Yesterday morning, when I was sitting on the futon in my attic study, I looked across the room and saw a small star of sunlight flashing and moving a tiny bit up and down along a single strand of cobweb stretching from the ceiling to the desk chair. After a little while, I got up and went over to the windows to see if I could see it from there. I couldn’t, and when I got back to the futon, I couldn’t see it from there either. It had disappeared. Somehow that made me think of the trip out West my partner and I took at the end of the summer—of how you have to look, really look, to see, and what also matters is the place and angle you look from.
Michael and I spent the last two weeks of August driving across Kansas, visiting various places in Colorado, and travelling to northern New Mexico. I’m trying to remember some highlights or details from the trip, or anything from the trip, actually, before it slips away. It was already slipping away while it was happening. Michael and I kept saying that—we could almost feel it disappearing into forgetfulness like the highway receding into the distance behind us, and sometimes, during our many hours of driving, we reviewed and compared notes, to keep our memories of the trip alive: What was your favourite restaurant? What was the worst bathroom, the best bathroom, the worst place we stayed? If you had to move to this part of the country, which town that we’ve been in would you move to? Michael picked Salida, Colorado. I picked Taos, or maybe Manhattan, Kansas.
Manhattan was our first stop. A good friend of mine moved to Manhattan recently for a job. We stayed in her house and headed out in the morning, continuing across the Great Plains. Manhattan, Kansas, is a friendly smallish college town with nice restaurants and a pretty campus. I like college towns. I liked how Manhattan felt like it had been set down in the middle of nowhere, far away from the seat of the U.S. government and from tourist attractions and big-city traffic and heavy populations. And I liked Kansas, with its wide sky and green grasslands and long, smooth, straight roads, the horizon punctuated by many windmills.
After Manhattan, there was a long, long drive till we got to our next stop, the Denver metro area. Denver is in the High Plains, not far from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. We stayed in a La Quinta hotel room that smelled like dirty socks and had a rattly air conditioner that I suspected was the source of the smell. The metro area was full of cars. Cars and many lanes of traffic, cars going fast or grinding to a halt behind other cars. One day we drove to Colorado Springs and saw the Garden of the Gods, a place where there are towering red eye-filling rock formations pointing at the sky. On the way back to Denver, we took an alternate route through ranchland. There was a thunderstorm, and we barely missed hitting a dog that ran out in front of us. Michael said the dog looked like a farm dog that was spooked by the storm and trying to get home, but I said it looked like someone’s pet, a black goldendoodle or something, that had been allowed to get out of the house by a neglectful owner.
It took me about forty-five minutes to get past that near miss—it was as if the thought of hitting the dog was almost the same as actually hitting the dog, as if the fact that we could have done that was mingled up with what really happened in some inescapable way. And so as we were driving along through that Western scenery under the blue sky, moving past fields and fences, cattle and ranch houses, I could almost hear the screech of the tyres and the dog’s loud yelp, could almost see that dog’s broken body lying on its side on the road. And I couldn’t stop feeling the deep distress we both would have felt if that had really happened.
But it didn’t happen, and eventually the distress wore off as we continued driving.
In some ways, that’s what the whole vacation feels like now. Not the horror and relief of almost but not hitting a dog, but the imagination imposing itself on the real thing, and the experience, the memory, of the real thing gradually wearing off. I am driving on into the rest of my life, and I have to work to bring back the landmarks we saw out West: The D. H. Lawrence ranch—three or four tiny isolated cabins a long way up a steep, poorly maintained dirt road in the mountains outside Taos. The San Francisco de Asis mission church, its twin bell towers and adobe buttresses rising startlingly into the bright blue sky. The Mabel Dodge Luhan house, where we stayed for one night in a room that felt haunted by the ghosts of famous writers and artists: Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Georgia O’Keeffe.
I do remember vividly what it was like to arrive at the Rio Grande Gorge ten miles outside Taos, to come upon that enormous deep gash in the earth when we weren’t expecting it. We’d been driving for hours through southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, where the road was mostly flat, and all you mostly saw were towering clouds in the wide blue sky and endless fields bisected by the two-lane road. And then suddenly we came to that deep slash in the ground.
Michael stopped the car next to another car on the dirt pull-off beyond the bridge—there was an ice cream truck there too. I walked halfway across the rusty white fence that kept you from falling off the bridge into the gorge, but Michael only went a little way across the bridge and stopped, which surprised me. I’m usually the one who’s afraid of everything—I was afraid when we were driving through the Rockies, although he was perfectly calm and in control on the nearly vertical climbs and steep descents and wide sweeping curves. But this time I wasn’t afraid—just curious and thrilled in some physical way to look down into that deep gash in the ground, the thread of blue river way, way down below with enormous reddish-brown mesas rising on either side of it. In the middle of the bridge was a place where the rusted white metal fence protruded in a half-square, and attached to the fence was a sign that said, There is hope! Make the call! There was a large red button you could use to make the call. (The bridge was closed to pedestrians due to an increase in suicides, not long after we were there.)
I looked down at the tiny snaking river way down at the bottom of the gorge, and the thought of the long, dizzying plunge to get there took my breath away. I could not even begin to imagine climbing up the rail and leaping off it, couldn’t imagine what could be bad enough to make you want to do that.
Like everything else in life, there were hard parts and lovely parts and tedious, mundane parts of the trip. But I’m finding that the farther I am from the vacation, the more idyllic it appears in my imagination. Even the hard parts have been transformed in some way, like an interesting story I read a while ago: The long, boring hours of driving, which made a nerve in the back of my leg hurt. The dog we almost hit. The heavy rain and fogged-up windshield in a mountain pass, where we couldn’t see or pull over because of construction on the side of the road. The heavy rains on Route 80 in Williamsburg, Iowa, when we were almost home, when there were moving sheets of water on the windshield so thick we couldn’t see anything at all, and we had to slow way down while giant trucks zoomed passed us. That red button on that sign above the Rio Grande gorge.
None of that is what really sticks in my mind now that I’m home. What sticks in my mind is all the openness. I think of staring through the windshield at the clouds and the fields and the mountains at the edge of the fields, and sometimes many windmills, turning and turning, across the fields. I tried to memorise the clouds: towering cumulus clouds with blue and grey shadows and dips, bright white clouds invading darker clouds, layer upon layer of clouds in the blue sky.
Those clouds and that open space seem to exist inside me now. Sometimes, when I sit in the green brocade chair in the corner of my study and meditate, I can get to the clouds—to some clouds anyway. I climb up the ladder of my thoughts, listen to the sounds around me, notice the feeling of my feet flat on the floor, the cat on my lap, and all my thoughts clear for a moment and I am there, in some high clear landscape of the soul or the mind that is like those clouds or maybe the blue sky around them.
I feel as if something is in my mind that wasn’t there before, as if something opened inside my eyes or my mind during that trip, and it’s still a little way open, mingling with my sense of home.
