Spotlight: Wayfinding by Renee Gilmore
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Throughout her life, Renee Gilmore has been in love with the open road. Her passion for exploration has taken her across all seven continents—but the real journey has been much more personal. In Wayfinding, she confronts the impetus behind her wanderlust: a lifetime shaped by loss, betrayal, and sexual violence. Told through a series of car trips and postcards from the road, this powerful memoir maps a route toward healing, acceptance, and hope, with stops at Waffle House and the Monaco Grand Prix along the way. Narrated with unflinching honesty and flashes of humor, Wayfinding is the story of a fiercely resilient woman determined not only to survive but to remap a new life filled with freedom, connection, and joy.
Excerpt
Angels in Plaid Shirts
Thank you, Angels.
Twenty miles outside Sidney, Nebraska, I heard the thump, thump of a tire that was breathing its last, leaving its skin in the right lane of I-80, and its bones on the wheel. It was January, and I was leaving Minnesota in the rearview and heading to Albuquerque. I was a mid-year transfer student to the University of New Mexico, and it was time to go. I was both driving toward my future and away from something else. Away from a lot of things. I had made mistakes, and I had put myself in danger – real danger – more than once. In the previous two-and-a-half years, I had been battered and nearly destroyed by two separate assaults, and I lost the scholarship I needed to stay at the Catholic college I attended in northern Minnesota. I made terrible choices in men, money, and alcohol. I had recently come home from studying abroad in Ireland, and during the last couple of months I was there, I got engaged to a boy, and then we broke up. It was messy, and I felt lost.
When I got back from Ireland, Duluth had gotten too small, too cold, too provincial for me, and I needed a change. There were too many people I knew, and too many places that held very bad memories. I fired off applications to colleges in warm places that I could sort of afford. I was accepted by Arizona State, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of New Mexico. New Mexico was the cheapest. I prepared for a new start in the
desert.
I didn’t know a soul in Albuquerque, and that was okay with me. The inside of my 1976 Plymouth Duster was packed to the rafters with pots and pans, clothes, and my Smith Corona typewriter, hefty in its light blue case. The trunk of the Duster was a treasure trove of shoes, frying pans, and bedding in white garbage bags, anchored by my 50-pound RCA television.
I had been fiddling with the radio, trying to find the sweet spot between Jesus and Dolly Parton, when I heard that sound and felt the pull of the wheel. I had been on the road for hours that day, driving by dormant cornfields with their lonely stubby stalks, waving at truckers, and eating gas station doughnuts. I was trying to make it to my grandmother’s house in Fort Morgan, Colorado, for lemon cake pie, homemade biscuits, and easy games of cards. I confidently flew by every exit for Grand Island, Nebraska, where my family usually stopped, with the hubris that only a 20-year-old can possess.
I pulled over on the shoulder and stopped. This was years before cell phones. If I got out, that flat tire was going to be real. I thought I would just sit for a minute. I hummed along to Led Zeppelin on the radio. Ate a chocolate-covered donut. That minute turned into five and I finally clicked out of my seatbelt and opened the door. Yep, the left rear tire, flatter than flat and missing several layers of rubber. I knew how to change a tire – my father wouldn’t let me out in the world without it. We had practiced and practiced when I got my driver’s license at 16. By practice, I mean my father stood in the driveway, in his baggy jeans, plaid shirt, and cardigan, smoking a cigarette. He pointed out where I missed something, very occasionally telling me, that was pretty good. I knew where to locate the jack, I knew how to loosen lug nuts, and I could heft the spare out of the trunk. I knew what to do.
I opened the trunk and sighed. It had taken two of us, my father and I, to get that huge RCA television into the trunk.
There is no way one of me was going to hoist it out. And the spare tire, which we had checked just two days before, was tucked in its compartment under everything. I looked to the freeway, and there were no cars for several flat miles, in either direction.
More sighing.
I started unloading the trunk on the side of the road.
Comforters. Shoes. A spare winter coat. My red Slimline telephone. I dug and lifted until nothing was left in the cavernous space but that damn RCA. I rocked it one way and then the other. There was just no way I could get it out. I stood with my hands on my hips. I was a 20-year-old girl with no more good ideas. I turned toward the freeway. I heard the distant rumble of 18 wheels eating the road. Long before I saw it. I had no choice.
