Hiker, Writer, Traveler, Recovering Person
So it was with the time I … well, it doesn’t really need any setup. I’ll let Paul of the Year 2000 tell you all about it.
The sign on a barely paved road, leading into the sagebrush nothingness, with the name of a town and “12 miles.”
The glimpse of a snowy mountain range just over the bare local horizon.
Walking into a cafe and everybody in the place stopping to look at you juuuussst long enough to realize they don’t know you and they don’t care, then resuming their chatter.
A rest area with a horse, not pet, exercise area.
Normally, I’m not a Big Moment guy. For example, as I left my hometown of 24 years, literally as I got in the car to drive off, there was a small dash of “Oh my gosh, this is happening,” but a lot more of “I need to let my friend in Bend know when I’m getting there for coffee.” Never mind the year of international travel I aspire to after that, or the two decades of life I was pulling away from.
It would be a comfort to think so, that at some point the schedule will be nice and simple, the days clean and the mind clear. Certainly it will happen in the new place? When the boxes are unpacked over there, a new life can emerge without all these current complications — right?
They aren’t real lasts, of course. I’ll be back this summer, after all, just not as a resident, and not for terribly long. But knowing that it’s the last time you’ll do something brings a certain awareness and appreciation to it. You know how you look back at things, people and experiences in your life after they’re gone and wish you could relive them one more time? What if, the last time you did something, you knew it was the last time?
Gave me several laughs, actually. The sightseeing brochure from Norwich, England was still in there from about 2015 because … why, exactly? Same thing for the car insurance documents — from my previous car. And an expired Food Handlers Card.
I don’t mean a test of character, or planning, or searching for a place, or any mental acumen. I mean the test that determines whether I keep a thing or not.
There’s just something impossibly endearing about a guy who is an absolute goofball and makes no attempt to either hide it or change. “In my early days of touring,” he has said, “I used to worry about being a cultural bumpkin — but now I embrace it. After all, I travel to learn.”
It was just one of those pieces I felt good about at the time, like I had really gotten the essence of the experience and the place. And it was, for all its goofiness, a pleasant memory, road-tripping around the desert with my first serious girlfriend.