Counting States

“And I’ve peed in 42 states” Jodi announced.

“You what?!” The obligatory two-truths-and-a-lie ice breaker detoured into a discussion: how do you count the states you’ve been in? According to my dad, driving through a state counts but going through an airport doesn’t. Is driving through sufficient, or do you have to get out? Do you have to spend the night? For Jodi, it counted if she peed there. 

Just south of Chicago, we pulled off I-90 onto Route 53 arrowing south between corn and soy fields in search of the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. Headed into day three of a three-week road trip, we needed to wiggle. My daughter began her chant from the back seat “Labuuuu, labuuuuu,” her invented word for “I need to get out of the truck, now!” What if, in order for a state to count, you have to walk—get out of the car? Enough to stretch your legs and see something beyond the highway. What if you had to walk a half-mile? 

The states on our route are not new to me. I’ve peed in all of them - many I’ve hiked or camped in. But on this trip, I’m seeing the route again through the eyes of my daughter. I catalogued our stops. In Pennsylvania, a state my daughter had traveled before to visit her Poppa, and where I’d grown up, we stopped to see Lake Erie at Presque Isle State Park. We strolled along the water’s edge stopping to collect stones, dance away from the waves then plunge in up to our knees. We paused to gaze out across this improbable expanse of fresh water. 

I had once joined a pilgrimage to consecrate this lake. For days, I’d watched a sand mandala kaleidoscope into being. The monks, hunched over the table ratcheted colored sands from a narrow chack-pur, a hollow tube with notches along one side which they grated or tapped to position the sand. Then, in an instant, a monk swiped the completed mandala with a brush. Nothing is permanent. They gathered the sand and processed to the lake. There, the deep tones of the dungchen reverberated across the water. The monks, in saffron robes, stood along the industrial wharf chanting as they poured the consecrated sand into the lake. A few particles swirled on the surface and the rest roiled into the murky water. Twenty-four years later, we waded in the same sacred lake. 

We had sped by Cleveland and turned south at Toledo to stroll along the Springbrook trail, a mile-long loop through the Oak Openings Metropark, where the trees and birds were as familiar to us as those around home. Ohio.

We had spent two nights in Indiana exploring Indiana Dunes National Park and the shore of Lake Michigan, weaving out through the dunes past common hop plant and jack pines to the lake. But was that really Indiana? Our exploration of Indiana was equally as reminiscent of Cape Cod and entirely different from the deciduous forests of the south or the corn fields in the state’s center. When can we say we’ve been in a place? Perhaps these half-mile walks revealed the wizard behind the curtain: the artificial construct of “state” is as “place.”

In an interview with Sean Elder, poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder explains thinking in terms of watersheds rather than political boundaries, “Watersheds are not arbitrary; they have been shaped by the land itself, the play of the ridges and streams, whereas boundaries that are on the map, especially in North America are arbitrary lines drawn with a ruler, often by people who had no idea where they were.” I grappled with labeling these places. State lines are deeply etched in our vernacular. But Snyder’s thinking has long shaped my idea of place as well.  

We had driven up to New Buffalo, Michigan for dinner then walked out past the yacht basin and condos to the beach. The morning’s placid water had been riled by the wind. Even standing back, we soon wore a fine mist. The waves tossed and seethed. But this half-mile walk was only thirty miles up the lakeshore from where we’d walked earlier in the day - a new state, but the same Lake Michigan watershed. Our half-miles provided a snapshot in time as well as place.

We stepped out of the truck, stretched, grabbed granola bars, sun hats and binoculars. At the pasture gate, we stepped into a fold of fence and pulled the gate across. Phoebe stopped to try the gate herself, working out the mechanics of it. “The bison can’t get through here - but we can!” She walked into the pasture, and we ogled at bison tracks and “plop.” We scanned the horizon and shade trees for the creatures without luck. An indigo bunting sang it’s doubled notes from a phone line. It was time to take a walk and see this moment, this half-mile of Illinois. In the Illinois River watershed. Time to check off another state.