"TeresaBruceBooks"

Goodbye gun (Drive day 240: Feb 24th, 2004)

Posted on February 24, 2018 Updated on January 29, 2018

We leave the city and head to the Tierra Del Fuego National Park with the gun still hidden in its secret compartment under the camper’s floorboards. We set up camp and hike past grass covered shell mounds created by the Yamana.

At the shoreline of the Beagle Channel the skies part in a moment of epiphany. We are at the end of the world and I can start again. I run back to the camper and return with a bottle of Argentinean champagne and the rusty pistol I have dragged through two continents. Gary pops the cork and I fling the gun as hard as I can. A heavy plunk and it is gone, sinking out of sight and out of my life. It might be the champagne, but I feel free, forgiven and new again. The light dips down behind the mountain peaks and closes a chapter I outgrew long ago.

Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.