The last leg of the journey was through the Waterton Lakes side of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, where we drove and hiked along Red Rock Canyon, stopped for a drink at the definitively haunted Prince of Wales Hotel, and continued on to Calgary at sunset, running wild through the canola fields. It was over all too soon.
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(7/7/17)
11:23a: Leaving Glacier, road to Waterton – I do not want to leave. We are leaving. I am not ready for cell phones and day jobs, meetings and life in four walls.
(7/9/17)
2:21p MST: YCC -> Minneapolis – We leave. The world keeps rotating. I feel as if all will change upon descent? – but I can neither control nor fight it, so will adapt, as usual. Calgary, as we leave, as a most accommodating and simple airport. What will I do when I get home???
2:37p – Well, we guzzled wine and put all the remainder of our bourbon and tequila in fresh TSA-friendly toiletry bottles. I am sleepy and introspective, which could or could not be a blessed combination.
4:40p MST – nearly to Minnie – I peeked toward the sunny window – over my neighbor reading Backpacker (I wanted to borrow it the whole flight, but never worked up the nerve) – to the grid of green and yellow plots below, a chessboard at seeming checkmate: the weight of all the people everywhere sometimes crushes me. It’s not even that I dislike people – I’m a people person! – but there are so many of us, and we do bad things and feed the bears and don’t recycle if it’s not convenient. I feel overwhelmed!
8:59p Central Time – Everything out the window is dusky blue and runs together, blended over the horizon like a watercolor wash in a painting. It took me a minute to realize that the glowing clusters of lights are edged by the deeper blue of one of the Great Lakes. All the people in those twinkling orange cities have lives as deep and wide as mine, and yet, they are unfathomable. Where the water meets the sky over the lake is indistinguishably blended and blue, save for the faraway veins of light without plane, out there in the expanding ether across the lake. I felt – I feel – unmoored, but here’s the other shore, and we’ve crossed the water and reached it quietly while no one noticed.
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That was the end of this trip, my babies. In present life, summer is blipping out and in like static, alternating in days of buzzing heat and nights of evocative fall air and woodsmoke smells.
I miss roadtripping, and I am ever thankful for silly and lame, though everlastingly joyful memories, like this gif, from Lake Josephine at Glacier, which I could watch all day. If I think hard enough, I can still feel the liquid coolness and rising gooseflesh of being in the lake.
I love you all and hope always that you get to experience many of the things you wish to, like I get to do.
Be well.