That was the whole point of the trip. My father, a man who still prints MapQuest directions and keeps a Thomas Guide in his glove compartment “just in case the satellites go dark,” had planned every mile of our two-week journey from Seattle to the Grand Canyon and back.
I was seventeen. I wanted to get lost. I wanted static on the radio and a boy in the backseat who wasn’t my little brother. But you don’t say that to a man who cried when they discontinued his favorite brand of canned chili. blog amateur
And I learned that sometimes, the only way to find the thing you weren’t looking for is to run out of instructions. That was the whole point of the trip
I can’t describe it right. That’s the amateur part of this blog. I’m not a poet. But imagine if someone took all the colors of a bonfire—gold, rust, deep purple—and poured them into a crack in the earth a mile wide. There was no guardrail. No gift shop. No plaque. Just us, and the silence, and the feeling that we’d found something that wasn’t supposed to exist. I wanted to get lost
He smiled. I’d never seen him smile without a reason before. It changed his whole face.