It’s just me and the cat, and she’s not happy with the situation. She belongs to my sister, just like everything else in the car. The stuff is crammed into the trunk, the back seat, the passenger’s seat, every hole plugged with random pieces of clothing, not a square inch taken for granted. I have enough room to sit, to drive, to shift gears, and nothing else. It’s more like a space capsule than a car. I don’t get in so much as strap it on. But then, this is everything she owns.

Mia huddles in her carrier and glares at me through the bars. She spent the morning yowling in protest, but now she’s resigned herself to passive aggression. The towel we gave her for comfort is all crumpled up now, and wet where the water dish sloshed. The kitty litter has slid into one corner of its cake tin, spilling a little over the side. Mia works to find a position that doesn’t get her wet, or force her to sit in her own filth. She’s just not happy with this whole adventure.

It’s technically Day 2, but we only got in six hours yesterday, driving till one in the morning after a stop to visit family in Madison. We didn’t even make it out of Illinois. It’s a 36-hour trip altogether, and we’re off to a bad start.

Still, I’m filled with a sense of mission. It’s a rescue mission, helping my sister leave her abusive fiancé two days before their wedding. My parents and I were supposed to fly to Chicago, go to the wedding, and then spend a week with relatives in the Wisconsin Dells. Instead, we flew to Chicago, helped Alyssa move out of their apartment and into the car, and took her with us to the Dells. We were civil with Joe, and he was too busy playing the martyr to make a scene.

The original plan was for me and Alyssa to drive the car back together. But I wanted to get home sooner, and she was still in a serious state of shock, hardly ready for a 2,000 mile road trip.

So now it ‘s just me and one royally pissed-off cat, who’s more than a little unbalanced to begin with.

The cat’s the reason we’ll only be staying at Motel 6’s on this trip. That was my sister’s idea. She made the same trip in the other direction a month ago, with the Rat Bastard, when they moved into their Chicago apartment. The Motel 6 always takes cats, she told me before I left, so I should always look for one of those.

But I think the real reason she likes it has more to do with the commercials. “Motel 6. We’ll leave the light on for you.” It’s allegedly the voice of the owner, and Alyssa had mentioned with glee that when you ask for a wake-up call, that’s the voice you hear on the phone, too. He usually says something about how tough it is to wake up, but easier when you know there’s a free continental breakfast waiting for you in the lobby. It’s a homey voice, Midwestern, and it hits that chord that makes you feel very down-to-earth and American. It makes you want to settle down, maybe start a family, or a farm.

My whole family are suckers for that vibe. We actually like Disneyland. We tend toward the wholesome. When we see a chain restaurant, instead of thinking about the homogenization of America and capitalism’s imperialistic tendencies, we think about how great it is to be able to order exactly the same thing we usually order at home, and how nice it is to know what you’re getting.

So it’s Motel 6 for Mia and me.

I’ve already bought a pocket-sized road atlas, more to gauge distance than anything else, since I already know it’ll be I-80 the whole way. I plan to cross Iowa and most of Nebraska today, to make up for the slow start. I called the Motel 6 toll-free number this morning and got the exit numbers for five or six locations in Nebraska, scattered along our route. I want to hit Sidney tonight, about a hundred miles east of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

I’ve got it all planned out. Sidney tonight, maybe even Cheyenne, and then Nevada by Wednesday night. Get home to Placerville by Thursday afternoon, at the latest. Take a break every two hours, drive 12 or 15 hours a day, why not?

We got a good start this morning, leaving around 8. I paid for it in lack of sleep, though, and I can feel it. When I make my next pit stop, I pick up an energy drink, all caffeine and sugar, and it helps.

You meet locals on a trip like this, but you also meet other travelers. The locals fill up their tanks, buy a candy bar, and go home, but the travelers talk shop. Where’re you headed? Are you moving? How many hours is it to Omaha from here? No one talks in miles. You talk only in hours, because that’s what counts. Four hours to Omaha, but the cops on that stretch don’t care if you go 75, so you can make it in three and a half easy.

The problem is, they exaggerate. Three and a half comes and goes, and you’ve only gotten as far as Des Moines. Sidney is looking farther and farther away. I start inching my goal eastward. Maybe North Platte.

I pound another energy drink at the next stop and head out fast, because I’ve been listening to the weather. But I don’t need the radio to tell me Iowa’s looking angry right now. The clouds there don’t have anywhere to hide, and I see them behind me and to my left even as the weatherman announces a thunderstorm warning in the east and the south. Still not on top of me, but they’re catching up. I can see them flashing.

