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It’s one of the greatest pleasures in life -- arriving home after a long trip. Your own bed, favorite chair, pets, flowers, and best of all, the people you love most -- in my case, Eva. How I missed that smile!

Two travels bookend my life. The last time I was gone from home for four weeks, it was the Summer of Love, 1967, and I was 21, hitchhiking, and seeing the West for the first time. Michigan to Seattle to Big Sur and back. My future was a confused muddle, and I was trying to figure out what in the hell to do with myself.

Now I’m 71, and this time, I traveled the opposite direction. Oregon to Florida to Michigan, and back -- 22 states and 8,300 miles. Unlike that hitchhiking trek, however, every one of my 28 days on the road was a joy. Visiting dozens of friends from every corner of the last half-century of my life, it was unavoidable to take stock of what I actually did do with myself.

Those visits were filled with laughter, as friends recounted nearly-forgotten events we had shared. As we filled in missing years of successes and failures, I was struck by how much we’re all alike. It seems that every family has its tragedies; we find our happiness in spite of them. It's hard to regret the bad times, because they got us from there to here, and here is where we are responsible for finding happiness. 

I am so grateful to old friends who opened their homes and lives to me. Universally generous, they shared their favorite stories, listened to mine, and took me to their favorite places -- backyards and parks and rivers and restaurants and museums.

I wasn’t able to see everyone I hoped to (Kathy), to stop every place I wanted to (Noah’s Ark), to stay as long as I’d wished (sisters), or to spot every bird along the way (total, a modest 163 species). Nevertheless, as with life, I’m pretty happy about how my trip turned out.

A highlight was making friends in Florida. And returning to the Diego Rivera murals in Detroit. A lowlight was losing friends in Texas. As with life, win some, lose some.

I can’t imagine ever again taking such a road trip. It was kind of like Elton John’s “Last Tour.” I’ll be sticking closer to home from now on (my travels still extending to the Grand Canyon, of course).

I can’t sing, but I can write, and I’m glad a few people have enjoyed my tales from the road. Thank you.

Last story from the road: HOW WILL IT ALL TURN OUT?

                

HOW WILL IT ALL TURN OUT?

It's the question I asked everyone I met on my road trip across America: How will it all turn out? You know, the Trump thing.

The range of predictions surprised me. From, Trump is a man of "heinous" character, to "it's all a bunch of noise."

I found cynicism: "Muller will find collusion, but nobody's going to care." And head-up-butt wishful thinking: "Nothing he's done is Constitutionally wrong."

Lots of fear: "He'll start a war and ride out four years." And, "He could lose the 2020 election, but refuse to concede."

My friends with the most dogmatic opinions were those who were the most informed ("I can almost 100% guarantee you, he won't make it through all four years."), and, to a shocking extent, those who were least informed "What's the pee-pee tape?"). Everyone else expressed sensible uncertainty about the fate of Trump, et al., and all the unpredictable political events in our immediate future.

Will the Democrats control the House after this fall's elections? Answers were "yes," "no," and "they have a 52% chance." Few thought Trump will actually be impeached, even some of my most liberal friends.

Will Trump last four years? Get re-elected? I heard every conceivable answer.

I asked the big question about how it's all going to turn out because, like everyone else held captive by the drama, I wish I knew. And there's no way to tell. Anything is possible. Any one of us, or none of us, could guess correctly.

* * *

Having broached the question, it's only fair that I put out there my own prediction. As a wise friend reminds me, everyone's entitled to their own stupid opinion.

Character is destiny. This truth comes, not from a fortune cookie, but from a Greek philosopher 2,500 years ago. Trump's character is thoroughly and absolutely foul. He's a psychopathic narcissist, and the most corrupt politician ever. There will be no good ending for Trump, and history will not be kind.

Absolutes can be dangerous. The worst character ever? You might ask in response, as did one friend, "Yeah, well what about Hitler?" To that, I say, if that's the bar, you got me.

Next up for defense by the Trumpettes, always, is Hillary. "Well, yeah, but what about Benghazi," etc., ad nauseam. They proclaim that no matter what Trump may have done, or is doing now, he's still way better than that lying, stood-by-her-man, evil woman. We'll soon see how that works out.

No matter how bad things look, they are always worse. That's my second political principle. Trump never really wanted to be President. He just wanted to build his brand, get richer, and feed his insatiable ego. He never counted on savage, investigative beasts clawing through his sordid garbage. What we know now will be just the start of revelations about the Trump/Kushner shenanigans with Russian criminals and their booty.

Trump and his court of jesters are in way over their heads. The talent and brilliance of those determined to learn the whole truth -- journalists, Muller and crew, honest bureaucrats -- will persevere. For all his instinctive gifts as hustler and con man, Trump's not very bright. Nor are his kids, and certainly not his coterie of buffoons, whom he considers "the best people." Journalists have risen to the challenge, and they are rock stars of the day.

