TUCSON'S BEST BICYCLE RIDE

Big fat raindrops pounded onto my skylight sounding like a staccato snare drum. My east-facing bedroom, which should have been showing signs of dawn from the window, was dark and gloomy. It was El Tour day, the one day of the year when all of Tucson experiences this huge event call El Tour de Tucson. And I lay snuggled in my bed, mentally preparing myself for what was to become the most challenging El Tour out of the eight I have completed.

 

El Tour de Tucson, for which upwards of 9,000 riders pay an entry fee in excess of $100, is a charity bike race with four distances – this year 111, 85, 60 or 42 miles long. The first riders, for the 111-mile race, were scheduled to start at 7am. I’m guessing most of these riders had been awake for some hours before the start. The 111 is the race for the biking elite, attracting professional and semi-professional riders from all over the world as well as dedicated amateurs.

 

On the other side of the bicycle wheel is the 42-mile race which attracts all kinds of people at all skill levels - dads and moms riding with their kids, dads and moms hauling their tots behind them, individuals looking for a challenge, weekend cyclists, church groups, business associates and groups of friends out for a good time, groups of riders riding for a cause like my own group Riders for Recovery. One year I followed a rider dressed as a pirate wearing a gaily colored blouse and spiffy pirate boots, sporting a tricorn hat adorned with skull and crossbones, and playing Commodores music out of a small cassette player strapped to the back of his bicycle.

 

But in El Tour’s entire 31-year history, it had never rained on race day. It just doesn’t rain that much in the desert in November. But this year was to be different and not only would we have rain, but a whopping 2.5+ inches starting within the last few hours before the race, equivalent to about 20% of our annual average rainfall. The dry, dusty roads in Tucson can become quite greasy during a heavy rain preceded by a period of relative drought. With this year’s monsoon season a bust, surely the roads of Tucson would be slick and easily flooded during the race. And the riders would be further challenged by the very real potential of hypothermia.

 

Of the eight El Tours I have run, this is the only one in which rain would bring cancellations by the hundreds – even though no one gets their money back. Forecasters had been predicting heavy rain and chilly weather Friday through Sunday all week. But I knew I was going to ride – my friends and I had thoroughly discussed the possibility of crappy weather, everyone with their phones constantly updating various weather apps. Because I am a backpacker, I was perhaps less concerned about the weather than some of the others at the ritual ‘carb-loading’ party at my friend Margaret’s the night before the race. I’m used to walking in the rain with 30-pounds on my back. How bad could riding 38 miles in the rain be? Besides, it's nice to be able to get some use out of rarely used gear.

 

But the sound on the skylight reminded me just how much rain had poured from the sky the day before and what was predicted for Race day. I began to check with El Tour’s Facebook page, its website, its Twitter feed and my own Facebook page for any changes in the route. The 111 had two water crossings which could be exceeding dangerous for riders caught in fast-moving water. The first crossing, the Santa Cruz River, was a go but El Tour officials said ‘stay tuned’ for updates on the perhaps even more dangerous (because it is right below the Santa Catalina Mountains) Sabino Creek Crossing which would be taken by the 85-milers as well.

 

And then there were worries about my own short ride – the 42 which had become 38 just a few days earlier when part of the 42 was scratched. I was not at all unhappy about the change – the portion that was scratched was over an incredibly pot-holey road in rural Marana with the steepest hill of the route leading riders up and then down into surburban Cortaro Farms. Instead we would be following the relatively smooth Frontage Road – far less scenic but imminently more rideable.

 

On the other hand, Moore Road, the northernmost part of the route, would be ridden by all riders and was close to the canyon drainages of the Tortolita Mountains. Moore is not particularly hilly but rather rolling as it coasts from one drainage to the next. Surely there would be water and debris in these drainages.  I was glad I had elected to ready my hybrid (a bike not quite as heavy and fat-tired as a mountain bike but steadier and more stable than the skinny road bikes many would be riding). I had had time for exactly three training rides, the longest of which was only 12 miles, after I had returned from my 5-month summer sojourn in Yellowstone, the roads of which are notoriously narrow and dangerous during the busy summer months. Except for my three training rides on a level bike path, I hadn’t even been on a bike for nearly six months.

 

As the morning progressed, I made my final choices for riding gear and stuffed additional, warmer clothing in a dry bag just in case I became hypothermic. No doubt, this Tour would be a challenge! I stayed in touch with my biking buddies, all who were making similar decisions or who would in the end decide to scratch. For me, there was never a question of scratching. I’m the kind who would rather try something and fail than fail to try. And frankly, having successfully completed six of these shorter rides before successfully completing the 60-mile last year, the now 38-mile route needed a bit of extra challenge. I was actually excited about riding in the weather.

 

My housemate Annie thinks I am a little nuts about dangerous activities. Our danger meters are set completely differently. As Annie watched me prepare for the race, she said “I’m not comfortable with you riding in the race. It could be dangerous.” repeating all the facts of the hazardous road conditions, the hazardous weather, the likelihood of novice bikers being totally unprepared for the riding conditions. I calmly affirmed I had every intention to ride, would do so carefully and would be prepared for all but the freak accident. Freak accidents happen. I can’t control for that.

 

She watched me pack and continue to view the Twitter and Facebook feeds. “The first riders are off and the Santa Cruz crossing wasn’t changed.” I excitedly told her.  About 9 am I looked up the wash behind my house up toward Sunrise Road. “I see the first riders coming down Sunrise!” I posted on Facebook. “This is getting exciting.” I told Annie.

 

Annie, who had been even reluctant to shuttle us in the rain to our start site, eventually came to tell me that she ‘got it’. This would be a historical race, one that would be the ride we all will be talking about for years. She understood that I wanted to be part of it. “I’ve decided it’s not that you have a death wish; you just prefer to go out in some rather spectacular way.” Annie really does get it.

 

Eventually four riders and bikes plus our Support Person Annie piled into my truck Yiha for the rainy ride to the 38-mile start line.  When we arrived the site of our start in Oro Valley, we sought parking under sheltered spots in order to unpack the bikes and dress for our ride. It was still pouring down rain and about 50 degrees. Everyone was in good spirits and seemingly as well-prepared as I was. No reason to worry…yet.

 

Eventually we caught up with one more member of our group – our friend Mike who had started his cycling that morning not far from the 60-mile start in order to meet us at our 38-mile start. Mike was very nearly hypothermic by then, thoroughly wet and chilled after being beaten by the wind and his own draft. His extremities were downright cold to the touch. And the longer he stayed with us, the colder he became. As soon as the signal to ride was sounded, Mike took off to raise his body temperature through the physical effort of riding.

