“Can’t go up every road. Will I ever lose that sense of “what am I missing” when I drive on by? It happened many times today. Okay, so what if I was a refugee, avoiding the plumber scheduled to rip out my kitchen sink at 9 am. It’s why I have a truck, so I can drive away and get lost, even disappear. The truck was warming at 8:30 am. What a day to be banished. Drifts over my head, the wind howling, kicking up snow dust as I raced down the road. If you ask, you get some image, a place to start or to end. You dowse the rest. And if you know dowsing, you know about the “yes” “no” answers. Maybe based on a pendulum swing, or just a feeling. I can do it at intersections. This way .. or that? Soon I was headed. You recall parties, jobs, ex-friends who lived out this way. But you’re aiming past all that. To where the raw land hits your mind, and makes you cry. Where we navigate according to the ordinary to meet spirit, a divination exercise honed to honor our discontent. Bear Swamp Road, being one way in. Blue, beneficent, tempered. Windswept valleys, pouring fields up into the harsher alpine. The point is, to ache. To yearn, to mourn what is being pushed down below human consciousness. To revive, to relive, to rejoice in what is about to be lost. The truck did not disappoint. Not much traffic, yet when I stopped in the road to read my map, I checked my mirrors compulsively, not wanting to disturb any other driver or call attention to myself. Would a blinker to the right be enough? I’m squinting, my eyes aren’t what they were. The paper maps are, frankly, bad, because GPS has taken over. So what looks like a thru road, likely is not. And likewise, I expect to be turning around, hopefully in a friendly driveway and not one with shotguns. I’d rather have someone with me. But I don’t have. Every time I get a glimpse of the run up to the peaks, I feel weak in the knees, as if I was walking it a century ago, with a canvas backpack and a flint. Just in case. You can get stranded up here when you’re dumb, or just tired. I review a lot of history, this way. Personal history, when maybe I think I’ve been here before on a meditation retreat, or a memorial, or a potluck, or just driving aimless after a lover’s quarrel, about as far out as I dare. It does a soul good to have scary, sketchy loops you half know, half don’t. You try to get lost each time, but sort of know where you’re going. Right, don’t you?”
