This narrative and poetic rendering acts as an articulation of a journey of many routes. It is a storying of critical research issues and events as performances of lived experience. It is a metissage of hybrid, but interrelated, themes that find cohesion through fragmentation and coalescence, severance, and regrowth. These themes are invoked by the (inter)relationship of the metaphors of roots/routes and the play on meaning through the play on words. The storying is a journey of seeking that calls forth, highlights, and attempts to dislodge, or "root out," the dilemmas and contradictions in discourses and practices that emerge through the choices we make as we search or "root"--like a wild sow in the sod--for routes toward transcendence. This ethical seeking occurs as we reflexively unearth our understandings of the histories, epistemologies, practices, and prejudices of ours and others' roots/routes and routedness/rootedness. [For Part II, see EJ846804.] (Contains 17 notes.)