of the house.

If we get sick, we’ll take rapid tests, and if they’re positive, we’ll happily quarantine.

The rest of my worries are not so easily dealt with. I lack the power to do anything about them, and that’s probably a good thing. I think of Putin, who does have that power, somehow compelled to test its limits. If he’s in bed right now, I hope he’s not awake and terrified and feeling powerless, because that would be a very bad thing for him to feel. He might feel like he was about to die, and that could kill us all.

 

“It’s nice to be home,” Julie told me during our afternoon walk. I was glad to hear her say it, because I’ve been feeling guilty about wanting to be home when she was wanting to walk the beaches.

She was getting over being disappointed more quickly than I was getting over disappointing her. It’s a good, forgiving way for events to unfold, and I’m determined to keep it that way, no matter how long I end up feeling guilty.

“Life is good here,” I said.

She nodded. “But not if we never leave home again.”

“I’ve vowed never to shorten a road trip again. I’ll figure out ways to enjoy them rather than having them test my character. No matter what disasters threaten.”

Except in August, I was thinking. Fire season. Tourist season. A bad combination. Julie usually can hear what I’m thinking, but she didn’t this time.

“You enjoying our next road trip will make things a lot more fun for both of us,” she said, and we left it at that.