Spring                                                         New (Emergent) Moon

Left Denver and drove into Wyoming snow and 50 mph wind along 25. The snow looked like ice cream dots pelting down from the sky and there was only small accumulation. Signs advised no small trailers due to the wind and the big rigs wove back and forth. Kate steered a straight course through the buffeting. She drives now because it helps her back and neck.

We couldn’t connect with the Wavin’K ranch so we left the area without meeting any staghounds, but we know who the breeders are and did talk to Mike Bilbo (yes, that’s really his last name.) of Rancho Fiasco (and, yes, that’s really the name of his place.). Seemed like a nice guy but he was in Kentucky at a terrier breeders get together.

We left 25 at the Guernsey, Wyoming exit and drove through Wyoming, then South Dakota countryside, often in the rain and from Hotsprings, South Dakota on it rained constantly. This is beautiful, but stark country. That’s definitely a western landscape aesthetic, the repetitive hills and swales, grass and scrub brush, rock outcroppings here and there, bare. About the only agricultural purpose is cattle grazing and we saw some of that. Most of the land looked uninhabited, though much of it belonged to this ranch or that one.

Also part of the landscape here are missile silos. You can see them off the road, surrounded by mean looking fence and with various objects sticking above ground. This is lonely country and here men do a job for which they have trained, but will probably never be called upon to execute. It’s not hard to see why morale would be an issue.

The Black Hills are beautiful and emerge slowly when coming from the south and west, gradually gaining height. Trees begin to show up more and often. Rock outcroppings are more frequent. This too is stark, bare land, a variation on the Wyoming aesthetic.

At Rapid City we found I-90 and began our journey east. We stopped, improbably enough, at the Wall Drug exit. We’re in a Best Western just seven miles north of the entrance to the Badlands which we’ll drive through tomorrow morning. Home tomorrow late afternoon, early evening.

Spring                                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Our country is so big, so very, very big as Monty Python might say. Having recently transited the central portion of the country from Minnesota through Texas and back up through Colorado, then the plains again this week, and an outlier six days spent in the southwestern states of New Mexico and Arizona, I can testify to that with seat time. Well over 5,000 miles this month

While it’s probably true that I share more culturally with Texans and folks from Kansas than I do, say, with folks native to Thailand or even France, (though in some matters like religion and politics, I have my doubts), it is also true that the geographical difference between our hectare at 45 degrees north and that of another hectare outside Lubbock, Texas is great. Soil types, climate, native vegetation, water availability, history of land use, former inhabitants, current state of the aquifers, natural resource policy, native fauna, degree of environmental degradation are all different.

Here in Colorado the big difference is topography.  They have more top in their -ography. Leaving near or in a young mountain range like the Rockies is not the same as living in the heavily glaciated state of Minnesota where three major biomes: Big Woods, Tallgrass Prairie and Boreal Woods meet. Water versus rock. Flat versus high and variegated. With grandkids here, I often wonder about the difference between a young mind formed with snow peaked mountain ranges in view every day and one surrounded by lakes and rivers and trees. Not sure what the effect is, but my guess is it’s substantial, or at least will be for a certain type of young mind, that is, one open to the world around them.

I’ll be interested to see how Gabe and Ruth take shape as the years go by. Rock. Mass. Snow. Barrier. Hard. High.

Spring                                                                        Bee Hiving Moon

Travel. Kate and I, discussing her limited mobility, have investigated various modes of travel that can accommodate both of us. So far the ideal is the cruise. Kate can enjoy the ocean, the dining, lounging on the deck chair with knitting or hand-work and take the shore excursions that use buses. I can take some of those same excursions but I can also take ones that involve more walking. Train travel has some of the same benefits, too, as long as we get to a city or destination that allows Kate a place to enjoy herself and gives me some room to wander. Driving in an R.V. is a good option, too, because she lie down, “unload my spine,” which brings her solid relief.

She said, in that conversation yesterday, “Travel is important to your soul.” Never thought of it that way, but I realized she was right. Something in me needs to experience the not before seen, the food not eaten, see ways of life different from my own. I suppose it’s in part voyeurism, but that’s only a very small part. The rest of it comes from the same motivation that leads me to fiction, to the unimagined place, the unfamiliar narrative, the quirky characters.

In our intimate isolation, the existential nature of our solitary lives, each of us reaches out, tries to find the other whether friend, spouse or the creators of Chilean culture. We search for clues, shards of evidence about interior lives other than our own, but they’re difficult to find and hard to interpret. Those for whom travel is necessary, and I would include myself in that number, find seeking those clues easier when the environment is most different from home.

Wandering among the ruins of Angkor, for example, the traveler finds a world based on god-kings who ruled in a time saturated with divinity and filled with magic. These were not deluded, naive ancients, but vigorous powerful people who built with fine architectural skills, mastered the art of using water for transport and defense, supported a large military and offered themselves to their gods with passion.

Walk the streets of Ephesus, marble streets and communal latrines, a large library and the ampitheatre where Paul preached to the Ephesians. This was an outpost of the Roman empire located on what had been a thin ribbon of Greek settlement in Asia Minor stretching from  Byzantium to Miletus and Rhodes. Again, not deluded or feeble ancients but a civilization that conquered the peoples of the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and Aegean seas. They had trade with countries far to the east and even, by the time of Caesar, had conquered also what is now Spain and France. Their language, their customs, their beliefs differ from ours in ways we find difficult to fathom.

Or, walk the streets of Beijing, Bangkok, Singapore, Lima, Peru or Rio de Janiero. All different, all humming with the commerce, art, politics and the family life of people, our contemporaries, who do not share beliefs we consider fundamental. They might reject democracy, or Christianity, might display native dress that seems exotic to our eye, eat foods that would disgust us or engage in recreational activity incomprehensible to us as fun.

Travel places us in the culture that chooses ideals and values different from or even in opposition to our own. It makes clear, on the one hand, our own insularity and helps us see our values over against those of others while at the same time demonstrating that humans deal with similar problems and needs though the solutions may differ, the satisfaction of the need may have very different inflections.

Holding ourselves intact, honoring our own beliefs and values, our own foods and art, our solutions to life’s problems and the ways we satisfy basic human needs while also honoring the beliefs and values, the foods and art, the solutions and satisfactions of others is the most direct route I know to self-knowledge and self-acceptance. It’s tempting in those other places to go native, to adopt the ways of the other, but that’s a different way, one that involves sublimating your own in favor of the others.

What I want is to embrace the American flag, English, hot dogs and hamburgers, football and television, wide open spaces, democracy and our strange but wonderful struggle to include others not as guests but as fellow citizens while celebrating sushi, the Crescent and Moon, that other football, Bollywood, Mandarin and even, though with more hesitation, modes of governance that have more centralized authority. In this way I can come to understand that my interior life, solitary and isolated though it may be, is not, at its core, so very different from that of the other billions of my kind, living and dead, who’ve faced loneliness, love, fear, hunger, desire, ambition, anxiety, dread, awe, wistfulness and the myriad of other emotions that drive the lives of all of us, us humans.