Go West, Old Man

“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through it.” —Lyndon Baines Johnson

The older I get, the more I find that my most enduring memories spring from two categories: lovemaking and landscapes.

When it comes to the latter (no one wants to hear about lovemaking from an old man), it is scenes from national parks that most often rise up from my memory banks. Although I’m no adventurer or sportsman or hardcore anything, I have visited many of these parks and feel delighted by their very existence as public spaces. Wallace Stegner called them “the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” I couldn’t agree more.

Redwood National Park, along California’s northern coast just south of Oregon, is my favorite of America’s sixty-three national parks, a cathedral of hushed majesty. The Grand Canyon, in which Susan and I have twice hiked to the Colorado River at the bottom and out, exhausted and amazed me. The colorful aridity of South Dakota’s Badlands is also baked into my memory, and Canada’s Jasper National Park, in the Canadian Rockies, enchanted me so much that I was actually researching six-month rentals in the town of Jasper, gateway to the park, when it burned down in 2024 (they’re rebuilding).

As I write this on the last day of April, we’re about to fly to Salt Lake City, Utah, the capital of Mormonism, where we’ll rent a car and go camping for ten days in Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Parks. By the time this piece is published, we’ll also be zipping up to the eerie wonders of Yellowstone, in the northwest corner of Wyoming.

Right now, however, I’m finding it hard to leave home. The flowers and leaves are popping; there’s a mother bird nesting in my woodshed who scoots out to startle and distract me every time I pass; and I’m nervous about my cat ChaCha having to get used to a housesitter instead of his familiars. Missing these tiny pleasures and worrying about these tiny anxieties in advance of our departure have me feeling grim, and the prospect of shlepping duffle bags around airports adds to the grouchiness . . .

But hell, I’ve been chastising myself lately for all of the experiences I’ve foregone throughout my life just in order to dodge anxiety (scuba diving! Mexico! orgies! motorcycles!), so it’s time now for Chin up! Pack the bags and let’s go, already!

In truth, “Go West, Old Man” is not an anxious phrase for me. When I was 19, in 1971, I hitchhiked and tented my way across the United States, hoping to sniff the fumes of the Summer of Love. Four years later, Susan and I cemented our romance by hitchhiking all around the United States for nine weeks. (How amazing to have lived at a time when people in their early twenties could simply do as they pleased for nine straight weeks, with hardly any money in their backpacks!)

We also took our kids cross-country twice, including down and out of the Grand Canyon. So the many pleasures of our national parks are familiar to me, and their challenges are no big deal. After all, the most remote-from-civilization spot in the entire continental United States is only 22 miles from the nearest road and — surprise! — it’s located within Yellowstone National Park . . .

Basically, Susan and I are just going for a stroll. See you later! (If the grizzly bears don’t get us . . .)