 

Since I had very few training rides and was on my heavy, stodgy bike I knew I would hold back the others. But because I somewhat uncomfortably live with asthma, my riding companions had agreed to stay with me for the first few miles to make sure I made it past the only really challenging inclines of the route. Once we all got past the last challenging incline, the rest took off – the less time spent in the rain the better.

 

I chugged along, much like the Little Train that Could, up Rancho Vistoso to Moore, up the slight incline at Moore and then with all the others along a soggy, wet and slightly dangerous route. Dip after dip prompted riders to yell “water!”, “debris!”, “mud!” or to use the customary hand-signal – pointing down toward the spot that might be the cause of a serious accident. At one particularly high water crossing, several emergency vehicles blocked the traffic lane but it was not clear whether a rider had gone down or whether they were there in case one did. I said a little prayer that it was the latter and kept slogging on.  I was actually having an excellent ride.

 

I rode in the pouring rain down Thornydale and Tangerine to the Interstate but I was warm and relaxed, my preparations sufficient for the weather. My full-fingered bike gloves were keeping my hands warm although not dry. My cashmere socks were keeping my feet warm even though I felt I could wring water from my socks and pour out the accumulated drainage water from my shoes. Eventually I stopped to do just that and to refuel for the next 20 miles to Downtown Tucson. I always ‘see’ myself at the end of my ride, or hike, or other adventure and this time was no different. Despite the adversities, I was already there.

 

As I continued to ride, I noticed there were many, many riders, especially of road bikes, pulled off to the side with flat tires. Way more than usual. I guessed that the debris littering the road surfaces and under the water in the crossings was taking its toll on the more fragile tubes, tires and wheels of the road bikes. I was later to learn that two of our own riders had to scratch because of problems having to do with twisted bike tires, broken spokes and flats.

 

About half way through the ride, I also noticed my left knee was beginning to really grumble. My knees are not exactly the most cared for in the world and they occasionally remind me that my youthful (and not so youthful) activities have shortened their lifespans a good bit. As the rain let up, my attention turned toward the growing pain in my knees. Would I make it on this tank of a heavy bike?

 

Hybrid gears are much smaller than road bike gears because they are designed more for ease than speed. Hybrid gears assume you are going up, not down. The gears are simply not designed to zoom down the highway. The bikes are more versatile in some respects but riders may peddle many more times due to the smaller gear sizes. More revolutions, more effort for the knees – on frames that are heavy enough to stay together even after several bad spills.

 

At the last support stop before the Finish Line, riders can always find gooey chocolate brownies. My favorite ‘go food’ for the last seven-mile dash. After chomping down a brownie, I learned Ibuprofen was available. I grabbed several and chugged them down. Now if only I could last until the pills took affect on the last long incline up to the Downtown Finish Line.

 

As I continued my ride, I noticed the other riders, even those with those beautiful sleek skinny-tire bikes, were slowing down. The wind, rain and chill were beginning to affect us all. I saw a man slam onto the pavement about 50 feet in front of me, having caught a skinny wheel in an expansion joint on the road.  Fortunately, no other riders were right behind or around him and his fall was not as serious as it could have been. He was assisted to his feet and he and his bike were led over to the shoulder. I slogged by wishing him godspeed should he decide to resume the ride.

 

At St. Mary’s Road at the northern end of Downtown, I felt the familiar end-of-race adrenal kick in. And, thank god, finally the Ibuprofen. I could almost touch Tucson’s Downtown skyscrapers. I was going to finish this amazing race! With adrenalin coursing through my tired body and blunting the pain in my knees, my pace picked up. Down to 22^nd Street along West Frontage Road I rode. Under the overpass and up the hill toward the blazingly white steeple of Santa Cruz Catholic Church. A church had never looked to good.

 

Then, finally, up the 6^th Avenue to the Finish Line, each revolution of my tires bringing me closer. At the end, when I see the people waiting along the barriers for their loved ones and friends, it is difficult to even think about the difficulties and dangers of the ride. Signs welcoming the riders abound. “Go Mom!” “Bill, you’ve done it” “Lopez family does it again.” “Cancer survivor survives another one!” El Tour is Tucson’s own brand of Olympic trial – except this one is democratically open to anyone willing to come up with the fee and try it. No particular skillset required.

 

I have made it once again, meeting this particular challenge and conquering it. Perhaps justifiably so, I have been accused of throwing myself at life and saying ‘bring it on’. For this particular slice of life, I know I’m glad this El Tour came with rain and water crossings. Regardless of the danger and discomfort, riding in the 31^st El Tour de Tucson’s means I will always have the pleasure of being part of Tucson’s bicycling history.

 

Note: Although El Tour is an extremely well-planned event, accidents happen. Several years ago an older driver slammed into 10 riders near Westward Look Resort leaving one of them with life-changing brain damage. This year, we also lost a rider to a driver crossing over the barrier cones and running right into the rider from behind. The rider was pronounced dead and the word spread through the riding community as we all celebrated meeting our challenges, blunting our own elation. My sympathies to the family and friends of the rider who died. Sport of any type can be inherently dangerous and we all know that we might be next. This knowledge does not stop us but it does humble our victories.

UNCOOPED: BECOMING A FREE RANGE HUMAN

God, I am writing this on a laptop that is so old is has Word 2003 on it. Internet Explorer grinds away and I have had to restart it because of too many open windows at least twice now. But part of being the person I want to become more fully, a Free Ranger, means not sweating the small stuff.

A few days ago in my doctor’s waiting room, I stumbled on an article written by Dr. Marianne Williamson, an author and spiritual life coach (she’s the “our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate; our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure” author). In the article, Williamson talks about the extra 20 years people my age (I’m 60) have added to our lives but she proposes instead of adding it to the end of our lives, we have actually added it to the waning years of our work life and especially to our retirement. That really resonated with me.

Having added these 20 years, Williamson posits, we are woefully unprepared to live them. My generation still grew up thinking we would retire somewhere between 60 and 65 and then we would live another 5 or so years before we died. But our lifespans have increased so much that not only do many of us HAVE that extra twenty years, but many of us are have no plan for how we want to live them. Some of us keep on working – way past the point in which we actually experience pleasure in what we are doing.  Most of us late baby boomers are not really prepared to sit in a rocking chair. Many of us like myself are still physically and mentally very active and have no desire to ‘slow down’ that much.

