...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.
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