The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Road Tripping

We’re on the road, me and the mizzus, one destination in Arizona to meet up with old friends in Sedona, the rest … well, like I said, it’s a road trip, side trips welcome, kind of the way the mizzus and me fell in love, on the road, a backpacking trip that ended with premature snow in the Big Horns then morphed into a Mexico detour..

We stayed on the Columbia River Gorge last night next to an incredibly weathered Indian church and houses, a village, I guess, browned, tilted and barely standing, its own museum next to the Bonneville lock and dam. South and north were two fishing platforms where the tribe netted salmon before the dams destroyed their harvests, a skeletal reminder of a slow genocide most history books omit. Traveling the byways is an unfurling history lesson. Especially if you drive with an historian riding shotgun.

We’re running the east side of the Cascades, dodging snow, high plains drifting, cutting east across roads a mile high with no traffic or services for vast distances. You want to know what I think America is — Clue: it’s not Trump, it’s not politics, it’s not the Japanese internment camps we passed in Tule Lake — it’s this wilderness that stretches beyond anyone’s view, this sea to sea purpled majesty, a continent that rolls and heaves and manages after centuries to remain wild and free. Yah, corny stuff. Until you hike it or drive it … or simply stand in awe of it.

I love this country. Let me say it again. I love this insane country. People ask me why we don’t visit Paris or Beijing. Why we don’t travel the world. My answer is I want to see Death Valley. I want to go to the Everglades. I won’t be happy til we’ve gone to see the ancient bristlecone pine forests. I don’t care so much to stand in line to see the Parthenon or the Louvre. Sure, they would be great, fabulous, swell. But … I’d rather see the Appalachians in the fall. Big Sur anytime. Mt. Rainier again soon.

You can have your cities, all of them. I have a love affair with America, the land. We’re on a road trip to see what we haven’t seen before and a few places worth returning to. It’s a second honeymoon, a third, maybe a 25th. The mizzus is with me and I’m in 7th heaven. Heaven, I hope, if I believed in fairy tales, will look a lot like this.

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