Williamson’s idea got me thinking about this term Free Range I have been hearing about as it applies to Humans.  I’ve maybe always had a little Free Range in me – I have moved large distances multiple times, I took my 5-year-old son on a 5-day backpack trip across the Grand Canyon, I have chosen a career path which would give me the flexibility I felt I needed. But I am realizing that I have only been dabbling in Free Ranging, picking and choosing among its strategies like a gambler at a Las Vegas smorgasbord, without any real commitment or goals except how to deal with the problem right in front of me.

I spent last night researching everything I could find on the Web about Free Rangers which admittedly is not much. Most of the references to Free Range Humans lead to Marianne Cantwell, who was the first author to claim the title. She describes a Free Ranger as a person who has decided to live his or her life fully every day, not just on weekends. She also credits Free Rangers with figuring out how to make a living by doing what they love. 

One of my favorite sayings, particularly to my overly cautious doctors, is “I’m not afraid of dying; I’m afraid of not living.” I see myself becoming a Free Ranger because I put a high priority on living a really full life instead of ‘being successful.’ Matter of fact, the way I see it ‘being successful’, unless you carefully define your terms, can be a serious detriment to Free Ranging. Success can provide just the right inertia to keep you ‘cooped up’ in a life that no longer is in sync with your changing priorities.

Unlike Cantwell’s view that all Free Rangers definitionally find financially sustainable ways to engage in their passions, I think there are a lot of Free Rangers out there that USED to make a living doing something that at least didn’t make them take anti-depressants but who have broken away from the ‘work until you are ready for social security’ mold and are now doing exactly what they want, picking up work that suits their lifestyle instead of vice versa. That’s beginning to look a lot like me. That’s one of the lessons living in Yellowstone for five months taught me. Sometimes, it’s not about the work – it’s about the lifestyle.

In the past year, now that I’ve been thinking about what I want to do when I grow up and observing how people are choosing to live their lives, I’ve met a lot of Free Rangers. They might not know they are Free Rangers but I do.  Yellowstone and perhaps many National Parks are entire subcultures of them.

In Yellowstone, I met two sisters that left their highly lucrative corporate jobs in a law firm after a particularly scary mugging to move to a tiny burg in Montana and work in Yellowstone National Park. They’ve just retired because in their 70s they realized there are a lot of places they have yet to see and believe me these ladies have seen an awful lot of the world. I also met a couple who work for wages well below their earlier professions, just to live in a traveling home with their dog and spend the better part of the year living in beautiful places. My Meetup Backpack group, Tucson Backpackers, has a heap of Free Rangers although they might not recognize their Free Rangerness unless I have had this very conversation with them that I am having with you.

Free Ranging is not just available to older adults. I’ve met a whole lot of young Free Rangers in Montana doing many different things that support their existence in a place they love even though they may have to work three different jobs so they can bike, kayak, backpack or just step outdoors and say good morning to the towering peaks that erupt from the ground behind their apartments or back yards. They may have been initially forced into Free Ranging because of the lack of positions available in their professions after graduation, but many of them are beginning to view this as an opportunity for enlightenment – a way to escape being shackled by ‘corporate America’. My 24-year-old son Daniel has his own consultancy firm so that he can take part-time work and projects that feed his passions AND his outdoor lifestyle in Montana.

I suspect I was born a Free Ranger and just strayed a bit for a long while. I’m not saying that all Free Rangers are born, but I guess I am saying that Free Rangers have a certain lust for new experiences and distrust of institutions and structure that make them more open-minded about stepping away from what is socially ‘normal’ into new dimensions of how to live. My mother once told me that as early as 3 years old I would scurry out of doors at every opportunity in order to live outside. Fortunately, my Mother had two very kind old spinsters (that’s what Free Range Women were called back in the 50s) living next door that would keep watch for the escaped toddler next door on Saturday mornings when her exhausted parents were still sleeping. They would take me into their warm, sweet-smelling kitchen for breakfast. I was fearless at 3. Or already on to how to train the adults in my life.

I still like to wander outside on Saturday mornings. The best Saturday is one during which I wake up under the heavens, having slept ‘cowboy’ style without a tent. Of course, cowgirls do this, too, but it’s the crooning, socially misfit cowboy that gets the cred for sleeping under the stars. But I digress.

The point of being Free Range is that I no longer feel comfortable being COOPED UP. Cooped up might mean having a corporate job that seemed fulfilling at one point in your life but no longer suits you. Cooped up might mean being a spouse in a marriage that no longer is fulfilling but at least you have two cars and good-looking smart children and a membership at the Art Museum or Symphony where everyone can witness how successful you are. Cooped up could mean sleeping too late after a night of reading a really good book and being concerned you will be fired for lateness. Cooped up might mean having so many bills that you are required to continue your not so terrible but ‘in a rut’ life in order to keep up a lifestyle that you no longer find interesting. Cooped up could manifest in being so tired on Friday because you spent so much energy on being exactly what other people thought you should be all week that you have no energy to fulfill your need to go camping, or traveling, or star-gazing, or fishing or dancing or even taking a refreshing afternoon nap.

I must be osmosing all this Free Range stuff from the eggs I buy at the Farmers’ Market - eggs that are advertised as laid by ‘free range’ or ‘uncooped’ hens. Somehow, the idea that the chicken had an option as to where, when and how she would lay the egg I am going to consume makes a difference to me. The egg is the object but how the egg got into my basket is probably the most important aspect of my egg-buying.  If the chicken was ‘cooped’ in a tiny wire cage or had to trip over hundreds of other chickens in order to roost in a corporate hen house, I am certain I will taste and experience the difference. And if I am cooped up in whatever corporate cages are more typical, I expect I will experience the difference. 

I think Free Ranging is having ideas about what is good for you, without waiting for permission to carry those ideas out.  It is deciding on Thursday you will be spending your New Year’s in Big Bend National Park just because you have never been there and having the plan to do so in place by the following Sunday.  It is taking six months off to live in the wilderness of a National Park, working a job you would never apply for ‘back home’ just in order to watch elk cows give birth and their bull mates go through rut. Free Ranging is being less concerned about the wheres, whens and whos than the hows. It is being more concerned about the quality of your life than the quantity of the years you spend in it or the amount you have saved up for ‘retirement’.

Looking back, I realize I have been planning for Free Ranging for a couple years now. I have been retiring debt; getting rid of ‘things’; trying to go digital in my financial life so I can pay bills, look at statements and balances wherever I am; getting a roommate so I feel comfortable leaving my house for months at a time; refusing new responsibilities once old ones have played out their lifespans. And that is just MY journey. The thing about Free Ranging – only the Free Ranger can determine what has meaning to them and how to get it because the process IS a very large part of the goal. 

So here I am, continuing to restructure my personal and business lives in order to be able to leave whenever and wherever the wind calls my name. It will take some work but I’m worth it. Stay tuned.