I flapped my right hand listlessly. I tried hard to look brave and tough and not cry. Tried not to think about the fact that I could be kidnapped right there by the side of the road, or murdered. My picture and story would end up on 48 Hours, for sure. The mountain of a vehicle started to slow, edging toward the shoulder, and came to a stop with a whoosh of air brakes. The driver, with his straw hat, cowboy boots, brown suspenders, and round belly, stepped down from the truck cab. He was as old as my dad, sun- soaked and strong. “Looks like you have a problem there, little lady.” Without permission, two tears wobbled down my face as he approached me. He hitched up his jeans. “Let’s see what we got.”
He helped me yank that TV out of the trunk like a tooth from a socket. We grabbed the spare tire and the jack and got to work. I jacked up the car, and he unscrewed the lug nuts. One was very stubborn and he swore at it with great creativity and enthusiasm. We pulled that tire off, and as we did, the rest of the rubber shrugged off the rim onto the ground. We put the wheel, its once-shiny surface now pitted and scratched, on my front seat, and loaded everything back into the trunk. He got on his CB and found out good news and bad. The good news was there was a garage 20 miles away, in Sidney, and they could get me a tire. The bad news was that they would get it tomorrow. Or the next day. He told them I was coming.
I thanked him and offered him ten dollars for helping me, but he laughed and told me to spend it on a new tire. I pulled back on the interstate, and drove far slower than the posted speed, with the radio off, straining to hear any signs of distress from the spare tire. There was honking, as I was passed by every car and truck heading in the same direction. I made it to Sidney. I found the garage and pulled a third of my cash out of my red wallet to pay George the mechanic for the new tire. I left my car and most of my possessions in his care. I stayed overnight a few blocks away in a Howard Johnson’s Motor Inn, with the dresser pushed in front of the door. When I walked back to the garage early the next afternoon, the tire had arrived. George clearly felt sorry for me. “Hey, I got a kid your age.” He didn’t charge me to remove the spare and tuck it back into the compartment in the trunk, next to the jack, under the bags of bedding, and the RCA. George said that damn TV weighed 60 pounds.
I made it to Fort Morgan, a day late. I stopped overnight, ate two good meals, and was sent on my way in the morning, with a lemon cake pie and a plastic fork. From Fort Morgan, it was about an eight-hour drive to Albuquerque. I arrived right before the sun was thinking of setting over the mesa, and there was just enough golden hour left to read the street signs. I already had my key, so I hauled everything out of the Duster and up to my apartment until nothing remained but the TV. I stood in the parking lot, in the deep twilight, and assumed the hands-on-hip position, as I stared into the trunk. An angel, in the shape of a plaid-shirted man named Terry Garcia (or that’s the name he gave me, anyway), asked me if I needed some help. Together, slowly, we carried that TV from the parking lot up the stairs to my second-floor studio apartment. The next morning, I wanted to thank him. I described him to the apartment manager. She said that no one named Terry Garcia lived there. I never saw him again.
I was not prone to thinking about God, about angels, about mysterious, mystical protectors. I attended Mass when required by family obligation, I lit candles in church because the ritual was comforting. But my hard-edged cynicism about religion, about those all-powerful beings who supposedly lived in the clouds, who controlled what happened to me in everyday life, had begun to seep in. It all started to make less sense than when I blindly accepted it earlier in my life. All the dogma, the unlikely-to-be-true Biblical myths I absorbed during five years of Catholic school, two years of confirmation classes and then Catholic college. I mean, didn’t God control the hands of the men who wrote the Bible? Whispered in their ears, shared the Truth™, the Good News, His word, to control the people? But I digress.
Maybe a benevolent God, a personal savior did not, could not exist. I was starting to think that maybe this patriarchal God was just not for me. Maybe I just had “daddy issues.” How would this Father God explain sitting on the sidelines while I experienced such horrible, evil things? I was sad and angry and I wanted answers. But at that point, I didn’t have anything better to replace Christianity, Catholicism so I continued to search. I wanted to believe so badly.
Copyright, 2025, Renee Gilmore. Excerpted from Wayfinding: A Memoir with permission from Trio House Press.
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About the Author
Renee M. Gilmore is the author of Wayfinding: A Memoir (October, 2025; Trio House Press). A multi-genre writer, essayist, and poet, she earned a BA from the University of New Mexico and an MA from Hamline University, and her work has been featured in The Louisville Review, The Museum of Americana, Fatal Flaw, The Raven Review, and Pink Panther, among others. She lives in suburban Minneapolis with her husband Steven and you can visit her online at reneethewriter.com.
