Tuesday, December 4, 2007
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Last night was cold - 30 degrees or so - and I barely had enough propane to see me through the night. I'm going to have to find some today and with that in mind I've decided to head south from Leeds on AL route 25 and keep an eye out for a propane dealer. I found one about 25 -30 miles out and AL 25 took me south of Birmingham and then gradually westward, eventually crossing I65 at Calera AL where I've holed up for the night, once again at Wal-Mart. My Verizon broadband connection is a little slow here but I'll get by. So far this service has performed very well for me.
Night camp: Wal-Mart in Calera AL
A Voyage and a Harbor
The native American was forced westward by the young escaping the limits of east coast villages that had been established only a generation or two earlier by parents escaping the limits of European villages. From then on, whether seeking a whale, rafting with Huck Finn, easy riding with Peter Fonda, or next week in Cancun, there has been a strong belief in America that happiness lies somewhere else. And yet as we find freedom we also rediscover loneliness. As geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says, we require both shelter and venture. We need freedom and support, silence and cacophony, the vast and distant but also the warm and near, a voyage and a harbor, the great adventure and the hobbit hole. Much of the iconography of our times gives little sense of this. Instead, the individual is treated as a self-sufficient, self-propelled vehicle moving across a background of other things, other places, and other people.