Winter's Tapes

As the first snow of the season buffets down, I take a drive along my favorite town road between Brunswick and Cook's Corner, watching everything spring, summer and fall become cloaked in a grey stillness. There is a peace in this, a perfection of design, as if all the stresses, mistakes and sorrows of the past are now covered in a sparkling, new purity. Nature seems to be repainting my life's canvas, gifting me with a Christmas present of one giant do-over.

I rustle through my glove compartment, looking for the tiny tapes, the little treasures I made almost ten years ago on a solo cross-country trip to the coast of Oregon and Washington.

Ten years ago.

Those words hit my stomach like a sucker punch.

What did I do in those ten years? I struggle to think. There was love, to be sure, along with plenty of heartbreak. There was prosperity and good times, and there were lean times filled with loneliness and poverty. There were times of uncertainty and times of beautiful blossoming. Times of creative intensity. Times filled with mysteries that still, to this day, completely boggle my mind.

The tapes noisily play on, filled with tales of birds dancing slow circles in the sky, of lonely truck stops out in the middle of the country, the only place to get something hot to eat, for miles and miles around. Standing inside of the skeleton of a dead tree that was stories tall and as big around as a small cabin. Coastlines that plummeted to the sea, filled with bright yellow flowers.

I could go on and on about the experiences I had, and may do so in another entry. But one thing about the trip is staying with me today.

The passage of time.

How similar my ten-year-younger voice sounds on the tape, and yet, how different. I was the same self back then - but it was like being in a very different play. My goals were different. My living situation was different. My lifestyle was different. And every player, with a few exceptions, has now been replaced by someone else. And I realize, upon listening, that this crazy trip that I had taken years ago had marked a new beginning. I did not know what compelled me to go - but only that I must go. And in those crazy thirty days, I learned more about Life and myself than I had ever dreamed possible.

When I returned home from my journey, I thought things would just go back to the way they had been before.

But I was wrong.

The mysteries, the spiritual experiences, the great, vast spaces of the West were somehow now in my heart, and a part of me forever. It was like trying to fit a galaxy into a tiny box, and as much as I tried, pushed, pulled and shoved - there was just no going back.

And I remember thinking something that every experienced wanderer knows.

Sometimes you just can't go home again.