“Home drive. High beams shearing the bromegrass,
blackcaps, brambles by the roadside;
red stems siphon frozen ground
grown soft, a bruise beneath the smooth suede
winter peach that rolls across
the dashboard.”

— Richard Kenney, "Driving Sleeping People"

AFTER ALL THE STAYING INDOORS THAT EVERYONE’S DONE we just had to get out. Our family had quarantined with the best of them, but our two highly-energetic children were exploding in the house, and we thought, if we’re just awaiting the apocalypse anyway, we might as well do it poolside. By driving to Arizona, we encountered many fewer people than we would have in the course of our normal routines here in the middle of a big city. There, people stay inside in summer anyway, moving from pool, to grill, to television, which seemed better than cursing and muttering that all the shops in Seattle were closed, and the parks, and libraries. Our Lucca had been waiting all year to swim in her grandparent’s pool, so with nothing on the schedules, we set out.

I used to make the WA > AZ drive a lot as a kid, when my family lived in Lake Stevens and my grandmother in Scottsdale, but then, we balled through as quickly as we could on the I-5; my only memories of those trips were the orange groves in AZ that signaled we were close and the funny place names on the map I consulted: Yelm, Eureka, Blythe. Our kids are too little to stay strapped in to a seat all day, so we took it slow and opted for the more scenic road.

We stopped at the capital in Olympia to stretch, but the first days’ goal was to make Astoria for dinner and then Seaside for sleep. The former I’d never seen, but was eager to after having read a history of the city a while back. I love every bit of Washington, but my does Oregon have us beat when it comes to beaches. I was not at all expecting such light, such shapes, such arrangements of space.

We did touristy things: like paying to see concrete dinosaurs from the 1950’s, but also playing on the sand dunes, hiking in the redwoods, but those things are draws for a reason; they give us the world afresh. They give us ourselves in our proper size.

We arrived in Arizona a little exhausted after 5 days on the road, but we were full of rich encounters that made things seem, if not normal, at least worth the effort. Plus, it was nice to get my camera out again, as I also have recently pulled out again my guitar after so long with so little use. If I was impressed with the natural beauty of the West as always, I was this time struck over and again at the ingenuity required to let us see it: the bridges, roadways, and all of the other invisible, or often-taken-for-granted, infrastructure, accomplishments so great they seem, to me anyway, almost as magnificent as the terrain through which they pass.