I believe the urge to travel is born in Americans even as we are nesters by nature. We are a nation of immigrants after all and of native tribes forced to constant mobility for survival. The immigrant in us wants nothing more than to make a secure, permanent home and yet the tribesman needs to see what lies beyond the next peak and to follow streams to their ultimate destinations.<\/p>\n
I suppose that\u2019s romanticizing my own lifelong wanderlust and my paradoxical nesting instinct but I do believe it is largely an anthropological matter and a nationalistic one as well. Most societies either stay put or keep moving. Americans tend to want both at all times.<\/p>\n
For as long as I can remember I have explored the Western U.S. and embraced its heritage. My father was born and raised on the plains of southwestern Wyoming. He took me there often and to get there we had to cross some startling and impressive landscapes. There was never a single day of our travels that wasn\u2019t breathtakingly beautiful and completely different from the day before it.<\/p>\n
When I was twelve Dad and I were given special permission to watch a Pueblo Indian bonfire ceremony outside of Taos, New Mexico. That was a day or two before we were caught in an Arizona flash flood and forced to dodge boulders bouncing onto the highway.<\/p>\n
I have fished for trout in the Yellowstone River during a snowstorm while being watched by a family of moose that surely thought we were crazy.<\/p>\n
I saw lightning explode a tree outside of Denver.<\/p>\n
Bits and pieces of old memories and far away places dance in my head fairly constantly.<\/p>\n
Tuba City, Arizona: an unremarkable town of Dairy Queens and KFCs plopped smack in the middle of a fabulous nowhere, an arid land of beautiful red rock mesas and spectacular cumulus sunrises and sunsets. One constant view, a million shifting colors; nine thousand people bored out of their minds.<\/p>\n
If you wish to see the entire Western U.S. from the top, climb eleven thousand feet up the Beartooth Highway from Yellowstone to Red Lodge, Montana. Above the timberline you will meet tiny ground-dwelling marmots dancing through breathtaking fields of wildflowers between lingering patches of August snow. Looking down <\/em>at Rocky Mountain peaks may bring tears to your eyes. It should surely install God in your heart.<\/p>\n My heart aches for these places and the thousands of others like them I have never seen. And yet I fear I cannot travel fairly constantly without being tethered to my hearth and kin. I need my home and I need just as desperately to leave it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a uniquely American dilemma.<\/p>\n Carolann and I have long talked of getting a nice motorhome someday and easing our way into a lifestyle that will give us the best of both worlds. Someday, we figure, we can run away from home for a few days or several weeks at a time secure in the knowledge that our children are well and that our century-old house awaits our return.<\/p>\n It was a good plan until last weekend when it finally dawned on us that \u201csomeday\u201d never comes.<\/p>\n We will take delivery of our new home on wheels on Tuesday.<\/p>\n