I find that I have fallen into a routine in trying to establish a “home” in my travels. I eat a pastry-type object and drink orange juice every morning. Every lunch I have a Subway Tuna sandwich. I pull off the road at 5:30 or 6:00 each night, call my parents, journey out for dinner, come back to write, check email, post, get ready for bed. Even my car has its own compartments where my camera, maps, CDs, change and other important items live. I’ve created a traveling apartment with every room imaginable except for the bathroom (If I could only work that out. Just think, I wouldn’t have to stop as often).
Being on the road this long (10 days now and counting), without the normal chatter of life, dwelling for so many hours in so much silence changes you. It makes you pay attention to every last detail. It makes you listen to things differently. It makes you know things that would have otherwise been unknowable.
As I stood at a lonely intersection in the middle of the dust today, the unknowable thing I knew with every ounce of my being was that I had to reach Sedona, Arizona by Monday. The message was clear and unshaking. Despite the fact that it would mean that nearly the entire width of the United States would then sit between me and Seattle, I really had no choice.
So there at that intersection with roads stretching out before me in both directions, I made a decision to turn south instead of west. I left the grandeur of Wyoming to travel all day through Utah towards the eventuality of Sedona, prolonging the journey with yet another loop.
And now, my car is a cake of mud sprinkled lightly with bug guts. My back hurts from sitting for 10 to 11 hours a day. When I close my eyes, I see maps, routes stretching out in all directions, speed limit signs, distances and times. When I lick my lips, I taste dust. I smell of wandering. And to be honest, I am just tired, and I have myself to blame for it.
But the willow is just outside my door, standing at the brink of a Japanese-style pond overlooking a field of hawks. Her trunk is gnarled like fingers entwining the essence of eternity. Her countenance is everbending towards the water, dipping her tendrils to its surface. In this, she becomes air, earth and water. She is reminding me of something important.
In the last few days of my travels, I have omitted many things. I never mentioned the ravens that followed me around Yellowstone, the ones that kept landing on the car top carrier when I wasn’t looking. I never discussed seeing herds of buffalo grazing, the one that blocked my path around the park and the one I passed so close to with my car that his horn brushed my window. I never mentioned the black-footed ferret I played with at the top of the medicine wheel mountain, or the bald eagle that I spotted at Old Faithful, or even the 12 Red-Tail hawks that swooped down on the farm fields of Wyoming. I never described the elk that seemed everywhere at once.
All of that thinking and all the repetition of routine has made me feel very heavy and that heaviness has made me miss honoring the lightness around me. It’s made me forget to Play. And so, I lay here, staring at the ceiling in the half-light, at the little bits of mica in the stone that glitter like stars above m.
I think I’ll run around the pond, to chase the ducks into the water to sit by the Willow and tell her everything.
Route: Drive around and around until I found 15S and then just traveled like hell until I reached Beaver, Utah.