People are fucking morons. This is actually "Wayne Rule No. 1," but I stuck it in here at the end, since it's sure to offend. Nevertheless, it's a failsafe rule for explaining any inexplicable behavior, such as "how can 40% of voters still support the greatest con man that America has ever seen?"

The upshot. I think the Muller team, as well as the Senate investigating committee, have grounds for impeachment right now. Trump's efforts to keep his own hands clean of his Russian money-laundering scams, campaign collusions, and personal foibles (e.g, Stormy Daniels), will prove amateurish. He's going down.

The Democrats will take the House in the mid-terms, but probably not the Senate. That will leave an impeachment process uncertain, since the House impeaches, but the Senate convicts. In any event, I think the House will initiate impeachment before the 2020 election.

At that point, the walls of reality will be closing in on Trump. With Jared facing jail time, his own scandalous misdeeds further revealed, and public support dropping back into the 30's, what will he do?

For one thing, he will find some way to fire Muller. It may be a suicidal act, but there will come a point when he has nothing to lose. It will be too late. When he realizes that, then what?

The rosy scenario is that he will resign. Declare his MAGA mission complete and go home. I can't see that happening. When has he ever backed down? Okay, maybe once, when he let that porn star spank his flabby ass with the magazine with his own face on it.  WWJD? Let's give him a mulligan on that one, like the Christians are doing.

The nightmare scenario is that he starts a war to rally public support behind him. That could work. I could absolutely see him capable of doing that. It would not surprise me. Pick a country. Syria? How about Mexico?

The most-likely scenario is that he continues along in his bubble, until it bursts when he loses the 2020 election in a landslide. He will declare himself the victim of fake news and illegal votes, find some way to blame Obama, and retreat to whatever ignominious future awaits him alone. Melania will be on the first jet out of town. Trump will be endlessly featured on National Enquirer covers, as she declares that her prenup was negated by his affairs and cover-ups.

Attorney Michael Cohen will write a tell-all from jail, in order to pay his own legal costs. Fox News viewership, and NRA membership, will sky-rocket as they declare the imminent end-of-the world, with a Democrat woman as President. Fox will reveal she is related to Hillary, with intimate ties to the Deep State. Evangelical leaders will declare her to be the new she-devil and the Anti-Christ.

Anyhow, that's what I'm predicting.

* * *

As for how this road trip of mine turns out, it ends where it began -- at home, which is now less than three hours away. I'll wrap up this little travelogue, "Travels with Wayne," later, with one more story.

Yesterday: PARADISE

http://wayneaschmidt.blogspot.com/2018/04/paradise.html

PARADISE

It was a white-knuckle drive across the high plains of Wyoming this morning. Fog, snow blowing sideways, drifts, low-teen temps, near white-outs when passing trucks, actual white-outs behind snow plows.

Crossing the Red Desert, I couldn't see much due to the weather. It's a little-known and poorly-protected expanse of grasslands, sagebrush, remote canyons, archeological sites, and antelope. I got up close and personal with the Red Desert on a visit fifteen years ago with leaders of the environmental group where I worked. The threats are in plain sight -- a terrain already pocked with drill rigs, pipelines, service roads, and oil storage facilities.

Wyoming has this backwards attitude that they don't want any more land protected by the government. Period. So I doubt much has been done to guard the Red Desert. Parts of it should be a National Monument.

Despite the lousy weather, I watched through swirling snow the great, dark silhouette of a golden eagle, wings outstretched, flap low over the hills. It was one of several I would see this day.

I had looked for one yesterday during my tour around Fort Collins. Becky took me to the prettiest places, especially the canyon of the Cache la Poudre River, where I watched a fly fisher land and release a small brown trout. It would prove quite a contrast to weather a day later.

Becky and her husband, John, moved to Colorado from Ann Arbor two years ago. They seem transformed with happiness in their new lives. It's quite a wondrous thing. Their enthusiasm for their new geography is understandable -- spectacular mountain scenery and none of the dreariness of Michigan winter. Plus, a nice town, from what I saw.

Everywhere I've gone, people have proudly shown me their own paradises. A wooded subdivision in central Florida, the backyard of an East Lansing home, the lake-studded glacial hills of southeast Michigan. Even downtown Houston, of all things. And Fort Collins. Paradise is where you find it.

I found a break in the nasty Wyoming weather about the time I hit Green River, so I pulled off to have lunch on Expedition Island. This is the spot that many famous expeditions have launched to float the Green River down to the Colorado River and on through the Grand Canyon. Most famous was the Powell Expedition of 1869, which was the first-ever such trip.

