Aug
5
Last Saturday night I was sleeping out under the stars, which sounds rather romantic or at least aspirational (Instagram photo caption: live ~ laugh ~ love ~ *stargaze*) but really it was a last-ditch effort to deal with being way the fuck too hot at night during a camping trip. Sure, let’s ditch the tent! Can’t sleep any worse than I have been!
As it turns out, it was in fact possible to sleep worse, in the sense that I slept not at all. However, if a person is going to have a night of unrelenting insomnia, being immersed in nature next to a river isn’t a half-bad place to be.
I mean, I did have to cycle several times through my own personal laundry list of outdoor-related anxieties before I could fully unclench. For instance, I was quite worried about bugs, particularly orifice-seeking spiders since we were directly on the ground. At dusk, there were a great number of bats swooping around and I kept imagining one borking its echolocation somehow and smashing directly into my face Fabio-style. The noise of the river was both pleasant and distracting: it was a continual white-noise rush and burble with inconsistent surges that I kept misidentifying as the sounds of something in the river rather than the river itself.
Also, we were stationed a few hundred yards from an actual bear fence protecting the coolers, so there was THAT.
As the night went on, I gradually stopped worrying about my surroundings conspiring to attack me and I was able to relax/surrender. The sky went from a collection of pinpricks to a riotous expanse of glitter and black, the kind of jaw-dropping starry night it’s impossible to see from town. I saw shooting stars leave blink-and-you-miss it tracers in dramatic zipping arches, I saw the bright busy movement of the ISS, I saw the Big Dipper slowly rotate until only the handle was left in view.
It was a staggeringly beautiful, endlessly long night. It felt like the kind of night where you’re supposed to come out the other end with some sort of grand epiphany, but mostly I was deeply grateful for two things: that I had experienced it, and that it was over.
Jul
20
We just wrapped up a weeklong family road trip, driving from Eugene to Logan, Utah (where John’s manufacturing facility is) and then on to Moab/Arches National Park and Bryce Canyon before winding our way home via some of the most desolate stretches of road I’ve ever been on. Like, “Next rest stop is in 273 miles and it is a 3-inch-tall sage bush.”
It was extremely humbling to be in these parks, particularly Arches and the nearby Dead Horse Point where you can see rock layers that go back 275 million years. I felt very small, gazing at this scenery, like not so much in a physical sense (although some of the formations are dizzyingly huge, it seemed impossible to capture any kind of scale in a photo) but in terms of … earth time, I guess?
There was this feeling of insignificance that was actually weirdly reassuring. It can seem like the whole story of the planet is people and what people do and say, but plot the entirety of human existence on that layer-cake of ancient sediment and sandstone and petrified wood and it would barely show up. My own life: a blip. I felt cosmically unimportant and enormously grateful; briefly untethered from the endless mental loop of fretting about the past and the future and my purpose in the world.
I am so lucky to be here, is what I kept thinking.
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