Friday, January 2, 2009 - Charlie's Transmission, Carlsbad NM
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Leaving the Wash, Devil's Hall trail, Guadalupe Mountains National Park, January 1, 2009
Arrangements were made and by days end LD had been dragged the 60 miles from the Guadalupe Mountains National Park visitors center parking lot to the Charlie's Transmission parking lot in Carlsbad where she and I sit awaiting Charlie's ministrations on Monday.
Night camp
Parking lot - Charlie's Transmission, Carlsbad NM
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.