After I said goodbye to Buddy, I went down into the slot canyons. It was so was cool I can’t begin to describe how beautiful those rocks are. Down in Coyote wash, I saw beautiful groves of dwarf hackberry trees and datura. I must have hiked 8 miles that day and I hit my head hard in one of the slots trying to get past a big ass spider. There was a dead Raven I left alone out of respect. I got back to the car exhausted and drove out the 26 miles of washboard road. Everything was covered with dust down into the roots of my hair. Dust mixed with sunscreen, I felt so grimy. That afternoon I drove through the most bleak and beautiful landscape I’ve seen so far. I couldn’t even stop for a picture it was so disturbingly stunning. Rocky slopes of ashen blue gray hills behind bright yellow cottonwood trees in stark contrast.

I hit the emotional wall today. It’s been coming on slowly. The daily repetition of road life, the lack of direction, and my own critical inner thoughts have worn me down. I have the debilitating melancholy that occasionally comes with my rich and engaged life. The feeling tells me to leave, to eat burgers and shakes, to go home and play video games, to get fat and run away from life. Ugh, I hate it. I force myself to take a hike. Ironically, it’s one of the nicest hikes of the trip, up Grand Wash in Capitol Reef. It has the highest concentration of heart rocks I have ever seen. There are heart rocks everywhere. Thanks God, your humor never fails to amaze me.

Geez what day is it? When I hit the wall like I did yesterday, I focus on negative feelings of purposelessness. Taking care of myself is not enough purpose in life. Why take care of myself, to what end? There is so much to do and see. I will not see it all. This landscape though stunning, is also bleak, desolate, and harsh. This land does not nurture, it challenges you to survive. Yesterday after Grand Wash, the road starts to climb in elevation. At first, I enter a continuous blanket of juniper and shrub pine. Then the larger ponderosa pine and Douglas fir appear. The trees get bigger as my heart begins lifting. There is a connection with the land that I feel as I get up out of the canyons, off of the desert plain and into the hills. With its water and relatively lush plant ecology I feel protected by the nurturing beauty. The aspen trees have lost their leaves, their bright white bark leading me to a perfect campsite.

Outside Bryce canyon , camping at 9,000 ft it was so freaking cold. The man said it got down to 15° in the valley. I survived in the car but all the windows had ice on the inside. That whole national park is high elevation. I got up this morning with no desire to beat the crowds. I cannot look at another hoodoo. I drove the other way, down the mountain to a little town where coffee and donuts wait for me at 6:00 am. I put on an audio book, Scattered Minds by Gabor Mate, thank God, and I just kept driving. Downhill past Flagstaff, past Glen Canyon dam. It’s getting warmer all day. I got on I-40 East towards home then I turn south cutting across the state of Arizona to the hills west of Silver City. That’s where I’m camped. A lovely site by a creek among the big willows and pines. It feels good down here, forested and Southern. I love the sweet smell of cotton wood leaves in the fall.

I feel at peace in this land 90 miles west of silver City. Up in the hills, it’s heavily forested with ponderosa pine. Lower in these middle stretches of the San Francisco River, it opens to range land with Junipers and I’m starting to see live oak. There’s an elm, pepper bush, horehound, deciduous holly again. This is familiar, a plant community that makes me feel at home. I stop to pee and the air reminds me of December in Florida. As a child I loved the train ride to the grandparents. The crisp fall citrus breeze with ozone. It’s like a south eastern savanna. I find a roadside ruin, the foundation for a house, a wayside garage, and a spring house. The retaining walls are simple rocks and concrete. A slipform construction style promoted by Helen and Scott Nearing. There are busy woodpeckers, and some ailanthus.

I’m often amused at our society’s notion of progress. Not the moral arc of history, that’s seriously important. No, this is a critique of our physical progress, our technology, and our relationship with the land. Go out into rural areas and you’ll find remnants of communities, an abandoned mill, or a movie theater. Places that could never support commerce now, have structures that used to support people. Perhaps a family lived here at these ruins. The people would have cattle, and may have repaired tires and sold soda. The land used to support families locally. Some of the empty towns had hundreds of people in the past, and now this land is probably a corporate holding that sends a few bucks to distance stakeholders.

Look at old bridges and old buildings. The architecture has ornamentation and details like beveled edges and raised panels. Artisan and crafts people were hired to build structures that are now replaced with prefab units glued together. Nowadays we can’t afford the handwork. The problem is efficiency. We’ve traded something away, we’ve lost something. It’s a sacrifice we gave for the illusion of progress.