I've been thinking about journeys lately, partly because the North Dakota Humanities Council has been conducting a fascinating journey stories initiative, partly because I have been writing a long essay about journeys (the "Odyssey," Huck Finn, Kerouac's "On the Road") and partly because I just made a loopy auto journey of 4,895 miles with my daughter. She's now a genuine American teenager.

My vehicle averaged a miserable 18.3 miles per gallon. That's 267.48 gallons. The price of gas hovered around $2.75 per gallon. Not to mention motels, souvenirs, entrance fees, emergency toothbrushes, ice for the cooler, appalling quantities of soda and chips, daily ice cream treats and value meals at all the major fast food outlets, at every one of which we were urged to order the big-calorie version of whatever it was that we wanted. The geographic zone we explored was bounded by Detroit Lakes on the east, Yellowstone National Park on the west, Washburn on the north and darkest Kansas on the south.

We saw a grizzly bear. The Yellowstone River was running as full as I have ever seen it. It was green as Ireland for almost the entire journey. Only on the return, in the marvelous Custer State Park in South Dakota, did the grass have the bleached and tawny look of summer on the Great Plains. I took a photographic portrait of my daughter at Mount Rushmore, to enlarge and hang next to the one I took of her there when she was 9.

Actually, she'd like that earlier one retired to a closet.

We played miniature golf. We talked about God and life and books and colleges and boys(!) and family and "the course of human events."

She predicted that the mountain carving of Crazy Horse will never be finished. We attended the Medora Musical. We hiked. We drove over Beartooth Pass and wandered through obscure canyons in Wyoming that would be national parks anywhere east of the 100th meridian.

There are no words to explain the immense joy of wandering America with the person you love most in the world, sitting together in the car, drinking it all in, laughing endlessly, talking in lovely bursts of memory and revelation, and gazing out in silence for long stretches on the endless highways of the West. Drifting past distant pine ridges you would love to visit and never will. In Deadwood, S.D., as Simon and Garfunkel voiced it, "She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy." As with all good journeys, we discovered things about each other and about ourselves that we did not previously know.

We made a sweet pilgrimage to my grandparents' farm just south of Fergus Falls, Minn. It was her idea. She had never before been to the farm, which is no longer owned by our family. Nor had she ever visited the graves of her maternal ancestors.

No one lives on the farm now. The house was locked, the barn boarded up, silo and granaries empty, the humans and livestock all gone, the flower beds overgrown with weeds. Still, we could feel the souls of my grandparents there, and though we did not talk about it much, I could see that it was an important rite of passage for my only child.

Her great-grandparents are mythological creatures in her consciousness. She never met them. She has been told they were giants in the earth. She wanted to see the ground that made them strong. I told her beautiful, wry stories about her mother's first visit to the farm. She was gratified to see us all together, even if only in my narrative.

Eventually, all journeys must end.

I dropped her off at her mother's house in northwestern Kansas on Father's Day. We all shared a quick meal. Then I turned the car north and started for Dakota.

It was about 8:30 p.m. Exquisite light, no wind, an open road straight to the vanishing point, my heart full of love and joy and biting sadness. With the radio off and windows down, I cruised along at a deliberately unhurried pace.

The wheat down there in Kansas is ready for cutting. It's going to be a bumper crop.

The sky was that serene blue of late June. Temperature 72 degrees. It was the first day of summer, the longest day of the year, in the season of endless dusk. The car seemed to drive itself through that improbable Van Gogh landscape: section-sized fields of yellow wheat, oppressively green corn, a flawless blue sky, antelope drifting the ridges and the charcoal ribbon of backroads highway. Somehow to me it was more beautiful than the Rocky Mountains or Yellowstone National Park.

In that wonderful numb state we get into at the end of a very long day of driving America, I tried to imagine my daughter's re-entry into her world after two hectic weeks with Papa. She would be telling her mother stories of our adventures, showing off her new clothes, queuing up journey photographs on her laptop (no need to send film to the developers any more), repeating strong and amusing bits of her grandmother's conversation, describing moments that would make little sense to her mother out of the context of the trip. She also would be trying to determine the minimum quantum of time she needed to spend with her mother before she could call her best friend to catch up on a world much more real and significant than the one her faraway father inhabits. I felt no self-pity in that. Life is what it is.

She was to start driver's training the next day. It occurred to me that in our immense journey she had never once consulted any of the maps or atlases in the car. For perhaps the last time in her life - she will be 15 soon - on her summer vacation of 2009, she put herself wholly in her father's hands. She had assumed (erroneously, in the way of our children) that he knew what he was doing. It suddenly struck me, in the afterglow of that long, long Great Plains day, that there will never be another auto journey with my daughter in which I do all of the driving.

My heart broke - right there on Kansas Highway 27.

I wanted to hoist her life (and mine) up on blocks and put the vehicle into reverse and race back the odometer, like the shadiest used car dealer in the country.

No, grasshopper and gray-haired wanderer, the journey is always forward.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute, a distinguished visiting humanities scholar at Bismarck State College and the lead scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. You can reach him at Jeffysage@aol.com.)