To Clear My Head

I like to intuitively take road trips. In other words where I wind up I get there intuitively. The best person for me to travel with like this is my son. So, it always becomes quite an adventure between the two of us.

The last few months I have been aware my best friend through Junior High and High School was dying. His sister called me to tell me he was in a coma which is one of the final stages of both alzheimers and senile dementia. Both of which are fatal diseases. First that person goes back in age and ability until they reach about 5 years old then 3 then 2 then 1 then coma. So, at 63 that is where my friend was last week. I was staying in the desert near Palm Springs when his sister called to say my friend had passed on last Monday. My son thought that even though the weather was bad that we should still try to drive to Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon. I was a little surprised as I had wanted to take my son there earlier in the week when the weather was better. Now it didn't look very good weather wise. However, my son showed me that there was a break in the weather that day (Thursday) and that if we left right then we could miss the worst weather before we arrived in Flagstaff for the night. So, off we went around to interstate 15 and then east on Hiway 40. I hadn't been on 40 in this stretch since I was a boy before they created Interstate 10 to be what it is today.

For example, when  was 5 years old and living in San Diego, I believe it took at least 3 days or more to get to Mt. Shasta from San Diego because then Freeways only were in the biggest cities and mostly if you were driving long distance it was 2 lane or 4 lane hiways almost everywhere. So, since Interstate 5 wasn't there it took about 4 to 6 hours to drive over the Grapevine and similarly it took about 4 to 5 hours to drive from Redding to the little city of Mt. Shasta. Since it now takes barely and hour to go over the Grape vine and the same for Redding to Mt. Shasta, you can see just how much things have changed just since the 1950s when I first went to Shasta that I can remember in 1953 when I was 5 years old.

So, I was a little surprised to see that he was right about missing most of the storm. We could see all the really dark clouds to the north and heading north quickly all the way from Barstow to the Colorado River. My son was completely unprepared for northern Arizona because most people think only of cactuses and Red and Beige Buttes and all that. As we drove through Kingman and Williams in Arizona my son could not believe that there was anywhere like this in the U.S. with so many miles and miles of no houses no anything between these towns. It seemed unbelievable to him that places like this still exist in the U.S. I told him California outside of the larger cities was like this almost everywhere when I grew up in the 1950s in California. There was definitely a kind of cowboy experience in the wilds of California back then.  In northern Arizona you have Flagstaff  in a forest with a lot of trees which is over 7000 feet high (around the same altitude as Santa Fe New Mexico) and if you aren't used to it it might be hard for you to sleep. And if you have a breathing problem or other health problem be sure to take a tank of oxygen to revive yourself if you aren't sure about yourself at that altitude. At 63 I looked in the mirror at the Little America Motel there visible from Hiway 40 there in Flagstaff and even I looked very pale and woke up the next morning with an altitude headache. Friday morning my son got some bad news by phone and was kind of depressed that day so I insisted that we go to the Grand Canyon even though it had been snowing most of the night. So, we headed off into a blizzard with my new 4 wheel drive truck. About a third of the way to the Grand Canyon the blizzard backed off so we could see further forward than about 40 or 50 feet in front of the 4wheel drive truck. So, I felt a little more relieved. However, when we reached the Grand Canyon rim it was blizzard started going good again and mostly whited out the area so all you could see of the Canyon was the trees on the edge and about 300 feet straight down along the sandstone and rocks of the south rim of the Canyon. So, since my son isn't used to this cold of weather because of being acclimated to Southern California we went to an IMax theater nearby and watched an IMax presentation on the Grand Canyon. If you go there in foggy, snowy or rainy or just thick low clouds weather it is a must to see. When we looked at the weather coming in they expected about 2 feet of snow. And since we didn't want to get snowed in at they  Grand Canyon(I had already been snowed in several days at Lake Tahoe with 4 feet of new snow in 2 days earlier this year). And I didn't want this experience again this year at least. So, we decided to head for Sedona for a hotel there my wife and I had been to a couple of years ago. The new roundabouts there really through me off so I didn't really recognize the place. But finally by keying in the best western motels in the area I found the nice one my wife and I had liked before. That night it got very cold and snowed about a foot there. But at least we didn't have to deal with 2 feet and much colder weather. The next night we spent in Prescott and it snowed again there but not so much this time and we visited an old friend of my wife's there.

My wife had an intuition that we should not try to head north and go back interstate 40. This proved correct this morning because the grand canyon rim was 7 degrees Fahrenheit and it was below 20 where we were this morning as well. My wife's friend had said that Black ice was really going to be a problem for anyone driving last night and early this morning. So we waited until after 9 am to drive. By that time the sun (the storm had passed in the night) had warmed the asphalt enough to melt 90% or more of the black ice everywhere. My son found this great shortcut to interstate 10 that was less than 5 hours from Prescott to Palm Springs. This sounded pretty amazing and we really enjoyed the incredibly remote ride with very very few cars and pickup trucks (nothing longer than 40 feet in length is allowed on a section of this road over the mountains.) My son, living in Southern California couldn't believe just how barren the roads were in this section of travelers and just how clear the air was and just how beautiful the snow was on all the mountains and trees along this route. I suppose your smartphone  gps or Google maps on your computer might find this route if you route from Blythe to Prescott. or if you are non-tech by choice or nature just look at any Arizona map on paper and find the route. (It should be one of the alternate routes or even the main one to Prescott from Blythe. It was a very amazing drive (but very very few gas stations or amenities, just remoteness and beauty). We saw everything from pine trees near Prescott, to Saguaro cacti, to ocotillo cacti, to many others, and this time of year many different desert flowering plants and cacti are blooming if you are in a specific altitude. Because desert spring varies with altitude and the amount of rain that fell this year. However, the deserts were greener and flowering more than most years in memory in my whole life this year.

So, this type of trip is always an adventure and this one I would call "One step ahead of the Storm".

I think in regard to surviving on earth right now maybe we all feel we are one step ahead of the storm.

Though it was an adventure and in some ways an ordeal it helped both my son and I to recreate our lives and to move forward and not just get caught in totally unuseful places in consciousness. Thank you God for this opportunity for re-creation.