Being Alone

I’m about halfway out to the first major stop – the Badlands of South Dakota.  For all those concerned, Rosie got her travel day Egg McMuffin on launch day.  We drove about 350 miles to western PA, near the West Virginia border.  The evening before I left, I stopped at my daughters house for a pre trip dinner with her and her family.  Rosie spent 3 hours being chased by their lovable, crazy, 120 pound Bernese Mountain Dog.  Belly full of McDonald’s and completely exhausted, she slept the entire ride west. After another 400 miles on the road, we are spending a few nights at the Indiana Dunes State Park, a bit east of Chicago.  Unlike the first campground, this place is packed.  The attraction is a very beautiful beach on Lake Michigan, backed by 200 foot sand dunes.  From the beach you can see the skyline of Chicago.  The sky is a cloud free, lake and sky competing in a blue beauty contest.

As Rosie and I were taking our evening stroll, I realized that I was perhaps the only one in the campground traveling alone.  There are few kids with school is back in session, but lots of couples and friends sitting around their campfires.  I know this sounds strange – like why didn’t he think of this – but I realized I was going to be alone with my thoughts for the better part of six weeks. I was in a different state of mind on my February Southern tour, with my wife’s passing a fresh cut.  That trip was pure escapism – very little thought of the future, other than there wasn’t one.  Being alone was the perfect place to be.  Why inflict miserable me on anyone?

With time, grieving and the insight of others has yielded understanding.  I know now that I do not need to be alone – that living my life to the fullest is not a repudiation of my life before, particularly for the love I have, and will always have, for my wife.  The present and the future are just part of a bigger whole that includes the past in all its fullness. Although open to many interpretations, I think that is what the poet T. S. Eliot was saying in the opening lines of Burnt Norton, the first of his famous Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable….

I always struggle with that last word, but I have 300 miles of driving, to the Mississippi River on the Wisconsin/Iowa border, to think about it.