The second I looked inside, I forgot how to breathe, because the lockbox held a thick travel journal, its pages covered in an old mans handwriting and pressed flowers and ticket stubs, and on the last written page, mid-sentence, the writing simply stopped.
I sat at the picnic table and turned to the beginning.
The zippered bag held maps and postcards and a small camera full of undeveloped film.
The old man who owned this motorhome had been keeping a journal of the greatest trip of his life, a solo journey across America he took after losing his wife, and the journal ended mid-sentence because that was where his own journey ended, when his health forced him off the road for good.
His name, the journal told me, was Ed. After his wife died, he had set out alone to see the country they never got to see together, and he had recorded every mile of it, every sunset, every kind stranger, every roadside diner, in loving detail. The journal was joyful, full of wonder, an old man falling in love with the world again.
And then, partway through, the entries grew shorter, the handwriting shakier, and finally, in the middle of describing a sunrise over the desert, it just stopped. He had gotten sick. He had to sell the rig. His trip, and his journal, ended unfinished.
Tucked in the back was a note: Whoever finds my journal, my trip is not done. There is so much of this beautiful country I did not get to see. If you have a heart for the road, finish it for me. Go where I could not go. Write it down. Let an old mans journey reach the end it deserved.
I could not resist a request like that.
I took Eds journal, and I picked up his route exactly where his handwriting stopped, at that desert sunrise. And I finished his trip. Every place he had planned to go and never reached, I went, and I wrote it in his journal, in my own hand beneath his, describing it as I imagined he would have.
I developed the film in his camera too, his last photographs, sunsets and canyons and his own smiling face, and I added my photographs after his.
When I finished Eds trip, months later, his journal was full, his journey complete at last, half in his hand and half in mine.
I found a nephew of Eds and gave him the finished journal. He wept over it, his uncles great adventure, completed by a stranger, a joyful record of two men and one unforgettable trip across America.
I bought a motorhome for a retirement trip. I ended up finishing a dead mans journey and giving his family back his joy. Ed, your trip is done. I saw the rest of it for you. It was every bit as beautiful as you knew it would be. Every mile.