Here I am at Arches National Park.
This was from the lengthy season in my life when I lived in a Westphalia camper van (yes, I realize it’s spelled Westfalia, but I like the joke because I found the OPPOSITE of “peace” in that van. Instead I found WAR) and traveled around the country with my boyfriend. We camped. We hiked. We met people. We went mountain-biking on slick red rock canyons in Moab. We broke up – messily and awfully – during the trip. Leaving from the East Coast, we were together. We were moving to San Francisco because he got a job at a big swanky law firm. By the time we arrived in San Francisco, we were barely speaking. My friend Jackie still jokes about the postcards she got from me during my trip. “Saw a bald eagle fighting with an osprey. Huge fight at a truck stop.” “Took a hike into the Badlands. It was beautiful. We haven’t spoken in 3 days.” It’s funny now but it was the opposite of funny then. In my recent Halloween costumes post, I wrote about the tail-end of this whole thing, once we arrived in San Francisco. I actually decided MID TRIP – MID TRIP – where did I get the cajones – to move to Los Angeles instead of San Francisco. Which I did. Within 2 months, I had fled to Chicago. Again, on impulse. I was reckless then but I knew I had to get out.
I was in so much pain during aspects of the trip (and it’s ridiculous to me now: my boyfriend and I were so CLEARLY incompatible. Nice guy, but seriously, not for me) that I remember one night, standing on the side of a small lake, drinking whiskey, my boyfriend setting up our tent down the shore, staring at the stunning Teton range and saying – directly to the mountains: “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to come back and visit you. Now’s not a good time.”
I post this mainly to say:
Regardless of how terrible the trip was, we visited so many National Parks. They were our bread crumbs through the forest. We traveled up through Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, then over and down, through Montana, Wyoming, to the deserts of the Southwest, and then across Death Valley to California and then up the Pacific Coast Highway. We avoided freeways and took back roads. We followed Route 66. We took off our watches. We cooked over open fires. We washed our clothes in a bucket, hanging our stuff out on the bike rack to dry. In the mountains of Colorado, our clothes froze stiff in their bended positions. We visited literal ghost towns, strolling down the empty streets. The whole thing really was incredible, and I’m so glad I did it.
The National Parks are OURS. I will fight for them.
