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.

Quick Thoughts on a Road Trip West: Up High, Down Below

Traveling Glacier Park's Going to the Sun Road makes one feel on top of the earth. Walking among Yellowstone Park's geothermal features makes one feel uncomfortably close to earth's nethermost regions. Either place, one is may be forgiven for feeling small and powerless in the face of overwhelming geological forces. One may also be expected, no matter what his or her religious convictions, to feel the force of the Psalmist's question: "What is humanity that you–God–should pay any attention at all to us?"

Am I wrong in thinking Yellowstone Park is like no place else on earth? I don't care; I like thinking that. After a day mostly spent exploring thermal pools and geysers and the like we visited the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. It took our breath away in a way that perhaps only the other Grand Canyon might do. On our drive back to our room we saw bison and elk and one pronghorn grazing in vast valleys cut by glaciers and rivers, almost the way nature meant them to feed. Our planet is writ large in Yellowstone, and complex, and vulnerable, too. Awe strikes unawares, and even massive buildings such as the Old Faithful Inn cannot compete.

What's been the most impressive and moving site or experience on this Road Trip West? About that I have to think much harder than I have energy to think at the end of our last full day of sight-seeing. (We will perhaps drive by the Tetons on our way east tomorrow, but do not have time to explore them...everyone has to head home eventually.) A summary post will no doubt follow as I process and feel it all. Meantime, thanks for coming along for this ride.

Quick Thoughts on a Road Trip West: A River Runs Through It

I-90 from Spokane WA through the Idaho panhandle and well into Montana may be the most spectacular interstate highway I've ever traveled. The road follows long-followed routes between tree-covered mountains, races up and down spectacular passes, and grants one astonishing view after another  of this grand corner of our planet.

The highway weaves around the Clark Fork River for many miles as it approaches Missoula, the main setting of Norman Maclean's short novel, A River Runs Through It. Its story is based upon Maclean's growing up in Missoula, where his Presbyterian-minister father taught him how to fly fish and how to write. Many of my minister friends saw and loved the film Robert Redford made of A River Runs Through It about twenty years ago. It so moved me that I bought and read the book itself and about wore out the CD of the sound track. I think reading that book was the first time in my life that I read something and said to myself, "I want to write like that guy writes." It turned me on to writing as an art, not just as a means of sharing information.

A River Runs Through It also touched me, I think, because my brother, Don, was at the time I read it fighting the cancer that eventually took his life. I identified with Norman, who could do nothing to help his brother, Paul (played by a relatively unknown young actor named Brad Pitt), in his struggle against a very different illness.

I went on to read all I could find of the rest of Maclean's work. There apparently isn't much: two longer short stories usually published with River; Young Men and Fire that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago; and a book of various writings by and about  Maclean that his colleagues at the University of Chicago put together after his death. That volume includes pieces he was working on about The Battle of Little Big Horn, which I will reread when we get home since I've now been there myself.

So as Maxine drove I-90 nearing Missoula, I Googled "First Presbyterian Missoula Maclean" and learned that in 2009 a monument to Norman's father had been placed in front of the current FPC building (built in 1915). I wondered if we should stop to find it, and Maxine knew I absolutely needed to do that. Map Quest makes these things easy, and five minutes off the freeway we were at the beautifully well-kept brick building, and I was posing beside a large upright stone engraved with a picture of a fly-fisherman about to land a fish from a Montana river (surely the Bitterroot), and this inscription:

"In memory of Dr. John Norman Maclean, pastor of First Presbyterian Church from 1909 to 1925, whose love of God, family and creation inspired the story A River Runs Through It and construction of this sanctuary designed by his friend and church member, Missoula architect A. J. Gibson."

I feel as if my first visit to Montana has been somewhat like the first personal meeting of long-time pen pals. You know one another, and you are eager to experience one another in the flesh, but you are anxious that you won't live up to one another's expectations. That one or both of you might have mislead the other about who you really are. Norman Maclean's writings, however, seem to me to have presented Montana as the bold and beautiful place it really is.