SPIRITS OF OUR PAST

Traditions twist together like grapevines sometimes.  Harvest festivals morph into Thanksgiving. Local spiritual traditions are syncretised into Christian rituals. And Halloween, now mostly a fun spooky festival, erupts as a zombie from the grave from its roots as a Gaelic holy day of Samhain, a liminal time where the veil between life and death is thin and souls can more easily visit the living world.

Although some scholars dispute this interpretation of Halloween, others insist that the Eighth Century Catholic holiday to honor All Souls (or All Hallows) on October 31^st followed by the next day’s festival honoring All Saints evolved from the Gaelic festival.  Regardless, the commonality in these two origin stories is natural season of Earth moving from light into darkness in the Northern Hemisphere, the birthplace of both Gaelic spiritual rituals and the foundation of post-Christ Christianity.

Along with honoring the harvest, the theme is also one of honoring the people that came before, a time to honor our ancestors and recently departed elders. I’ve lived now in Tucson for nearly 30 years and the Hispanic cultural tradition of El Dia de los Muertos offers some of the most colorful rituals around All Hallows Eve. This is the day for honoring family members who have passed on before you. It is a time to do a little housekeeping at their gravesites, sweeping and cleaning the graves and headstones and then decorating them to let your ancestors know your living family is celebrating their importance to present day lives.

Some Southern Arizona cemeteries erupt in color, with the smaller and more traditional cemeteries beginning to take on the feeling of someone’s living room. South of Tucson, in Tubac which was part of Spain not so very long ago, families gather to sing and talk in and around the gravesites of their ancestors at the old ‘cementary,’ founded in the 1700s. You see giant coolers, grills and sofas among the historic gravesites. You hear guitars and violins as family members serenade their dearly departed. It’s a family reunion in a graveyard.

Tucsonans also have the unique All Souls Procession in which to publicly express appreciation for those who have gone before.  The All Souls Procession is a grassroots event, drawing around 35,000 participants, some dressed in creatively wild costumes and others simply holding pictures of those they want collectively honored. No judgment here – whoever the participants choose to honor is exactly who deserves honoring.  The 2013 All Souls Procession starts at the southern end of 6^th Avenue and winds up and through Downtown Tucson. Its emphasis is on creatively honoring your departed while supporting others’ grief and love for theirs.

Today in church (yes I actually go to church every once in awhile), our entire service was dedicated to honoring our loved ones who no longer are with us, recognizing that we are who we have become not only due to the influence of our parents and grandparents but also those family members who choices and decisions created cultures of education or enlightenment or sense of family or rural living that have impacted who we are today. We were asked to share our stories of remembrance – a beautiful way to honor our dead.

The first story I thought of is still too fresh to speak out loud so I chose another equally important story in my life. Here on this page, I don’t have to worry my voice will crack or tears will stream down my face. Here I can tell my stories of the dying days of my mother and father.

My father died first, way back in 1993, of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma when he was still in his 60s. I was living in New Zealand but traveling often back to help my Mom care for Dad. In the last few months, my small son and I moved into Mom and Dad’s house. At one point, after it became obvious the chemotherapy was not slowing the progression of the cancer, my father became increasingly irritable, sometimes outright mean. My mother came to me in the hallway after a particularly unpleasant interchange with my Dad and directed me to ‘talk to your Dad’. “Uh, you mean about the whole dying thing and him being to mean to us?” I clarified. My mother nodded, tears in her eyes.

I took a deep breath and walked into Dad’s sick room. “Hey Dad, I need to talk to you. You’ve been really unbearable lately. I just wanted to let you know that if you are being mean to everyone in the hopes we won’t miss you so much when you die, you are doing a really good job. You DO know you are dying don’t you?” 

With that, my father and I talked about death and dying and finding spiritual meaning in death and how we, my four siblings and my mother, would cope just fine when he died.  After that, Dad seemed a little less irritable, a lot of his meanness about anxiety over how my Mother would fare and whether we children would make sure she was ok. I was honored my Mother chose me, the second child, to have ‘the Talk’ with my Dad. I found joy in helping ease my father’s sense of helplessness. Not too many weeks later my Dad died, his last days surrounded by a tag-team of his children.

When my Mother’s dying from Lewy Body Dementia began, nearly 20 years later, I was living alone in Tucson. I got to know the Dallas airport pretty well in the intervening months from the time she was provided hospice and the nearly 12 months before she died. Every time I left my Mom’s sick room in order to fly home I knew that moment might be the last moment I had with Mom. I cherished each one of those leavings but the one right before she died is my most special memory of her dying.

Every time I visited Mom, I would read poems and stories and People Magazine to her. And even though she could not really track what I said, the cadence of my voice and my hand in hers seemed to bring her joy and peace. One of her favorite authors had been James Herriott, the Yorkshire country vet who wrote fairly maudlin but endearing stories of country life. As the weeks added up to months, I read James Herriott to her again, out loud.

On my last visit before her death, Mom was very close to the veil, not eating, speaking or moving most of the time. I read anyway, out loud again, even though I had no sign from her that she could even hear me. I read for four solid days. I reread to her Herriott’s love story about meeting his wife and of their first date and honeymoon. I read until I was nearly hoarse. And when the moment to drag myself away from her bedside and into my rental car came, I put the book down and told her how much I loved her and that I knew Dad and her sisters and brother were waiting for her in that beautiful place and would be okay if she decided to go before I got back. As I left her bed, tears streaming down my face, I once again croaked out “I love you Mom”.  And as I walked by the foot of her bed, I heard her rusty voice tentatively and softly say “I love you too.” For a moment I almost thought I heard it in my mind; my mother had not spoken for days. But her day nurse looked up and confirmed what I knew – my Mom had said her final goodbye to me.

So on this All Saints Day, I celebrate my honored dead. I celebrate my father and my mother, all my beloved pets – Wolf, Cucumber, Tippy and silly Sonora. I celebrate my ancestors and cousins who did the best they could through the Great Depression, World Wars and Viet Nam. We may feel unique but we are all composites of our family. This is the day I honor them all.

ROAD TRIPPING

I really can’t imagine my life without long Road Trips in the American West. In the late 1970s I moved from Missouri to Colorado and fell in love with the West and its sweeping vistas, towering mountains and sparkling creeks and rivers. My then husband and I took a mountaineering class, started buying all the gear and began backpacking, snowshoeing and skiing around that beautiful state.

