Travel, Tragedy and Love
When you wake up each morning, do you ever have that feeling that something is missing? Or that your life to this point hasn’t been what you’d planned? My adult life started I’d say when I was twenty two, down on my luck and apathetic toward everyone and everything I’d ever known or cared about. I’d dropped out of college twice, couldn’t hold a job and didn’t really try to. A partner? Good luck with that buddy. I was a pathetic thing, something to be pitied and forgotten like a stray cat huddled against the outside of a building on a cold day, no one is going to bring it in but they also feel sorry for it. Left alone to fumble through the cold to freeze or survive. I felt like a stray, lost and alone. I had friends and family but I couldn’t find my way to what I truly needed. I couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy.
Travel was something I came to later in my life than probably most. We didn’t take many vacations when I was a kid and it never even occurred to me that I could go wherever my heart desired whenever I wanted to until I hit my early twenties. A curtain was pulled back and my immediate world was turned upside down. A road trip around the western states opened my eyes, gave me that push I needed to reach ever outward towards the unknown frontiers I’d yet to have seen.
I figured out my life to a certain extent after that twenty second year, got a job and eventually used my new career path to move away from home. In that space of time I found a partner but it wasn’t meant to be and it ended the year I moved away. Spent the next year floating through life, evaluating what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. I had a few partners none of them very serious, until finally almost two years on I found someone I knew I could spend the rest of my life with. Things were coming back together again, I’d found renewed focus at work and a plan to explore the country as well as plans for further down the line with my recently discovered soulmate. It felt like I’d found a key to the world.
I’d also decided to make 2021 the year of the road trip. After a COVID induced year of minimal exposure and hardly any travel in 2020 I felt the urge to explore at a pace I’d never tried before. My partner and I travelled to Royal Gorge then to Taos, New Mexico. I took a solo journey to the Grand Canyon, the first time I’d ever visited Arizona, on that trip I saw Monument Valley and Bryce Canyon for the first time before traveling through Capitol Reef on the way home. My partner and I ventured to the Badlands and the Black Hills of South Dakota, I was at ease, life was in balance and I could’ve jumped the moon I was so ecstatic and elated with it and what was to come. Everything seemed to be falling into place and every door seemed to be opening. That key to the world was firmly in hand.
But the minute you think this world has given you the key to it you find out the door you thought that key would open disappears and leaves you with another door where only loss and pain are found and you’re left holding the bag.
That door was opened on June 14th of 2021. A phone call on my way in to work from my Mother. The spells my Dad had been having, the dizziness, the confusion, it had come to a head the day before when he was delirious and could hardly walk without almost falling over. He had been having trouble sleeping for quite a while and was diagnosed with sleep apnea but after a few months of fitting his mask and machine he’d been getting better sleep for the first time in forever and lack of sleep was the excuse for the minor moments of delirium and they subsided a bit with his better sleep. But he still had moments where he was a little confused or disoriented. Some remedies were tried but to no real avail and when he almost fell over trying to walk down the hall to the bedroom my Mom got him loaded into the car and headed to the emergency room. A cat scan and an MRI soon followed and later a phone call with news.
Cancer, a tumor on the brain from which there was no real cure. Inoperable.
Part of me died that day. My Dad was my best friend throughout my entire life almost and one of the few people I ever really felt comfortable talking to about the goings on in my life. I don’t remember a lot from that week I had planned on sneaking back home for Father’s Day to surprise him but the surprise wasn’t appropriate anymore. I went back home, drank as heavily as I could to get through the weekend and returned trying to keep from coming unglued from reality.
My partner kept me grounded and sane through one of the most incredible bouts of sadness and pain I’d ever experienced. She was there for me every step of the way especially that first week, when we were a mere 3 months into our relationship. I knew then that I couldn’t be without her, no matter what else happens in my life she’s my rock. I’d never known what that felt like before then, I’d never had a partner that was truly all in like that. It drove me to push myself to do the things I needed to to feel whole again and to find calm and peace that summer. To experience life as it is meant to be.
Since I got my first real taste for it travel had been something that helped soothe my soul and ease my worries. Getting away from the day to day and discovering new and exciting places, adding more maps to my brain’s catalog. I’d already planned on seeing quite a few places in 2021 but now it was imperative. My Dad’s diagnosis kicked my ass emotionally and mentally and I needed to get away more than I’d ever needed it in my life but I also wanted to do my best to see as much as I could and to catalog it for my father to see before the inevitable happened. July featured a trip to Theodore Roosevelt National Park and a camping experience that featured a herd of Buffalo roaming through my campsite. Every step of the way I was documenting, taking photos, video, FaceTimes back to my Mom and Dad. Trying to share the experience with them and hoping my Dad would see things he’d never get to otherwise.
