What a relief it was to leave the overcrowded camping in the Southwest, and head through Nevada and Idaho. For proximity to town I stooped to camp at a place likely to be listed on one of those vile free-campsites apps. For a couple days, my luck held and my little dog and I had a great time walking single track trails, while some bad weather blew over.
Then a 'van nomad' showed up. I became furious and left a couple hours later. And yet I was laughing at my own rage. The other camper wasn't doing anything wrong. It was what he represented that offended me -- let's just leave it like that, rather than go into my standard stump speech.
There was a promising gravel road a couple miles away that I had always meant to check out. There are patterns that one can "smell" off a good atlas. There is only Hope -- there are no guarantees. The geography had not really changed from the last location, but mentally and emotionally it was a whole new world.
How's the old song go?: "Wiiiide Open Spaces...room to make a big mistake."
Wide open indeed. The photo makes it look like the Great Plains but in fact it was gradual ascending hills. When the weather settled down, the two-track roads would be great for mountain biking with my little dog. Nothing but grass and sagebrush, huffing and puffing our way up to higher and cooler locations. Soon we could see snow on still-higher hills. It would be a few miles before the trees started.
My little girl certainly understands the Dixie Chick song, as the video shows. It was taken in southwestern Utah a couple weeks ago.
Here at last I had found a place where the formula-following 'van nomads' or other scenery tourists would not be.
I had slipped into an other-worldly mood that William James, Henry David Thoreau, or W.H. Hudson might compare to a religious mindset. But it is not necessary to invoke an Imaginary Being. Let us attribute to a real human being certain marvelous capabilities that other animal species are also capable of, each in their own way.
Humans have imaginations, powerful under the right circumstances. All it takes is a sharp need to escape some unpleasantness, a little uncertainty or risk, a lack of routine, some strenuous effort, and an absence of rules and regulations and fees and reservations and formula-following human visitors; and off the imagination soars, into gently ascending hills and puffy clouds and blue.
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