Farther up and further in

Ah, a road trip. Good for the soul - or at least, good for my soul.

It certainly wasn't the 3500+ miles of driving, the lasting effect of which lingers in a sore left shoulder and screaming right hamstring.

Maybe, then, it was the variety of lodging - everything from guesting in my own house to sleeping in a concrete wigwam and bedding down in a haunted balcony room of a ghost-town Nevada hotel.

Maybe, instead, it was fleeing a hurricane inland, or being feted by complete-stranger evacuees afterward, attending mariachi mass, or sipping a prickly-pear margarita 75 stories up above a steamy San Antonio.

Maybe it was floating past the Paseo del Rio late into the night, or sailing on Lake Tahoe, or wafting a thousand feet above Albuquerque in a hot air balloon.


Maybe it was haggling for Native American jewelry in the depths of Canyon de Chelly, picking up a bottle of local wine in Colorado, sifting through hills of Navajo rugs in Chinle, or receiving the completely unexpected, yet surprisingly appropriate gift of two WWII-era Filipino island paintings.

Maybe it was meeting my renters, or long-lost, never-seen friends (at last), reconnecting with good friends and former shipmates, or maybe it was the host of new, welcoming folks I met along the road, from an ex-pat Londoner forced out of New Orleans by this summer's storms, to a live-to-ski rock climber, rambling for a month in the California Sierras.

I like to think I'm not materialistic, but I was so excited to see my car again that maybe it was the getting back of my slightly worse-for-wear, Gustav-battered Beetle, or after five months apart, laying hands at long last on my long-missed and carefully-kept "real" violin.

I was down to a meal or two each long-driven day, but maybe it was the food: the burritos and brick-oven pizza on the Gulf, the fry bread in Four Corners, the homemade granola in Cortez, the tea bar at the Whole Foods headquarters in Austin.

Maybe it was the massage in a tiny town in Artesia, New Mexico, the live music at a dive bar in Austin, the grandiosity of Temple Square or the surprising diminution of the Alamo. Maybe, after all that, it was the UFO museum in Roswell.


Or maybe...maybe it was the Willa Cather desert southwest, the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, the grandeur of Canyon de Chelly and Moab, the sparkling valley at Yosemite.


It certainly felt good to taste what I ate, to push without tiring, to hike some 20 miles up and back rocky switchbacks without my heart & lungs wilting within me, clutching at my chest. And there's the inevitable allure of abandoning all responsibilities but the air in your tires and the fuel in your tank.

Whatever it was...the music started to flow. This only happened to me once before, after rafting the length of the Grand Canyon's Colorado, when in the weeks that followed poured out dozens of songs, lyrics, chords, fully formed on the page. This time it's a piano rag, and a symphony in four movements, and more yet to come. I can't explain it.

But I know this much: I'm back. And it feels good.