I blame myself for Montana. When my daughter told me that she had just turned down the job offer, I told her that she was going to regret it. Her last year at home had been miserable, I reminded her, and a summer away from Savannah’s oppressive heat would do her good. She never listens to me about how to dress, how to act, how to behave. But she listened to me about Montana, and early in May, she boarded a plane with a single backpack. A month later she phoned to tell me that she was putting off college. And by the time she was to fly home to go to the now-postponed college, she asked me this: Could she take her car back to Bozeman, Montana and stay?

A drive that long demands a co-pilot, which is how I found myself sitting in a Mini Cooper for 2,523 miles over 5 ½ days and 11 states in August. It was a drive that took us up and left, up and left, and finally up and left. On Monday and Tuesday we drove up through Georgia, and then to Tennessee and Kentucky — familiar roads all — to have dinner with her brother and a visit with my family.  But the adventure began on Wednesday as we pointed the car into the unfamiliar.

If you are going to spend 2,523 miles driving across America staring out the windshield of a sub-compact car, one thing quickly becomes clear: Your social studies teacher was right. As we drove, there was a Charlie Brown voice whomp-whomping in my head about how geography and topography determined state lines. So it was. The hilly green of western Kentucky led to a bright cornflower blue bridge into rural Indiana, which was so verdant and misty that it was practically blue. In southern Illinois, it was like someone had suddenly turned on a very bright light in a very dark bar to reveal a washed out palette of green and brown. We hit the Mississippi River, wide and muddy, and at the entry to Missouri there was the Gateway to the West.

Well, not any more. Not exactly. It is now the Gateway Arch at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. But it is still a 630 foot tall stainless steel catenary arch. Can a mother invite herself on her daughter’s road trip without scheduling an educational experience? Not on my watch.

Because I am me, I herded my daughter straight to the exhibit about the design. There was a contest with a grand prize of $40,000 for the winner: Eero Saarinen, a Finnish-American architect who also became a noted furniture designer. It took forever to get funding, and the local member of Congress carried a purse with catenary arch handles to drum up interest among her colleagues to finance the park. Sadly, Saarinen died two years before they broke ground on the Arch. If Saarinen had lived, he would have seen an African-American crew integrate the building of the Arch in 1960s, a massive scaling back of his plans for the grounds around the Arch, and the installation of the keystone piece — which required a hosing down of the Arch to cool it off and reverse some expansion.

I read that Saarinen was proudest of his design for the tram, these micro-pods with five seats. I can testify to the fact that each pod sat two small people comfortably. On the four minute trip to the top, there were four of us, including one person who was incredibly claustrophobic. Her husband reminded her that she wanted to visit the Arch. She told him that he was supposed to talk her out of it.

So for $13 and a 4 minute ride in a very tiny tram pod, you can find out just how claustrophobic and scared of heights you really are. I was fine — sort of — knowing intellectually that the Arch could withstand strong winds and 18 inches of movement on each side. At 630 feet up in the air, it felt like standing in a closed curved cabin on a large boat, with the sea gently roiling beneath my feet.

It is hard to shut off one’s lizard brain 630 feet in the air. It is even harder when some knucklehead tourist announces at 200 decibels, “Hey! Can you feel it swaying? It keeps moving and moving!” But we made it down the tram alive — and to my credit, he did, too — and when we walked, I saw where vandals had defaced the arch by scratching their initials onto the stainless steel.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

But our next destination awaited. Leaving St. Louis featured rush hour traffic and an identical Mini Cooper whose driver insisted on snapping our photo as she hurtled by. Missouri had plenty of bridges, and lush rolling terrain, and gas stations whose names I had never heard of. And unbeknownst to my daughter, the reason we stopped in Columbia was not because I had to have a Chick-Fil-A ice dream cone (the stated reason), but because I could drive past an SEC stadium.

Priorities, y’all.

Wednesday ended in Kansas City at a Frank Lloyd Wright house that is now let as an Airbnb. I have seen the Wright room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it is a very different experience than, say, parking one’s Mini Cooper on the exact spot where cars have slowly leaked oil for decades.

The house began with 1100 square feet in the 1930s, and Wright himself drafed expansion plans in the late 1940s to double the size. The walls were cypress and the floors concrete. There were low, narrow hallways that opened into higher ceiling rooms with views to the outside. There was an incredible amount of precision: All the lines on the screws faced the same direction. And there was wonky placement of the light switches: Many were on the ceiling, for Wright hated to interrupt the lines on the wall. The hosts invited us to have friends over and throw a party during our evening’s stay, which had the benefit of sounding both exceedingly gracious and being completely impossible for two travelers from Georgia. But the dining area sat 14 and the room it shared with the living area was low-slung, and if we’d had that party, here is where it would have been:

Thursday took us up through Missouri into Iowa. A convenience store at the state line featured both Japanese toilets and “gourmet” Jell-O, a combination that may have rendered me more confused that I have ever been in my entire life.