 

We moved to Tucson Arizona in the early 1980s and learned about the Sonoran Desert and its ‘Sky Island’ mountains. From there, we moved to New Zealand for a short time where my ex fell in love with all things Kiwi. In each place, we packed our vehicle and took long Road Trips, learning to appreciate the scenery and the people of the place. But I yearned to be back in the States closer to my family. Eventually I would bring our 5-year-old son back with me to the desert by myself. I continued the Road Trips, schlepping my son all over the Western US. Since then the only Western state my son Dan and I have not visited is North Dakota and it’s on the List.

 

Dan and I developed a deep understanding and appreciation for each other on those long Road Trips. The rules were simple: 1) rotate ‘primitive’ camping in National Forest or BLM lands, camping in campgrounds with ‘facilities’ and staying in inexpensive motels with hot showers and clean sheets; 2) never take the same road twice if you could help it; and 3) take no electronic entertainment devices except one tape or CD player.

 

My son and I learned to be a team on our Road Trips. We would share camping chores. We would take turns with the music selection and we would often mutually agree on a book on tape which we would listen to over miles and miles of open road. We would bicker about the merits of the book and its characters; we would argue about which band played the best cover of any Dylan original. On one Road Trip, we spent our time learning more about the Bible by listening to all of Ken Davis’s Don’t Know Much About the Bible, discussing which parts had meaning to us and why. My son told me if he were a juvenile judge he would insist that every family with wayward teens take a Road Trip without electronics because they would be forced to talk and cooperate as a family or be miserable. Fair enough.

 

Besides helping to build a relationship with my son that will last the rest of my life, Road Trips also gave both of us an appreciation for the quality and variety of landscape in the American West. We would spread our maps and Atlases out on the roadside tables searching for a new way to get from A to Z, giving any road that was NOT an Interstate a higher priority. We both still love driving through the tiny bergs and villages that make up the rural population centers of the West. You can park your truck in the local park and walk around looking for grub and never worry about a stranger messing with your things.

 

And then there are the views – the endless variety of colors and shapes. The first time I drove through Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument I was a danger to myself (since I had the road just about all to myself) because I could NOT keep my eyes on the road. Around every corner I spied the most beautiful scenery I ever saw – until the next corner. The thing about these views - even though I’ve been through Grand Staircase many times now, the awe the scenery invokes is new every time.  Mother Nature keeps changing the canvas so that each time has the probability of being a totally new experience.

 

I have been reminded of my love for Road Trips as I have made my way back to Tucson from my summer season in Yellowstone National Park. My friends have named it my ‘re-entry’, worried that I will find it difficult to be back in the city after spending five months living in expansive vistas and with entertaining wildlife. I have employed Road Trips before as a way to cushion big changes in my life. When I dropped Dan off for his first year of college at University of Montana, I took a 10-day circuitous route back to get over my sadness at being an ‘empty-nester’, wanting some time and distance before coming back to open the door of my now-empty house.

 

I really started my journey about a week ago as I drove out of Missoula following the sparking Clark Fork River along I-90 headed for Salt Lake. Montana is incredibly beautiful. Whether it is soaring snow-capped mountains or rolling grassy hills, the trip down I-90 then I-15 forces you to count your blessings. Maybe it is possible to stay grumpy in scenery like that but not for me.

 

After a few hours, I realized I really didn’t need to be in Salt Lake that night which opened the door to getting off the Interstate and onto a byway – much more desirable for a Road Tripper like me. So after sailing by the handsome gently undulating and productive farmland of Idaho, I turned off on US 91, hugging the Bear River Range all the way into Utah which is quite possibly the crème de la crème of Western river canyon country.

 

It is also the site of one of this country’s largest massacres of Native Americans in our history.  Standing atop a lofty and windy bluff overlooking the beautiful Bear River just north of the Idaho-Utah border at an educational memorial to the many Shoshone families killed in the valley below, I could understand why the Shoshone were angry at the loss of the land and the water of this verdant valley. Land and water – two of the West’s most common reasons for battle and integral to the history of the West. I was pleased that as a nation we are recognizing that not everything we have done in the past was honorable and that sometimes the victims are the ones that deserve the Memorial.

 

I grew weary near Ogden where I chose to spend the night. Ogden, the home of Utah’s Weber State University, hosted ski events in the 2002 Olympics and has become a western skiing hub with three downhill ski resorts in the nearby Wasatch Mountains. And if you are a railroad buff, you’ll be able to visit the train museum in Ogden’s historic Italian Renaissance Union Station and see the exact place where the western and eastern railroad expansions finally met up to provide transcontinental service to the US at Promontory Point.

 

I stayed at the historic Ben Lomond Hotel, an upscale ‘suite’ motel with soft beds, great amenities and friendly staff. I don’t normally allow myself the luxury of an upscale hotel on my Road Trips but I’m glad I did. The grand style of the Ben Lomond with its beautiful and soaring lobby, sumptuous ballrooms and many photos of early Ogden felt a little like staying in an unexpectedly comfortable museum.  I loved my stay at the Ben Lomond and I loved Ogden with its quaint historic blocks (25^th Avenue), public sculptures and beautiful mountain backdrop.

 

Not a bad day for a Road Trip. Road Trips start each day with the knowledge that the day is bound to be special – special because you are taking your time to get to know the area through which you are traveling, perhaps meeting some interesting people, learning about why this country is so great. You find out that people all over value the same things.  So while the scenery around you changes like an Imax production, the central core of what makes us great stays the same – productivity, generosity to strangers, a sense of place and history, a longing and reverence for ‘home’. A great reminder why I take Road Trips when making big changes in my life. It’s a comfort to know that there are some things that are timeless.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF TRAIL: THE CAMPAIGN

I’m in a room on a narrow bed.
A giant football twists above my head.
A young boy’s jersey hangs from the knob.
It’s all part of my volunteer job.

Dawn is breaking over Missoula. It’s still dark but I am already astir. I have been walking and making phone calls for the candidate who has hired my son to do something my son just loves to do – get out the vote for a candidate he believes in. I don’t normally do these things unless someone else believes enough in the candidate to offer me a place to stay. After all, it’s Montana – not even my voting STATE much less precinct - yet.

Well, I guess it’s better than last year. Last year I flew up to Whitefish, in the Flathead Valley of Montana, for the last four days of the electoral cycle on my own money to help (for free again) my son who was the Field Organizer of a campaign of a very nice and passionate Democrat for Montana State Legislature in an tight race in a swing district. He was able to get ‘volunteer housing’ – a virtually empty old house being completely remodeled. At least the remodeling had progressed far enough that it had a working shower and a working toilet.

