Home In a Place Called, West.

     After spending four months traveling across the western half of America, I was finally coming home. I packed up Falkor, my 2002 Subaru Forester, and left Los Angeles in the dust even though the city continued to throb my mind for the first 50 miles. 

     The road carried me away from the desert and north toward the mountains. The scenic beauty of Highway 395 took over. A drive through small-towns, mountain-towns, ghost-towns, the empty lands east of the Sierra Nevadas. 

     The Mt. Whitney Portal was the first to greet my return. I spent a day exploring the John Muir Wilderness on a 10-mile hike to Muir Lake that instantly refilled my soul. I needed to walk through the woods. I needed to be alone without conversations and worldly distractions stealing the direction of my mind. I needed to remember why I began the trip in the first place, the tears that rolled down my cheeks as I headed north to Oregon, from one old home to another, feeling homeless in every town and belonging only to the road. I needed to bring myself back to the reality of my father's death, of his forever absence, and my mission to spread his ashes across our backcountry homelands. 

     The following day, I stumbled into Bishop, California without knowing what was there waiting for me. Having just been in Utah for the month of May learning the very basics of rock climbing, I was already hooked on the activity as it supplied me with the self-redemption and courage I was desperately seeking. The only problem was that climbing with partners only brought me right back into the mess and drama of humanity when I still needed to heal in solitude.

     Falkor and I meandered through the main streets of the isolated town of Bishop until we found an intriguing road that took us west into the Buttermilk Country. There, sprinkled about the valley floor were boulders as large as houses. Boulders beckoning to be courted and climbed. The mountains to the west standing by for support.

          A dusty, potholed road became our home for several nights. Each morning began with a kiss form the rising sun coaxing me out of Falkor's car bunk and into the new dawn. I would throw on my good-as-virgin climbing shoes, my bag of chalk, and head out to the boulders. 

     Greeting the boulders was my favorite part of the day. It felt as though they had just awoken to the morning, too. I stood below a highball wall and placed my hand on the rock. The quartz monzonite felt good to touch, the divine handshake I had spent my trip searching for, and finally now in the purity of solitude. The holy communion was found. Skin and sun. Rock and bone.

     I laced my shoes tight around my feet, pulling at the toe boxes that felt like a pointe shoe in ballet. I sunk my hand into the bag of chalk dusting my fingers and palms. My skin was covered in the substance, white like my father's ashes. My hands and feet were ready for contact with the glacial erratic boulders that, like me, have slid a long way from their origin.