#RSRSeesTheUSA Days 52-54: boondocking in Torrey, UT & Parachute, CO + Denver, CO
Out of the wifi-less wilderness to share my handwritten journal reflections from last night, my second night of boondocking on the way to a friendship-focused Denver weekend.
I’ve spent the last two nights car camping and I really do like the feeling of a routine to it that I’ve developed about what goes where and how I set up my cozy little nest. After this, BLM land disappears so this is my last night boondocking.
After Capitol Reef today and Kanab before that, and the glorious afternoon hike along Calf Creek in Escalante, I’ve been soaking up the awe-inspiring geology for a while now. I’ll be sad to leave it behind, but there’s part of me that’s looking forward to heading home to see how the next phase goes.
I’ve been thinking of my life in phases and that still carries a connotation that I’ll ‘arrive’ somewhere, even as I know that that’s now how things work. I’m always looking for something to be a clearly delineated ‘before’ X / X / ‘after’ X but that’s only how things look in retrospect.
Maybe that’s a new way for me to think about it: curiosity about what I’ll look back and see this moment as coming ‘before’ and ‘after’.
I have been loving the phased nature of this trip, though, even as I’m only seeing it that way as I look back. At the start I thought I’d be out and back home in a month. By the time I get back, it’ll be over two months. There was the initial phase that felt like long driving most every day and sleeping in a new spot every night. There was the museum visits phase in Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. There was Santa Fe and some time in one place and seeing lots of friends. There was my Wellesley crew birthday gathering in Joshua Tree. There was a week discovering LA. There was the California coast. There was the national parks phase of the Yosemite, Bryce, Grand Staircase, Antelope Canyon, Capitol Reeef. There was the San Francisco stint. And now there’s some Colorado time, and then driving home.
I’m glad to be in Colorado again, and I’m curious to see how my emotions do in the coming days. On the one hand, I’ll be in some lovely company and doing fun things (stay turned for my second Meow Wolf experience on this trip). I’ll also be reminded of some of the lifestyle and spaces I could have had if my Aspen adventure had played out differently. It feels good to ‘reclaim’ the state before letting the negative parts of my time here calcify for too long. It’s truly beautiful, and the natural surroundings are so soothing and kept me such good company when I was lonely and depressed and angry.
This feels like my example of the ‘It’s been 2 years since…’ conversation that Mike Murawski posted about that bore such interesting fruit. It’s rhyming so well with my thoughts about Lost Jobs, Found Voices and with the American Alliance of Museums conference about to take place in person again. My feelings about my job in Aspen are pretty inextricably tied to living here, so even if I don’t go back to the Aspen Art Museum ever again (and I’m not planning to make a point of doing so), the town of Aspen / the Rocky Mountains / the Western Slope / the state of Colorado all feel bound up together as part of that time in my life that held such promise and was then truncated by a messy tangle of reality.
I wish for myself that this time in Colorado can be a fun and reclaiming one, where I get to have some familiarity with a gorgeous place and associate it with friendship and exploration.
Sorry for no pretty pictures today. I’ve got plenty from the last couple days (you can find some at Instagram), but I’ve been awake since sunrise this morning, and spent the first 4 hours of my day driving into a snowstorm and a Denver traffic snarl and some serious winds. So I am wiped out and going straight to bed after sharing these thoughts with all of you.
I offer instead, the audio recording from my peaceful, tearful stroll through Angel’s Rest, the animal cemetery at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, where people have memorialized their beloved animal companions in all kinds of sweet and heartbreaking ways, including a veritable forest of wind chimes with dedications, that sound like this…
