The morning before...

Its around 10:20 am on Saturday morning and its time to get ready for the trip ahead. The sun is out and the air is crisp, temperature in the 30's (farenheit), and it feels like early morning in late October. In the nearly two years I've been on the road most every weekend I've gotten the routine down to the point I basically never panic and packing is easy when all you wear is black.

Usually every morning I get up and spend a little time in front of the computer. I've always been curious and I like to find out what's been happening when I was asleep. About half the world is always awake or asleep at any given time and its good to see how the other half has been living while I've been in bed. I'll type a few notes here and then get on to work or travel or on a rare day off some precious hours watching Westerns on TV.

I like the scenery in Westerns and the subtle shifts of character and story that occur wrapped in and around the obligatory shoot outs. Sometimes I think Westerns are a kind of dream world, a genre where you reach beyond the characters as you see them and find the greater meaning somewhere in the panorama of place and people. A good western like "Pale Rider" or "Rooster Cogburn and the Lady" simmers with life and meaning just below the surface and despite the usual violence often speaks of a longing for something better even if its just the next valley over the mountains in the distance.

There is that restlessness in the human soul, a restlessness in me, that understands why places only hold a person who's truly alive for so long and then its time to ride off into the sunset. And you can feel that way even if you've lived in the same place all of your life and only have those feelings when you look up from chores out the window and for a moment your heart travels where you yourself, bound by invisible ties, could never go.

So on the morning before the road calls me back to LaCrosse I'm looking out the little window in the upstairs front of my house, thinking about life somewhere else, time that has past, people long gone, and perhaps something better in the next valley over the mountains in the distance.

Time to ride.