fires and stars and roadtrips

Roadtrips are an art form

There are wonderful places waiting for you to join them.

Places with the open night sky and more stars than you can count. Places where the Milky Way is so bright that it almost casts a shadow. 

Places where the campfire cracks and pops as you tell stories and make music even though dawn is only a few hours away. 

There are beaches, there are mountains, there is the high New Mexico desert. 

There are little towns with strange names and curious people who think you must be exotic and will talk about things you can't imagine. 

There are foods you won't find anywhere else. Foods that can only good here. 

There are long stretches of road and cruise control. There are songs you sing along to while one dog tries to help with the driving and the other navigates.

Things go right, things go wrong. You get by on  your wits as much as your credit card. 

You do this to be curious and free. 

It costs gas, but you are careful everywhere else. This is too important.  This is art.

Some say it costs time; but it gives you time.  This is living and there are moments of magic. Who needs a TV when you can watch a a thunderstorm chase across the desert with its rain evaporating before it hits the ground?  Who needs someone else's story when you are making your own.

___

well, i'm standing on a corner 

in winslow, arizona 

and such a fine sight to see

it's colleen, my lord, in her long-bed ford

out writing  her own history

(munched up lyrics by a friend)

 

Comments

[Doug]

Well-said. Hooray for road trips! I'm heading cross-country from Atlantic to Pacific this week. Our 2-oz. budgie is along for the ride, so I suspect he'll be the source of any poetic travel musings...

[Linda in New York City]

Hi Colleen:

I love the new images on the site. And speaking of road trips...my first job after moving to Santa Fe from the East Coast was delivering dealer trades for the Volvo dealership. I would drive one new Volvo or Mazda to points in New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and Texas. I didn't make a lot of money, but it was an amazing way to explore the Great Southwest while someone else covered my gas and meals.

While I had to deliver cars on tight deadlines, I could dawdle on the return trip, taking the back roads, camping in Monument Valley and waking to views of the Mittens; spending an afternoon with my face to the sun in Chaco Canyon; hiking the mountains outside Boulder; or swimming in the cold Barton Springs Pools of Austin.

One winter night while driving South through Chama, I slowed as a herd of elk crossed the road. That's when I noticed the most amazing meteor showers filling the sky like a speeded-up photographic experiment. There was nothing else to do, of course, but pull off the road and watch the show. Amazing.

[Linda in New York City]

Colleen: this New Yorker article, "Song of the Earth" (May 2008), may interest you. It's about Alaska-based composer John Luther Adams who is known for his "Sonic Geography." The piece by Alex Ross focuses on John's sound-and-light installation- The Place Where You Go to Listen - at the Museum of the North on the campus of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

Ross describes it best: “The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound."

Wondrous stuff.