We should have turned north by now. Headed up the spine of the Rockies for Denver, then Fort Collins. We’re scheduled to meet some friends there in two weeks time, but spring hasn’t found the mountain passes. Not yet. Cold winter nights linger there, waiting with late season snow and ice.

So we kept pouring west, gunning for Flagstaff, hoping to catch the Grand Canyon, Zion, and Moab before the summer sun sets the place ablaze. Hoping to hold onto temperate days as long as we could.

So much of this life is an exercise in adaptation. Bend to the circumstances, or be broken by them; swim with the current, or drown in it. It’s the slow lesson—second by second, minute by minute, day by day—of the past two months.

Years ago in my grandfather's basement I found some shoe boxes brimming with black and white photos. His brothers, hair slick and cigarettes lit, standing next to a Ford sedan, doing their damnedest to look like they were up to no good. Or caught mid-laugh, leather soles sliding in a rare East Tennessee snowfall, hands full of the stuff, arms cocked and ready to throw at the camera.

The sign says, “Danger. Keep Off.” But over its shoulder there’s a jackrabbit path winding up the ridge, snaking through the shattered blue stone littering Mariscal Mine. Abandoned mercury shafts stare through iron bars like empty eye sockets carved into the yellow ground more than 100 years ago. They have their own gravity: the pull of all rare and dangerous things.

It’s raining in Mexico. I can see it, a big storm pushing its way north on a quick cool wind. The top of the clouds burn orange with the setting sun, their bellies grey and prism-streaked. We see the lightning from where we sit but hear no thunder. It’s far off, but close enough. It could be on us at any minute. It could pass right by.

We took a walk this morning. Threw kiddo in her pack and hiked a few blocks for breakfast. Skipped the brick-and-mortar shop for a little trailer outside a dive bar and ordered up an Austin favorite: breakfast tacos. Egg and cheese and chorizo, avocado, bacon, and beans. We ate with the construction workers there, fed the girl handfuls of warm tortilla and cheese while she waved and played shy with her friends in hard hats and safety vests. The lot of them smiling at the goofy little girl in red socks.

Last week landed us in Texas. We popped out of southern Mississippi and across the Louisiana lowlands. Charged into a thin band of spring thunderstorms, the wind setting each roadside tree whipping in the ecstasy or agony of motion. Dropped ourselves into Houston, the fourth largest city in America. A staggering 6.3 million people churning around the oil and gas industry’s epicenter.

We stopped for a restroom. Pulled into a fuel station, parked the truck, and went inside for a look around. Let the kiddo wiggle some before we kept up the long ride to Houston. Highway 28 into Alexandria, Louisiana is a long road to nowhere in particular, skirting Catahoula Lake and the Dewey W. Wills WMA, a tract of little but high water and low land.

It’s been a long month since we left Knoxville. More than 3,000 miles of Virginia hills and Atlantic coast, Florida swamps and Gulf sands. Now, the low hills of southern Mississippi. The truck rolled past 300,000 miles at last, clattering its way over ever more country and lugging our lives along with each sweep of its crank. It’s odd to look down and see the odometer glowing with so many zeroes. I keep running my eyes over it, tracing the digits like a new tattoo, or another scar. Tender, somehow.

It’s a long march across the Everglades, slogging over 41 or I-75 for 150 miles. Leaving behind the Atlantic, and her coast. Pushing from one shore to the other. After almost 10 days in Florida, I went at it like a chore—a thing to be endured.

Nothing about the state’s eastern face made me comfortable. Save a few quiet spots, it's length felt like a living ad campaign. Every road is a "Coral Way" or "Coconut Path." Every strip mall a gaudy shade of pink, or teal stucco. It’s a vast stretch of the country built by marketers—not real Florida, but an Ohio real estate developer’s idea of the place.