Here’s one conclusion of a dedicated non-traveler (also, the conclusion of Dorothy from Kansas): it takes travel to know what treasure waits at home. In this particular case, travel involved a three-week trip through the Southwest, comprising 12 hiking stops in the Four Corners states over 19 days, with hotel rooms changing at the speed of light.
Big country, big sky, big people. Speed limits in the Southwest are frighteningly high, but road space is luxurious, traffic is calmer, drivers are more tolerant. When the route from here to there is hundreds and hundreds of miles, what’s the hurry?
It seemed almost natural that, coming upon a stranger on a summit in New Mexico, he was shouting—to no one—that he was now in God’s country. Being dropped into that vast and often treeless land is like being dropped onto a new planet. Cows loping across the highway know they have the right of way, all the time they could ask for, and spectacular views. What’s the hurry?
It’s not all romance, of course. Years ago, I was cheated out of hundreds of dollars by a cheerful rental car agent in Phoenix….but let us forgive and move along. Even travel personnel are friendlier in the Southwest. When a TSA agent in Durango-La Plata County Airport took the obligatory photo to confirm identification, he paused over it and then said, “Ma’am, that’s the most beautiful smile I’ve seen all day.”
“You say that to everyone,” I said (expecting that he didn’t).
“Yup,” he said, and we parted, dear friends.
Between high air, long views, and a sense of continual soaring, the thought of returning to New England began to feel cramped and closed in. I haven’t met a stranger yet in Boston who sings about God’s country. There is history, of course, but also the borne-along pace of crowds, repeated rudeness and brown snow in bleak February.
Two weeks into the trip, coming back started to become an increasingly dismal—though necessary — reality. It was as if one part of the country had won over the other: their aspens, our brown leaves; their friendliness, our traffic snarlers; their slow pace, our hurried frenzies to nowhere.
The taxi pulled up in the early morning, thanks to schedule delays you can now count on. It was too dark to see anything but the front door. Because time zone differences confuse sleep, and between laundry and the grocery circulars, hours passed. When dawn came, the day was gray. Of course it was–this is what it felt like to fall back to earth. I opened the door for the paper, and my feet were cold. Without much interest, I looked up.
The street was full of stained glass; on the ground and in the trees, foliage so glorious you could swallow the colors. Fall is generally a morbid symbol of endings, but this was a beginning. New England in October, it came back to me, is almost always unrepentant and magnificent (I would have told this to Dorothy, if only she weren’t in Kansas). It’s an ode, an elegy, a haiku, and I had forgotten that there is no other poem like it.
Elissa Ely writes about seniors/baby boomers for The Belmont Voice. She is a community psychiatrist.
