Now that I am taking road trips again, I’m back in a world of roadside beauty. I am ever amazed at how utterly beautiful our world is. Everywhere I go, there is wonder easily at hand. For someone who spends any significant time driving, finding this gorgeous scenery along the way is vital. It can be as important as the beauty found hiking into the wilderness.
It’s true that I can’t hear birds or crickets or silence while I’m in the car. Or smell sagebrush, or feel a soft breeze. But I can see dappled sunlight in forests, mountains with crowns of clouds, deserts stretching to the horizon. Streams flow past, sometimes cascading into waterfalls.
Rivers wander to the left and right of me, sometimes switching under bridges I drive over. I see the history of the planet in the jagged upthrusts of rock and the millions-of-years-old canyons cut by patient rivers. I can see storms in the distance, sunsets, the moon in its many phases.
All of this tends not to be true of the places where we live. We possess a tragic willingness to meet the grandeur of the world with strip malls, boxy buildings, and flat rugs of grass. Getting off the road in an inhabited place is often an exit from the sublime into dreariness.
This post is an updated version of one I wrote a long time ago now. That one concentrated on the wayside wonders of our trip to and from Alaska in 2015. This time I’m home from a road trip that took me through northern California to Idaho and Oregon. Prompting me to remember some of the entrancing scenery I’ve driven through over the years.
I’ve limited the photos to only those I took from the truck or car, or standing near it, parked on the side of the road. I share some of the memories attached in the photo captions.
Driving through all that roadside beauty has a bewitching effect. The catch of breath and expanding heart happen again and again. Snow-capped mountains cascade into a wildflower-filled meadow in Montana. Around a bend, a serene, deep green wetland in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Another bend, the last of the sunlight lights a ridge on fire in southern Utah.
Driving becomes an open heart meditation. Even after a whole day, and a complaining back, it’s hard to return to the reality of towns, motels, dinner. We are here to see this. To be the consciousness of the universe reflecting on itself, to be participants in its continual unfolding.
Of course, it’s best to be out in it, not driving through it. But since traveling requires the latter, I’m celebrating the great gift of the moving panorama of roadside beauty I can see from the car. Dogwood filling the woods. The dry curve of dunes in Death Valley. A lighthouse guarding the coast in Nova Scotia. Gold lighting the autumn forest. And everywhere clouds, rivers, reflections, glory.
The Irish poet John O’Donohue said that one gift of the Celtic imagination is that landscape isn’t just matter. It’s as alive as we are in a totally different form. Maybe my love of Earth is a legacy of my Irish heritage. But most indigenous cultures feel the same way. Not so long ago, we were all indigenous to a living landscape somewhere on our planet.
Perhaps what gets stirred when we leave our settlements is a reminder. An ancestral sense of kinship with our vibrant world. Of emerging from it, being an integral part of it. We travel through a landscape that speaks to us of history, endless beauty, mystery, and presence. Places whose moods and glories both open and hold our hearts.
(Top photo: After driving through Glacier National Park and seeing wonderful things, but not wildflowers, I came across this glorious meadow on the outside edge of the park.)
~ RELATED POSTS ~
Living on an ancient, vital landscape had a profound effect on me. It was my call of the wild. As I did in childhood, I could feel the aliveness of the landscape itself and my place in it.
In Missouri, I found a country road full of wildflowers and other beauties. Walking grounds me on our green and breathing planet, weaving me deeply into the plants I love. And, in this case, into some curious cows and an adventurous baby bird.
Human history is barely a whisper in Earth’s 4.5 billion year timeline. A lot of wild things happened before we came along. Utah is a perfect showcase. Standing on ancient stone, I can find both the history of Earth and my soul’s bedrock.