Even though I’m not from there, I feel a sort of familiarity with Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Belleville, the small Mennonite farming town where I grew up, is similar in demographics to Lancaster, and is a smaller, less commercialized nook of Amish Country.
So when I found the Shawn Smucker’s blog, soon after he wrote
My Amish Roots, I was curious. Like him, my roots are Amish, and I’m always a little surprised and feel a kinship with other ethnically Mennonite/Anabaptist people with a writing bent.
I began following his writing adventures in Lancaster, and when I read that he would be going on a months-long cross country adventure with his wife and four kids, I was a little jealous. Ok, a lot jealous.
He and his wife, Maile, documented that trip in How to Use a Runaway Truck Ramp. It was released today in paperback, with a Kindle edition forthcoming. You can also grab a PDF edition!
What I enjoy most about this book is its honesty. It might be easy for some writers to present a trip like this as a cooler-than-thou On the Road or an always-joyful family adventure, the way some bloggers document their lives as if they are naturally art-directed, free of cat hair and dust and bad days and depression and anxiety and loneliness. Shawn and Maile tell the truth of their journey, without making it seem like just a grand, epic family vacation.
Because it was more than that.
Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of their story:
After we returned from The Trip, strange dreams plagued my sleep, visions of scowling grizzly bears and highways that never ended and mountains that rose up in front of me, white and foaming like tidal waves. I dreamed of being trapped in tight spaces. I dreamed of careening over a mountainside, the bus’s brakes failing. We crashed through a guardrail, plummeted thousands of feet, and just as the bus was about to make impact with the tops of the trees, I gasped and woke up.
I was alive. We had survived.
A local television anchorman came to the house to interview us during those glazed-over days just after we had returned from The Trip. This particular anchorman had seen us off, four months before, with an interview that aired on the local news, and he had asked me to let him know when we made it home.
The news truck pulled into my parents’ driveway, and when he came to the door, we shook hands and smiled and felt like old friends. He was as fascinated as ever by our epic journey. First, he interviewed Maile, and she answered his questions with grace and that beautiful smile. Then, I sat down in the chair. The cameraman fished the microphone wire up through my shirt. I squirmed.
The anchorman asked me question after question, and I settled into a groove of answers, the words coming easily. Thinking back over that trip, from which we had so recently returned (relatively unscathed) was fun.
Then something uncomfortable happened: he asked me a question I wasn’t sure how to answer.
“So how do you think this trip has changed you?” he asked.
I didn’t know what to say.
I felt changed. I felt very changed. I thought through our experiences during those four months on the road. Every emotion, from boredom to terror, excitement to annoyance, freedom to entrapment. My mind wandered back through the glorious structure that trip had become, and I realized I couldn’t articulate how I had changed because I couldn’t find my old self. Somewhere along the road, my old self had been lost, and this was what remained. This new me.
I blurted out some kind of an answer to his question, but for the next few days, I found myself revisiting it.
How had I changed? I thought back through our adventure of a lifetime, and I tried to figure out when the old me had disembarked from the bus without getting back on.
Adventures will change you. They’ll saturate you with a fresh view of life. They’ll take every foundation you ever stood on and shake them until they crack. Adventures will tear away layer after layer of you, and in the end, when it’s all over, you’ll step away from that pile of old skins and barely recognize the person you have become.
This is the story of our transformation.
Shawn Smucker is the author of How to Use a Runaway Truck Ramp and Building a Life Out of Words. He lives in Lancaster County, PA with his wife Maile and their four children. You can find him on
Twitter,
Facebook, and he blogs (almost) daily at
shawnsmucker.com; Maile blogs at
mailesmucker.blogspot.com.
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