The nice thing about having a cat in the car is, you don’t feel crazy talking to yourself. As Mia glowers at me, I tell her reassuring things about the storm clouds. I tell her not to worry, that they’re still behind us. She starts licking her tail.

Iowa lasts forever, and nothing changes. But the storm never does catch up, and I pop Elvis into the CD player and enjoy the ride.

We overnight in a Motel 6 in Lincoln, about an hour west of Omaha and the Nebraska border. It’s okay, I tell Mia. We’ll get a good night’s sleep this time, and make up for it tomorrow. We’ll make it by Thursday night at the latest.

But reality hits on Wednesday.

A good night’s sleep, a friendly wake-up call, a free continental breakfast. So far so good. We get an early start.

But I soon discover that we’ve hit Nebraska just as they’ve decided to overhaul their entire Interstate system.

We stop for lunch in Grand Island, 94 miles and four hours west of where we started. I study my pocket atlas and a distance finder I picked up too, somewhere along the way. It’s ingenious, a U.S. atlas with little holes next to major towns. There’s a dial behind the map. You point it to the town you’re in, and the distance to the other towns pops up in each little window.

I turn the dial to Grand Island. 364 miles to Cheyenne. Averaging 70, that makes 5.2 hours, which would take us into late afternoon. But when evening hits, construction traffic has only allowed us as far as Sidney, still short of Cheyenne. Another night, another Motel 6, and we haven’t even made it out of Nebraska.

Sitting on the bed Thursday morning, I play again with the distance finder. Cheyenne to Sacramento, 1,126 miles. Add the 100 from Sidney. Divide by 65 miles per hour, that makes 18 hours. Something inside my head snaps, and I think, why can’t we just drive straight home?

I am, after all, an expert on the no-sleep drive. After moving all over Northern California, I’ve had plenty of experience driving the four, five, six hours home after staying up with out-of-town friends all night. You slam down something with lots of caffeine and sugar and take breaks when you need to.

There is no real reason for me to push it. If my sister had gone ahead with the wedding, she would have quietly settled into her marriage from hell, my parents and I would have vacationed in Wisconsin, and I would have flown back with them on Monday anyway. Even if I take it easy, I’ll still probably beat them home by at least a day.

Maybe I’m just too American. Maybe any time you point an American west, it sparks some indigenous gland and ignites an incontrollable passion to conquer, or at least to move. My family, especially, are natural-born wanderers. My ancestors hit North Carolina about 300 years ago, and they never stopped moving. They passed through Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Georgia. They fought to get away from the British in the Revolution, and the rest of the Union in the Civil War. Then they headed for Texas and helped settle the panhandle. My great-great-grandfather wandered around as an itinerant preacher, leaving my great-great-grandmother alone in a dugout on the Texas prairie minding the kids, staring down cougars and Comanche. My mother’s side took to the air, with my grandfather winging from Kansas to Pennsylvania to Wisconsin in whatever plane he could get his hands on. He’d fly sideways or upside-down or under things, not minding if my grandmother, albeit white-knuckled, was along for the ride.

There has to be a connection. It’s programmed into our DNA. My Texas-born father and Wisconsin-born mother met up and married in California, creating a permanent geographic triangle in our family’s history, along with an insatiable wanderlust. Before college, at age 18, I’d already lived in 11 different houses, in three different states. By now, at age 27, I’ve added 10 houses and two states to the list.

In a week, I’ll be adding another house and another country to the tally, when I move to Berlin for yet another year of volunteer service. August has been a respite, a chance to touch home again after two years of AmeriCorps in Boston, a chance to feel normal before taking yet another plunge, this time into a country where I don’t even speak the language. I can’t explain my urge to keep my life in upheaval, any more than I can explain my drive to cover the entire western United States without stopping to sleep. Blame it on the genes. Or maybe I just want to go home.

I’ve been looking forward to this stretch the whole time. The Western stretch. The cosy wheat and corn fields, reaching flat to the horizon, fall behind us as we roll across the border to Wyoming. The land is still flat, but barren now, stark. The spirit of the place feels bigger, somehow. The accents in the gas stations change, the people loosen up a little.

I meet up with a trucking couple when I stop for lunch at a gas station Subway, an island squatting alone in Nowhere. I’d brought Mia in with me, and now I sit with her carrier on the table, stubbornly finishing off my sandwich even after the manager has told me to leave the cat in the car. The trucker woman glares at the uniformed manager, and strikes up a conversation with me.

“It’s gotta be a hundred degrees out there,” she tells me as the manager watches from the counter. “How you gonna leave your cat out in this heat?”

