Saying farewell to the West

Laramie, WY

As our road trip reaches its last stages, if there is one thing that has struck me about The West--something that I have experienced before but had sort of forgotten--it is that The West is BIG. Vast. Expansive. Dramatic. Wide open. And very much up and down, up and down; one gets used to yawning to pop one's ears as the roadway stretches up to the Continental Divide and back down to the foothills. And so, from Laramie, Wyoming, I say "yee haw!"--which is something that a Wyoming cowboy no doubt says about every 10 minutes.

Whether it be the Grand Canyon, or the Las Vegas strip, or the beaches of Santa Monica and Venice, or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, or the Hearst Castle, or the redwoods in northern California, I have been taken by the immensity of our nation, and its resources, and its wealth. We may think that we have economic problems--and of course we do--but the America I have seen is doing all right. Indeed, my niece and her husband, who live and work in India, sometimes come back to the U.S., look around, and say, "WHAT economic problems?"

Along the way, I have continued to correspond with my old high school classmate "Kyle," who is mentioned in a previous post. Kyle continues to hope that Mr. Obama fails, that he is incompetent, that he wasn't even born here, that he advocates socialism, that he's locked us in to trillions of dollars in deficits for at least the next ten years, and that he's not even a particularly good public speaker--among other things! I have been hoping to at least soften Kyle up a bit on the notion that Obama is a mean, nasty, incompetent person, and that one can disagree with him on the issues without demonizing him or resorting to name-calling and fear-mongering. The jury is still out on whether I will succeed! But looking out over the grand vistas that are the American West, all of that seems like mere politics. When you are standing in the silence of a towering redwood forest, or looking out over the rock formations and buttes in Wyoming that seem to go on forever, what's important seems to change.