The Sky Uninterrupted

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it last for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

—C. P. Cavafy, “Ithaka”

Time to idealize another place.

Road trip to Laramie to secure a flat so that Iphigenia can start law school there next year. We career through the striking Columbia River Gorge, a two-faced monster, one cool and leafy, the second desiccated and wind-blown. 

Then it’s up and over the Blue Mountains, where wolves haunt the slopes once more, only to find ourselves in dun and drab southern Idaho before having to traverse the north-east corner of a certain religion’s welcome mat. At last we enter the Equality State. 

Next day, after Evanston, the high plains! Visions of a cranky wizened Eastwood and his trusty horse on the sun-scorched steppe are marred by scores of road kill — once-dignified beasts now crumpled in lamentable death-poses on the asphalt, their souls inches away from being able to return to the dust of the earth. Man has not been kind to animals in these parts.  

With some 1,000 miles covered, with Laramie fast-approaching and too tired to have any more clichéd visions, Iphigenia waxes wonderfully poetic for me: scanning the boundless horizon she says it’s nice to see “the sky uninterrupted”. The impressive skyline aligns with her heart’s ambition.  

Suddenly Tbilisi, where we spent a tumultuous year and a half, retreats to a spectral past which cannot be called anything but a myth. In another month I won’t remember the smell of the overheated June days touched by brief but intense rains, because here in the US life is familiar, easy and plain to me. Old routines imperil memory. 

In the little university town we fail to find accommodation. No one wants pets in the precious dwellings, and we are sent back to Portland having accomplished little but a wicked sunburn caught from an ungoverned sun beating on us some 2,000 meters up.

A strange wave of invigoration washes over us on the way back, though. Laramie in retrospect starts to feel like a challenge, as far-flung and discoverable as Turpan, Lisbon or Tbilisi. In the river basin, some 100 miles west of where the roof of the country at length drops off, the waters seem almost unsure of which ocean they are headed to. 

But we think we know where to direct our surging currents. We want the chance to make new routines.

* * *

Select Enlightenment:

I. L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1960).