west by east

Bellingham is, geographically speaking, about as far west as you can go and still be in the continental United States. But to get to the West, to the imaginary land of cowboys and Indians, of ranches and coyotes, of boom and bust and arid mountain landscapes, requires going east. Standing at an old fire lookout just east of Mt. Rainier, the difference was clear. To the west were the clouds we’d driven through on our way around Seattle, grumbling all the while about the rainy Northwest send-off. To the east, the skies were open and blue, marked only by the high clouds that bring neither shade nor rain. We were headed east, to Texas to visit my grandma, and to Kansas, to visit friends and to judge barbecue. We had a couple of specific destinations in mind and a vague time frame for getting there; we carried sleeping bags, a tent, food for the road, and a couple of bags full of books.

In Sunnyside, Washington, we met two Mexican cattlemen at a taco truck. Over tortas, they told us the winding story of how they’d come to be in eastern Washington, and then they asked us what we were doing there. We told them, more or less, our general plan, insofar as we ourselves had worked it out: to camp, to drive small highways, to visit friends and family. The more business-like of the two, the man we assumed was the boss, looked at us curiously and asked, as if rhetorically, “But won’t that waste a lot of time?” His companion rejoined, “Don’t you see? That’s what they want, to waste time.”

Of course what he actually said was, in Spanish, “lo que quieren es perder tiempo,” which translates literally as to lose time. Not spending time unwisely, as the English suggests, but misplacing it, losing track of it, using time, perhaps, as something other than as a measure of progress. To give yet another economic metaphor for the passage of hours, it is a luxury, certainly, to spend time this way. Given my druthers, I would, like most people, choose time over money, although the real grace lies in keeping both in perspective. A trip of this sort, though, offers little with which to bluff the passage of time; absent the busyness of workaday life, time must instead be fit to the immediate needs of the day.

As we drove through the landscapes that have served as backdrop to so much American self-invention, time weighed heavy upon me. It was present in the form of geologic time, as traced out by the canyons and gorges through which we crossed, and in the splay of social history that leads refugees from Laos and Somalia to the Texas panhandle, that creates the oil- and gas-fueled boomtowns of modern Wyoming, that finds a market for the corn from acre after acre of irrigated fields in Nebraska. It jarred a bit, as in the odd mix of military bravado and family vacation levity at the Little Bighorn Battlefield monument. It was there in family history, which is time’s way of sinking memory into flesh, as well as in the more personal past, as I measured the present of a town I’d loved against the images of it that I’d carried away so dearly.

I came away a little shaken, honestly, unsure of how best to rejoin time, having once lost it.