And So We Go

Well, I like to think we will go. Go where?

On another long-hike, of course.

Silly.

Where else would Jacob and I go when we GO?

Right now, I'm sitting with Margaret Thatcher, Kurt Vonnegut, and Frank Clifford.

I'm rereading A Man Without a Country and And So It Goes, because KV always seems to pull me out of any kind of funk.

"I wanted all things to seem to make some sense, so we could all be happy, yes, instead of tense. And I made up lies, so they'll fit nice, and I made this sad world a paradise."

Most lies aren't intended to make this sad world a paradise, but I believe KV when he tells his lies. Not sure why.

Jacob woke up earlier than I did this morning and when I came out he was sitting in front of his computer screen. Lately when I look over his shoulder I've seen a black background with little colored boxes being moved surrounded by a green fence like thing. This is the world of Dwarf Fortress. 

However, this morning instead of Dwarf Fortress, I saw a map of New Mexico. And then I saw a trail which travels along the Continental Divide. And he said, "I want to go hike."

I was jumping for joy! Yay! He wants to go, again!

I've been trying to plant the seed now to go on another hike for a while. Like a few months. But I know he actually kinda likes what he's doing at work right now, and I don't really like what I'm not doing, which is not working on anything really that important except learning about how other people write, and how much crap there is on the internet.

So I didn't want to push him.

But he wants to go!

Maybe next Spring? I don't know. But we will, one day, hopefully, go.

Frank Clifford, an LA Times writer and editor, who is also by my side, wrote the BEST portrait of the west I've ever read in The Backbone of the World. 

"Progress may have liberated us from the need to work the land, but it has not freed us from the impulse to do so. Disconnected from nature, we become strangers to our senses. But the senses are like smart dogs that grow restive when they are ignored for too long. They need work to be happy. Pay is not the issue. It is the experience that matters."

Also, "The trail provides the sort of organizing principle you need when you are looking for an excuse to drop everything, lock the door on your life, and light out."

But unlike my husband and I, Clifford was less interested in hiking the trail than he was in the Divide country and the people who lived in it. He was interested in spending time around people who have tailored their lives to fit into exposed places, where travelers spend a night or two. He wanted to write about their stories, not those who pass on by, before they are all gone.

Through his reporting, and clear cadence, we meet ranchers, a sheep herder, a Yellowstone Park Ranger protecting elk and grizzly bears from illegal hunters, and a group of Blackfeet Indians in Northern Montana.

I am in love with this book, and the people who are in it, and the contradictory frontier values.

And now I'm ready to go hike.

And So We [will maybe?] Go.