Notes from a Road Trip West: Where It Began

Which is more important: the journey itself or the journey's destination? Is it more important to travel than it is to get there, whether there is determined by you or by someone or something else, where there happens to be?

In our time, pop psychology and philosophy weigh in heavily on the side of the journey itself. Is that because we do not know where are going, or even headed, these days? Or is it that we fear there's nothing out there that we can imagine might be more interesting or challenging than the world we glimpse as we rush through it?

The European-stock scouts and settlers of North America no doubt regarded their journey west as a high-risk necessity on the way to a life-promising destination. There were unimagined vistas to see and prairies and mountains to cross on their way, and those scenes and sights no doubt generated a wonder and an awe in them that our own experience of them can never duplicate. Nevertheless, it was the destination that mattered, that made the journey necessary, and they dearly hoped, worth its many costs.

When we left our home near Cleveland, Ohio, on Tuesday, July 9, 2013, we knew where we were going and we had a fairly clear idea of what we would see and when we would see it. Maxine and I packed all we could into our green Prius, and headed west on the Ohio Turnpike at 75+ miles per hour. The first day we drove some 675 miles to Grundy Center, Iowa, my home town, where we stayed with my mother for three days. Then, on Saturday morning, July 13, we headed west again, mostly on US 20 in Iowa, then jumping north to I-90, our main route for the remainder of our journey.

Our western-most destination was Spokane, Washington, home of our older daughter and her husband and their two children. But it was only an intermediate destination: after three days there, we turned around and headed back east, eventually arriving again where we had started in Ohio, by way of Iowa. The journey itself–nearly 6,000 miles of it–mattered most to us, for its final destination was the familiarity of where we had started. Ironically, even our most western stop, Spokane, was about to lose its significance for us when two weeks after we were there the family moved east to New York State. Will Americans ever learn to sit still?

What follows are entries into my blog, www.coelietterra.blogspot.com, which I made during our journey. I did not intend a travelogue as in a point-by-point description of every experience, but only to post a message coming out of what seemed to me at the time to be most interesting, perhaps even revelatory of the larger reality we were visiting at the time. You have read, two paragraphs ago, one of the few references to our route. What ended up mattering to me on this trip is not the journey nor the destination(s), but the markers along the way...as is true of life itself.

Just before we left home I downloaded an app to my phone called simply, "Altimeter." Turns out not give not only height above sea level, but latitude and longitude. So, at each place we spent the night, I recorded our elevation and our coordinates.

Here in our kitchen in Orange Village, Ohio, we are 1,180 feet above sea level, 41° 25' 46" N, and 81° 28' 19" W. It's a great place to start...and to return to as well.

Notes from a Road Trip West: Noticing Home

It's long past time for that summary post I promised nearly a month ago...

...we drove too quickly through the Tetons, vowing to go back and explore them more fully one day. Little did we know we were about to cross our highest pass on our way east: the sign told us we crossed the Continental Divide this one last time at 9584 feet above sea level, and my altitude app gave just about the same reading. We then drove and drove a long descent through more kinds of landscapes that I can remember, finally landing in Chadron NE (3471 feet, 42° 49' 19" N, 103° 1' 0" W) to spend that night, before the last mad dash to Iowa, three nights there, and home late on August 1.

If there's one word that keeps coming to mind as I recall our journey it is the word "vast." We live in a vast country sprawled across a vast continent, seemingly beyond the bounds of any natural or human limitations. Perhaps that is one reason we American’s play our part on the world stage as if we were answerable to no one but ourselves and our own desires.

Upon and underneath much of the landscape we traveled are the vast resources with which we have built our wealth, and that we count on to propel us into the future. From petroleum to precious metals to just plain, but absolutely essential, water, the great mid-section of North American holds riches every bit as valuable at the fertile Iowa soil of my birth. The cost–human, economic, and environmental–of extracting and exploiting this wealth is enormous, and we are willing to pay it because we trust it will lead to even greater wealth. Maybe it will, though that is not as sure a proposition as it once seemed, as the costs grow greater and the risks to the future livability of the planet increase.

I would like to see us contemplate the vastness of it all, more often, more deeply, more intentionally. To let where we now are sink into us, just as it is, and bring us face-to–face with the graced giftedness of this land we call our home. We might then treat it with the kind of respect we are told the original inhabitants had for the bison and for everything they used in their living. We might then realize that our living is not just an ongoing journey toward an imagined destination, but a series of stops and experiences along the way that hold value and worth in themselves, just as they are, just as we are.