I had plenty of time to ponder my confusion, for Thursday was a long, unbroken drive to Wall, South Dakota. There was no educational outing planned — none at all — so for the first half of the drive we decided to embrace the familiar.

I will throw this out casually now, like the seasoned traveler I am not, but If you are driving up the Iowa state line, you might as well see Nebraska, especially when Google maps tells you that there is a Chipotle in suburban Omaha. That detour took us down a highway through a cornfield, across a rickety yet lovely $1 toll bridge, and into an area that seemed at first to have us lost. I am pleased to report that the best Chipotle in the United States is in this Nebraskan suburb, the deliciousness of the food tempered only by the hyperactive air conditioner.

Like Kansas City, downtown Omaha was lovely in a clean, efficient way, and when we were back on our route, things had changed again: the roads turned pink, the electrical lines perched on unfamiliar towers, signs warned that the interstate was closed when the lights were flashing, the speed limit bumped to 80. We stopped at a Planet Fitness on the Iowa/South Dakota border, and if you’ve ever wondered if your black card membership buys access nationwide, rest assured that it does.

South Dakota began with a Taj Mahal-equivalent convenience store, complete with several stories with glass staircases, a miniature food court, and a ton of bikers. It then marked the entrance to the last left of the drive: westbound I-90.

The road started as desolate scrub land, complete with exits miles and miles from any city that were marked “139th Avenue” and so on. The 139th Avenue of rural South Dakota? I wondered. After an hour of nothing, there was a rise in the road, and then a curve and a dip, and then a lake surrounded by mountains and trees. It was so enchanting that my daughter and I gasped in unison.

South Dakota dazzled me with her beauty, only to distract from the fact that she would try to kill me.

At dusk, three hours from our reservation, I almost lost control of the car. I had heard on the news earlier in the week about 60 mph wind gusts on the prairie, a fact that is easy to ignore until you are the beneficiary of such a wind gust — at which point it becomes impossible to ignore.

As the wind registered and I slowed the car to half speed, I looked to the left. In the eastbound lane, the wind had taken out a tractor trailer, which in turn had capsized several cars behind it. Half a dozen cars in our direction had pulled over as people in the other direction crawled out of their cars, woozily trying to rise to their feet. My daughter could not exactly process what was going on, and I wished that I had that luxury, for it rattled me. I watched the road. I watched the prairie grass. I watched the night fall. But I kept going.

I was almost blown off the road the second time that night, at least metaphorically speaking, during the Big Talk that I feared was coming. It was pitch black, the interstate hummed under our feet, and upcoming towns were visible from miles away as bright spiderwebs on one side of the highway. I gripped the wheel, and my daughter told me all the things that she needed to tell me.

I felt better when it was over. I think she did, too.

I did not feel better when our hotel for the evening called to make certain that we were arriving, for despite the fact that the room was prepaid, the hotel planned to give it away. At 9:15 p.m. on a desolate stretch of interstate and reeling from gusting winds and an important talk, I needed that Best Western in Wall, South Dakota to come through. It really did, in no small part thanks to Yvonne, the housekeeper.

If you have been to South of the Border on the South Carolina/North Carolina line, you have been to Wall Drugs in the middle of nowhere South Dakota, where we went on Friday morning. There are the same cheesy signs, the same overpriced souvenirs, the same attempt to create something — a tourist trap — out of nothing.

But the Badlands were something else.

Picture this. South Dakota is a land of prairies, with striated mountains — ivory, pink, rust, and green — rising on the horizon. As a tourist, you have no idea what the Badlands mean, or why they are even called the Badlands, as you are headed to the national park. On the seven mile drive from Wall to the entrance, there is the occasional topographical blip that is easy to dismiss. And then you run into this:

And this:

Which overlooks this:

There are 64,000 acres of arid rock formations and canyons, all with dried up streams. A 42 mile scenic route wends precariously through the park, a narrow road traveled by Mini-Coopers, tour buses, and massive RVs alike. Signs warn you of rattlesnakes. The heat is oppressive. There is an exhibit about the formation of the Badlands, a 70 million year process registered by the striations on the hills. When North America was split by a 600 mile wide internal waterway, alligators roamed the Badlands. Unknowing settlers placed their names in a lottery for this land. They later called them starvation claims. It is easy to see how having traveled by wagon for so many miles, settlers would have been at first so relieved by the expansive prairies and then so absolutely crushed to find that their acreage was in the middle of a barren rock formation. You can feel their dismay.

