Last year, when
I turned 60, my wife took me to Hawaii. This year, to celebrate Kristin’s own
flipping of the six-decade page, I took her car-camping in the desert. I suppose
this says a lot about our relationship.
In my own
defense, while warm tropical sands, island luaus and whale watches might carry
an undeniable appeal, sleeping on an air mattress in the back of a station
wagon at a pull-off along a desert road holds an allure all its own.
I had long intended
to take Kristin on a broad western sweep, but I wasn’t exactly sure of where
the road should take us. Our youngest daughter’s latest career move set the bull's-eye
on the map. With Sylvia in the middle of a nine-month internship at Capitol
Reef National Park in Utah, I was given not only a destination, but also a huge
head start on the planning.
An intrepid
explorer since her youth, Sylvia spends her workweek giving talks about
everything from bats and mountain lions to the mind-boggling geologic history
of the region at the park’s visitor center, but during every moment off, she
dashes off into the wild.
Utah is an endless cornucopia of deep canyons, high
deserts and wind-and-water-crafted landscapes that defy imagination. Bighorn
sheep, mule deer and pronghorn dot the horizon while lizards, marmots and the
occasional legless reptiles hang out amidst the rocks and sage grass. It’s been
the young lady’s personal mission to explore as much of this wild country as
she can while she’s there, and she’s done a heck of a job of it so far.
With little more
effort than telling Sylvia when we’d be there, my logistical planning was done.
By adding a cargo carrier to the top of the Subaru, along with an air mattress
in the back, our accommodations were complete. The only thing left was to
convince Kristin we weren’t about to end up as mountain lion or
rattlesnake bait as part of the adventure, and I had roughly 1,800 miles of
driving to work on that.
Life on the road
always begins with high optimism and a grand sense of adventure, and in an
effort to further perpetuate those notions, I charted our first stop to St.
Louis, where the greatest of all western adventurers, Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark, set off on their own exploration of the west a mere 221 years prior.
Visiting a museum on the banks of the mighty Missouri River that detailed the
endless hardships of Lewis and Clark’s 1804 “Corps of Discovery” mission also made
the notion of sleeping in the back of a station wagon (in that very museum’s
parking lot) seem like a day at the beach. (Well, maybe not quite a Hawaiian
beach, but you get where I’m coming from here.)
Ten days on the
road can yield a whole mess of stories for a guy like me, so plan on coming
back next week when the real fun begins!
Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John at jlorson@alonovus.com.
