Part 8.  Prescott to Denver.

Ghosting it

When I am on the road, it always feels like something out of a dreamscape.   Alone in the car, drifting through towns, hour after hour.  Day after day.   Its almost as if I am in a space capsule  hurtling through an alien space, and each window in the car is its own digital screen, beyond a void, and nothing outside is real.

Especially now on this trip, with all of the Climate Change heat waves and fires - and the COVID pandemic layered on top of that, it does not feel like the America I grew up with, but instead feels more like the last days of a passing world, and the beginnings of another world that  - because of my age - a world that I will never really get to know.   A strange landscape of which I am only an outside observer, and one which I will never get to know.   Maybe apocalyptical novels are just metaphors for how life continually needs to rebuild itself from the ashes of what came before.     I will be ashes soon.    Where will my corporeal molecules be 100 years from now?   A thousand years?  A million?     Every one of our atoms are born of old stars.   Compiled Space dust.   That has learned to walk and talk.   A comedy of animation. 

Another aspect of my life on the road is that I travel extremely cheaply.    When I am with the kids we always stay in hotels, but when I am on my own I sleep in the car and eat mostly out of supermarkets.     This makes for a surreal life.    Just passing through.   Always just passing through.    Like a ghost.    Sitting in cafes with a coffee and my laptop or phone, unseen and surrounded by people who all seem to know each other well, and have spent their lives with each other.    A day comprised of exchanging one or two pleasantries with the odd cashier as I stop in scattered town along the way.    I would lay awake at night, and think  "I spoke 3 sentences today".    

It's a quiet life.

The Forest is neither the beginning nor the end of the Fairy Tale.

I took my time getting up to Denver, stopping for the night in Flagstaff, then Gallup NM, then Albuquerque, the Las Vegas NM, then Pueblo CO then Colorado Springs, driving less than 200 miles a day, walking around the towns and spending the night wrapped up somewhere.     I did stay in one Airbnb (Flagstaff) and one hotel (Las Vegas) along the way.    A Shower,  aTV and a warm bed with clean blankets can never be underrated.

Somewhere along the way, Tammy asks if I want to show up earlier and go hiking with them up in the rockies west of Denver, near the town where she raised her kids.   I say yes, and cut my trip by 3 days, and show up on a Tuesday instead of the Friday.

Scott calls Tammy smart.    I call her perceptive.     She observes everything and almost always knows what someone is thinking (or maybe  - rather - feeling) just by watching them.       She is also extremely competent.       This is something that is at once a blessing and a curse, being COMEPETENT, or SMART.    Being smart can make you lazy, as you never have to think that hard to accomplish something, and laziness will catch up to you.   Mea culpa.  Being competent can make you annoying to others, as you truly and usually do know the best way to do things, and to how things done, and if you do not communicate Extremely Efficiently to leaven this, it can come across the wrong way.    You are just trying to be helpful, but if your sage advice is unasked for, it comes across as didactic.    Every one of my siblings and I have this.    We are all really good at figuring things out.     Not always so good at the understanding required that others need more time to do so.  Tammy calls this trait in us "Humble Arrogance".

We spend our lives trying to tame areas in which we excel, as those same areas can both help us and hurt us in equal measure.   In my technology career, whatever success I achieved was because I always knew how to save failing projects, and never doubted how to do it.    It was never that hard for me.  Clients could stand back and I would firefight with a team and save careers.    My problems arose once the projects were stabilized, and the clients no longer stood back but started to make decisions again that would point the way to disaster again.   Hard to keep my mouth shut.

The good news is that the world is never short of failing technology projects that need saving, so I was never that long out of work.    I just had to learn to never hang around long enough to watch them start to fail again. and be the one standing up in a meeting saying something that no one else wanted to stand up and say.    Hence.  Hence I learned to be a journeyman.   Come in.  Firefight.   Put out the fires.  Then leave.    Strange life.

Swoop in.    Meet a woman.  Give her a family.  Help raise the kids.  Experience the wonderment of being a Dad.  Then she looks at you one day 30+ years later and you recognize that look in the eye, and she asks to be set free.  And so you find yourself walking alone into the forest once again.

Dust off the old bag of tricks.  Get back on the road.

At least I got two great kids out of it.