Wayside wonders

One thing that is constantly and wonderfully borne in on me as I travel is how utterly beautiful our world is. Everywhere I go, there is magnificent scenery easily at hand. For someone who spends as much time driving as I do, the gorgeous wayside wonders along the way are crucial. As important as the beauty that can be found hiking into the wilderness.

It’s true that I can’t hear birds or crickets or silence while I’m in the truck. Or smell sagebrush or pine trees 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. 

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, slivers of moon.

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, box stores, and flat rugs of grass. Getting off the road in an inhabited place is often an exit from the sublime into dreariness. 

Because the landscape gets wilder as you go north, the roads in British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska are startlingly beautiful. Mile upon mile of wayside wonder in every direction..

Driving through all that roadside beauty has a bewitching effect. The catch of breath and expanding heart that comes as a snow-capped volcano rises from shimmering blue water happens over and over again. Around another bend, magenta flowers frame a glacier in the distance. Another bend, sunlight glitters on the cascade of water down a lush, green coastal slope.

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, RV parks, 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 I can see from the road. Magically lit mountains, still water at twilight, the coming of fall on the Yukon road to the Arctic, clouds, rivers, reflections.

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, just in a totally 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 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.

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(Top photo is a mountain being lit from below by the setting sun in Donald, British Columbia.)

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The photo collections from my Alaska adventure can be found on the Galleries page.

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