On the third day of our last raft trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, we bobbed in the surreal-turquoise-colored water of the tributary Little Colorado River. One of our friends sighed, and declared, "Except for the fact that we're surrounded by atheists, you might'a thought we'd died and went to heaven." Paradise.

I dipped the toe of my sneaker into the Green River. The backdrop of sandstone mesas and cliffs, and the namesake color of the river, would have been the same in Powell's day.

On this last night of my four-week road trip (I'll be home tomorrow night), I'm camped alongside another river, the Snake River in Idaho, in a deserted BLM campground. White pelicans are spending the night on rocks across the river.

Day-before-yesterday: EAST-WEST

http://wayneaschmidt.blogspot.com/2018/04/east-west.html

EAST-WEST

When I started smashing into tumbleweeds, some tall as my car's hood, I knew I was back in the West. It's a different place than the East.

I crossed a big chunk of the continent today -- half of Iowa, all of Nebraska, a little piece of Wyoming, and down into Colorado -- and the best thing was seeing this ferruginous hawk, burnished copper and black in late-winter sunshine, sitting on a fence-post alongside the freeway.

I-80 follows the Platte River, current home of sandhill cranes, white pelicans, and lots of other waterfowl. As I passed, I silently thanked some of the folks I used to know who helped keep the river's ecosystem relatively intact. That's where I saw the ferruginous hawk. It was the 146^th bird species I've seen on this trip. My first was a house wren singing in my backyard in Oregon, the morning I left, 25 days ago. The 100^th was a gray catbird, mewing in Florida underbrush on the Atlantic Coast.

I started today in Iowa City, and drove like an arrow shot due west, nearly 800 miles. In Iowa, last year's corn stubble covered the landscape, ready for a spring shave and planting. Across Nebraska, vast herds of jet-black cattle grazed manicured grasslands, echoing a time when countless bison feasted on native grasses.

Late yesterday, cruising west through Illinois and eastern Iowa, I was surprised by the beauty of a landscape I remembered as nothing but flat, green cornfields. This time the bare, late-winter croplands were shrouded in fog and rain. Soft, rolling hills were lost in the horizon as low clouds crowded the sky. Distant farmsteads pixilated in the mist. Bare trees stood as outlined-sentinels, in copses, and woodlots.

Iowa City is where I spent the evening with Audrey, a close friend from another life. We shared memories and stories of our families. She told me that people in Iowa are kind. She's there by way of Johns Hopkins, California, etc. We all seem to have complicated lives. Holding up the mirror of the past, we marveled at how our lives turned out, and the weirdness of crossing paths again after 38 years.

It's what this road trip has been all about -- renewing friendships and sharing memories of past adventures, foibles, and accomplishments. But after nearly four weeks, I feel like a sponge that can't hold much more.

Yet not quite full, which brings me to Fort Collins, Colorado, to spend a day with Becky and John. Recent migrants from Michigan, they seem to love their new home in the West. As I watch the sun sink behind snow-capped mountains, I can see why.

  

Yesterday: MY REARVIEW MIRROR

http://wayneaschmidt.blogspot.com/2018/04/my-rearview-mirror.html

MY REARVIEW MIRROR

After five days in Michigan, my car is pointed west. Headed home to Oregon, with a couple more stops along the way.

I've been impressed with the ardor my friends along the way have expressed for their home towns and home states. It's good to love the place where you stand. However, demanding that your friends share your jingoism -- not so good. One went so far as to tell me I wouldn't be welcome back because I said and wrote unkind things about his state.

Michigan, my home for nearly four decades, is now in my rearview mirror. The hospitality of my hosts was big-hearted -- as throughout my travels. No one I met in Michigan seemed offended by my frequent complaints about the state's terrible roads. Everywhere -- freeways, local streets, parking lots -- are tire-busting potholes. It gives the place a tired, run-down feeling.

A state's potholes, dreary weather, and gray landscape do not, thank goodness, define its people. Old friends I met are spending their work lives making Michigan a better place -- environmentally, culturally, economically. They are meeting people where they are, enriching their lives with art, music, and dance.

Some are bringing hope to real people who have to live in the squalor of Detroit's shambles. They're helping real children growing up in Flint -- still unable to drink or bath with their tap water, and still living day-to-day with bottled water for everything. And, by the way, paying two times higher water bills than most places, despite being surrounded by the Great Lakes, which hold one-fifth of all the surface fresh water on earth.

I wrapped up my Michigan visit with a four-mile hike with Tim through the still-bare woods of southern Michigan, a land sculpted just ten thousand years ago by mile-high glaciers. We watched dinosaur-like sandhill cranes fly overhead, and debated whether the hills were glacial eskers or moraines. I learned how my friends recently had saved one special hill off in the distance, the highest point in the county and an island of biodiversity, from being ruined by gravel mining. I learned that the hill is a "kame," formed where a melting hole in the ancient glacier poured down meltwater, dirt, and rocks to create this special kind of hummock.

