A blog about running, hiking, dogs and seeing the world
“National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” —Wallace Stegner, 1983
I’ve just finished re-watching America’s Best Idea, the PBS special from 2009. In 1988 I wanted to go see the western National Park and signed up for a trip. Now, I just want to go see all the National Parks; I just want to go see the world. As much as I can. Ken Burns inspired travel.
I bought a few plane tickets and booked a couple car rentals this week. I can’t remember when I’ve felt so excited. Well, at least in the last year.
See, the last year has been filled with moving plans, buying furniture, adopting a dog, buying a house and starting a new job.
While all of these things are exciting in context, at my age they have produced unwanted anxiety to the level that I’ve never felt before; although all self-inflicted. While anxious, travel and and seeing new places is the last thing on my mind.
However, as things have settled down, one of the things that makes me want to travel is reading. After a period of stress and watching too much television, I have a thought about a book. I find a book on my bookshelf, or in a random online search and I’m suddenly reading for hours – I’m back to the self I like.
The reading frenzy started with Thomas Wolfe and Look Homeward, Angel; a book I read 20 years ago and fell in love with. I live 90 minutes from the setting of the book and where Wolfe grew up. I drove over to Asheville and walked around Old Kentucky Home.
I started reading his biographies and literary scholarship. I fell in love with him again. But reading Wolfe has led me back to my favorite author, Wallace Stegner. Reading Stegner makes me want to travel west, and so I booked my flight to Phoenix and can’t wait to see the desert, Grand Canyon and Tucson.
Right now, I’m on a reading frenzy. I have books lined up: The Secret Knowledge of Water, Following Esabella, Dakota, Marking the Sparrow’s Fall and more.
I’ve also started listening to audiobooks while driving. This was suggested to me by my friend Missy. I’ve mostly listened to music while driving all over East Tennessee. I live in the country so it’s a 15 minute drive minimum to anywhere I want to go except for the grocery store which is two miles down the road. YAY. I’m listening to Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner. Next up: Angle of Repose. I didn’t think I’d be able to concentrate on the words while driving but I can now lose myself in his descriptions of the midwest and west, his characters and their lives.
Reading and traveling make me question everything, and that is always good for me. It makes me reevaluate my choices and where I live. I live in the south and after one year, I truly like living here and enjoy learning about this region. I’m reading books about its history, about Great Smoky Mountains National Park and nonfiction from local writers.
As much as I like living here, and feel at home here, it’s always been a pattern of my thinking that I need to go away from a place, even if it’s just for a few days, to really appreciate it. I need that distance to think about my feelings towards a place I chose. Yes, I like living here but why do I really like it? One of the hard things to get used to living in East Tennessee is how far west in the eastern time zone it is; it is so dark in the morning. Right now, the sunrise is at 6:45 am and can’t walk dogs or run in pitch black for safety; from wildlife or crazy people.
Distance helps me sort out complicated feelings of home, place and choices. In the last 25 years, home has always been where my dogs are. Could this be my forever home, a place I own and where all my stuff is?
I’ve been told that if you don’t own a home you are considered homeless by the government. All these years I’ve been homeless while searching for my forever place. So there is this to think about while traveling and walking around the desert.
I do know that as soon as I start writing packing lists and preparing dogs for the kennel my travel anxiety will begin. As much as I love being away from home, or the place I live, I will miss it and can’t wait to get back home again.
It’s been a crazy few weeks where I’m trying to figure out what I’m suppose to be.
Am I an ultra runner?
Well I ran today and back on a training plan.
Dog lover?
I’m taking care of my dogs and wanting a third dog so my young pup has a playmate.
Worker bee?
I love where I work and that is always a good thing for me.
Friend?
Kassandra is visiting in a few weeks and I have a bunch of things to do such as buying a bed for the spare room. I can’t wait to see her and show her my place.
Hiker?
Now that I don’t live in Gatlinburg it’s tough to hike in the park. Ugh the traffic but I have to get in the park and hike/run to get ready for my ultra running season.
It’s been such a transition this last 45 days and I’m finally figuring everything out.
Here are the things that make me happy and know I’m going to get through everything to meet training goals, have fun, do what I say I will do and explore the world.
After weeks of lackluster training and so much stress of homeownership, I sit and watch a random show that pops up. It’s the Meredith Grey last day episode. I just love the monologues of this show.
When I moved to Tennessee in July last year, I needed a great show to watch to relax at night to take my mind off the bears around the rental house and steep windy roads that I drove to get away from the rental house. I surely thought I would plunge my car off one of these roads and no one would find me for days. But I digress ..