I slept on a mattress spread out on the bare subfloor but the fact that my son had me walking and phoning pretty much all day every day made up for my less than luxurious sleeping arrangements. Dan wasn’t too worried about finding fancy digs; when my son is on a role, he would sleep on top of a desk to get the person he believes would make the perfect legislator, mayor, judge, (fill in the blank here) elected.

My son is what is known in polite circles as a ‘political consultant’ or in bigger campaigns a ‘field organizer’. FOs are usually twenty-somethings who migrate from campaign to campaign, usually for low pay, in order to make this democracy work.  Doesn’t matter which party, the job and the pay is about the same. My son happens to work mostly for Democratic candidates, being a Democrat himself, but he’s not opposed to working for someone with another affiliation if he thinks the person is right for the job. But the thing with being a Democratic FO – you get to play the awesome ‘ground game’ that the Democrats have been building for the last 10 years.

The ‘ground game’ is not really a secret. The leading political reporters and pundits have written a lot about it. The rules are simple – get a person elected by knowing your base, working the undecideds and doing this with clean statistics, voter lists and lots and lots of volunteers who make phone calls to every single potential voter on those lists – more than once. That’s how Obama won  - twice; his ground game has been the best the Democrats have ever played.

The key to a good ground game, just like a football game, is to have a really good coach who is your campaign manager and strategist. The campaign manager for local campaigns strategizes about where the voters for his or her political candidate would come from, calls the plays and recruits volunteers by the bucketload.  In larger races, the recruiting is done by Field Organizers. If the candidates are running as a Democrat in a partisan race, the FOs are given the keys to the winning kingdom – a slick electronic voter database called VoteBuilder, nicknamed VAN. VAN is the increasingly specific list of voting behavior of certain voters within specific political districts. And it’s a powerful tool for Democratic organizers.

I used to be fond of saying I agree with Will Rogers who always said he wasn’t a member of an organized party – he was a Democrat. In the past, if you eliminate highly questionable machines like Chicago’s Daley regime,  the Democrats in my humble opinion have been anything but ‘organized’. So I can barely rap my head around the fact 1) the Democrats are amazingly organized and 2) they actually have a slick anything.

But Missoula municipal races are nonpartisan, run according to rules for nonpartisan races. So what is a candidate’s capable (and may I add good-looking and single in Dan’s case) Campaign Manager to do without the VAN, his or her most reliable tool in the toolbox? In my son’s case, he went after (from the County Recorder) the publicly available list of folks who vote in municipal elections.

I think most people know that the elections soliciting the highest number of votes are the National elections – particularly when a President is being elected. US House and Senate races are pretty high profile, too, in the off-year but municipal races have the lowest voter participation of all elections. Do most people REALLY care about who their mayor is? Maybe in big cities with a lot at stake but smaller towns have the benefit of usually knowing the candidates. If Tom and Mary are both good people, regardless that Tom sports a tat and Mary sometimes can get insufferably long-winded, they are not likely to spend much time prior to filling out the ballot to make their decisions.

But Missoula is just big enough that personal familiarity is just as likely as not likely. So for Dan’s candidate, it comes down to the group that may be the most dedicated voter in the world – the ones who consistently vote on school board elections. That’s an elite group of voters. Most of them even actually study the material, if any, that the candidates have put together to sway votes their directions. Particularly in a year in which there are no National or even State elections at stake.

So my son writes the scripts, trains the volunteers through role-playing exercises and then maybe walks with them or phones a few people for them for a bit until he is sure they are not too nervous about questions for which they have no answers. It’s always okay in door knocking or phone calling to say “Gee, I don’t know that but I can certainly have someone get back to you.” (With our society being very hard on people who ‘don’t know’, admitting you have no answers can be quite daunting.) Heck, from a Campaign Manager or FOs point of view, it’s a second chance to talk to the voter. Score!

But, no matter how well-trained and passionate the walker or caller is, school board voters are the well-informed group that says very politely, “He sounds really good and I will definitely look carefully at his website and written material once my ballot (mail-in type only) gets here.” Geez, no pushovers in this crowd. So Dan has to rely on his most capable phone bankers to get the word across. His candidate CARES about being a judge. He WANTS their vote. He wants it so much he has published his phone number on his website and on his printed mailers or door hangers. That really IS impressive to a lot of folks who are used to the increasingly remote relationships they have with their elected officials.

I guess by now you are wondering why a slightly more than middle-aged mother would suffer a twin bed covered with sheets stamped with tiny little footballs on it that a young boy has willingly agreed to give up for his Dad to spend my days walking or phoning for a candidate from whom I may never actually benefit. Yeah, well part of it is I trained my son to be political and I am having to live with the consequences of that. I also taught him to look at ALL the candidates before coloring in the little circle because the right person may not be the most obvious. But I also have a sense that I am watching a unique democratic play from a front-row seat being directed by an increasingly capable director who continues to sharpen his skills and knowledge with every single election.

At some point, I really believe my political son will decide that HE wants to run for office. HE will be looking for some slightly disheveled, smart strategist willing to work for little or nothing just because he or she believes in democracy and the person for whom they are working. I hope some other son or daughter’s mother steps forward to help her child in my child’s race. And I personally pledge to find them some decent ‘volunteer housing’ if they come from somewhere else in order to give my son the chance to make his particular piece of the world a better place. Heck, if (when) my son runs, I may be able to give them my own bedroom because I’ll most likely be sleeping on a cot in his campaign office. The desk, I’m sure, will be already claimed by his campaign manager.

 

OMENS AND INSPIRATIONS

I've been kicked out of Wonderland. I’ve had my summer sojourn and this morning as I pass the open gates of Yellowstone, I feel disoriented and a bit sad. I can honestly understand how people get so used to an environment, especially if it is as special as Yellowstone, and why they go into withdrawal when they leave.

I say goodbye to Merry, my coworker who has been my able wingman on our journeys in and around the Park. I give her a cd by Ludovico Einaudi that we often played at high volume as we drove through the thermal landscapes of the Park and the tall mountain scenery surrounding it. She is a ‘core seasonal’ and is headed to Grand Canyon. Lucky her. She is the hospitality equivalent of the migrant workers who travel from place to place as work presents itself. A lot of Xanterra employees are like this – it’s a whole subculture.

On our drive through the Park under an overcast sky, there were already signs the shutdown was over. I thougt I would be grumpy about sharing the Park but when I see a couple practically skip to the boardwalks at the Terraces, my heart leaps for joy.  Even having experienced this magical place almost all to myself, if it was in my power to keep the wilderness for only me and my like-minded friends, I just couldn’t do it. I love, love, love the looks of awe and inspiration on visitors’ faces when they witness Old Faithful or a stately bull elk or a large herd of bison trudging along in the middle of the road. I love the children leaping out of their cars in excitement to head for the Paintpots or the thundering Yellowstone Falls. I also know that the more people come to see these wonders, the more political power there will be to influence things like shutdowns or drilling in the pristine Arctic.

