Westward Bound: Roadtrip Reflections Two Months In
The West is quiet. It’s far apart. I feel none of the Midwest warmth, but also none of the Midwest focus on who you are, where your family comes from, what you look like. There’s no small-town feel; there aren’t towns. Just big stretches of completely different landscapes, studded now and again with a big city, each with its own culture and subcultures, all of them shadowed by the nature that surrounds them. Two-lane highways stitch the mountains to the shrubby hills and the technicolor desert to the monogreen fields.
We drove from the Grand Canyon to St. George two days ago. In a half hour of driving, we gained 1,200 feet of altitude, dropped 30 degrees in temperature, and traded in wide mesas for tall alpine forests and little baby deer darting across the interstate.
The diversity of things to rest your eyes upon and the willingness of people to not rest their eyes upon you create a strange environment. One where communion with nature is better understood than communion with other humans.
On the Road = Microscope, Meet Relationship
Diego and I have spent more alone time in the West than we have anywhere else. Our West adventures started off in Denver in Matt’s full house, where there was always someone around and always something to do, but after a few days in Salt Lake City with my friend Skye, we hit the road.
For a week, we spent time only with each other. 20% of that time was spent in the car (we clocked 36 of our 168 hours behind the wheel of the rented Ford Fusion hybrid we’d taken to calling Evita, after Eva Peron), where we were literally locked in with each other. The rest of it was on hiking tracks and at lookouts, where the only escape would’ve been plummeting off the side of a cliff. Then there were hotel rooms, which—you guessed it—we shared.
It wasn’t easy. I relish alone time, which was impossible to get, particularly without hurting Diego’s feelings, as he has less of a need for solitude than I do. We were already more stressed out than normal, having blown our budget our of the water to rent the car and get the hotel rooms, and we devolved into squabbling over mundane things. Those skirmishes turned into big fights about who we are and how we are with each other.
We were forced to confront a lot of the hardest parts of our relationship—our cultural differences, our communication differences, our very different weaknesses. We’ve come through the other side, helped by new practices like using code words to indicate bad moods, but the questions we’ve unearthed on this trip haven’t been resolved.
A complicating factor was the fact that we started beating ourselves up even more for fighting during what should have been a highlight of our U.S. adventure. We were on vacation from our lifestyle, which is fairly vacation-like to begin with, and this is how we were spending it?
But then I realized that those higher expectations—that feeling of “this is expensive and special, every moment should be happy”—was in fact worsening our issues. I’d have a version of how everything should work in my head, and when it began to go awry, I got crabby, which led to more arguments.
I realized that without a rock-solid communication strategy honed in times of low stress, you’ll be absolutely screwed in times of high stress. I overheard bickering parents all over the national parks fighting over who’d forgotten to pack the lunches or who was hiking too fast. It was sad to watch, particularly when you think that they’re probably using a large chunk of their on-average 16 annual vacation days on these family adventures only to have them tainted with frustration.
We need federally mandated vacation in the U.S.; we need to put less pressure on ourselves to feel and look like all things are going well all the time. But in a world without those things, I want at least the life that I am constructing with Diego to be in line with those values. I love that we balance the hours we work (or look for work) with the hours we relax or explore. I need to come to love that sometimes things aren’t perfect, and that unhappy emotions are valid emotions, deserving of their own time and space, not meant to be hurriedly smoothed over.
I don’t mean to write only about the bad times, though I realize I have a penchant for doing that. They just seem richer to dig into than the good ones—they’re the ones that make me think. But the good ones exist, too. The West has seen us walking around in the rain after a tough confrontation with a friend; climbing a mountain, sleep-deprived as all get out, egging each other to climb higher and higher and making it to the top through debilitating giggle fits; making each other inventive breakfasts from the Chopped-worthy collection of vittles in my canvas food bag. Diego has made me feel loved, supported, and cherished almost all of the time, and the West has been home to a disproportionately large number of our favorite memories of this trip, even if it’s also where we’ve had our worst fights.
For Purple Mountain Majesties
The West made me think about my relationship with Diego, and it also made me think about my relationship with America. I don’t think I understood or appreciated how different this country can be, how diverse it is. Traveling from Michigan out west took me through landscapes and towns I’d imagined but never experienced, and it’s only in the experiencing of something like America that you get a sense for how incredible it really is.
I came to love every region for something different.
The dry deserts of Navajo Nation in northern Arizona for their horizons, where red-orange sand met bright-blue sky and proved complementary color theory true. Where roadside markets selling cedar berries and horsehair pottery stand against a backdrop of stretched-out mesas, lopsided layer cakes of millions of years of compressed sediment in rusty colors that bake in the sun.
Northern Utah for its mountains that crest into the sky like crocuses, wide with snow and looming unapologetically above the boxy buildings of downtown Salt Lake.
Southern Utah for its hills, bright green and merry, folding into each other in an undulating wave of shrubs and pines.
Eastern Utah for its dry, rocky valleys, home to a Union Pacific ghost train disintegrating slowly into rust and dust, its ruddy red walls speckled with holes and its black wheels stalled.