In July I watched an episode, and Meredith Grey’s monologue hit me like a ton of bricks. I was making so many changes; and at times doubted everything. I posted this on Facebook:
Now, here I am, again, trying to relax after stupid homeowner stuff is stressing me out. I watch this random epidode and it hits me. My life is what I made it. And while, I wish I had someone in my life to help me figure out the well, the septic tank (I live in the country, man), how to hang curtains and bathroom hardware, how to landscape a yard that I think is infested with weeds, and how to get weird smells out of carpet when you can’t open the windows because the prior owner puttied them shut (I ordered new windows and with the supply chain problem I’ll get them in 2025).
I’m trying to figure out all this stuff, while training for ultras, taking care of dogs and trying to figure out if I can adopt a third dog, and working hard to do great things at my workplace. Trying to figure all this out is hard stuff. I’m feeling sorry for myself.
Then I hear this from Grey’s Anatomy.
[Isn’t it amazing how words can transform your thoughts?]
I’ve been through broken bones and a broken home. And the death of people I love but I’m still here.
I never chose the safety of what was known when there was the possibility of more to be discovered.
I’ve had adventures that most people only dream about.
And I’ve had loses that I still dream about.
And if there is one thing I’ve learned in all my adventures, it’s that there’s no such thing as a life lived happily ever after.
Unless the happily means simply that we’re still alive. That the sun is rising on another day. Because with every sunrise comes the possibility of happiness. And also the possibility of heartache.
And sometimes it’s all rolled up together.
I came to understand as a very young child that when the imagination is limitless, life’s possibilities are endless. But I learned that the hard way.
I learned it through yearning and frustration and ache and longing. And sometimes desperation for a different life from the one I was living. I learned to stretch my imagination and spread my wings. And to allow for all the options life had to offer. Not only the ones I could see with my eyes. I stretched for the ones I could feel with my heart.
As long as the sun rises on your life, there will be new dragons to slay.
The end of my story is not any kind of ever after because I’m still alive. I’m still here.
And the sun still rises on my life.
The Sun Still Rises On My Life.
Keep training. Keep adopting dogs. Keep doing a great job at work, life and friendship. That is what I’m thinking tonight.
I bought this poster in 1988 when I traveled out west after high school.
Once I got back to NH, after I thought I’d live forever in Colorado, I framed this poster and it has traveled with me every move.
I’ve always loved the quote, and after spending time in the Tetons, and the Jackson Hole Hostel I get it. Keep Wyoming Wild. Keep all beautiful places wild.
I love the composition of the photo: dark clouds over the Tetons, a little bit of light.
There are no beautiful blue skies and pastoral landscapes on my walls. I’m no decorator but the wall hangings in the countless homes, apartments and condos I’ve lived in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Colorado, Arizona and now Tennessee, all mean something to me. I seem to love dark-ish, black and white photos and illustrations; yet somehow I’m still hopeful.
Tonight, for the first time, I research the writer and the quote and find out this:
“God bless Wyoming and keep it wild” was written in the last entry in the diary of 15-year-old Helen “Becky” Mettler, a Bar B-C guest from New Jersey in 1925. She fell 100 feet to her death in Taggart Canyon.
Ouch.
A girl from New Jersey – out west. Sounds a lot like Pam Houston. A writer who wrote about growing up in New Jersey and couldn’t wait to get out west.
My favorite story from Houston is the one about her dog Jackson in the book: A Little More About Me, the essay Home Is Where Your Dogs Are:
“My dog Jackson died today. He was my first dog, and I bought him at a pet store when he was only eight weeks old. We’ve been together more than fourteen years, which makes our relationship the longest successful relationship of my life.” I get that.
She also writes in this story about a place they lived in Fraser, Colorado. Fraser is a place I know pretty well and it is known as the “icebox of the nation” until a city in Minnesota won a court case. But I digress.
Houston fell in love with the west and wrote about it for years.
I get that, too.
But the poster makes me long to go see the Tetons again. I skied Jackson Hole during my Steamboat stint but haven’t hiked those mountains since 1988. It’s time.
While 2023 is still going to have many racecations, it’s time for some old time hiking and driving the west to see things.
I love the west, the stories, travel, the adventure.
This week, my NH hiking buddy, Ross is out west taking photos of Yellowstone and the Tetons and it got me thinking.
I need to go see these places again.
If I’m not living there I must travel there and be a part of it so I called Mark and made a plan to go there. I told him tonight, let’s go in the next two week or next May. He said without saying it: let’s go next year.
