It’s a stunningly clear July morning in Wyoming and my son Asher and I are making our way south along US highway 191 out of Yellowstone to the Tetons. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ Christine’s Tune is playing. We’ve been cross-stitching the Continental Divide, following the Lewis River, and, closing a stitch, we’re stopping for a while at Lewis River Falls—a 30-foot drop of whitewater breaking into the river just beside the highway. The trunks of broken Aspen—snapped toothpicks—are fallen along the steep banks, a scattering of Lodgepole Pines along the south bank thickening into Lewis Canyon. The morning air up here is crisp and clear, warming as the day heats up, a mix of asphalt, pine and river water on the wind, one breath after another after another.
We broke down our campsite near Yellowstone Lake just after dawn, and after breakfast in Yellowstone Village, we’re heading south in my son’s 1997 Subaru—177,000 miles on the odometer and, this morning, at least, still counting. Our ultimate destination is Portland and Asher’s second semester at Reed College, but for this week, we’re meandering the 2,500 miles or so from New York to Oregon, with stops in Yellowstone and Grand Teton. We shotgunned the first 12-hour stretch past Chicago, taking 4-and-7-hour shifts at the wheel. We’d been on a schedule to make our campsite reservations at Yellowstone, and we started behind that schedule. I’d just flown in from work in China and, thanks to July thunderstorms between Chicago and New York, and after multiple flight cancellations with no clear path home by air or rail, rented a car to make it back in time to sleep, shower, and turn around, with Ash this time, and drive straight back to Chicago.
We’re at about 8,000 feet in Yellowstone, finding sense in the strict logic of motion—the poetry of a road trip, a succession of gas stations, diners, and motels. The Flying Burrito Brothers are this moment’s soundtrack; we’ve been alternating books on tape with my driving bible of Gram Parsons, the Burritos, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Very specific late-period Elvis. Curated playlists I’ve been nurturing for decades. Ash is whip-sawing between enjoyment and rolling his eyes at my predictability and the mid-tempo pace of the playlist.
Behind us, the black scars of the 1988 Yellowstone fires are slowly being subsumed by new growth of Lodgepole and Fir. Ahead of us, along this rippling and twisting highway, US 191 cuts gracefully through new and old stands of those lodgepole pines, fir and aspen. The road stretches in front of us in a series of hills descending those 8,000 feet out of Yellowstone and to the sawtooth Teton range. The morning’s quiet behind the steady thrum of the engine. A series of moments opening into the next moment, and the next.
Around a sharp bend in the road we’re abruptly confronted by the jagged teeth of the Tetons in the distance and the north shore of Jackson Lake at our feet. The suddenness of the Teton range is shocking. There’s no more iconic mountain range in North America, and even though it’s immediately identifiable, and even though I’ve seen this in person a handful of times, and in images hundreds if not thousands of times, I’m freshly amazed by the simple, stripped-back fact of the Tetons, a massive, 40-mile long zipper of gneiss and granite ripped 7,000 feet up from the floor of Jackson Hole valley.
In a few hours, hiking around Jenny Lake, at the foot of the range, I’ll be bitten by a Lone Star Tick and it’ll pass me a viral infection that will threaten to kill me. In this moment, under this bell-struck blue sky and standing beside an imperfect but beloved Subaru Outback, in the company of one of my kids, everything makes perfect sense. The wind is crisp and gently sweeping high summer grasses. The highway, an uninterrupted stretch of blacktop that won’t end for us until just shy of the Pacific Ocean, is radiating heat in distorting waves. An occasional truck or SUV blows past us. This absolutely quiet, vastly open world pulling us forward into a perfectly infinite, absolutely ringing present.
One more thing.
As a zen priest I’m a student of Tenshin Fletcher Roshi at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center. For more info on Yokoji, please visit www.zmc.org.
I’m also the caretaker of Warwick Zendo, a small in-person and online sangha based in the lower Hudson Valley of New York. if you’d like to check out our practice community, we’re at www.warwickzen.org.
How this works.
I plan to post at least once a week, at minimum. The Freeside will offer those weekly posts, which will always be accessible. Payside will (eventually) offer access to some longer writing and ongoing investigations into practices both literary and zen.
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