In August my partner and I loaded up the car and explored three of the four national parks in Colorado. Mesa Verde, Black Canyon of the Gunnison and Great Sand Dunes. Camping in the San Juan mountains and then on the Gunnison reservoir all the while traversing the southern half of the state and bringing the wonders of the centennial state back to my Dad.
At the end of that month I brought my partner back to meet my family for the first time and show her from whence I come. She met Dad and he couldn’t have been happier for us. I knew she was who I’d want to spend the rest of my life with and I wanted my Dad to meet her and for her to meet the man who made me who I am for better or worse. I know I’m not perfect but neither was he and he’d be the first to tell you that, but what matters is how you treat those you love and he instilled that in all of us kids so for my partner to get the opportunity to meet him before he was gone meant the world to me.
A week later I was once again heading west first to see some of the oldest living organisms on earth at Great Basin National Park, where a grove of Bristlecone Pines features trees that range from 2000-4000 years old. A walk through this grove was one of the most peaceful experiences of my life a calm serenity fell over me as I wandered amongst the ancient trees and breathed in their air. There’s something to being near organisms that old that makes everything we do feel hurried. I took my time in that grove and spent as much time as I could near the gnarled creatures that cling to the mountain top.
Further west still to Reno, then California, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and venturing through the Redwoods. Towering giants surrounded me as I sauntered through Lady Bird Johnson Grove I could hear waves crash on the coast in the distance and birds chirping in the forest around me. Peace. I was looking for it, I’d found it.
A journey along the Oregon coast followed and a trip through the Willamette Valley and on to Washington before returning home by way of Idaho and Utah. A massive journey which took 11 days of driving to complete but one I wouldn’t change for the world. Every step of the way I was sending photos back to my Dad, calling when I could, FaceTiming when I had signal. I FaceTimed my brother and showed him the grove of redwoods. Showed my Mom and Dad Mt St Helens, the Oregon coast and hundreds of places in between. I wanted my Dad to see every bit of my trip, I had a feeling he’d not get to see these places on his own and it felt like an obligation to be his eyes. To record every single facet of every trip I took and to relay the information back. It had become so routine that any little trip I took by myself, with my partner or even with friends I would send back photos or FaceTime or call.
I was doing it for me but I couldn’t help but feel like I was also doing it for him giving him something to live through vicariously, one last mega road trip pieced together out of a multitude of trips I’d taken.
I started writing this at the beginning of 2022, in January about 5 months before my father succumbed to his disease. I knew he had precious little time left and I tried my damnedest to see him and talk to him as often as possible but it didn’t make the end any easier. When time was shortest I loaded up and headed for home, I had been torn, I’d seen him a solid week before and he’d been awake and there but also not there and he couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t want to see him withered away in the last minutes of his life but I also couldn’t help but feel the pull to be there when the final hours were approaching. I’d headed out that Friday morning while he was still alive, he passed 3 hours into my 8 hour drive. I’d prepared for his passing from June 14th on, that first call, a diagnosis for which there was only one possible end and the only variable was time. How much time was left and how could he extend that amount.
A year was the initial estimate. In the end that was about what he got. I’ve travelled since his passing, heading to south Texas and New Mexico on a tour of national parks, Carlsbad Cavern, Guadalupe Mountains, Big Bend and White Sands. Then a solo journey to Rocky Mountain National Park and in every place I couldn’t help but feel his presence, I could almost hear his voice, joyful and excited to see the pictures and videos I was sending him and telling me he’d have to load the truck up and head on down or out to see the places in person when he got the chance.
I cried at mills lake in Rocky Mountain National Park halfway back on a ten mile hike when I stopped to take pictures and realized I couldn’t send them to him anymore. But I smiled at the end of it, knowing that even though he was gone he’d always carry on in me.
Whatever I’d been trying to find ten years ago, be it serenity, love, accomplishment I found it all in one year. Simultaneously the worst and best year of my life. It’s funny how that works out isn’t it, a year that should be so painful to look back on and remember but one so full of new beginnings and wonder.
— Wandering Toto, 2022
I love you Dad.
The Wandering Toto 