Stories From the Road
People think it was brave of me to follow my photojournalist husband John on a project to travel around the U.S. by van, but it was actually my idea to sell the house. Our kids were grown, he was gone all the time for work, the pandemic had changed the world, and I needed to shake something up. I wanted to see things in a new light. It felt like the only way to do that was to make a radical change.
It didn’t take John long to agree. He’s always wanted to do something like this. We could buy our own health care and do without my salary, barely, if we got rid of the house payment.
On October 4, 2020, we gathered in the driveway of the house in which we had raised our kids and lived for 20 years. We said goodbye to family and friends and hit the road. We didn’t know how long we were going to be gone, but it wound up being 900 days — or, 2.5 years.
We started in a 34-foot trailer and downsized further into a van. We went from 2,200 square feet of living space in a 1960s split-level house to 82 square feet in a van named Vinny. It was amazing. It was life pared down to its simplest. It stripped away all the things that fill up our daily lives but don’t add value. It allowed us to focus.
People think it must have been a dramatic change to get rid of so much stuff, but it felt like a natural transition for us. It wasn’t hard. It was freeing. I had everything I needed and most other things I could do without.
Of course, the hardest part was being away from the kids and our friends, but we talked all the time and made regular passes through town to stay connected.
We came off the road in January 2023. My biggest takeaway is that we have a much clearer focus on what’s important — which is not about accumulating things. It’s about finding beauty, appreciating what we have, and making memories.
I miss the daily adventure of the road, exploring and experiencing new places. But stepping away from our routine for those 2.5 years freed up space in my mind to think about life in new ways.
Following are excerpts from A Peace of My Mind, by John Noltner, which won a 2024 Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction.
Bethany Cram lives on a remote island in Puget Sound that has a year-round population of 12. Bethany enlisted in the U.S. Army when she was a senior in high school and left for basic training two weeks after graduation. Once she completed her Advanced Individual Training, Bethany was deployed to join her unit in Iraq. (photo by John Noltner)
“Veterans are not all angry people that are going to put our hands through walls. I’ve encountered people who, after finding out that I’m a veteran, treat me differently. It’s awkward, because I don’t think that anything they’ve seen me do should warrant them acting like I’m a time bomb.
“Most people would never know by looking at me that I’ve had 11 or 12 surgeries. You can’t see most of my scars. You can’t look at me and see what’s been hurt under my skin. You can’t see the scar tissue. You don’t see the wounds. You just see an outline of a mostly normal looking lady, and they think that I’m fine. I would love to be fine, but I’m not.”
“Not every disability is as visible as missing a limb or missing body parts or scars. There are things that affect us internally, beyond what the eye can see.”
Tania Aubid is an Anishinaabe woman who is involved in the Water Protector movement that resists the Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota. She says she is driven to care for the natural resources so they are available for her children, and their children’s children, seven generations into the future, so that they have a place where they can feel safe and happy and exercise their inherent rights. (photo by John Noltner)
“The face paint is because of the ceremony that I have been through. It’s a ceremony for me to be able to come out and speak about the truths of our people, to be able to speak up for the voices that can’t speak.
“I am an original person from these lands. My family has been here for over 15,000 years. Harvesting is in the treaties that have been signed by the federal government, protecting my inherent rights to hunt, fish, and gather here, to be able to stand strong in the community and to be able to protect the things that I have for future generations. Just like what my ancestors have protected for me.
“We’ve fought so long and so hard, and the Indian people are so tired right now. We need non-native allies to step up and help protect the Anishinaabe people so that they get more rested.
“In our traditions, there’s this spirit being called a Windigo. And that Windigo is never satisfied with whatever it takes, whatever it eats. It just keeps going after more and it kills and destroys whatever is in its way. So, to me, all those people that came from abroad and immigrated over this way, they had that mentality of always wanting more. Nothing was ever satisfying to them. That’s kind of like the Windigo spirit that I see.”
“I can’t trust the process. The process doesn’t work. If you get along, these are the toys and trinkets that you’ll be able to have, but if you don’t get along, you’ll be denied all that.”
Jillian Peterson teaches criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University in Saint Paul. She co-founded The Violence Project with author and sociologist James Densley. They have compiled a comprehensive mass shooter database in order to better understand the phenomenon and prevent future tragedies. (photo by John Noltner)
“[Mass shooters are] 98 percent male. I could teach an entire class about why, in terms of biology and socialization. I think it’s men who are disenfranchised, who feel like they haven’t gotten what they’re owed, who are hopeless, who are actively suicidal. Nobody goes in with an escape plan. This is meant to be their final act. There’s a performative element of wanting people to see how much pain they were in.
“The history of America is a history of violence, but there’s also this piece of individualism and that American dream. If I work hard, I get what I deserve. These are individuals who are angry that life hasn’t played out how they expected it to.
“We tend to respond to difficult things with a punitive view, as opposed to a reformative view. How do we shift that culture?
“We’re trying to think about the pathway to violence. Where are the off-ramps and how do we think about helping people get off that track? How do we see those? Preventing violence is really about human connection.”
“We realized that we knew very little about who mass shooters are. I don’t think you can prevent something from happening until you deeply understand why it’s happening.”
For 2025 coverage, Minnesota Women’s Press earned a community leadership award, three photography awards, and four editorial awards, including for coverage of social issues and for our Spring 2025 “Know Your Rights” special section supported by Unidos MN. Our publisher was named Journalist of the Year by Violence Free Minnesota for gender-based violence coverage.
