High Plains Drifter

Or, I have traveled a long way to be in Utah, part 5 (reviving the series from October 2024)...

(Valle de Rocas, Bolivia)

The Bolivian Altiplano, or high plain/plateau, resembles the high plains of the Intermountain West.  There's a lot of scrub, and a lot of badlands formations and salt lakes in great basins.  There are random herds of vicuna ranging around, like the Rocky Mountain pronghorn but more abundant and less skittish of human contact.  There are wolves and mountain lions and foxes, and hyperactive tiny life everywhere.  Of course, here, the elevation runs between 13000-16000 feet, so the sun is more intense and unrelenting and the dry air more dessicating than in the western US.  

(Vicuna!)

A strange side-effect of so much familiarity is that I find myself....not underwhelmed, but not overwhelmed either.  I keep coming into contact here with travelers who are absolutely agog, who have never seen anything like this place in their lives, and who are awestruck by the vast distances, the desert quiet, the baroque fantasias in rock erupting out of the flat landscapes.  

But for me, to be honest, it feels more or less like home.  

Which response has this time brought with it a surprising longing for home.  

(Laguna Colorada, a salt lake filled with 30000 flamingoes.) 
(We def don't have flamingoes in Utah.)

I have had such an unspeakably amazing several months, drifting around the globe and feeling myself transformed by a series of dislocations--some profound and some gentle.  And the thing that I am most surprised to discover in the midst of it all is that I am even more grateful for the life that I live in "normal" times:  for my home (my actual house, yes, but also my gloriously beautiful state, which gives me access to all the mountains and rococo red rocks that someone could want, with very little effort or distance required).  For the people I'm fortunate to have in my life.  Even for the (maddening, messy) country I live in, which--for all its manifest flaws--works so freaking well in comparison with just about every other place and is worth our collective labor and energy to sustain. 

(A field of quinoa in the middle of harvest)

After Jay died, I was emotionally wasted.  It wasn't just that I felt cheated by the universe, and that I lived in an economy of scarcity and loss (though that was certainly what I felt).  It was also that--as much as I was glad to be the person who walked with him to the end--dedicating all my hours to the care of someone else had depleted my ability to feel compassion and had made me resentful of relationships, which frankly seemed to me to have become merely a huge checklist of obligations and demands that I could no longer respond to.  I hesitate to say that this year has been healing for me, because I don't wish to make it seem vapid or pop-psyche or whatever.  But this year has certainly given me an abundance of time to be present only to the day, and has reoriented me to what's at hand rather than the past-focused jaggedness of anger and grief or the future-focused miasma of fear and grief.  And in my fascinating isolation this year has impressed upon me that what makes the present most meaning-full is the people with whom I'm so fortunate to share this world.

(Salar de Uyuni--the world's largest salt flat--at sunrise)

I guess what I'm saying is that this year has given me the opportunity to come home to myself.  And that has made it possible for me, finally, to want to be once more fully home.