Sic Semper Tyrannis

Great Road Trips I Have Known-Episode V:The Dream Child

The year after my trip to California, I was on a limited budget and compressed time schedule, due in large part to being a brand new homeowner. But this life of domestication was not enough to silence those strange longings for the road and to “get away.” Highway 50 was calling to me again. So I decided to take a short trip and see Arizona, Utah and Colorado again.

There’s a point when you head north of Flagstaff on the road that leads to the Grand Canyon, and you reach the top of this huge hill, turn a curve and see what looks like the entire United States before you, down in the valley.

There’s something about the landscape there that makes me feel like I’ve gone back in time. I expect to see cowboys and Indians riding by at any time. But in a way, those huge expanses of sparsely populated land do give us a vision of the continent’s past. For, what are a canyon wall, or mountain if not a visual representation of the passage of time? Indeed, most of the features of the American Southwest would not exist without having been carved out by the knife of time.

Anyway, you just drive for miles and miles on those lonely high plains, surrounded by rocks and plateaus and storms creeping along the horizon, and every now and then you’ll see a little trailer with rusted-out truck parts and random household appliances out in front, parked away from the road in the protective shadow of a desert canyon wall, or you’ll see a little one-hallway-school out in the middle of what seems like nowhere. I see those things and I wonder what life is like for the people that inhabit those lonely places. I wonder what the average day is like for them. Are they somehow stuck in life? Or are they running or hiding from something? I wonder about the stories that lead up to their now, living there amongst the ghosts of rugged individualists past.

posted by Mike @ 3:48 PM