Up to this point in my writing I have tried to focus on our travels...Where have we been, whom have we met, what is it like traveling and being on the road? I throw in the odd remembrance from days gone by that I think might be relevant to or connected in some way to what I am writing about or where we are at the time. I started out in this long and jointed missive wanting to reach out to my friends and my family, giving them written descriptions of our travels. I also wanted to create a record for family yet to be.
You see, my dad did just such a thing when he took his great adventure to Alaska in 1939. He left us pictures, 8mm movies, and a journal. He documented his day to day life there and I find a lot of pleasure in reading it. My dad, though he passed away 45+ years ago, sits by my side as I read his words and see through his eyes his version of Alaska before World War II. We smile together as I watch in 8mm that whale, one more time, leap from the ocean of time behind him as the Wannagan, the house mounted on a raft being towed by a boat, began to sink beneath his feet. All the the drama and adrenaline of the moment back in 1939 leaps into my soul from that crackling and faded film. Maybe somehow, some way, I, too, can sit warmly beside my children, now adults, if and when they read this travel blog and journal. Maybe a great grandchild will pick up my writings and cast their imagination back in time to 2018 when we set out on our long 50 Amp Vision Quest. Maybe, just maybe, in this way I, along with Diane and all my friends and acquaintances, can part the curtains of this dimension and become people...folks again, alive and real for the moment gathered together in the room with them to tell our stories.
Knowing that my dad, and my great, great grandfather Hodges, who also left a small journal of his time as a captain in the union army during the civil war, would want to sit down for a visit in the future, I will, at some point, include their journals in this Vision Quest. Perhaps someone, somewhere wants a time-machine, a connection, a good story. This morning, as I enter these words and recall my dad, and yes, the great, great grandfather I never met, I feel their hands on my shoulders. I feel their presence in this motor home as I write in the pre-dawn darkness. I know this is so. The tear on my cheek provides me the truth. My heart cannot lie to me.
And so, this entry into the 50-Amp Vision Quest will be less about travels and more about the signs of the times. Surely, it will be about my interpretation of those signs. Surely as well, others see things differently than I do in 2022. That is one of the great tragedies of these days. So many of us are so divided.
I walked out into the winter night last evening to walk the dogs, Dash and Heidi, before bed. The half moon overhead gave out a monochromatic view of the surrounding forest of Ashe-Juniper trees. Their low-slung canopy is parted at our campsite so the full night sky in all its mystery and glory bathes us as we stare into the cosmos. Though the afternoon was bright and sunny, perhaps 70 degrees, the evening brought temperatures dropping into the 40’s. It was cool and crisp. The stars were abundant even with the half-moon nearly overhead. I could see Orion so clearly, ready for battle again in the heavens. I thought about the signs that were seen in the stars over the millennials of time. For thousands upon thousands of years people have searched the skies for signs of things yet to come. The Inca, the Mayans, the Aztecs, all made a science of these signs. Surely enough, the Wise Men saw the sign of signs that brought them to Bethlehem. Would but I see some sign tonight as I strained my eyes upward?
Now, perhaps more than any time in my life, I want to see a sign. These days I feel the planet balanced ever so precariously on a thin blade. It feels to me that the slightest push in any direction will set off a series of cataclysmic events. No, now that I’ve written that last line, I realize the events are already in motion. The waves of change are beating against the shoreline insistingly, incessantly, even now. Perhaps the signs I seek are all around me. Perhaps we all on this planet, recalcitrant brothers and sisters, refuse to acknowledge them. We keep our heads collectively down and continue our trudge through the day ignoring that which doesn’t fit in our little box of consciousness. We don’t confront the uncomfortable truths.
There have been three waves so far of the Covid virus. Currently we are inundated with the Omicron version that is apparently very highly contagious, more so than the last two. For two years now we have had waves of infections from this fast-mutating virus. 800,000 souls in this country alone have perished either directly or indirectly from its ravages. It has ripped up our economy and changed our lives dramatically. I know souls who have been taken by it. In my nearly 70 years nothing has ever appeared like this virus. It doesn’t have to be as bad as it has been for us here in America. Here, in America, we have near miraculous vaccines that have been developed in record time. They are available to anyone who wants them. Yet, some 40 odd percent of the population won’t accept the shots. Somehow it doesn’t fit their politics. They feel in doing so they would betray their party, their Republicanism, their fealty to Trump. Even the simple task of wearing a mask in public is beyond them. It is as if wearing that simple protection were akin to waving a Democrat flag, God forbid. God forbid they may save someone else’s life. This tribalism is an abomination. The freedom they profess to have that gives them the liberty to imprison others in this deadly virus through contamination is dead wrong. Freedom contains and is part and parcel to responsibility. It does not contain license to hurt your fellow person through your indifference or self-inflicted ignorance.
My neighbor here at Pedernales Falls State Park claims brusquely that, “No one has died from Covid. It’s all co-morbidity.”
“Where do you get this? How can you say that? Just look at the statistics! There’s 900,000 souls lost and counting.” Diane counters.
“They all would have died from a disease they already had. I know an example of a guy who got killed on his motorcycle and they hauled off and said Covid killed him” He blatantly stammers.
As I listen to him I am just aghast. He thinks I am brainwashed by the liberal media. I think he is among the walking dead of FOX Broadcasting. Therein is the capsulization of the main problem in America today.
