West

Tonight is my last night in Omaha.  I haven't been blogging much, too much excitement going on.  Had Brother Mike and Sister in law Sue over for dinner at Tom's on Friday.  Made my favorite meal to cook, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, peas, berries for dessert.  We looked at old pictures and read some letters our Pop wrote home during World War II from Lincoln Airbase.   One of them got us all choked up when he wrote about how awful it was from everyone to be separated from their families and about war being caused by human sin.  He wrote about  how much he missed is parents and MJ (our mom) and Tommy, who was just a baby.  He would be discharged after 90 days because he was discovered to have a heart murmur and spent the rest of the war working in a bomber plant, but he didn't know that when he wrote the letter. 

Saturday, helped Brothers Tom and Bill to go through Tom's garage and all the Christmas decorations.   Already have filled up one Cindy box and started on the second.   They will have to stay in Tom's garage for time being.  I took one teddy bear dressed as a Christmas Tree to serve as my Christmas tree this year, since all my decorations are packed up.

Saturday evening we took off and went to the Big Red Keno Bar.  My brother Bill is the attorney for Big Red Keno, we have had some interesting discussions about gambling.  But it is also a great place to watch a game, especially a pay per view game.  Potato skins, onion rings, burgers, cold beer all brought right to you.  It's a wonderful thing.  Nebraska won big, too, so GO BIG RED.  I've already got it set with Bill that I get to take Nephew Bob to the last Colorado game ever when I am home for Thanksgiving.

Rested on Sunday, today, more garage cleaning in the morning.  This afternoon I took my father's three fishing reels to Cabela's to be restrung and learned they are valuable antiques.  The salesman restrung them but begged me not to fish with them, especially since I had the boxes for the reels.  I haven't done any research yet, but I bought myself a new reel and will leave these with Tom.

Tomorrow, I turn West.  I am as much a fool for American History and American Myth as anyone.  There is something about the drive west, from the prairie, through the mountains to the ocean.  I am in  awe of the people who made this trek before cars, interstates, rest stops and McDonalds.   Last summer when I paused in the great Salt Desert to survey that bare, incredible, terrifying landscape I marveled that people once crossed it in nothing but a wagon.   I'm amazed that anyone built a railroad or a highway across that expanse of white.

I first made that trip by car from Omaha, to Colorado, to San Diego when I was a child.  Brother Mike was on a mission trip to San Diego and Mom, Pop, Bill and I drove out there to pick him up and go to Disneyland.  It was fun.  But my Pop and I both caught some kind of upper respiratory infection in LA.   By the time we got to Arizona, we were dreadfully sick.  All I remember about the Grand Canyon was how awful I felt looking at it.  Mother and Mike talked after Pop and I fell asleep and decided to find a doctor in the morning. 

We just went to a doctor's office and were seen right away.  Remember, this was the mid-sixties, and you could still do that.  The doctor we found had gone to the University of Nebraska Medical School with our doctor back in Omaha.  He told us that many people from the Midwest got sick in LA, it was the smog that our lungs couldn't handle.  He fixed us up with some kind of cough syrup, we were both well again very quickly.

During and just after seminary I lived in California for just over four years, but in the San Francisco Bay Area.  I have never been back to Los Angeles.  It always seems like the journey East has always been more dangerous to me since then than the trek West.  I made the trip by car just a handful of times by car while going to or coming from seminary.  Flying by plane, which I did more often, just doesn't count.  I've had to nurse my finicky convertible across I-80 twice.  The trip from San Francisco to take my first call in Ohio was particularly exciting.  My car gave a huge cough of a back fire on top of Donner Pass, but kept going.  I had a scary moment in Wyoming, passing a truck and suddenly realized I was driving on shear ice.  A trucker I will never know saved my life by easing back and letting me back in the right lane.  On the way back east to Nebraska from California last summer, I tripped and fell on my way into a gas station in Fallon, Nevada.  I'm still having back and knee problems from that fall.

Yet, I am still in love with the trip West.  There is a curve that I-80 takes on the way out of Omaha that just looks like the road goes on forever.  Every time I take that curve, I feel the years fall away and I'm on my way to the mountains to go fishing with my Pop, on my way to meet Mickey Mouse.

Most of the time, I am in love with this adventure.  How many people, in the 51st year of their life, can just get in a car and take off?  Other times, I look around my bedroom, I'm sorry, Tom's living room, now completely taken up by a rather large inflatable bed and think with longing of when I still had a home myself.  Then I feel angry and sad all at once.  I long for my desk, my bed, my pictures on the wall, my kitchen, my stuff, now all packed up in Kearney. 

It doesn't last very long.  West.  West like Lewis and Clark to learn about a continent.  West like Teddy Roosevelt to cure his asthma and his broken heart.  West like Willa Cather as a child by train and wagon from the gentle hills of Virginia to the Nebraska prairie to find her destiny and her voice.  West like Marcus and Narcissa Whitman.  I used to sit underneath their stained glass window in Stewart Chapel at San Francisco Theological Seminary.  Later, I served in their home Presbytery in New York.

I am not in their class, nor in the class of the thousands upon thousands who came, who for good or bad built this country.  I am an informed historian. I know it came at the cost of lives, lives of people who had lived in the west for centuries.   I know it came at the cost of the land itself.  But somehow, there is still something in me that responds to the romance of the American Dream.  But still, I head West, to see the mountains, to smell the sea air.   Oregon or Bust.

Blessings.