Beginnings and Endings

by Lisa

My mission for the evening was simple: to watch football.

You see, it was a Thursday night.  It was also opening day of the 2004-2005 football season, and that night's game was a match-up I was really looking forward to: Tom Brady of my beloved Patriots was facing Peyton Manning and the Colts.  But there was a problem.  I wasn't in Boston.  I was in Springdale, Utah, just south of Zion National Park, and my lodgings for the night were a bare bones private campground.  My tent doesn't have a television.

I asked around, stopping here and there (hotels, outfitters, souvenir shops) along the main road to ask where I might watch the game, and preferably drink some beer and eat dinner while I was at it.  The consensus was clear.

So, shortly before game time, I strolled in to the Bit 'N' Spur, a Mexican restaurant a short way down the road from my campsite, and settled myself on a bar stool.  The (ruggedly adorable) bartender kindly agreed to put the game on one of the televisions, I ordered a drink and some dinner, and dug in to watch the game.

A little while later, an older couple took the stools to my left.  The gentleman heard me zealously rooting for my team, and asked me if I was a Pats fan.  He asked if I was from Boston.  I said yes to both, and introduced myself.  We got to talking.

I explained that I was on a cross country road trip to celebrate graduating from law school and surviving the bar exam before starting my legal career.  He was a just-retired District Attorney from San Diego, on a cross country road trip with his wife, celebrating the end of his legal career.  We got along famously.

His wife, upon hearing that I was traveling solo, immediately asked, "Isn't your mother worried?"  Yes, probably.  "Aren't you scared out here on your own?"  No, not at all.  She told me that she'd chew her fingernails off with worry if her twenty-six year-old daughter took off on a trip alone.  I assured her that it's not that bad, particularly if you pay attention and don't take unnecessary risks.

Her husband jumped back in.  He didn't want to talk about my trip, he wanted to talk about the law. 

Where was I going to practice?  Did I have a specialty?  Where did I go to school?

A few hours later, the game was over (27-24 Pats, thank you very much).  The couple got up from their stools.

"It was a pleasure to meet you," he said, shaking my hand, "and I wish you congratulations on success in law school, and a long and fruitful legal career."

I thanked him.  "Maybe I'll start planning my own retirement road trip," I teased, "since it seems to be working out so well for you."

She shook my hand too.  "Good luck, and call your mother.  As often as possible.  And tell her another mother is worrying about you too."

We said goodnight.  I settled my bill, and returned to my campground.

Mission accomplished, with a little career encouragement thrown in.  A good night, indeed.

A Different Kind of Gold

by Lisa

“You ready to strike it rich?” Mike asked, grinning at me from beneath his baseball cap.

“Sure!”  I hoped my tone reflected the enthusiasm I was trying to fake.

Mike had set two plastic buckets upside-down in the creek, and now he instructed me to have a seat on one of them.  I stepped into the creek and felt the chill of the knee-high mountain water rushing around my hip-wader rubber boots.  Cautiously, I sat on the bucket.  It seemed stable enough.  Mike handed me a pan filled with dirt, sat across from me, and showed me how to use the rushing creek water to get rid of most of the clay and sand, and how to swirl the remaining sediment around in the pan to separate out any gold specks.  Patiently, I listened and tried to mimic the circular motions he made with his wrists, all the while wondering how long was long enough to sit there.
Several days earlier, I had arrived at Flynn’s Hidden Hollow Hideaway Cattle & Guest Ranch in Townsend, Montana, for a week of horseback riding, hiking, and enjoying the peace that comes with being miles from the nearest cell phone signal.  The first few days were filled with wonder and magic as I rode all over the mountainside, herded cattle, and learned how to fire a rifle.  The food was good, the setting was breathtaking, and the ranchers were friendly. 

One of the ranchers was Mike, an older man who strode around in full waders (with suspenders) and an ever-present grin.  Mike helped out on the ranch when needed and spent the rest of his time looking for gold on the ranch property.  Throughout the week, Mike had asked me if I wanted him to teach me how to pan for gold.  It seemed a silly endeavor, a tourist trap, and every time I simply shrugged.  The owner of the ranch had mentioned that they didn’t salt the cache, meaning that if I did find any gold it came from the mountains.  The unspoken caution, of course, was that I shouldn’t expect to find anything at all.  Mike was persistent, however, and his grin was so enthusiastic that I finally agreed, in part because I thought it was a small thing I could do to make his day.  I went in thinking that I would be polite for an hour, and then move on to pursuits that were more interesting.

Once I got the hang of the panning, Mike started to ask me questions.  What did I do for a living?  Where was I from?  Did I like the big city?  And so forth.  When I said I was a lawyer, he started asking me questions about famous Supreme Court cases.  I was a little surprised at first, but lulled by the warm sun on my back, the cool water rushing around my boots, and the repetitive, circular motions of my gold pan, I relaxed and we began to talk in earnest.

