Last night I found myself on a trail inside Mesa Verde National Park. It was almost sunset, and the narrow trail at the top of a mesa was breathtaking at 7000 foot elevation. Travelling with a family is hard, and travelling with two families is even harder. I hung back on the return after we reached the end of the trail. All I could hear was the wind as I recorded a few thoughts.
I ended up alarming my family, who were worried that I might fall and hurt myself on the way back to the car. Tears were shed, and I got some frantic texts asking if I was OK. All was well and we headed back to our campsite for the final night, before departing the next morning for points west.
After a few more hours of driving through parts of Monument Valley, with a necessary stop at the Four Corners Monument in Navajo territory, we ended up in Big Water, Utah, at a rented house with a spectacular view out the backyard.
Now as everyone else is fast asleep, I’m awake in this gorgeous home with a view of the vast natural landscape that seems to go on forever here in the Southwest. Next up is Zion National Park, then the north rim of the Grand Canyon. But this isn’t a straight-up travel blog. It’s about an emotional journey, a juxtaposition of past regrets, present-day tensions, and a murky future. I’m trying to process some long-standing themes: unemployment, fatherhood, and of late, a world of uncertainty unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Travel is just the vehicle, the method, of delivering that narrative. It’s an eternally unfinished, rough work and re-work of ideas that I’ve never been able to fully unfold either in print or in my mind. The words, pictures, and audio are my way of unpacking my thoughts and feelings, and of becoming something _more_ or at the very least, resolving some unfinished mental baggage so that I can move forward, past the psychic point of no return.