Tonight we sleep in Gardiner MT, just north of the Wyoming state line, and about a mile from the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park. The next three mornings we will drive through the Roosevelt Arch to explore the wonders of one more spectacular place in our great country. I am very grateful that we can do this, and for all who've made it possible for us to do it...and for family and teachers and writers who gave me the hunger to want to explore and experience so much.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Music to My Ears

While filling up our car with gas today in Spokane, I noticed that a fairly battered white pick-up had parked near me. A man dressed in work clothes got out and went into the store, leaving the windows open and the radio on. What a surprise to hear the music of strings and woodwinds floating out that window...obviously a classical-style chamber work of some kind. When he came out I resisted the temptation to congratulate him on his musical taste; how condescending that would have sounded!

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Family Business

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Family Business

I keep trying to think of something to write about Glacier National Park that may not have been said already by someone, somewhere.  But I am sure the picture I posted on Facebook a couple of days ago and the many other pictures I took before and after it would be the best commentary I could offer.  I guess I will simply take note of what seems like a side issue, but is important to all of our visits to parks and monuments preserved for us and shared with us by the Federal government.

I think Ken Burns called our national parks our government's best idea, and while I can't say that for sure, I am sure they are a darned good idea by our government. From this consumer's experience they are well-run and appropriately shared with us and will hundreds of thousands of visitors from overseas. I can't imagine what they would be like if they'd been left to private enterprise and entrepreneurship. They are beautiful, mostly clearly presented, and offer nearly everyone of nearly all physical abilities a chance to experience them.  They employ highly-dedicated staffs, supplemented by equally-dedicated volunteers. I know not everyone is happy with everything they do, but achieving that would be impossible. Their mission is too big to expect perfection.

Our parks even take global warming/climate change seriously, because they see it happening and they see what it is doing. It would be good for a number of the members of congress to spend some time at the national parks for which they are responsible, although I fear what they might try to do to alter their message about our climate if they knew what was being said. Maybe this is one area of public life where we're better off if they stay locked inside the beltway.

We are now in Spokane WA with our daughter and son-in-law and two granddaughters. The older of them celebrated her 5th birthday in a city park with a bunch of her (and her parents') best friends, and for the last half-hour her 2-year-old sister has been engaged in a fairly predictable end-of-a-big-day meltdown.  But it sounds as if a bath and the girls' patient parents have settled them into sleep mood, and soon all will be quiet so we adults can relax with appropriate drinks after hosting a big party in the 95-degree heat of the day.

In a couple of days we turn around and head back east, seeing Yellowstone en route. Can anything top what we've seen already. Maybe not, but I don't think it will matter.

Quick Notes from a Road Trip West: Miles and miles and miles and miles...

North out of Butte MT, driving the little Prius up the steep, steep grade of I-15, we catch a glimpse of the enormous copper mine that skirts Butte's northern edge.  The land flattens into the familiar high prairie ranch land we've see so much of already, then dips into the valley from which little Helena governs this huge state. North of Helena we come to the Gates of the Mountains, named by Lewis OR Clark (I can't remember which). I look for a memorial to the Mann Gulch fire that occurred in the area in1949, taking the lives of about a dozen young smoke jumpers, and subject of Norman MacLean's Young Men and Fire, but it and they seem forgotten on this busy Montana highway in 2013.  We visit the Lewis AND Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, but didn't have time to see the falls themselves, great as they surely are.  (It is almost impossible to imagine how the Corps of Discovery made that journey and learned so much from it.) Then we pass through farmland that makes me think of Iowa-without the cornfields though. Then back to grassland as we head west into the foothills of the Rockies.

You cover a lot of ground fast when you can legally drive 75 mph on the Interstates, 70 on many two-lane roads, and when miles of one-lane construction driving only makes you slow to 65. I ask myself why we can't do that back east, and then realize there's almost no traffic out here compared to New Jersey, just to pick a random example.

Tonight we are ensconced in a lodge just south of Glacier. What vistas of these magnificent mountains we had as we approached them from the east! Now looking forward to two days of seeing this majestic park. Even my cold won't keep me from enjoying it...but don't call me Lewis OR Clark. I'm nowhere near that brave or persistent, even in safe adventures like the one we are now on.