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greenstormWe rolled home in the sunset, cool soft air pouring in through the windows, and I got the shivers and butterflies in my stomach when I saw my ecozone again. In Iowa the soil is so so deep and black, being stripmined by corn, and there's no wild in it. Across the Dakotas it rises up, gets drier, rolls rocky through Montana, and then crisps through the near-desert heart of Washington, leaving only brown and irrigated fields in stark dots. We came through the rockies, a mere pile of variably-sized gravel with trees poking through, and finally into real mountains that created the platonic-ideal crags and cones which live in my mind. Here you're cradled by stone and tree, the air is gentled by the ocean, and everything grows like gangbusters.
At the border they didn't ask to see ID, they just knew we were supposed to be here, and through we went. Gone eleven days, no shopping.
From US border to US border we travelled 6500 km, from Blaine, Washington to Lytton, Washington via Twin Lakes, Iowa. We went across on the I90, and back on the I94 and then the I90-- I recommend the latter troute, it's green and lovely as god's own garden in North Dakota, and there is a line in my trip log that labels part of that ride right before the edge of Montana as the most beautiful place on Earth. I could live there. The hills are low and rolling, things are green and rich, and startling shapes of hill and rock ride up - I would say, as Kim Stanley Robinson does of Mars, that the feng shui is strong.
We did all the driving in five days. That's a lot of driving per day. On the way back, the time zone change helped us. At the border we suddenly became giddy, on the way back, laughing and laughing, because the weight of being somewhere else was off us, and we were home.
Here we call it 'The US'. There it's 'America'. My family is there. I am here.
At one point, Justin was pretty drunk, and we were talking, and he says plaintively, "I don't speak Canadian, can you translate that into Iowa?"
It's morning now, and I've come back to sticky bits, confusion and chaos and pain that I knew would be waiting when I left. I need to put my house in order. The weight of obligation, of being a part of things and thus of both giving and recieving, of moderating and of pushing, is back on my shoulders. It was good to set it down for a bit and be a child again.
It is good to be back.
See you soon.
At the border they didn't ask to see ID, they just knew we were supposed to be here, and through we went. Gone eleven days, no shopping.
From US border to US border we travelled 6500 km, from Blaine, Washington to Lytton, Washington via Twin Lakes, Iowa. We went across on the I90, and back on the I94 and then the I90-- I recommend the latter troute, it's green and lovely as god's own garden in North Dakota, and there is a line in my trip log that labels part of that ride right before the edge of Montana as the most beautiful place on Earth. I could live there. The hills are low and rolling, things are green and rich, and startling shapes of hill and rock ride up - I would say, as Kim Stanley Robinson does of Mars, that the feng shui is strong.
We did all the driving in five days. That's a lot of driving per day. On the way back, the time zone change helped us. At the border we suddenly became giddy, on the way back, laughing and laughing, because the weight of being somewhere else was off us, and we were home.
Here we call it 'The US'. There it's 'America'. My family is there. I am here.
At one point, Justin was pretty drunk, and we were talking, and he says plaintively, "I don't speak Canadian, can you translate that into Iowa?"
It's morning now, and I've come back to sticky bits, confusion and chaos and pain that I knew would be waiting when I left. I need to put my house in order. The weight of obligation, of being a part of things and thus of both giving and recieving, of moderating and of pushing, is back on my shoulders. It was good to set it down for a bit and be a child again.
It is good to be back.
See you soon.
