There’s maybe one more post in me after this before the ‘walkabout’ chapter of my life comes to an end. The following is excerpted and lightly edited from an email I sent to my mom in Canada this past March, and does a good enough job hinting at the coalescing conclusion of the past year and-a-half on the road that I want to include it here.
03/15/2019
Hi Mom,
I don’t remember exactly where I was when we talked on the phone last- probably somewhere in Texas, but wanted to give you an update re where I’ve been and how I’m doing. After Houston, I spent a couple of days in San Antonio with friends where I remembered The Alamo, explored the river walk, and had the best barbecue of my life about an hour north in a tiny town called Driftwood. From there I headed to Brownsville, the economically depressed and most southeastern tip of Texas and the place where one of my good friends from the BYU philosophy days had spent a couple years in the Teach For America program. I drove west along the southern border, hoping to see as much of the wall/fence as I could, passing through any number of tiny agricultural towns and just as many immigration checkpoints along the way where the Border Patrol usually just told me to “have a nice day” after I confirmed my citizenship. Seeing immigration in the news so much, it was good to get an eyeball on where the action supposedly was. I stayed a night at the Amistad Reservoir near Del Rio, Texas and crossed the beautiful Pecos River the next morning on the way to Big Bend National Park where I made a few new friends on the trail who I would connect with a few days later to hike the Guadalupe Mountains. After Big Bend, I slept at a picnic area in my car just outside the small oil town of Pecos, TX, and got a first-hand look at a through-and-through oil town. Tough looking laborers and semi-trucks hauling oil rumbled past non-stop throughout the night.
…I could go on and on about the people I’ve met along the way, but like trying to list my favorite places I’ve traveled, if tell you about one person I’ve met I’ll want to tell tell you about all of them. Suffice it to say, it’s been humbling and inspiring to meet so many different people from such different walks of life and with such different stories. It’s had a reassuring effect on me to hear their stories and see how who and where they were now was the culmination of an almost infinite sequence of experiences, events, and choices. ‘Well, of course twenty-one year old Kira who’d escaped an abusive home at age fourteen would end up bartending in Bisbee, AZ with her musician and vagabond boyfriend John (who, incredibly, I’d met the year before in Silver City on that surreal Saturday night- he was one of the musicians in the hobo troubadour band at the bar). Of course Jerry in Flagstaff would sell his car dealership in Florida, give everything to his ex-wife who’d divorced him for leaving the Jehovahs Witnesses (his family disowned him, too), and end up rebuilding a life in Arizona where he spent his first winter living in a van before landing a job and eventually buying a house, all to prove to himself and his family that he could do exactly that. Other examples are less dramatic, but equally unique, equally beautiful, and perhaps equally inevitable. I think this is what Silesius is getting at with his couplet, “The rose is without a why; It blooms because it blooms,” and what Emerson means when he says “The true poem is the poet.” I think hearing how so many people came to be where and who they were, and appreciating them and their stories as invaluably unique and perfect, has given me some permission to have my own story and be… me. Collectively they seem to rally with me against that unloving and ungrateful voice that wants something different from what I have and what I am, that wants me to have had a different story, a different past and a different outcome than the one I do…
…I spent a couple nights in Bisbee and am now writing this from a coffee shop in Yuma, AZ where I’ve paused for the past two days to wait for the weather in Joshua Tree to warm up and dry out before I head there to camp for a month. Last night I slept by Mittry Lake about thirty minutes outside of town. Watching the setting sun turn the grass from yellow to gold and the dusty mountains into lavender and blue silhouettes, seeing the birds drafting up and dropping down on currents of air above the water, I was quiet in a way I haven’t been for a while, busy as I’ve been getting from point A to point B and thinking about the future, and from that stillness I saw the scene in front of me with the romance and clarity it deserved. Mittry lake was just a reservoir, I knew, and unremarkable by comparison to other lakes and certainly to the desert vistas I’d driven through over the past week. But last night my eyes had changed this ordinary place into something magnificent. Or maybe I just saw it for what it was. This made me think first of “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” itself an ordinary lake and not unusually beautiful compared to other lakes in Ireland- yet Yeats saw the poem in it and gave it to us. Then I thought of Henderson Lake in Lethbridge, Alberta and how much it too deserves a poem, and wondered if you might be the one to write it. And those thoughts led to this email to you.
I hope you’re well, mom. I love you.
Stephen Joel
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