We talked about the law, mostly.  Mike knew a lot about the law, because he was a gold miner, didn’t want to pay a lawyer very much, and so spent a lot of time researching, asserting, and lobbying for miners’ rights in Montana.  He read cases – new and old – and had taught himself how to analyze statutes, regulations and court decisions.  His interests were broader than mining, however, which is how he knew about many Supreme Court cases that I had never heard of until law school.  He read them for fun.

“If my life had gone differently, I probably would have gone to law school,” Mike said, adjusting his hat and squinting in the sunlight.  He shrugged.  “But it didn’t, so I had to figure it out for myself.”
We talked about life in general.  Mike was a Vietnam vet, and, like so many others, had difficulty readjusting to normal life once he returned to the states.  Despite the difficulties he faced, however, Mike adopted a practical, cheerful outlook and found a life that he enjoyed living: nominally indulging gold fever, but in reality using the gold mining as a way to spend time in the outdoors and dig into the intellectual pursuit – law – for which he was clearly well suited.

As we talked, I forgot about my initial reservations, and the time passed too quickly.  After a couple of hours, I had discovered several tiny flecks of gold from my many pans.  Mike helped me put them into a little vial, which I dutifully pocketed to bring home as a souvenir. 

I thanked Mike for teaching me to pan for gold.  He apologized that I hadn't struck it rich.  He didn’t realize that, in fact, I had.

Divine Intervention

By Ariana 

Travel journalists and bloggers spend a fair amount of time and detail describing the exotic places we’ve gone and the exciting adventures we had while we were there but we all too often overlook everything that comes between our place of origin and our final destination.  We assume that the airport, the plane, the boat, the train, and the bus are places of little or no consequence.  They are the places that should be hurried through on the way to our next adventure, an adventure which we can all be sure will occur in a place that is far more exciting than a bus terminal.  That is not to say, however, that these places of transition and modes of transportation completely lack any interest whatsoever.  In fact, one of my most formative travel experiences occurred in an airport.

Directly following graduation from college I went on a trip to visit Europe with my friend Elise and stay with her relatives in Italy and in France.  We were supposed to meet in the Washington Dulles Airport and fly to Italy together, unfortunately, all did not go according to plan.  Elise caught the flight to Italy but I got stuck in the Dulles airport because of a tornado (yes a tornado, I had previously thought that much like the rain in Spain tornados kept mainly to the plain, but I was, apparently very wrong).

I convinced myself that it was fate that I was stuck all alone overnight in Washington DC because of the flight that Elise made and I missed.  I decided that the obese middle-aged man sitting next to me on the flight to Dulles, the one who spent the entire flight edging closer to me (on the pretext that he was trying to move away from the stench emanating off of the man sitting in the window seat), might just be my soul mate.  He had, after all, offered to buy me dinner when we got off the plane, perhaps this was a sign.  But he was not my soul mate because the customer service line beckoned and, irrationally, I decided to turn down free dinner and drinks with my "soul mate" because somewhere in the masochistic region of my brain I decided that waiting in a line that spanned several terminals of the Dulles airport was, actually, preferable to a free dinner.

It was just as well, because while I was waiting in this aforementioned line I met God.  I suppose that was a very imprecise way of saying it.  Now you are probably expecting me to go into some epic conversion story along the lines of Emperor Constantine.  Or you will argue with the phrasing and try to convince me that it was not God who waited in line with me but rather one of his messengers.  Or if you are a skeptic you will try to convince me that it was merely a coincidence and that I attributed his presence to a divine power.  Or if you are particularly religious you might tell me it was nothing of the sort and that even thinking that I had met God let alone telling everybody about it is irreverent and disrespectful and I will probably rot in hell.  And you may be right and you can call it what you will but I will call it my meeting with God and it occurred at approximately 6pm on the 4th of June in the year 2008 in the United International Flights customer service line at the Washington Dulles Airport.
God was of medium build and he had a mustache (but not a beard). He was middle-aged and if you are the sort to care about

Sitting on Elise's grandmother's bed in Marina di Pisa, Italy, wearing one of her grandmother's classy 80s-style puff paint shirts

ethnicity then I will inform you that God was Sri Lankan.  God and his wife and two daughters had missed their flight to India, which meant that they also missed their flight to Sri Lanka. God was (as you would very well expect him to be) incredibly profound. He was very calm.  God was (also as you might expect) the only person in the line who wasn't bitching and moaning.

His argument was that he would get there eventually, but there wasn't anything he could do to make himself get there faster so why bother getting all worked up about it.  I felt like God definitely had a point there.  As I stood next to him in line I had this strong desire to be more like him.  I decided that from then on I wasn't going to try to fight the divine will, or luck, or fate, or whatever you may call it for control. I was just going to float and see what happened and just have faith that things would turn out all right in the end (which is not really a departure from my previous belief, but this God in the customer service line just sort of reaffirmed it.)

When I finally arrived at Elise's grandparents' house in Italy without my baggage, I heeded the lesson that I had learned fromthis travel God.  I didn’t allow my lack of luggage spoil my trip.  I merely wore Elise’s grandmother's clothes (which were frightful in a hilarious sort of way) all around Pisa.