davethegrinch.net

Dave says:

Consider this: the United States of America is a giant restaurant bill. You know, the piece of paper the server puts face down on your table at the end of your meal, and as she does so she performs that neat little trick where she puts a crease along the middle of the bill so it has a handy little ridge by which to pick it up. Am making any sense here?

The crease is the Rocky Mountains, they run from Canada down to New Mexico, creating a continental sized ridge that would be quite handy if some trans-dimensional being needed to pick up the USA to see what’s underneath. OK, that’s too much symbolism. Or is it? You see, I never thought the Rockies would be very symbolic to me. In fact, I didn’t really know where they were. I mean, I know where they are but just like any great natural marvel, you might know where it is from a book but you never can really know until you’ve been there. The symbolism of this whole g’damn trip slapped me in the face at 11,312 feet above sea level as the little red Santa Fe, despite a V6 engine, was huffing and puffing up the side of a mountain. There, at the top of Monarch Pass, is the crease they call the Continental Divide. Any river that starts to the east of that point flows into the Atlantic and any that starts to the west heads downhill, all the way to the Pacific. To the Pacific and to home, my friends, is where we are heading. This is it. Just like when you push your snowboard over the edge of the drop, you have no choice but to go where gravity takes you.

Now, I know that having a little red Santa Fe with a V6 engine means we can defy the laws of gravity and, if the truth be told, we have used it to do so in order to visit the best of New Mexico, but the fact still stands that we can not defy the pull home. It is inevitable we will be home sooner rather than later. The closer we get, the more momentum we have and the faster we’ll arrive. As I sat there on top of that mountain, posing for a self-timer picture, I realized that every crappy picture I take from now counts double, every stop is to be savored and each mile is more important than the last. Of course, each of the 54,124 miles we’ve travelled so far has been important but these last 1400 are special because they represent all the ones that came before it. The USA is as fantastic a place to travel around as any of the other countries we’ve visited. It’s ironic that this country holds a position of responsibility to our trip in the same manner in which it does to the rest of the world. But equally so, we must make sure the lure of a long left home doesn’t taint what it can offer. If anything, these last two weeks will cement the success of the whole trip. If we come out of this smiling we will have beaten the odds, silenced the naysayers yet proven nothing to anybody but ourselves because we having nothing to prove to anybody but ourselves. In Dutch, the restaurant bill is called the ‘rekoning’, so here the continental divide is the crease by which we can flip over our reckoning. Enjoy the ride downhill, we may never do this again.

(We’ll probably do this again)

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 5:32 am and is filed under Global Travels, USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.