A friend of Tim's joined our hike -- an expert on the area's ecology, and the person about to become volunteer-president of the conservation nonprofit where Tim and I had worked long ago. The group has fallen on hard times, like most of their ilk, and demonstrating but modest political influence or media visibility. I shared with him my pessimism that environmental and conservation groups, including his own, can ever regain the clout they wielded in the decades following the first Earth Day in 1970.

"I hope you can prove me wrong," I said, and wished him well. Like so many others I met on this trip, he's trying his best to make his world a better place.

That's all behind me now, and I'm happy to be right where I am -- headed back to the West Coast, back to my own home state. As I had to repeatedly point out to virtually everyone I met in MICH-i-gun (not mich-i-GAN), it's OR-a-gun, not or-eh-GON.

Day-before-yesterday: POSITIVITY

http://wayneaschmidt.blogspot.com/2018/04/positivity.html

POSITIVITY

Ben, my host here in Lansing, thought my apoplectic blog yesterday, about John Sinclair's pitiful lecture that we attended, was a tad negative. "We spent twelve hours together and that was only a couple hours," he correctly noted. But he undercut his point by showing me another critique that slammed Sinclair as a "pompous blowhard." Touché.

Be that as it may, I promised Ben I would write something positive about today, the end of my 2½ days in greater Lansing. Fortunately, that won't be hard, since we spent a mellow, sunny Easter wandering the beautiful campus gardens of Michigan State University. And looking at architecture and art.

Even in these earliest days of spring, the still-bare trees of campus are stunning. It was like visiting old friends. I knew where the beds of winter aconite should be blooming, and they were right where I remembered.

As Ben chauffeured me for a tour around campus, at one point I ordered him to stop. I wanted a picture of the powerplant smokestack I climbed one freezing February night a lifetime or two ago. It seemed completely crazy to think I'd really been up there, and lived to tell about it (see "Ayn Rand Got Me High"). As with so many tales of youth.

Much of the campus is little changed, but much is dramatically different -- new academic, sports, and residential buildings. Expanded demonstration gardens. The drinking fountains in the library dispense filtered water for reusable water bottles.

The most striking addition to MSU's campus is the Broad art museum, an architectural wonder of gleaming stainless steel and unpredictable angles, located right at the entrance to the university on Grand River Avenue. A modest exhibit of Andy Warhol art in its basement gallery was spectacular; we agreed that Warhol's sinister portrait of Nixon was best.

(At this point in my story today, I'm sorry to say, my positivity runs thin.) 

One might assume that if you give artists -- painters, sculptors, and such -- the finest display space that money can buy, that their art would rise to the occasion. The Broad proves that to be a fanciful dream.

When I went to school at MSU, and for the many years after when I frequented the campus, I knew the art school's faculty artists to be, at best, mediocre talents (possibly, with one exception). What I saw today at the Broad -- an exhibit of the current faculty's best work -- screamed that my memory was overly generous. Words such as elitist, inaccessible, and ridiculous only begin to convey qualities of their art.

Consider one non-faculty exhibit, which the Broad paid actual money to have installed. Picture a grungy, white, terrycloth bathrobe. Now hang it twenty feet overhead from a hook.

If you are waiting for more, there is no more to it. That's it.

The Broad devoted an entire gallery room to another of this artist's work. Picture a sheet hanging on the wall. Opposite is a small screen with a black-and-white video of a cage. That's it. Although it wasn't clear if the room's lighted exit sign was part of the art. The Broad explained the artist's intent: "Careful consideration of the architectural and ambient features of the exhibition space is integral to his process, as too are the social aesthetics and politics of Smith's hometown of Detroit, which specifically come to bear on this exhibition, the first major museum show by the artist in his native state of Michigan."

Hopefully, also the last. It may have been the first time I've ever been left speechless by art.

We later visited a small, scruffy, private gallery in North Lansing, run by Trisha, a friend of Ben. "This is so much better than the Broad," I gushed, within minutes of entering the display of eclectic, beautiful art by local artisans. It was a relief to be able to be positive again. Trisha thought that "better than the Broad" might make a good tag line for her gallery.

I don't know when, if ever, I'll be back to my old hometown again. It was a kick being here, and I've got one more day in another part of Michigan before I head west for Oregon and home. The best part here was spending quality time enjoying gardens, landscapes, and art with Ben, my friend now for forty years. Shared history can't explain such longevity. And it certainly can't be explained by shared politics -- there, we agree on almost nothing. But when it comes to esthetics, we agree on almost everything. And where we don't, Ben gives me insights I've missed, helping me broaden my understanding and appreciation of art.

That's pretty damned positive, don't you think?

Yesterday: FREE JOHN SINCLAIR'S MIND!