The two are old hands at this stretch of highway. They’re surprised at my plans, but not pessimistic, and they give me a piece of advice.

“Watch out for the Three Sisters,” the woman tells me, describing a little mountain range on the border, a tough pass with a penchant for nasty weather. “Just make sure you stop and take a rest before you cross it. Little America’s right there.”

Another high-octane drink, and I’m back on the Interstate. I should be more suspicious of Wyoming. It’s loaded with bad memories. On one family trip back from Christmas in Wisconsin, loaded down with luggage, presents, and two dogs, we hit a patch of black ice at four in the morning and flipped our Aerostar over twice. Even though a trucker behind us stopped and radioed for help, it took a good half-hour before the ambulance could reach us.

But now, as I hit the seek button and watch the digital numbers run their whole circuit two, three times without catching a signal, my thoughts are on an earlier trip. Same van, packed with my mother, my sister and I, along with an aunt and a cousin. My cousin and I had noticed the phenomenon with the seek button, and had laughed about us officially finding the Middle of Nowhere. That was the first time my grandpa died.

He’d had a congestive heart failure, and we packed black dresses for the trip, expecting a funeral on the other end. He’d flatlined, but they were waiting for us. As we drove, we heard reports over the cell phone. Amy saw his finger wiggle. Debbie thought he’d moved his eyes. The doctors said it was reflex. But then he woke up.

By the time we got to Madison, he was talking, and everyone was celebrating.

We didn’t actually bury him until six years later. He spent the time senile, childlike, with the whole family fighting over him. Don’t move him away from Madison. I know what’s best for him. He should go to the hospital. He should die at home. You’re starving him. He died among a flurry of ugly accusations.

I know a woman who stood in the hospital room with her family and their dead father. She laid her hand against his cheek, and felt his soul moving. It bothered her to know that they buried him before his soul was really gone. I envied her when she told me this story.

Little America is a glowing shrine to convenience, planted in one of the least hospitable landscapes in the country. Surrounded by the sere buttes and mountains of Wyoming, accessed only by a long, empty highway, this oasis manages to completely fill its acres of parking lot, collecting every stray traveler, trucker, and vacationing family passing between Wyoming and Utah. In one elaborate compound, you can find lodging, gas, a cheap cafeteria, a fancy restaurant, ridiculously posh restrooms filled incongruously with dazed-looking roadtrippers, and gift shops with the Little America logo printed on everything.

I’ve been upping my energy drink intake, and I pick up another one here, along with a cheap dinner. The locals in the cafeteria tell me Salt Lake City is an easy trek from here, but there are storms in the mountains. I stretch my legs on the outskirts of the mammoth parking lot, watching the flashes in the sky over the ridge.

Of course, Wyoming couldn’t let me go without a fight. The Three Sisters wind me around their skirts, dumping electric oceans on my car until I’m barely crawling, unable to see the twisting road, my wiper blades uselessly rearranging the solid sheet of water on my windshield. I promise the cat, who’s sleeping obliviously, that we’ll make it out of this. Locals speed past, and I wonder miserably if I’m going to fall off the mountain or just get rear-ended by a semi.

I’ve never been so happy to see Utah. From the western heights, I can see Salt Lake City, and I look on it as the religious mecca it is. I leave the storms behind in the mountains, but my goal has moved east, to Reno.

Another gas station, another Red Bull, another chat with locals. The cute guy in the Salt Lake station says Battle Mountain, half-way to Reno, is just a couple of hours away. The van-full of traveling salesmen who flirt with me next to the pumps agree. I call the Motel 6 toll-free line, and make a reservation for Reno.

I skirt the lake, edging around some lost-looking mountains to my left. Like the Three Sisters, they collect storm clouds like dust on furniture. When I leave them behind, I face a straight desert road leading all the way to Nevada. The horizon is broad, a line etched across my eyesight, a ridge of mountains resting on top of it.

Caffeine and loud music fight the fatigue, but they’re starting to lose the battle, as the early-evening twilight paints the whole scene black and blue. I keep my foot pressed down, my wheel steady, and I concentrate on that horizon, trying to see Reno just a few hundred miles beyond it. Just keep driving.

The twilight is endless. The road slides steadily under our wheels, but the mountains get no larger. I can see a dome of light just under them, a town, but that stays in place, too, changing neither its size nor its position. A few minutes pass, maybe an hour, and I can hardly bear the sight of that relentless horizon. When I blink, I see it burned into the back of my eyelids. I try to shift my gaze. I stare at the edge of the road, at the center line, I roll my eyes around to give them some relief, but they grow heavier and more painful. And the silhouetted horizon stands still, unavoidable. The sleeping cat is no company. Did we really sleep in Nebraska last night? How far have we come? Just how big is this country? And how long is this road?

