The pocket of my car’s passenger seat is reserved for a tattered road atlas from the late 90s (the first advertisement is for a Kodak Fun Saver disposable camera). Folded in half and deeply yellowed, the pages open to detailed maps of the United States, Canada and Mexico. I rarely use it for route finding these days, but I pulled it out recently and flipped through a few familiar road trip destinations. As soon as I unfolded the first page, the smell of decaying paper got me thinking again. This atlas watched me grow up.

When I was booster seat sized, my sister and I sat in the back seat of our family’s Volvo station wagon and entertained ourselves by finding Los Angeles and Bethlehem on the atlas’ over-sized pages. When I was a little older, it sat in the pocket of the family mini-van as I watched the moonrise over Arizona’s desert on my first cross-country driving trip. It was in the car when my dad drove me to practices, tournaments and games across Southern California. It heard us laugh at the Mark and Brian radio show, heard us talk while sitting in traffic on the way to Urban Youth Academy, heard the silence after the doctor told me my high school baseball career was over. It sat in the car as I stood on the rim of Bryce Canyon with my grandparents, listened to my Gram wax poetically about the Tetons, and was there when my sister and I couldn’t contain our excitement as we drove up to the water park in Needles, California.

When I got a little older, I spent more time behind the wheel on the highways I used to trace with my finger in the Atlas. Highway five between LA and the Bay became something of a commute, a straight line through the Central Valley bookended by two places I called home. When I graduated college, Dad and I unfolded the Atlas to plan how we would get the late 90s Camry that belonged to both of my grandmothers from Pennsylvania to California. Our route took us from Popsie’s driveway to Ann Arbor, up the mitten and across a socked in Upper Peninsula (apparently beautiful when you can see it). Across the heart of the Midwest to Reynolds, North Dakota, where the Hennessy family settled before coming to California. We didn’t find much except for a couple of Bud Lights at the Beehive Bar.

Into the West, the Camry nosed its was across Eastern Montana’s plains, slowed to 20 miles per hour up Utah’s mountain passes and drove straddling the middle line on Grand Escalante’s precarious two lane roads. The whole way Dad and I talked, and didn’t talk, listened to the same country song on the radio on repeat, and wrestled to turn the air conditioning on with pliers. When we woke up in Culver City at the end of the trip, something felt about unnatural about spending the day not driving. In the same way it takes a couple days to get used to being on the road, it takes some time to feel good being off of it.

A couple of years later, I got a job in Baltimore and found myself again with a car on the wrong coast. In a newly acquired, hand-me-down Ford Escape, Dad and I loaded up a cooler and tucked the Atlas into the pocket of the passenger seat. My cousin flew out to join us for the first leg through Colorado, giving Dad and I the chance to watch someone look at the Grand Canyon for the first time. We drove through the Southwest’s greatest hits, peed in the highest toilet in the US and crossed the Continental Divide. In far Southeastern Utah, driving through the kind of open country that makes you glad you stopped for gas at the last station, we saw a tiny town called Mexican Hat. As soon as someone said, “I wonder why they call it Mexican Hat,” all three of us looked up at a rock formation above town that looked exactly like a man wearing a sombrero. Some things just make sense.

We rolled into Boulder, Tucker’s final stop, to find Dan Baum in full form. After various musical guests, whole grain pancakes and just enough inducement of airport bus related anxiety, Dan sent Dad and me on the road across what he dubbed “the big stupid.” It’d be the last time we saw Dan. With a smile and a hug, he said, “Man I would just kill to be going on the adventure you’re going on. Savor it, and write about it.” Fitting for a man who lived the life that he did.

Across the plains and into Vienna, Virginia, where Dad would stay with family while I made my way to Baltimore. Departing Uncle Bob’s driveway, this time just me and the atlas, watching everything I knew shrink into the rearview. Alone, for the first time.

When I look at the atlas in my backseat, I think about that moment. The moment the atlas became mine, and took its place in my passenger side pocket. Through torrential rain, heat, backroads that smelled like pluff mud and hornets nests at the Jordan Dam in Wetumpka. It was still there when Noa and I fell in love on highway 22 outside of Tupelo, when we moved across the country together during a pandemic, when I crossed back into California for the first time in two years.

I don’t use its yellowing pages much, and I’ve kept it around mostly because I forget it’s there. But on the occasion that I pull it out, I think about that moment the atlas was passed along to me. Not because of the object, but because it was the moment the possibility of life’s adventures became my own. When I say the atlas watched me grow up, I mean that I raised by people with a profound appreciation for the beauty to be found in this world. The kinds of people who keep an atlas in their car. Just in case.