Friday, April 15, 2011

A Dream

I will never forget the first time I saw John. Physics class, freshman year. He was wearing a short sleeved rock t-shirt over a longed sleeved long john shirt. His baseball hat was pushed back and his eyes met mine with a slow and easy smile. My stomach flipped. I knew in that exact moment that I would marry him. But I didn't exactly have all my ducks in a row. It took 2 years until I finally was able to coerce him into dating me. Eventually, the boundaries between our lives began to erase.  My friend, Dot, once put it to me this way: "He keeps you grounded and you help him fly."

And with him, I have had great dreams turned into realities. One of these dreams has been to travel. I am so grateful for the five years that he and I had together before Seth was born. I am grateful that we camped from wilderness to wilderness, melding into a single entity - not only with each other, but also with the world created for us. It was a time when we went beyond sharing laughter and friends and common interests. Being together in the woods and hiking and seeing creation for the first time was to share something so great that words fail. Words like silence and reverence and beauty and dreams and freedom all pale, leaving the experiences we shared at that time as intangible and unutterable as wraiths. They remain only in our memories to haunt us with unimaginable beauty in place and in body and in heart. The places we have been and the world we have seen together have pulled us together with a inescapable gravity.

I find myself often tempted to just pack up and go. This of course is insane. But, as Margaret Gehrke stated, "To be sensible is to be commonplace."  I am a listless soul in search of something bigger than the monotony of the every day, bigger than myself.

While I was in the hospital recovering from a uterine infection following Darren's birth, John and I watched the  4th video of Ken Burns's documentary on the National Parks.  We have been watching them (slowly) over the last year.  I have loved them, and they evoke in me an idea of something beautiful.  Perhaps it is because John and I have loved visiting the National Parks together so much.  Perhaps it is because in the quietness of the world I have found a preservation of mind and spirit.  Perhaps it is because I have grown there.  The documentary has made me believe in the National Park system as something to be treasured as an American ... as a human being.  I have come to value public space as something to be treasured.

A dream has been born.  I dream to share these places with my children.  Now that Darren is here, I feel that I have completed something and I can't wait to share the world with my family of five!  My children are in that in between age .... too old to be hauled on our backs still, but too young to be able to hike a strenuous hike.  Since they are still small, maybe the next park to be visited will be Mesa Verde, where there is a lot to see without too many miles of trekking.  Or maybe Theodore NP in ND, where there are concretions, wild horses and a herd of buffalo.  Parks like Zion or  Bryce should be explored when they are able to knock off 10 + miles by themselves.  Like me, Seth has a wondering spirit, and has been longing to see Redwood NP for some time now.

I have spent a bit of time searching http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/.  There are pictures of every NP and many other places there, and it is phenomenal to see.  I have found that I love looking at the pictures and picking out where to go next.  But even with the incredible imagery there, the pictures pale in comparison to the experience of being in those places in person.

Anyone have suggestions on what parks are nice to visit with kids?

John and I have done:
Acadia
Great Smokeys
Theodore Roosevelt
Badlands
Windcave
Tetons
Glacier
Yellowstone
Cascades
Olympic
Arches
Big Bend
Canyonlands
Grand Canyon
Banff (Canada)
Jasper (Canada)
Campobello Island (Canada)


  

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