Nowhere for Very Long: The Unexpected Road to an Unconventional Life

Travel writer Madia recounts the highs and lows of life on the road in her quietly moving debut. As she writes, trading in just about everything for Bertha—her orange van with a “propensity for back roads and breakdowns”—made the difference between a humdrum life and a freewheeling lifestyle in which “fear was celebrated.” In their early 20s, Madia and her future husband Neil left their middle-class Connecticut lives and decamped to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012. They later took their wayfaring a step further when they began to travel full-time in Madia’s van around the western U.S. and Mexico with their dogs, Dagwood and Bucket. But with the captivating grandeur of the deserts and mountains—vividly depicted in Madia’s elegant prose—came the struggles of nomadic living, too: after Neil accidentally ran over Dagwood (who eventually recovered), Madia’s marriage began to crack, and a couple years later they divorced, leaving the author to continue her travels solo with the dogs. Madia’s insights drill deep, as does her knack for carving beauty out of pain (“Perhaps what Neil and I had was something meant to be left out in the wildest parts of the desert like the sun-bleached bones of a once-living thing”). Armchair adventurers will be inspired by this spirited story. (Apr.)