Southwest — Blog — Roaming with Roth

STARTING NOTES
April 14, 2023
Damn. It’s been a long time. Twenty months to be precise since my last entry in August 2022. It has been a challenging year for me for reasons I don’t wish to go into now. Just know that I miss you and I welcome me back. You will also notice that I have officially ended the ‘PANDEMIC DIARY’ phase, as well as completing my editorial engagement with Trump leaving his prosecution to others more capable than myself of putting the bastard in his place. As such, and because there is movement in the political air, I am starting afresh with the name NEW ERA DIARY, anticipating a major aspirational, philosophical, and political shift for the remains of our lifetimes. Welcome to the New Era.

April 16, 2023.
You will excuse the one day hiatus. That was on account of my birthday. Yesterday, I turned seventy-seven, or more accurately completed my 77th year. On to seventy-eight.

Adele and I are celebrating my birthday with a Southwest vacation. We started in Sedona, moved on to Winslow, Arizona. Traveled to Albuquerque where I am now writing this. Then, we drive to Taos, returning for one week in Santa Fe. It has been a wonderful trip with promises of more to come.

The Endless Horizon
What is level? Of course, the definition depends on its usage. Take for example, “Be on the level with me”. It suggests you want an honest response, not slanted one way or another, or colored by personal opinion, or a response with information withheld. “Hand me a level, please”, suggests a carpenter’s tool called a ‘level’ which measures the degree of inclination of a horizontal or vertical surface. Then, one kid on a see-saw may say to the other, “Let’s get it level and keep it level”, meaning the seesaw is not tilted one way or the other, implying balance and equality. In sports, two opponents can be at the same level, in this case suggesting of equal skill or evenly matched. But, until you drive through the Southwest High Desert you cannot imagine the true meaning of level. It is a land mass without growth or green or natural obstruction, that is flat and repetitively boring with endless horizon. There is an ‘other-worldly’ stark beauty that brings some closer to nature and may leave others cold from its brutality. It is nature in the raw. It is primal desert and petrification of the primordial. It is survival and finality.

At the same time, the Southwest gives a sense of the eternal. The eternal provides us with an aura and insight to life’s continuity…if not in our form, if not as we know it. Nature proceeds. It knows no mistakes or errors, despite human’s best efforts to disrupt and dominate. It offers humility to those willing and strong enough to accept our own smallness. For try as we might, nature adapts to the horrors of our interventions and produces grandeur and inclusivity out of it all.

I’m not one to think about death, at least not in any prolonged manner. Yet, at 77 years, still healthy and active, one wonders how many years are left to take on the dare of living fully with all one’s faculties. That question was answered creatively by Adele. In my birthday card was a folded piece of paper, a reservation for Adele, Alex, and myself to go tunnel sky-diving. “WOW! I thought.” This is great. And, having taken on Devil’s Bridge, The Bell Tower, and Airport Mesa in Sedona, three significant hikes, I felt that my time to procrastinate and doubt myself has not yet visited upon me.

**The Bell Tower. The view from The Airport Mesa.**

**Hiking the rim of The Airport Mesa in Sedona**

**15 million year old basalt lava formation**

While in Sedona, Adele and I and another couple hired a Pink Jeep Tour Guide. The Pink Jeep company has unique access to the rocky roads that you would otherwise not be able to enter. The unpaved, craggy, rugged and rough roads wind their way around to the tops of peaks and plateaus.

The tires are balloon like and under inflated to be able to climb boulders and steep, rocky inclines on the way up and to keep from slipping on the way down. The ride is not smooth…which is an understatement. We were violently tussled and thrown to and fro and side to side. There was a lot of delirious laughter going on. You know the kind that substitutes for fear. Yet, we were quick to adapt and everyone had a fun time.