The Badlands had another effect on me: It is so old and so immense that it drives home the notion that we are all just a blink of the divine eye.

The Badlands led to its polar opposite, Mount Rushmore, for if you have been to Helen, Georgia, you have been to the area leading to the mountain. Passing through the signs advertising water slides and funnel cakes, it was spectacular to catch the first glimpse of Mount Rushmore on the highway. Four faces on a mountain are a majestic sight, but otherwise there was not a lot to see.

(In all fairness, I suppose that that is enough.)

The black hills of South Dakota led to the scrubby hills of Wyoming. Heed the big horned sheep crossing warnings, for rounding a curve, we came upon a pack standing terrifyingly near the road. I loved the sense of humor of the unknown Wyomingite who placed a broken down stove, door open, in the middle of a plain under a metal OPEN RANGE sign. (I figure he is the same one who put little stickers of gas clouds emitting from deer’s posteriors on miles of road signs.) With all of this open and unpopulated road in the west, rest areas are a big deal — a frequent and clean big deal — and at the risk of damning with faint praise, Wyoming had the best.

But Wyoming led to Montana, and on the last morning of driving, my daughter played old school country music. There was Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline, Charley Pride and Willie Nelson and the Gatlin Brothers. At one point, as the car rocketed along and I watched the view from the passenger seat, I was singing “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” at the top of my lungs. It was one of those rare moments of transcendent joy, a blissful union of time and place and person and sound.

And it may even be the perfect country and western song.

In Montana, the sky was big, which happens when you drive on tops of mountains with nothing to obscure the view. There was the Yellowstone River, the bluest thing that I had ever seen, and the dawning knowledge that Bozeman had to be in a valley. It was, and I loved it, and my daughter reminded me how I had always loved a college town. And suddenly on Saturday afternoon, about 122 hours after we first buckled our seat belts, we were there. It seemed to take both forever and no time at all.

We both cried at the airport on Sunday morning.

My daughter called me recently and asked if I was disappointed in her. Disappointed? What do you mean?, I said. She asked if I was disappointed in her for postponing college and living out west, doing forestry work during the day and sleeping in a tent at night, all for miniscule wages. For moving far from her parents and being so uncertain. For not having the straight line of her life plotted at age 19.

On our trip, I had been reading a book about trails. The author wrote about how formal trails got laid out, but how people and animals innately searched for the shortest route possible. The lines next to the formal trails — the individual feet trampling through the grass to cut the distance on sidewalks, for instance — were desire lines.

That is how I have thought of it with her. There is a traditional path to adulthood and purpose that others have followed. But there are excursions off the trail and a sense of direction that only the walker can possess. She is walking her own trail right now, perhaps off the formal path, and whether her trail intersects with that one or runs in an entirely different direction, she will arrive where she needs to go soon enough.

This is how I feel about her.

She will be old a lot longer than she is young. I can attest to that, what with my rocket-fast path to full-on adulthood and responsibility. I have been a lawyer for 26 years. I have only started traveling. I would never have gotten into my small pick-up truck in 1987 to drive across the country, to sleep on the ground, to wake up with the stars. At 50, bravery for me consists of small things, like driving in a Mini-Cooper across the country. Writing a blog. Cheering from the sidelines as I wish she could be happier a little closer to home.

But is it ever too late?

The drive and our conversations led me to think: What is my own desire line? Georgia offers free tuition to residents over 62, and I would like to get a BFA in painting. To get a degree, I might have to retake the SAT at 61, to retire at 62, to subject myself to criticism and direction at 63 when I am otherwise far too old to take those things lightly, to have a graduation party at 64.

But still I ask myself: How? How can I do this? I have been clearing out my life and saving money to prepare. I have been working hard and painting more. Buoyed by the fact that my life is not an uncontrollable static straight line, I am happier than I have ever been. There is beauty to be found everywhere, even in a worn yellow knife and a couple of figs.

Disappointed? I ask my daughter again. How can she misunderstand me so completely? How can I be so unknown to her? Where I have I gone wrong? I suppose this is a mother’s lot in life, to seem at times both unknowable and disapproving.

Rather than offer these observations, I slip into the mother she expects. I tell her again how proud I am, and how much I love her, and how happy I am that she is so happy. All of these things are true, too, and all of these things are good.

ALC