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Test Drive
Like every endurance event, this one will require some training and practice. I was out in Colorado for a week in the early spring. Leaves were budding, prairie dogs burrowing, and late winter snowstorms still blew atop Long’s Peak, a few thousand feet higher than where I set myself up – Fort Collins. Somehow I persuaded my graduate-school-age son, Robert, who prefers walking and biking to getting in his car, to join me for a day of hitchhiking. We walked through the campus of Colorado State University, where he does research and teaches about plant biology, with a cardboard sign that read “Boulder” in black magic marker letters…
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Boots, Bugs & Ballads: A Trip to the Attic
There are two old backpacks in the attic, one green, one rust-colored. The rust-colored pack is a large open sack without compartments or frame. The grey and green one has an aluminum frame on back, an upper and lower compartment and zipped pockets all around the sides and top, adornments created to give the illusion that I can keep everything readily accessible and at hand. I think I’ll take the green one. Of the three tents in the attic, two are suited for three, perhaps four people, but one sits low to the ground, weighs very little, and could hold a human and a dog, or two average-sized humans. It’s…
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Keys
It is true that you can’t go home again, but this I know is also true – you can leave home again. So the question is – what are you taking with you and what are you leaving behind? Me, I’m leaving keys. Lots of keys. Multiple times each day I go through the ritual of checking my pockets for keys, wallet, phone. I have so many keys. There’s my car, my wife’s car, the pickup truck that plows my parking lot. There’s the key to the building where I work, and nearly a dozen door keys once I get inside. Keys to my son’s house, my bicycle lock,…
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There and Back Again (Maybe)
On or about the 11th of May, depending on the weather and my general state of health, I will step out of my old grey house on the Limestone Creek, built, we have learned, as a cobbler shop for Yankees heading south to fight in the Civil War, and I will make a right turn on Watervale Road. At that point, three miles north of the old Cherry Valley Turnpike, I will turn my backpack toward the south, stick out my thumb, and begin what I expect will be a 10,000 mile journey across the American land. This will be in fulfillment of a plan that came to me some…
