And so it begins…
One of my hopes for this trip has been that it will give me time to reflect and to provoke responses to new and unexpected situations. One of my surprises has been how strongly I reacted (negatively) to being in the red rocks areas outside of Vegas and in Utah. Part of it was initially the heat. My original plan was to visit Lake Mead and Valley of Fire for the first 2-3 days. Landing in Vegas on Sunday night, it was still 95 degrees well after dark, and I grew concerned about both the feasibility and safety of being in that intense heat under the baking sun. That area is known for being hot, but by October it was supposed to be cooling to mid-upper 80s, not mid-upper 90s. At the last minute Monday morning, I rearranged my itinerary and pushed those locations to the end (and may end up cutting out altogether).
I proceeded to the Lake Powell area on the border of AZ and UT. As I departed Vegas, I started to get a feel for the van, which I have nicknamed “Big Betty”. This thing is freaking massive, and if you’ve ever seen the show S.W.A.T., you will get the reference to the armored SWAT van in that show. I kind of feel like that is what I am driving (minus the guns, but hey, the van came with bear spray, so maybe SWAT for bears…?). Now, I love to drive, which is why I didn’t really think much of spending the better part of 3 weeks driving 1800 miles across the southwest. But Big Betty might change that. Driving east out of Vegas, the first couple of hours were so stressful that my smartwatch was giving me alerts telling me to relax. But it wasn’t just the van (though that was a large part of it). I realized part of it was the blistering hot, red landscape itself. About 2 hours into the drive, the landscape changed as I entered the Kaibab forest. My peaking anxiety dropped as I was suddenly surrounded by towering evergreen trees (and sadly, burn scars). I could breath again, and I felt my stomach and jaw unclench. It was profound. I had an epiphany about how deeply 1) my emotional state is impacted by my surroundings, and 2) how deeply connected I feel to trees. It shouldn’t be surprising given how much they have been centered in my artwork over the years, but I didn’t quite realize how much until that moment.
As an aside, driving through that area is a head trip using GPS. You move in and out of Mountain Time and Pacific Time, and with each shift, the “arrival time” on the GPS shifts by an hour. Normally I wouldn’t care, but I got such a late start due to the last minute itinerary changes and ridiculous amount of time it took me to get groceries and supplies that the difference of an hour would mean the difference between getting to the campground before or after dark. Especially for a first-come, first-served campground, my anxiety peaked and waned with every crossing of the time zone boundary. Adding to this was the 50% drop in the engine oil level since I departed, leading to me wondering if I would even make it, let alone before dark. (After a somewhat urgent text to the van owner the next morning, I was informed this weirdness was somehow normal.)
Fortunately, I did make it to the campground just before dark, and got the last available camp site. Now it would be time to really get acquainted with Big Betty, as I maneuvered cooking in this super fancy-ass van, with its mini kitchen, induction cooktop, and bathroom. Lesson #1: No cooking over a campfire, even if I wanted to. The induction-compatible cookware was very clearly not campfire-compatible. Probably for the best, because as lovely as it is to sit next to a campfire while camping, the moment would inevitably be ruined by the persistent voice in my head that points out the wood smoke is one of the worst contributors to poor air quality from particulate matter. Major buzz kill. Lesson #2: The van’s onboard water tastes like soap and chemicals. Thank goodness I stocked up on bottled water before leaving civilization, despite being horrified by how much plastic waste I would be generating. The onboard water supply will be relegated to washing me and dishes. Lesson #3: I am too short to get in and out of the bed! The bed raises and lowers to accommodate storing gear underneath, and I wrongly assumed that it would go low enough for me to get myself in and out of it. Nope! Of all the things it never occurred to me to bring was my trusty step stool! I then realized the cooler that came with the van, that hours earlier I had wished wasn’t there since I knew I wouldn’t be using it and it was taking up precious space, suddenly became my most valuable feature of the van. It does get in the way of, well, everything, given how little floor space there is in this thing, but it turns out I need it to reach pretty much everything stashed in the cabinets and storage areas near the ceiling. That cooler was a freaking lifesaver!
OK, here are some photos from the trip so far, not organized in any way other than chronological.
