Nowhere for Very Long

Brianna Madia's memoir opens with a scene that captures her entire story. She was stranded alone beside her broken-down 1990 Ford van, Bertha, on a remote Utah dirt road, 48 miles from pavement, with three dogs and no cell service. She could name every mechanical part beneath the van but could not repair one; that had been her husband Neil's job, "back when I had a husband" (3). She felt strangely calm.

From this framing, Madia traces how she arrived at this solitary moment, beginning with her childhood in Black Rock, a Connecticut neighborhood straddling wealthy Fairfield and poorer Bridgeport. Her father, a contractor, and her mother, a school secretary, fought mainly about money while working to send Brianna and her brother to private school. Her mother was torn between keeping up appearances and a wilder self who once sneaked 12-year-old Brianna to an Aerosmith concert and skinny-dipped in a neighborhood creek. Brianna idolized this rebellious side and resented the world she felt was suppressing it.

At 10, Brianna first noticed Neil at a local yacht club. He was a shy sailing prodigy. They barely spoke throughout adolescence, but the summer of Brianna's sophomore year of college, they reconnected at a backyard barbecue. Neil was living on his family's 33-foot sailboat, Satisfaction, docked in Long Island Sound. Five weeks after their first date, he told her he loved her. They spent the next few years long-distance while attending different colleges, Neil writing her long handwritten letters.

After Neil's graduation in spring 2012, they had $301 in savings and $40,000 in student loans. With nowhere to go, they moved onto Satisfaction with their hound, Bucket. The boat had no running water, no working toilet, and cockroaches. Despite the discomfort, life aboard cultivated an intentional simplicity that felt more honest than anything Brianna had known, and she began rejecting the conventional path she had witnessed growing up.

Hurricane Sandy forced them off the boat in late October 2012. Satisfaction survived, but the season was over. With about $5,000, they chose Salt Lake City for its cheap rent and nearby mountains. Brianna found a $485-per-month studio on Craigslist, sight unseen, and took a job as an account manager earning $28,000 a year. Neil worked for a wilderness therapy company, spending eight-day shifts in the desert and leaving Brianna alone for more than half of each year.

During this period, Brianna adopted Dagwood, a golden, fox-like dog who had been returned to the shelter three times for extreme destructiveness. A woman at a dog park identified him as an American Dingo, a primitive breed domesticated only since the 1970s. On Valentine's Day, Neil took Brianna to the desert canyons for the first time. She fell in love with the slot canyons, narrow passages carved through rock, as well as the petroglyphs and ancient pottery scattered across the landscape. Weekend desert trips became ritual, and Dagwood, frantic indoors, moved through the terrain as though he belonged.

Madia interweaves these discoveries with reflections on family. Her father came from a family of performers shadowed by depression and addiction. Brianna grew up believing she carried "the wrath of the women before me who were seldom allowed to be who they truly were" (82). She was expelled from her Catholic high school for defending birth control and gay marriage; her mother begged for reinstatement. When Brianna was 12, her father went to rehab for addiction; her parents briefly reconciled before her mother discovered his affair when Brianna was 16. Six years of estrangement followed. In college, the accumulated grief overwhelmed her. She stopped eating, broke up with Neil, and began misusing Ambien sleeping pills after her mother arranged a prescription. After telling a counselor she wanted to be dead, she was admitted to a psychiatric unit. Her doctor said a check-engine light had come on years earlier when her father left, and she had just kept driving.

The memoir's turning point arrives when Brianna and Neil, at 26, attended a mortgage meeting. As the loan officer laid out the next 50 years in financial terms, Brianna's vision narrowed and she flashed back to the sailboat. The next morning, Neil texted her a classified ad for a bright-orange 1990 Ford E350 van listed at $7,800. They drained their accounts, leaving 17 dollars, and named the van Bertha after a Grateful Dead song. By August 2016, they had broken their lease and moved in full-time. City camping required rotating between suburban streets, dodging tow trucks, and enduring frozen toothpaste through winter.

Their desert adventures grew more daring. They outfitted Bucket and Dagwood with rappelling harnesses and completed over 25 slot canyons. In one of the narrowest in the world, 9 to 10 inches wide at its smallest point, Brianna slipped while carrying Bucket and cracked her skull against the wall. Neil scrambled back to rescue them. They emerged after six hours, bloodied and exhausted. Madia reflects that they had been squeezing through their relationship the same way, increasingly making plans in separate directions.

Inspired by a speech from philosopher Alan Watts heard during a psychedelic experience in the desert, Brianna quit her office job to document van life on Instagram for a growing audience. She took her mother camping on a Utah canyon rim, where they lay in the dirt listening to music beneath the stars. Years later, her mother's revised living will requested her ashes be scattered at that same overlook.

The catastrophe that destroyed the marriage occurred on a dry lakebed in southern Oregon. Neil opened the driver's door to let the dogs run alongside the van. Bucket lunged playfully at Dagwood, who lost his footing, and the rear tire rolled over his body. The nearest emergency vet was 140 miles away. A rural vet gave Dagwood her last vial of morphine but could not save him, suggesting they try driving another 130 miles to Bend. At the hospital, Dagwood was rushed into surgery. Brianna posted on Instagram that he had been hit by a car, unable to admit it was theirs. A GoFundMe organized by her mother and a friend raised nearly $100,000 over three weeks. Dagwood survived 5 surgeries, 2 blood transfusions, and 24 days in intensive care, walking out on all four legs, having lost only his tail.

The guilt corroded everything. Neil fell into depression, unable to process having been behind the wheel. Brianna retreated into Instagram, performing normalcy for followers who believed the story had ended happily. Two years after the accident, they met at a copy center in Moab to sign uncontested divorce papers. The divorce cost $309. In the parking lot, Neil handed her a folded note wishing the wind would fill her sails.

Alone with her three dogs, including Birdie, an abandoned puppy she and Neil had rescued as their last shared act, Brianna continued into the desert. The memoir returns to its framing scene: Bertha broken down, a tow truck hauling the van back to Moab. Brianna then found and bought nine acres of undeveloped land on a mesa in southern Utah. Her father, now two years sober, called to congratulate her and promised to fly out to help build her house, offering his carpentry skills. In the closing scene, Brianna lay beneath the Milky Way on her own land, barefoot in the sagebrush. She smiled, remembering being 16 in Montana, peering from a car window at tiny houses in the middle of nowhere and laughing at the idea anyone would live there. She had become exactly that person.