When the town arrives, it arrives suddenly. Exit signs appear, and instead of a blur of light, I see a real town, a single main street crowded with low-budget neon and casinos. Welcome to Nevada.

I pull into a gas station, still rolling my eyes and blinking. A friendly little mongrel greets me, a cloud of stink orbiting him like an atmosphere. The worst is over, I think, my mind’s eye already in Reno. I have no idea that reality’s final blow is yet to come, from this very station.

They’re closing up, but they take a break so I can get gas, buy some hard-core caffeine, and talk shop. Reno is six hours away, they tell me. I can manage it, I say, and they shake their heads and laugh.

I finish the energy drink at the station, drinking fast, trying to pile-drive caffeine into my system. I’m about 15 minutes outside of town when I start to feel shaky. My fingers feel cold, my muscles feel weak, and my stomach feels like…

Half an hour out, I start looking for an exit off the dark mountain road. I find one, marked only with a number, nothing at the bottom but a nameless unpaved road and a way back on to the highway. I pull over and get out of the car, pacing and sipping water. I’m finished. The resolution I made in Sidney finally slips completely out of my grasp.

The next town up is Wells, and yes, they have a Motel 6. I wobble into the office and order a room. When I get back to the car, I pause, the door open. A couple of young guys stand on the other side of the parking lot, waiting for the two French girls I had just seen in the office. I throw up on the pavement. Welcome to Nevada, boys.

Mia and I settle happily into the comfort of our motel room (“We’ll leave the light on for you!”), and I request a wake-up call for a decent hour. We need our sleep tonight. It’s a two-thousand mile trip, and we did about half of that today.

The hardest question I’ve ever been asked is, where do you come from? I usually relativize the answer. In Boston, I was from California. In Santa Cruz, I was from Placerville. In Placerville, from Antioch. I’m always from somewhere else. That’s a given.

Home is where the heart is, but my heart is scattered all over the country. In Wisconsin, where I was born and where my mother’s enormous family spends so much time fighting, but only because they love each other too much. In Boston, where I became a liberal. In California, where my friends manage to hang on to me no matter where I go. It’s not that I hold on lightly to people and places. In reality, I hang on tight to each one of them, stretching my heart wider and wider.

I picked up a habit somewhere along the way of referring to the Other Place as “home.” I told my Boston friends I was going home to California for Christmas, and then I told my parents in January that it was time for me to go home to Boston. But home is never where I actually am. I’ve always imagined, the way some girls dream about love at first sight, that I’ll move somewhere, someday, and just know. I’d hoped it would happen in Boston. Now I hope it’ll happen in Berlin. That hope is the closest I ever feel to home, as if transition itself is my only constant.

The truth is, I’m most comfortable when I’m on the road. I’ve had to say goodbye at some point to everyone I’ve ever known, but that doesn’t stop me from seeking out new faces, like locals at the gas station, or other travelers. How many hours is it to Berlin?

When I check out the next morning, I hear from the desk clerk that I-80 west of here was closed half the night due to massive flooding. If that drink hadn’t stopped me, the weather would have.

It’s Friday morning, and my only goal now is to get to Placerville before the businesses close down at 5, so I can pick up the mail from the post office and the dog from the kennel. I’m in familiar territory now, the scene of countless other road trips through the Nevada desert. It stretches out flat, broken by small ridges along the way. The day passes quickly, uneventful, as if the land and the weather had made their points, had earned my respect. I stick to drinking water, steering clear of caffeine today.

It’s good to see the Sierras, a wall of green and brown rising up on the other side of Reno. We climb up, north of Placerville, and weave down Highway 49 from Auburn, passing through breathless mountain views and tiny Gold Rush towns.

My parents have only lived in Placerville for ten years, and this house for seven, but they’ve made it their own. It’s the kind of house whose personality makes up for its size, with funny corners and uneven stairs left over from the 1930s. They’ve hung up a little wood-cut sign in front that reads, “Hope Cottage.”

Nearly every house we’ve lived in was supposed to be the last one, but I actually believe it this time. It’s the longest they’ve lived in one place since they got married 33 years ago. They’ve made friends here, and kept them. They’ve dug in like I’ve never seen them do before.

I have to gear down to make it up their street, a steep hill thick with pines, and I open the windows so I can smell the mountains. I’ve spent enough time in Placerville to know that I don’t really belong here. Maybe that’s why, as I pull into the driveway, it feels so much like home.