Lassitude

I haven't set foot off my property in days. I try to walk 3 miles three times a week on non-busy local streets, keeping twenty feet away from everyone I encounter, but a certain languor is setting in as I don't see any familiar faces anymore and the best I can do is take virtual trips in this time of disquietude.

This is my favorite photograph from my favorite trip, a trip of eight days and seven nights down the Grand Canyon in 2008 with former classmates from the University of Colorado. They mostly graduated in 1974 or 1975 whereas I didn't make it out of CU until 1978, having a hiatus of several years working in the restaurant business wintering in Aspen and summering in Nantucket, "between semesters." It all worked out okay for me, except for the part of meeting my ex-wife on Nantucket, who turned out to be in my opinion a raging (high on the Trumpian scale) covert narcissist, which I believe is an impossible, destructive (to others) personality disorder.

I also enjoyed a trip to the great Northwest in 2012 as I completed my checklist of visiting everyone of the 48 lower states in my lifetime.  My most poignant day was spent visiting Mt. St. Helens and realizing by first-hand observation the vastness of the natural disaster there in 1980.

The most spectacular thing I saw on that trip was Crater Lake in Oregon, a vast caldera filled with blue-as-the-sky rainwater and snow runoff.  Other than the Grand Canyon, it is the most memorable natural landscape I have seen.  It was created by a volcanic blow-up fifty times greater than the Mt. St. Helens explosion and gradually filled in with water over the centuries to its current level.