The long road south through Illinois is familiar at this point. I look forward to the landmarks – the phalanx of windmills with their blinking red eyes and their wide white arms, the flea market that advertises with the life-sized UFO and the pink elephant, the portrait of Lincoln painted ten stories tall and staring beneficently down from a factory wall onto the flow of traffic below. These are the signposts that tell me, against the flat fields pockmarked with farms, each ringed with a stand of dying trees, that I am making progress. They are the waymarkers that lead me home.
When I tell people from the East Coast that I consider the five hour trip between Chicago and St. Louis an easy drive, the gap between our experiences looms so large it’s impossible to communicate across. They tell me about a world where an hour’s drive is a slog, and two is the limit they can push through in a day. There’s no way to explain the easy jostle of semis as the miles roll by, the contemplative weight that settles over me after the second hour or so. There is a reason that driving is so often listed as a sort of trance in introductory books. I keep my eye on the road, and I watch carefully for anything that might be a danger, but there’s a reason so much of my practice is tied up in travel. There are very few meditations, very few astral journeys, that match the depth and clarity I have when I’m talking to the empty passenger’s seat as the fields of the Midwest stream past my windows. I hit the road with a delight that is, at its core, religious.
Maybe it’s because I grew up two hours from the nearest city big enough to earn the name. As soon as I was able to, I was driving every weekend, four hours in a car around an afternoon with my friends, feeling urbane and excited for the future. Maybe it’s my star chart, stacked so full of Sagittarius that it makes most readers give a knowing and exhausted groan. Maybe it’s Hermes, taking me by both hands and pulling me along into the future, into the wider world and all of the people I am going to become.
Whatever it is, it is always waiting for me. Even exhausted, pushed to my limits, there is a part of me that takes solace in driving. I work it into my rituals – a long drive on the day I staged the ritual that would be my wedding, winding through back roads until it felt right to stop and find a place to stay. A road trip one year later, climbing through the mountains and hollers of Georgia and North Carolina until I rested at the little house by the creek where I renewed my vows. A winding, dangerous trek around the circumference of Iceland, leaving offerings and listening until I was sure it was time to dedicate myself.
And now, this trip, where I’m putting things to rest.
A railway with a train viewed from the 9th Street bridge in Lockport, Illinois. [Wikimedia Commons, Illinois_Roadbuff (Rogue Jr), CC 4.0]
It’s fitting, I think, that I’m going to a funeral. I load the car with snacks and toiletries, as usual, and the addition of the all-black shirt and pants that are getting trotted out more often, these days. I don’t know if it’s the chapter of my life I’m at – I’m told weddings, babies, and funerals all come in waves – or a new aspect of my work with Hermes, but this isn’t the first time this spring I’ve rented a car and hauled out of town to mourn someone. The last was the mother of a friend, a stranger who needed an extra pallbearer to see her safely into the ground. This one is more personal – a woman who guided my friends and I through high school and gave us the safety we needed to get out of town. I haven’t seen her for years, and the cancer has made sure that I won’t see her now. We’ll be celebrating her life, not burying her, but it hangs heavy all the same.
It’s also a longer trip. I’m taking it in two days, peppering in visits with friends and good food. It doesn’t make the trip any lighter, but it adds a few bright spots to look forward to. The first one is hardly even out of town. I’m just an hour from home when I pull into my friend’s front lawn and unload three bags heavy with books. “I hear someone’s getting into Norse mythology,” I say with a grin that I almost feel. “It’s your lucky day.”
I was a Heathen for a little less than a decade. In that time I read almost everything I could get my hands on, and collected my favorite books with the glee of a budding librarian. I harbored a grand dream of founding a lending library for Pagans, somewhere that made even the most rare books available to the budding researcher. It is humbling and frustrating to admit that in that time my collection grew to be just barely larger than a small Home Depot box could handle.
My friend is delighted, of course. She’s starting her own coven, and her students will be able to use these books more than I will. Still, as I drink coffee and visit with her and her partner, I keep fighting the urge to go through the bags and take a few back. Davidson, maybe – I liked those copies of Davidson, and they’re hard to come by. Or Bauschatz – I went through enough to get ahold of it, after all. Maybe I’ve made a mistake. Maybe I should pack everything back into the car and think it through again.
I drag myself back out into the car after barely an hour and I leave the books behind me. I am miles down the road before I start to wonder if this also counts as mourning.
A side view of South Weber Road in a cloudy day. This was taken in Crest Hill, Illinois. [Wikimedia Commons, Illinois_Roadbuff (Rogue Jr), CC 4.0]
It’s not that I don’t want to talk about why I left the path that I called home for all of that time. I just don’t know how. Unlike Christianity, which had a straightforward and concise narrative arc, my slow separation from Heathenry was complicated and unsatisfying, a laundry list of disagreements and disappointments and the slow shift of my values over time. It had all of the events of a satisfying drama – breakups and arguments and betrayals – and yet I cannot get my arms around it enough to make it into a story worth telling. Maybe it is too raw, still, even with two years under the bridge. Maybe it’s just not a story that wants to be told.
Here is the shape of it. I was a Heathen. Then, I wasn’t. The devotional relationship that defined my life no longer fit me. No amount of arguing or sobbing would change that. My experience was always that Loki is a god of hard truths, and he required me to confront that truth – that we no longer worked well together – even though it broke my heart. And I, his child to the last, made myself look directly at what worked about my practice, and what no longer did. And then I started to take apart my altars.
Those boxes left my house before the last move, given to friends in the community who could pass on the objects to others. The books – in some ways it was harder to get rid of the books. What if I wanted to consult them for a column? What if they were useful, one day?
What if I came back? What if I needed them again?
They sat in a box by my front door for months, still taped closed, labeled only as Norse Shit. The box was heavy enough that I could hardly lift it. I was just waiting, I told myself. Waiting to find the right person to give them to. Or the right opportunity to get rid of them. They should go to someone who would value them.
I really was going to find somewhere to donate them. Any minute now.
A view of the Eastbound Renwick Road traffic signal (red phase) at the Renwick Road and U.S. Route 30 intersection in Plainfield, Illinois. (December 2025) [Wikimedia Commons, Illinois_Roadbuff (Rouge Jr), CC 4.0]
There are hours between where I leave the books and where I stop for the night. It’s a straight shot – no turns on the highway, nothing but the music as I think about it, and don’t think about it, and play it over again. I keep getting anxious kicks – did I leave something in the bags I didn’t mean to? Did I make the right decision? Maybe I should go back and make sure, just check in real quick and –
The storm on the horizon clears off, and I am driving at the wrong time for construction. It’s easy to put miles between myself and the last remnants of that part of my life, which in itself makes me feel some sort of way. I turn over the sensation as I drive, trying to identify it. Bitterness? Sadness? Relief? I could have been a different person, if I kept going down that road. There’s no knowing who that might have been, no bringing them back now. They’re gone, and I’ve got another path under my feet, pulling me onward.
For the first time, I realize that I don’t know where it leads.
I keep driving.
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