I stop at the West Entry booth to talk to the Ranger. Merry and I speculated, already spyng a good number of ubiquitous fly fishers on the Madison just inside the West Entrance, that quite possibly a line of vehicles had been waiting at the gate for the Rangers to open the gates. After thanking the Ranger for his untiring work to preserve our sacred places, I ask him. Indeed, not a long line, but the Rangers expect to be swamped tomorrow when the word of Wonderland’s reopening really gets out. We both commiserate on how happy we are to see the end of Shutdown.

Boy, after such a tedious political drama, am I in need of a little inspiration. Caffeine will have to be an adequate substitute. Before I leave West Yellowstone, I will just pop in for a coffee to go at Eagle’s Store, a historic local ice cream and soda fountain right on the corner  of Yellowstone Avenue and Highway 287. The coffee pot is nearly empty and as I wait for a fresh brew, I ask the soda jerk and the only other patron, a local named Lee Lowry, what they thought of the end of Shutdown. I can tell their joy and relief is genuine. West Yellowstone, and its jobs, would not exist without the visitors to Yellowstone National Park.

We begin to talk of other things. Tyler Johnson, the soda jerk, is a cosmic spray-paint artist and he proudly shows Lee and I his work on his notepad. We talk about Tyler’s passion for his art and I tell him his work reminds me of fantasy landscapes. Tyler tells me he has written three fantasy books and is on his fourth. He shows us the first few paragraphs of his latest, all about wizards and wizardlings. This guy is good.

I ask him if he gets his inspiration from Tolkien and he says yes and also from Christopher Paolini, the author of the fantasy series Inheritance Cycle. Tyler tells me he has trouble promoting his works, partially because he lives with Autism Spectrum Disorder (a form previously called Asperger’s Syndrome). He tells me when he paints, the constant shaking in his hand disappears. I share that my own son lives with Tourette Syndrome and that when he reads his tics disappear. We agree that when people with movement disorders find a focus for their passion, engaging in that passion often lessons their symptoms. As writers, we share how we promote our work and both Lee and I encourage him to keep writing and develop some spray-paint art to illustrate his books – or vice versa.

Lee is killing time at Eagle’s Nest while his lady love of 50 years attends a class in West Yellowstone. Retired in 2003 from the nuclear facility near Idaho Falls, Idaho, Lee took up playing the electric organ a few years ago.  Lee had played a tuba but had never even touched a keyboard in his life. After seeing a demonstration of a Lowrey organ at the Idaho State Fair, he was invited to attend a free organ lesson. That lesson turned into a passion that extends way beyond Lee’s living room. He is now on his fourth organ (each progressively more technical and versatile) and has played in front of crowds as large as 200 people. It’s obvious how this retired couple stays young!

What a joy it is to share our passions at a soda fountain in a virtually empty little town waiting for the return of late visitors to Yellowstone! As I listen to Lee and Tyler talk with such excitement about their passions, I slowly realize that writing is mine. It’s easy to encourage people like Tyler and Lee to follow their passions, but I realize I have been remiss about following mine. How inspiring these two men are this morning! Just the remedy I need to get over my malaise at having to leave Wonderland.

An hour later, my truck Yiha and I start the drive up to Missoula via Hebgen Lake and Ennis in the Madison Valley, a journey of stunning scenery where the sun begins peaking out of the clouds, playing hide and seek with the hills and dales, creating sharp photogenic contrasts in the folds. Old wooden barns, the perfect foreground to snow-capped mountains, catch my eye and I stop to take pictures, of course, but mostly store the beauty in my memories as I amble by. I am Missoula bound.

I toy with the idea of stopping at Fairmont Hot Springs near Anaconda to soak my body, weary from packing and preparing for the leaving. I love visiting hot springs, whether they are tiny, rock-walled wilderness holes or giant commercial pools like the famous pools in Glenwood Springs Colorado. I decide I’ll have plenty of time for a soak and still get to Missoula in time for dinner.  I find Fairmont is a thriving commercial resort hotel and conference center with hot and warm pools both inside and out, tucked into the  Pintler Wilderness Area, not too far from historic Anaconda. Pretty plush for a hot spring.

I soak and practice my own version of hot springs yoga for awhile both inside and out then wander back to get my gear and get back on the road. A red-headed toddler, barely able to keep his balance, busily tries to pull the keys out of the pool lockers. A woman I assume to be his Mom stands sentry nearby and we joke that he will either be a locksmith or a safecracker. Turns out the little red-head is a foster child, removed from drug-addicted parents. The woman, recently transplanted from Upper Minnesota to Butte, is in the process of certifying as a foster mom so she can eventually adopt the child if possible. The child is currently under the care of another woman keeping track of their collective broods in the pool, one who is an autistic boy, also a foster child.

Sometimes, when you live in a bubble like Yellowstone, you stop caring about what’s happening in the world, convinced that the ‘news’ is mostly about wars and killings and hunger. What’s important is the local news, the condition of the roads, the weather and anything the government is doing to make it difficult to stay living in the bubble. Leaving the bubble means re-entering this world, once again coping with a world that is not only dangerous (even Yellowstone is definitely dangerous at times) but malicious as well. But today, whatever sadness and discontent I felt as I left the gate at Yellowstone has been erased by the passion of Tyler and Lee and by two nameless women who intend to lovingly raise the unwanted children of accidental parents.

When I went into the coffee shop this morning looking for a bit of inspiration, I had no idea just how much inspiration I would find. Maybe, just maybe, this day is an omen for the next step of my life.

ON THE ROAD.....AGAIN

This morning I leave Wonderland. And in the early morning hours, Obama signed the bill ending the shutdown and making it possible for our sacred places once more to reopen. I hope by the end of today, the gates will be open and visitors will once more stream into the Park. We need more places like Yellowstone and they need to stay open. Evidenced by the millions of visitors each year to our National Parks, the craving for nature is real in all of us and our National Parks are the best balm I know for this obsession.