The Canyon collection of parks—Bryce, Grand, and Lands—for their water- and wind-carved sculptures, erosion caught paused with its hands up, the arches and valleys and hoodoos (that’s really what they’re called!) left behind, resigned to the whittling that’s to come.
The best American landscape quotes—“The mountains are calling and I must go,” Muir; “There is a delight in the hardy life of the open,” Teddy Roosevelt—were inspired in the West. I can see why. The sheer immensity of everything here is impossible to describe. The West’s mountains are what all mountains are trying to be when they break through the earth’s crust; the West’s forests, all shingled pines and loamy soil, are what all forests want to emulate. I’m happy to be here, happy to be seeing it, happy to be creating my own little ode to it in the Notes folder of my iPhone, in my battered notebook, in this blog.
And I’m especially happy to be seeing it in a car, crisscrossing it like so many explorers and writers before me, on a Great American Road Trip®. Not until now did I really feel like I was in communion with the road-trippers who came before me. Bus-hopping-along doesn’t have quite the same ring.
I loved being on the road.
I loved the signs for fresh jerky that happened to appear just before a pile of roadkill—a deer, maybe, with its legs flung up underneath it—shouting ELK, BUFFALO, BEEF in neon yellow and red.
I loved how the curves took us up, up, up into hills that looked like a watercolor palette, streaked ochre, rust, lime, cerulean.
I loved the valleys, with the hints of snow melting down their edges like dollops of cream. I loved the steep gradients of sediment that gave way to long grass at seed, waving in the wind, their grained tops nodding in quiet harmony.
It astounded me, the scale of it all. I saw tiny little roads jutting off the main thoroughfares and I saw the Playmobile trees set down at the end of the striated rows of green, green forest and I realized how big it all us. How small we all are. How much we have to take care of.
The Life-Changing Magic of National Parks
Diego and I visited five national parks in seven days; each of them could filled a week on its own. We waded in waist-deep water in Zion’s Narrows; we watched the sunset over the rim of the Grand Canyon at Navajo Point; we hiked to Delicate Arch and ran down its sandstone base; we pulled ourselves up, one step at a time, to the summit of Bryce’s 9,000-foot-high Inspiration Point; we slid into the cool caves of Canyonlands and greeted the clouds.
We saw just a sliver of the hundreds of acres of land those parks contain, and those parks themselves are only a sliver of our national parks system. That system was started in 1916 with the protection of what is now Yellowstone National Park, and has grown to include over 52 million acres of protected land within the U.S.
I’m glad I saw them. I’m glad we have them. I hope we continue to have them for generations to come.
We’re not on track for that, though. The Trump administration is gutting them across the board: they’ve cut the parks budget by 15%, they’ve downsized national monuments and sold land bordering national parks for fracking, and they shut down the government for over a month but left the national parks open, which resulted in irreversible damage and vandalism.
Get there while you can. Donate if you’re able. Leave them better than you found them because that’s the Girl Scout way.
The parks aren’t what I expected. Not natural-beauty-wise, which I touched on above; they blow away all expectations. But not logistics-wise, either. I’d been to national parks in Argentina where you walked up to a trail map and then up a mountain, and to ones in New Zealand, where you registered yourself with the parks service before disinfecting your boots, then walked up to a trail map and up a mountain, and to several other countries in between; almost all of them included that pivotal step of walking up mountains (or plateaus or hills or cliffs or whatever it was the park was protecting). The walking was the only real method of seeing them.
But American national parks are built for Americans, it seems. They’re long and sprawling, and you’re allowed to bring a private vehicle into almost all of them. I was expecting intense day hikes requiring full packs of provisions, but that’s not how it works, usually. You park somewhere, leave your sandwiches in the car, wander off to see a viewpoint, pop back into the car, and drive to the next one, tooling around to your heart’s content. Visiting them is less active, more streamlined. They’ve been optimized for quantity of visitors, and they’re impressive—the roads in and out are freshly paved, maps are great and plentiful, the rangers are knowledgeable and friendly, the bathrooms are well-marked.
But they are very much made for the individual unit. The person, the family. You need a car to get around them; even if you are doing some long-term camping or backpacking within them, you need a vehicle to get there. No one nods “hello” to you on the trails; you don’t ask someone in line in the visitor center what they’re up to. You stay with your own and you explore in these tightly managed loops, always returning to the start when it’s time to go.
Seeing how our national parks work made me wonder if country’s land reflects its people or if its people reflect its land. American culture gets typecast as being cold—we need three feet of space between us when we’re conversing, we don’t kiss on the face when we greet—but how could we be anything else? How could we be close-knit when our country stretches out so lazily, unfurling over buttes and deserts and mountains and marshes and lakes? So much separates us.
En Fin
This part of my country leaves me more hopeful than the Midwest. The West has shown me how small humanity is. How much longer the earth’s been at this whole world-changing thing than we have; how much we have to go. It has shown me what resilience looks like.
But it’s also left me more isolated. There’s something about this culture and this landscape that cuts off new relationships, that pushes you back on the ones you already have. The warmth here is not in the people. It is in the way the mountains rise up, blue and waiting, in the distance; the way the rocks nestle into each other; the way the river returns, each day, to cut through a deeper path, to point out the way.
2 Comments
Leave your reply.