Promise Of The West

In the first week of July, the days were dull and gray. I rarely left the house. Reading. Typing. Peering out the window. Watching a fine rain fall straight down, in July. Through the window of my soul — I mean phone — I glimpsed blue skies in the Colorado Rockies. My mom and sister, Nancy and Melissa, out for a walk and the dog pouncing through sage brush behind them. Scrolling further, I spied old friends cooling off in cold-water granite cauldrons lost in the hills outside Los Angeles. Summer life was happening, but not here. 

Luckily, I'd planned a trip. Call it summer vacation. Call it an escape from the specific gauzy inertia of extended quarantine — where days drag painfully slow but also blend together until suddenly you look at the date and you’ve lost entire weeks to a routine of no routine at all.

I needed newness more this July then I have any of the other Julys (or Junes, or Januarys — really any of the months you might suggest). Experiencing newness is the best way I know to slow down time’s passage and keep my mental range of motion. When you explore new paths, your brain creates new pathways. This has always been true. Not just a 2020 truth.

So in search of rich, striking memories, Mark and I stuffed the Nissan Titan full of camping gear and drove into cowboy country. Montana. Idaho. Landscapes that hold the promise of the West. That make you feel small, what Kerouac called an “eager insignificance.”

Regarding traveling during a pandemic, it was fine. We were masked up in the presence of humans, but in general looking to get away from people, to get out and contemplate geology, investigate botony, conjecture about astronomy. I can’t and won’t forget the shooting star that harpooned the sky while I crouched and quietly tree-peed in the middle of the night on the edge of that soft-water, glacier-scraping mountain lake.