The West Coast Super Trip of '96

    Many times, when I came home from school, I’d look at maps and imagine what each place on them looked like.  I’d project myself onto the maps and imagine myself traveling on their roads, approaching any major city and national park my mind saw fit.  I’d known what the Seattle skyline looked like, but not any other cities.  My mind didn’t care though; it had the power to construct buildings out of thin air, and I even tried to draw some of the skylines that had conjured inside my head.  That’s why going on road trips is one of my favorite things to do.  The reality of a road trip always confronts my imagination with surprising results.  Los Angeles was definitely one of those cities I’d imagined driving through, so to finally accomplish that was something I was proud of doing.  Fortunately, we didn’t get stuck in any of the city’s notorious traffic jams.
    Anyways, I digress.  Where were we going after L.A.?  You guessed it- Las Vegas, the quintessential party town!  But Vegas was only a pitstop- no bars or fun there.  It actually rained when we were there, can you believe it?
        The road trip only got better as time went on.  We drove up into Utah and hiked the Zion Canyon.  I remember feeling like an Indian warlord because I’d found a walking stick that was in the shape of a spear.  I’d use it to ward off invisible enemies on the hiking trail; ones that threatened to kidnap the people I was protecting.  After Zion we saw Bryce Canyon, which has a grand assortment of rocky columns everywhere.  I remember being utterly baffled by nature for the first time when I saw that place.  It has a certain otherworldly quality that demands one to expand their mind, or admit that everything they knew was only on the surface of a much broader sphere.
        It snowed on our way to the north rim of the Grand Canyon.  The canyon was everything I expected it to be.  You can walk on the rim and there are no railings.  It totally freaked my fellow travelers, but not me.  I made it all the way to this "island" out there, where there were vistas of the canyon on all sides.  The atmosphere of that vista is something I’ll never forget.  The only bad thing about it was that other tourists were swarming over the views, too busy taking pictures to really appreciate the scenery.  I am dismayed by modern tourism's mantra, “Lets take a picture and walk away", even though I am guilty of it sometimes.  It rips the heart from a genuine experience and pastes it on a piece of paper for eternity.  Call me old school, but I’d rather live in the present and soak in the experiences of my travels instead of worry about what they’d look like on camera.
    They introduced me to a lot of weird music on that trip - techno and acid jazz.  I remember the strange sounds of Depeche Mode, Delerium, Waterlillies, the Blade Runner soundtrack, and the freakish yodeling of an 808 State song.  Stuff I had never heard before.  It made the terrain all the more atmospheric for me.
    The scorching barrens of the desert yielded to the soaring peaks of the Rockies as we headed north on I25.  We hardly stopped at all in Colorado.  Pike’s Peak was but a drifting stranger on the north breeze, and Denver was too boring to pass up a nap on.  Wyoming was much of the same, but this time we veered away from the Rockies on our way to the Black Hills, in South Dakota.  There we saw the Crazy Horse Memorial, which would be the largest sculpture in the world if it were finished by now.  It’s carved out of a mountain that’s even larger than Mt. Rushmore (which we saw later).  Only the face of the great Sioux warrior was finished when we saw it; the rest of his body and the horse he rode on was just a huge chunk of granite that hadn’t even resembled the forms they were supposed to take yet.  Mt. Rushmore didn’t impress us as much. We'd been expecting that quartet of presidents to be larger and more awe-inspiring than it appears in photographs.  But Mt. Rushmore isn’t the kind of Herculean wonder that stands out on the horizon the way Mt. Rainier does.  After all, the grandiosity of man-made objects pale in comparison to those of nature.
        If you’re ever in this part of the country, the Badlands is a place that can’t be missed.  Only 40 miles away from Mt. Rushmore, it contains some of the largest Oligocene fossil beds in the world.  Its hills are made by sedimentary rocks that were eroded by rain and wind to form bizarrely-shaped ridges that are stratified in color.  They’re separated by large grasslands that are fed on by bison and bighorn sheep.  The Lakota tribe called it “Mako Sica”, or “bad land”, because of its extreme temperature and scarcity of water.  Walking in that strange landscape, we heard the disturbing sound of rattlesnakes slithering on the sand as the sun set over the pointy ridges.  We spent a spooky night in one the cabins in the center of it all, hearing a wind that howled over the sands all night, as if its mission were to make the area’s namesake felt in the base of one’s spine.  One of my mom’s dreams is that some biker will steal her away and take her here on a motorcycle, but she never tells me who it is.  I imagine it’s probably Bruce Springsteen; he wrote a song called Badlands and it’s one of her favorites.
        The next day we started west, finally heading in the direction of home.  A major thunderstorm surprised us in Wyoming; it was terrifying and beautiful at the same time.  The raindrops were as big as water balloons, lightning as thick as the veins of Thor.  Bolts of green, red, purple and gold dropped from the clouds in stupendous arrays of synchronized color.  Someone tried to take a picture of the lightning, but it was too fast for her.
        Just after crossing the Continental Divide, we saw a long range of snow-capped peaks off in the distance.  This was the Teton range, which oddly lacks any foothills on its eastern side, offering travelers like ourselves some stunning views from Jackson Hole.  The range’s name derives from “les trois tetons”, so called by French voyageurs when they thought the mountains resembled three breasts.  These mountains, known for their aesthetic charm, are an icon of the west, and have been shown on film in several westerns.  Grand Teton, the largest of them, stood majestically in a tear-jerking scene from the movie "Shane".  My experience of seeing it was every bit as moving and memorable as it was in that scene.
     The car, the poor little Mustang, was exhausted after driving up another 8,000-foot pass.  I think by then we were all getting a little travel weary.  I couldn't wait to get home after 16 days on the road.  Idaho, Oregon, Mt Rainier, and back to Seattle we went.  I'll never forget arriving at my grandma's just in time for Sunday dinner, with the Sonics winning the Western Conference Championship over the Jazz, all in one in evening.  It was a prime time for celebration and story.  I am very privileged to have witnessed such amazing things at an early age.