Driving in the United States

More than a week ago, I drove from Provo to St. Louis in one go. I had only been back in the country (and time zone) for about a week at this point, but I felt my hours were still crazy enough to pull it off. And they were. Or I am still crazy enough to pull it off, which is inarguable. Anyway, I decided to finally drive through all of Colorado in the daylight. The last couple of times I have driven across Colorado, it has always been at night, and while I love to imagine gaping black holes of mountains and forests on either side of me while I drive, I decided it might be nice to see the whole thing again. The last time I saw Colorado in the daytime was more than a decade ago when I was driving the Ford Aspire aka "Ping" while my father was driving the airport bus aka "The White Whale" caravaning as we moved from Kansas City to Seattle. Memories of the landscape are vague. I most vividly remember losing my father (before the days when we both had cell phones) and both making long distance calls to my mother to find out where the other one was. Elinor was riding with me at that point and we got to stop in beautiful Idaho Springs, Colorado. I also remember when my tire blew out on a narrow two lane road down into Utah. I got to drive very slowly on the spare and there was a very long line of traffic by the time I got to the town in the valley.

This time was much less eventful. But very beautiful. I'm not sure how vistas of just trees and mountains can pull the breath out of you as you try to say anything relevant. Millions of years of geological and biological forces result in something that our petty version of aesthetics considers beautiful and there is nothing I can say to even describe the grandeur of these rooted rocks reaching up through soil, humus, and forests, all barely covering their surface. Anyway, after all this intense nature, I stopped in Denver to see The Dark Knight at a movie theatre. A nice break with some wifi to check email and facebook. Then the trip in the dark through Kansas. I stopped to nap twice and it was daylight by the time I recognized some exits around Kansas City. Before I left Utah, I was staying in the house I used to live in and camping on the bed I used to sleep on. I had been course marshaling the Tour of Utah bike race for the week before so I hadn't had a chance to see any movies or even sleep much the night before I began to drive. I needed those naps. I wasn't until afternoon that I reached St. Louis with a hotel reservation waiting. People entering Nirvana could not have felt as I did entering that hotel room. By the time I was driving into St. Louis, a massive hail storm was inundating the cars and road with sheets of rain designed expressly to make driving nearly impossible. After many many hours of driving, this was the last obstacle in my obstacle course across the states. And then I arrived in the largest hotel room I had stayed in in a very long time. Much larger than any in Europe - even the really nice ones. So nice and spacious. I immediately explored the hot tub to work out a stiff back before the heavenly collapse into bed.

But then the jet lag returned with a vengeance. Ever since returning from Europe, I had been encountering problems with experiencing a restful night. But now it was happening after driving across the country. Maybe it was because it was too easy. This wasn't like driving in Europe where I was constantly stressed about tickets being mailed to me if I was a couple kilometers per hour over the speed limit. I'm sure Switzerland is waiting to send a stack to me. This was just so easy. I just drove. No cameras, and if there were they wouldn't be mailing me a ticket from them. Maybe that was it. The long drive across the country wasn't hard enough. So, I wasn't tired enough to sleep in this beautifully soft bed. Maybe I should have stayed in Colorado under the mountains. Even if I couldn't sleep there, I could sit next to the unsleeping rocks, always awake and moving on a microscopic level or less. Watching the fast world that needs so much sleep.