First World Existential Angst As Seen Through a Windshield

 Back in September I set out for Northwest Arkansas in what would be a frenzy of mechanical motion, too many grand vistas, geologic and human history given a nod of recognition but left unsounded. Nearly six thousand miles in the going and returning. Smoke choked the air through the Cascades well into Utah, the Escalante dawned apocopliptic, then came the Grand Canyon with all it's unfathomable treachorous magnitude. On and on I drove stopping each day to walk some place, any place. Somewhere on the western slopes of the Rockies the finitude of life felt tangiable and that ledger of moments well lived, oppurtinties siezed, and the remainder of what's to come diminishing with each revolution of the tires. Not to say I let all moments pass: I rise before dawn, usually find myself in the forest at the blue hour, helped rescue an injured woman five miles down into the canyon. Her mistake? Carrying the weight of her late husbands dreams. Perhaps a mistake more of us should make. One night speeding down the western slopes thinking back to that old lady, dehydrated, ankle grotesquly aranged, recalling dinner with my nephew, and walking above the Buffalo River with a man who's become a father to me felt like a revalation of the value of a thing discovered long after it's been lost to time. The next day I crawled into an ancient graniery left by the Anastazi not daring to discard prematurely what would one day be marked as "squandered" under the heading of oppurtinities. That frenzy of motion didn't cease; I returned from that trip five days premature. Learning nothing, perhaps.