At certain times in one’s life there are markers. There are singular events that we experience as a society that are so shocking we recall where we were when they happen. We recall what we were doing at the time and whomever we were with.
For instance, in my time I recall Kruschev, the Russian Soviet Supreme leader, hammering his shoe on the desk in the UN shouting to the citizens of the USA, “We will bury you!” He came through loud and clear on our little tv set in ominously grainy black and white tones. I remember the “Cuban Missile Crisis”. As I sat in my desk at Holy Redeemer grade school the nuns, our teachers, telling us to prepare for a nuclear bomb sent flying with hatred from Cuba. “Pray, children, that if the bomb strikes us we will be in a state of grace to meet God.” A lot of the innocence of childhood flew out the window with those prayers. I was very scared that week in October. The thought of a nuclear attack still haunts the nether reaches of my mind.
I watched those many years later as the Berlin Wall, THE SYMBOL of communism, was torn down by East and West Germans together. Oh, that false sense of security that flowed through the television set to we Americans. Communism had finally lost the cold war we thought. As it turns out, it wasn’t Communism that threatened us. It was and is Authoritarianism.
Today, as I type, yet another Russian threatens the world with the potential for world war. Vladimir Putin has 100,000 military troops stationed on the border of the Ukraine, apparently readied for invasion. Diplomatic talks have ended with no solution between NATO, the USA, and Putin and his cadre. In any other time in my life, this threat to Europe and the US would dominate our attention. It should be akin to those other great events in our lives that cause time to stop in anticipation of the next move.
But...today there are other issues that lay before us as well that somehow steal our attention. Conversations start this way today...
“Oh, the price of gasoline has risen again!”
“Inflation is on the rise! Look at the price of that Porterhouse steak. I don’t know if I can afford it.”
“Housing costs are through the roof.”
Where is the national outcry about murder in the streets and in our schools? Mass shootings occur so often now that we have grown numb to it. Yet, these are our children, our friends and our collective family. Again, tribalism precludes any positive action to solve the issue. Turning away from the prospect of joining together as family writ large we complain about the cost of a jar of mayonnaise and blame the other political party for our neighbor’s loss.
Over and over those who support unlimited gun ownership clutch the flag and proudly state that the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution guarantees their right to own a fully automatic weapon...an outright killing machine. Again, these tribal’s “freedom and right” comes with a cost that thousands in this country end up paying for with their very lives. Why is it, I ask myself, that in Costa Rica owning a firearm is illegal and yet they experience near to no murders? The sons and daughters of the National Rifle Association profess incessantly that if you make guns illegal only the criminals will have guns. Really? Why isn’t that so in Costa Rica? Owning a fully automatic machine gun has apparently become the ultimate symbol of patriotism to the loudest 2nd Amendment hypesters. These are the same fashion show militarists who stormed the Capitol last January 6th in their Trump-led insurgency. These people aren’t patriots, they are traitors to our country plain and simple.
So often these same voices want to take from citizens of a different shade of skin their constitutional right to vote. The Trump Republican tribe/party is working feverishly to radically change voting laws at the state level. Invariably, these changes are intended to make it more difficult, even nearly impossible for those in districts whose citizens tend to be Democratic to vote. They bend and stretch the voting districts through jerry-mandering to create new districts that will be predominantly in their favor. Their platform has no programs to help the nation. There are no plans within that party to do anything save preserve and expand their power. In my opinion, the Republican party of 2021 is a party of White Supremacy. That is their underlying goal. They exist to obstruct any progressive change that would help anyone of color, anyone not white.
They have even corrupted the Supreme Court by insuring that its majority comes from their ranks and is beholden to their power base. This self-same Supreme Court just recently decided that mask mandates for schools and businesses, in other words, where people gather in great numbers, are unconstitutional. Why is the Supreme Court even involved in this issue? Why?...because the Trump Party wants it so. It is a further way to continue to divide this country, all the while killing thousands who, perhaps, didn’t need to die. They have made health a political issue.
Yet all of these Trumpian tragedies pale in comparison to what I believe is the central issue of our time, the saving of our planet. The global scientific community daily posts evidence of signs of our planet’s fast approaching, devastating, changing climate, all human caused. We all see the effects of climate change now, the shorter, warmer winters...the hotter summers...the melting of the ice caps and permafrost. The “canaries in the coal mine” are all on display and you don’t have to look deeply to see them. Yet, those who only care about self-enrichment and self-entitlement deny these “Uncomfortable Truths” as Al Gore said. The political upheavals among nations and the chaos that follows, I fear, will be this civilization’s undoing. I worry so much for my children and grand children regarding the planet they will be left to live in and on.
There are many other issues now that I do not mention or write about today that lay before us as a people. Most assuredly, history shows us that days long past were fraught with their own share of doom and destruction. Civilizations have crumbled many times over throughout the centuries. Disease has wiped out entire nations of peoples in the past. So, maybe we’ll make it through these times somehow. Hopefully, the children of today will unite to solve some of these man-made maladies. Perhaps God will intervene once again on our behalves. We can only pray and act...and look for a sign.
While I continue to search the heavens at night for that symbol of salvation yet to come, I also realize that the signs are all around me every single day...the small acts of love we bless each other with that make life in the 21st century joyful, if even for a moment.