Wait! Put down that shovel and brush the dirt off his face - I thought I saw him breathe!
Wait! Put down that shovel and brush the dirt off his face - I thought I saw him breathe!
Been kind of a busy end-of-summer (the real end of summer, not that fraud and travesty foisted off by The Virtual (but not Virtuous) Occoquan a few weeks ago. After the OSU -Washington game, my son and I drove a car that my mother in law had given him from Toledo back to Seattle. We had an enjoyable 4 days of experiencing the American landscape from ground level. For most of the last 15 years, I’ve flown any distance over 2 - 300 miles, and I wondered if I could possibly stand driving the 2,000 miles that I usually breeze over in the time it takes to read the latest New York Review of Books. And I have to say it was fascinating to stare at the terrain and landforms as they went by, even in the hot and featureless plains between the Mississippi and the Front Range.
The kid was advocating a quick trip with stops dictated only by biology and the frailties of the internal combustion engine (as in the Buffett song (Jimmy, not Warren), there’s a woman to blame), so there was no hope of stopping to tour the several plains pioneer museums advertised along the road in Nebraska that piqued my curiosity. We stopped briefly to peek at the Cabela’s retail store in Kearney, NE. I thought it might prove an interesting and outdoor-related break from the road, but once inside we both realized that it’s more of an animal-killer’s ordnance cache than a granola-powered REI clone. Kid was disgusted by a gaudy tableau in the center of the store featuring a cast of dead animals cavorting motionlessly. We escaped despite the lack of camo gear.
Once in western Wyoming, however, he became enthralled by the terrain, and I was able to con him into stopping for a reprise of the Grand Teton vacation my wife and I took earlier in August. We had a nice hike in the late fall heat, and he admired, as a fellow rock climber, the vista of the Grand Teton peak that his mother had climbed. Since childhood, he’s been a fan of pyrotechnics, and we also dawdled in the geothermal areas of Yellowstone before an epic push from there to Seattle.
Besides that trip, I also took my first camping trip in a kayak, on Sucia Island in the San Juans north of Puget Sound. Sea kayaks hold an incredible amount of stuff, and I loaded mine up like the ill-fated pilgrim ship in Lord Jim, including (god help me!) my laptop, thinking I might rekindle my blog. A glance will tell you how far that got, but I at least proved the concept of fitting expensive electronics into a dry bag and daring the sea to pick my pocket.
A day after my return, I was off to Milwaukee for a week of work, where I now am ensconced, in a Holiday Inn Express with free WiFi and an inexplicable Jacuzzi spa next to my bed, stroking my muse furiously and obscenely. She’ll thank me later.