It is lightly snowing here in Mammoth, perhaps Mother Nature’s last gift to me as I leave this delightful place.  My leaving won’t be magical like Alice’s or Dorothy’s. I haven’t suddenly ‘outgrown’ Wonderland and haven’t been dreaming. I have no ruby-red slippers.  My packed pickup and I will slip out of the Park quietly, through the morning fogs created by rising steam from the thermal features mixing with the cold Yellowstone morning air. I will convoy with a coworker, sliding by snow-dusted pines and through the mist down the west side of the Grand Loop to Madison and then out through the West Entrance. Perhaps the Rangers have reopened the gates but if not we will open the locked gates with the combination necessitated by a bureaucracy that is far away from its results. There, my friend and I will say goodbye to Yellowstone, for now, as we undoubtedly take pictures of ourselves in front of the newly opened entry booths

I am lucky. My department had enough work left to keep me busy right up to quitting time. I’ve been saying goodbye to other coworkers all last week as the need for their services ended. Because face it, for the past three weeks, we have all been employees of a hospitality company with no guests to which to offer our hospitality.

Even though I am very sorry the shutdown occurred, I also realize just how incredibly lucky I have been to experience Yellowstone in the fall with so very few people and so very many relaxed animals. Once everyone leaves, it is truly evident that Yellowstone belongs to the critters. It has been very quiet here except for the lovelorn bugling of the elk (even though most of the cows have already mated by now) and the occasional grunt of the bison. Once in a while a service truck lumbered down the road but traffic has been rare.

Last Sunday it snowed here at Mammoth, sometimes so thickly I could barely distinguish the outlines of the rail fence around the steam vents in the parade lawn outside my window. The ornamental hardwoods around Mammoth were draped with heavy snow, their branches sagging almost down to the ground. The cone-shaped spruces looked like perfect Christmas trees decorated with brilliantly white tinselly crystals.

Another worker and I walked around in the snow, up to the Terraces where we took pictures from the middle of the empty road. Heck, I even took a picture of the empty road standing on the yellow line.  We walked down to the tiny chapel at the end of Officer’s Row, taking pictures of the snow-covered mountains and the locked gate leading down to Roosevelt and Tower along the East Loop. Everywhere quiet beauty surrounded us.

As we walked behind the Chapel, we heard several bulls bugling and we were caught up in the magic of a snow-laden Wonderland. One big bull, on the hills to the west of the old stone chapel, accompanied by another down in the Campground below the hill and a third down near the Ranger residence area, bugled a song of unrequited love. They sounded lonely, plaintive – pulled by instinct to complete their business with their harems and then leave the easy life on the Mammoth lawns to return to the forest to survive another solitary winter.

I’ve learned a lot about Yellowstone and its natural wonders this summer. I have witnessed the transformation of majestic bull elk to sleep-deprived, sex-starved sultans of hesitant harems. I learned about the old bison bulls, leaving the herd to wander alone through the forest until they become food for other critters. I’ve become somewhat comfortable with the idea of grizzlies in my neighborhood. I’ve begun to learn to fly fish, becoming more aware of the movement of the water and the feeding habits of Yellowstone’s trout species. I’ve watched the miracle of cutthroat struggling upstream to spawn in crystal-clear brooks. I’ve observed osprey take care of their young in their nest high above Lamar River. I now know the different types of thermal features here in the Park and why their prismatic run-offs produce different colors. And yet, I feel I still have so much to learn about this particular patch of the Mother’s Nature.

I’ve also learned a lot about myself, becoming more aware of my personal need to hear the beat of the wilderness on a daily basis. I acknowledge I want to live in an environment where everyone always carries a camera in order to memorialize those nearly daily moments of awe. I am more than ever aware that I thrive in an environment where I am an interloper, an observer to a landscape that does not need my help to survive. That kind of environment challenges me, hones my own survival instincts just as it does the critters of the natural Earth. It also releases me from the responsibility of being ‘in charge’ for truly we humans are not. The task for me is to exist in this environment with as little impact as possible on the ones who really belong here.

I’ve learned that I am at my very core a solitary person, one who needs nature’s quiet sounds to think and pray – the slap of the water on the shore, the wind through the trees, the rustle of the bushes as critters pass by. I’ve learned to do without television, decent wifi, even heat and hot water sometimes. And I’ve learned I don’t miss these things when the environment itself fills my soul and keeps me entertained and thoughtful. I’ve always been in closer touch with Spirit in the wilderness but this summer has taught me I am so much more when Spirit is close to me all the time.

Both Alice and Dorothy were given challenges they had to meet in order to return home. They both returned more resourceful, more open, more courageous young women than they were when they began. For that is the hero’s journey – essentially all of our journeys as we travel through our own lives. I came to Yellowstone presented with the challenges of getting over personal grief and figuring out what part of my 60-year-old life was worth keeping and what I need to let go. My life has to change – the lives of the persons most important to me have changed and so must I if I am to remain vital and happy and energized.

As with most successful employees (and there are many who are not ‘successful’ at living in the fishbowl created by close living), I have been getting constant questions from full-timers and Returners (the name given to those seasonals that come back ‘home’ like boomerangers for another round and then another) - am I going to come back next summer? I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

I have the feeling I’m not done with Yellowstone. There are hikes I wanted to take but couldn’t because of the fires and then because of the shutdown. There are ‘honey holes’, as my fishing mentor Master Wiley calls them, I want to fish. There are sunsets to witness and new interesting characters to meet. Time will tell, though. There are also other Wonderlands like Glacier and Denali. And as nuts as it sounds, I really think I want to live the very isolated existence of at least one winter at Old Faithful sometime in the next few years.

I feel a bit like Dorothy must have felt when she first met the Scarecrow. Which way to Oz? she asked him. Scarecrow told her it depended on what she wanted to do on the way. Oz, for me, can be any wilderness filled with miraculous life forms and fantastical creatures. Dorothy chose the most direct path but Alice wandered somewhat aimlessly through Wonderland. Maybe I’ll do the same or maybe, just maybe, I’ll follow the road directly back to this particular Wonderland, my Muse for the summer.

Regardless, today I start on my last leg of the journey I started last May. I will travel up to Missoula to say goodbye to my son, then on down to Utah where I will stay for awhile in much more luxurious surroundings than those in which I have been living all summer. When I get back to Tucson, I may just sit on my back porch for the better part of the first week, greeting Brother Sun as he makes his way over the ridge to the east of my house and chatting with Sister Moon about what’s been happening while I’ve been gone. I will listen for the song of Friend Phainopepla who lives in the wash below my home and watch for signs of the neighborhood bobcat and javelina.

In the end, after an entire summer in the Wilderness, I’m not any closer to knowing what’s next for me but I remain convinced it will be wonderful and exciting. I’ve decided, gentle readers, I would like to invite you along. Earth is a rather spectacular place and I have only seen a very tiny part of it. So shalom, aloha, but not goodbye. Come along with me as I soak up the sights, sounds and scents of this wonderful world.