Cornering Consciousness

This trip’s purpose took us and our dogs to our daughter’s graduation from the University of Oregon in Eugene and we made the best of the miles along the way, camping and exploring.   At the university where I teach I’ve had the honor of reading the names of graduates at Commencement. This year’s graduation being the fifteenth time I’ve read not only their names, but their faces as well and there’s one affect display that’s truly tell-tale of the day, and it’s not the look of joy. It’s the look of oh shit . And this occupied my brain along with a million other thoughts as we made our way around the Northwest, 2,164 miles worth. That’s a lot of mile markers. Our first stop on Friday, June 16, was a departure from our route to Boise, a detour that took us Shoshone Falls. I’ve been avoiding Idaho for the last fifteen years, so it was nice to come back on different terms and in doing so, Idaho surprised us. We chose Arrowrock Reservoir for our camp...

Scale is as elusive sometimes as color. Your brain thinks it has it dialed in and the light changes or another contrast or scope obliterates your original references and you're left to sort it all out again. I wish I could just let it be. Some of us humans are embedded with a primordial drive that tries to makes sense of things including our relationship with the environment and when that relationship is diminished on the human side, far be it for us to admit our own insignificance. I believe that's the key to peace. I'm puny and I'm fine with that. Try to fit scale to something as transparent as the wind and admitting defeat is more difficult, at least for me, and such was the demise of our first big outing in this Montero. I had already logged ten thousand miles on this '98 Montero in the last four months and had a reasonable amount of trust in its mechanical integrity. Purchased with 121k miles, I did all the maintenance necessary to baseline its s...