It’s basically a day like so many others before it: I wake before the sun nudges me from sleep, except on this occasion, my head rises alone for the last time before I get home later today and snuggle in next to the person I love. Carlos and I are bringing to an end our brief five-day excursion that took us to places new to him but mostly familiar to me.

One never knows what might be shared when traveling with a young person, nor does one go on adventures knowing what can be learned about oneself. I anticipated prior to our departure that I’d have my stamina challenged as this 20-year-old young man would have boundless energy, but here, at the cusp of 60 years old, I’ve found the exact opposite. My day started more than an hour ago; I’m showered, packed, and sitting in the dark writing as I’ve already learned to let him sleep because he can fall asleep at the breakfast table, in the car while chatting, listening to music, exploring an environment he’s never seen. Sunrises are not his thing.

We surprisingly leave Mexican Hat, Utah, before the sun has risen, one of the rare opportunities for Carlos to witness the phenomenon for himself, hopefully not the last. While there are rough ideas for how this day might progress, there’s nothing fixed aside from the certainty that we will be traveling south.

We’ll cross over the San Juan River and find the Valley of the Gods in sight before stopping to stare at the sun, looking for the best way to capture its image. I have my ideas of how to photograph our star, but Carlos is new to this experience, which will force him to practice this type of portraiture. As is typical with my method of travel, it’s not long before we are pulling over again for me to learn if I can see something with new eyes in a way that will allow me to bring an experience of the senses home with me I’d not previously encountered. It’s all an experiment, even if I’ve traveled this way a dozen or more times before.

I know we have options regarding how this early part of the day might unfold, but as has been true the previous days, Carlos is along for the ride and has had no input regarding what comes next as this has all been an unfolding surprise of discovery for him.

If, from the title of today’s missive, you think I’m ending our journey on a negative note (Crushed Expectations could imply just that, couldn’t it?), you’d be wrong as the expectations Carlos entertained leading up to this adventure into unknowns proved wrong, well at least one important bit. You see, in order to allay his anticipated boredom due to the long haul across the featureless landscape, Carlos brought nearly a dozen books along with him. My thought was, who brings a dozen books on a road trip other than the person who fears not only becoming bored by the environment but one who becomes bored by the titles he’s attempting to read?

Instead, Carlos began falling into what it means to find the art to be seen in all things, and if he’s fortunate, he might discover the love to be found there, too. Like most young Americans brought up on a diet of instant gratification found in being over-stimulated by addictive media that dismiss that which is not consumed through a screen or intense human-created experiences, Carlos wasn’t prepared for the enchantment that awaited him by exploring immense space.

But here we are in the resonating throws of an experience that has unfolded in ways unexpected to the mind and imagination of a young man who now wants to continue the journey. By now, I’ve shared one of the secrets that have served Caroline and me so well: from the experiences you love, leave something undone so it will be the thing that draws you back. For Carlos, that draw was a hoped-for visit to the Grand Canyon, but our diversion and distractions that are allowed to happen will slice into the time that might have otherwise been available for a quick visit.

The loop is closing, though I hope the road ahead for Carlos will be a divergent one where he’s able to find a path of his own making instead of stumbling into the ruts etched by others following routines that rarely, if ever, change.

One cannot always simply go forward; we must yield to impasses, even if we created them ourselves. The road does not go on forever; you have to choose which way you will turn, though crashing into the wall ahead is also an option often chosen.

And if you can’t see everything ahead of you, that’s okay; perspective shifts and surprises work to enhance what will have been gained after finding the flexibility and adaptability to work within your situation.

To many, maybe a stop at a roadside diner is just another place for a meal, but for me, finding the Blue Coffee Pot Restaurant in Kayenta, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation open is a treasure. Carlos hadn’t noticed that initially, we were the only two non-Navajo customers in the joint; others passing through town are more likely to stop at the next-door McDonald’s or Burger King as those are the brands they know. Caroline and I have already visited this small restaurant and know that it’s not anything special, but we delight in the knowledge that our money will more directly support the Navajo community instead of some already wealthy executives in faraway Chicago, Illinois.

So, we take up a table, are brought coffee, and await our meal from but a few choices. Normally, I might have dug into writing so I’d have notes allowing me to add granular details to a trip, but over the course of these days, I’ve used my writing time as talking time to iterate and reiterate thoughts and ideas I believe worthy for a young person to at least hear once or twice before finding them at some future date. I’m a bit relentless in pressing these lessons into the ears of Carlos, who doesn’t seem bothered at all by the constant barrage. And so we talk, even at the expense of my breakfast cooling off instead of being eaten.

