This blog will really start on June 13, 2007 when I leave my home in Montana on a trip to visit my folks in Colorado.

In the opening pages of Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, there is a description of the wanderlust that is behind “going”:

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck, and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayard man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He as a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdon, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip, a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand it.

And also from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley :

I am in love with Montana – for other states I have respect, recognition, even some affection but with Montana it is love, and it is difficult to analyze love when you’re in it.

I do love Montana – my chosen home – and especially my own little corner of it. As it gets closer to the time I plan to leave, all of the things “here” become more dear and I have a faint wondering of “Why am I going?”. I look out the window at the newly thinned and healthy woods with the shadows of the mountains of the Swan Range in the background. I think about the mornings and evenings on my front porch with my dog and cat for company and them enjoying the freedom of this semi-wild place with no leashes – all of us going in and out as we please. I walk through my little house that glows with soft reflected light on warm wood and especially my cozy bedroom – knotty pine all around and fluffy down comforters and pillows – the always cool nights. But the plans are made and as the time to leave gets very close, there is no turning back, no second thoughts and suddenly it becomes impossible to think of not going – the trip has become an entity.