HOMESICK BLUES

One week into my four-week road trip, last night I got blindsided by a crushing case of homesickness. It's not that the trip hasn't been good; each day has been fabulous.

Yesterday, for example, I hiked through Walnut Canyon National Monument, near Flagstaff, with two of my dearest friends, Adam & Ann-Marie, and their family. We strolled by former cliff-side homes of long-ago Indians. At least 400 once took up residence here under overhanging ledges for a century or so, then abandoned their entire community about 850 years ago, leaving behind lots of pottery and other personal items that were looted as soon as white people discovered the place.

I learned that there's a deeper mystery to their leaving Walnut Canyon than exhaustion of food and firewood, drought, and other challenges -- which they certainly did face at that time. They also moved on to "fulfill a spiritual covenant." Their religious leaders proclaimed that this was not their permanent home, and they migrated, just as they had from time immemorial. Not until their arrived at the mesas of the Hopi, did they find at their permanent home -- where they are to this day. Reminded me a bit of Joseph Smith. 

I shared my musings, while reading the Park Service explanation, with a guy hiking with a big red backpack and walking staff. He was on his way from Mexico to Utah along the cross-Arizona trail. He said he had 220 miles to go. Last year, he had hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, Mexico to Canada, along the spine of the Sierras and Cascades. He explained that after that jaunt, he'd gone back to New England, worked 80-hour weeks during the winter, to get enough money to take off again.

He had this distant look in his eyes. I wondered if that came from his hiking or was part of what drove his obsession. I asked him if his own wanderings had a "spiritual covenant."

"You certainly find out who you are," was all he could offer.

At the start of our hike, when I met Ann-Marie's mother, Roberta, and described my road trip, she immediately said, "Oh, Travels with Charlie." It dated her as not all that much younger than me, since her reference was to a book by John Steinbeck from the 1950s. He tells the story of his road trip in a pickup and camper, "in search of America," with his little dog, Charlie. I'd read it as a teenager and forever after dreamed of such a road trip. Last month, I'd bought the book from Amazon and read it again. And now, here I was. Travels with Wayne.

On our way back up the several hundred steps to the parking lot, I tried to keep pace with Roberta. Every few dozen steps, I'd be panting and have to rest to catch my breath. She seemed unfazed. "It's the altitude," I whined. 

I mentioned I had hiked to Dripping Spring in the Grand Canyon the day before, so my legs were feeling it. 

"Yes, I backpacked and camped there with a girlfriend, one time," she said.

This was, I concluded, one badass woman, but I kept my opinion to myself. Not that I could talk. Each time I paused to gasp for oxygen, she would say, quite diplomatically, I thought, "We'll just wait for these people above us to come by." 

 Leaving Flagstaff, I drove east as far as Albuquerque and then, too tired for a night of camping, checked into one of the last vacancies -- a very marginal Days Inn: $75.10, inc. tx. You get what you pay for. It was the kind of place where you don't want to touch anything before giving it a dose of Purell. Not all the lights worked. 

That's where my wife surprised me with a call on FaceTime. Can something be too real? When our two kitties came running at the phone's camera to my "kiddy-kiddy-kiddy," then, realizing how much I missed them, I almost lost it. When the phone's image shifted back my wife's beautiful, smiling face, framed with her chic new doo, that's when homesickness crushed me. I was so not expecting it.

But that's the price you pay for getting to do all the cool stuff I've been doing, like  walking through Walnut Canyon with my friends. 

Nevertheless, no more FaceTime. Before I went to bed in that crappy motel room, I had myself a comfort-food supper -- carrot cake homemade by Ann-Marie, and some Arizona red wine that she had given me. Indeed, tomorrow was another day.

* * *

Crossing northern New Mexico, which brags about being one of the flattest places in the U.S., was about the time I managed to leave my 12-hour funk behind. Meanwhile, tailwinds pushed my car to its personal best mpg. 

I left the interstate and took side roads across the Texas panhandle to visit the poorly named Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge. Any buffalo or lake are long gone. Then, on through a string of sad, broken towns -- interchangeable in their poverty, shabby motels, and Family Dollar stores. Nazareth, Dawn, Floydada (home of the Boston Terrier Museum), and Paducah (pop. 1186). Fields were flecked with post-harvest cotton, looking for all the world as a fresh snowfall. And everywhere on the landscape, new-looking windmills: white, behemoth dragons that would have amazed Don Quixote. 

As I rushed along the deserted Texas highway, headed for camping in a remote state park, it felt terribly familiar -- exactly how a similar highway had looked nearly ten years back, when a peccary pig had come out of nowhere to commit suicide.

Death by Pilot. I paid a heavy price for that encounter (see ThePecos Pig). This time, thankfully, no pigs.

"Are you here for the dark sky," the park ranger asked when I checked in tonight to the nearly-empty campground. 

"Sure." Why not?

Now, Venus and a new moon are dropping away, into the sunset. The coyotes sound disappointed.

Sunday -- Copper Breaks State Park

Day-before-yesterday: SWAMP IS A VERB