And then breakfast will grow colder as I watch a man wearing headphones enter the restaurant holding a mic in a windscreen and circle the place. It turns out that his name is Jack, and he’s traveling with his friend Morgan; the two Frenchmen are on a pilgrimage to document the path of Hunter S. Thompson, and after getting Jack’s attention, the two of us talk. This traveling journalist/podcaster half-wondered, half-asked, “Why has America seemingly failed to find inspiration from Hunter S. Thompson, and what are my tips for their next destination of Las Vegas?”

I have a tickle in my throat due to all of my talking, and realize that people I enjoy talking to likely believe I talk like this all the time. Little do they understand that there are few people I like talking to, and that’s why I find myself so often before the screen typing, writing in a notebook, reading, or walking around looking at my world and spending time in my own inner dialog. The majority of people which whom I start a conversation only last about 5 to 10 minutes before eyes start rolling, hands fidget, and their body language is a subtle contortion of squirming. When I run into someone with the tiniest spark of curiosity, and I have their attention, I try to dump a sense of passion for knowledge and discovery into them without overwhelming the person or losing them in intertwined examples they typically easily lose track of what thread I’m adding to the tapestry I’m attempting to weave.

This metaphor of creating a cloth is hopefully an apt one because in weaving, complexity and a lot of preparation precede the outcome; similarly, the listener might be confused about the relationship of elements in a conversation being laid down; they cannot yet detect the pattern or value of the way things will be woven into their own experience. We, humans, are often not accustomed to listening to complexities of relationships between unfamiliar ideas and thoughts, finding it difficult to mix them into our own understanding, but this is essentially what the observer witnesses as the weaver throws the weft over the warp, we are not seeing the entire picture or finished form.

As the storyteller, I try my best to unravel the image drawn from my experience in a way that makes sense to the listener or reader, but this a fragment spun out of the impossibility of always finding a perfect coherence just as nobody has ever found the perfect alignment of musical notes that create the greatest melody which becomes the definitive song of all time and destroys the need for any new music after this discovery. Nope, we continue throwing contrasting notes into a melange of songs as people enjoy the variety. Sadly, the same cannot be said for stories, especially particularly difficult and possibly obtuse ones.

Our vocabulary and experience limit our ability to see beyond the immediacy of self, and through eroding attention spans, we have evolved narratives that have shrunk in much the same manner as moving from Victorian undergarments to g-strings in little more than a generation or two. So now we are left with a society communicating using monosyllabic language that accompanies an equally narrow comprehension. If this brevity is sufficient for operating daily life, then why not apply it to the interpretation of viewing the entirety of what lies ahead? The answer to this is that brevity and simplicity are inadequate for finding knowledge buried in the magnitude of what is before us.

There’s no bridging the chasm from an old-fashioned set of underwear (thoughts) to the other side of the abyss using a g-string (memes). I believe that a comparison could be made by suggesting that Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, comprising four parts lasting 30 to 40 minutes, could be reduced to one note, although in some way, it can be reduced to just the first four. Of the rest of the piece, I suppose it could be claimed that if you heard it once, why does one need to hear it again? Could the answer be found in the fact that humans learn very little to nothing after a single iteration of new information arriving to their senses?

So, we go out to find, see, listen, and hear those things in life we are unfamiliar with, which is precisely what I’m attempting to share with Carlos. When one stops at a friend’s home and listens to a person playing the 5th symphony on piano, they have no real idea of the piece’s complexity if it were being played by a symphony. In our current age, we don’t care. We have the 15-second loop of Beethoven that accompanies the TikTok video with a witty phrase typed over it, and we believe we’ve gained the kind of deep knowledge that has served the sages over millennia. We are whole, we are complete, and we can now face the world with certainty that what was needed to forge a way ahead has been acquired. This is grotesquely untrue; we only thrive when knowledge and wisdom reach deeper into our souls.

Mind you; this perception is not due to observations made regarding the person I’m traveling with; on the contrary, he’s quite curious, which is also the only reason we went out to share five days of being immersed in what for him are mostly new experiences. It’s precisely his willingness to look, listen, read, and wonder that allowed a basic foundation to be established where I felt that if I took the horse to water, it might likely drink. He supplied the seed, and I provided the sunlight and water.

This was the route of our 1,300-mile adventure.