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Location: Painted Desert, Northern Arizona,
South West USA
Generally, we travel to lose faith in coincidence and gain
faith in divine planning. Coincidences can happen anywhere,
after all. I live in Baltimore, on the East Coast of the United
States. I've always been inclined to leave my home country
to find adventure. My travels have taken me for long stretches
in far-flung parts of the world. However, with the surge of
patriotism that followed September 11, 2001, I was reminded
that my own country is a terribly diverse and interesting
place.
Thus, my last adventure took me to the American Southwest.
The Desert Southwest is truly a world apart to a Mid-Atlantic
resident like myself. The landscapes are positively lunar
- stark vistas, slot canyons, striated buttes. Despite having
not left my own country, I felt as far from home there as
I would have anywhere in the world.
However, my desires to get away from anything I knew were
not entirely satisfied as I ditched the pavement somewhere
in the Painted Desert in Northern Arizona and turned onto
a dirt track that ran through the Navajo Indian Reservation.
But when the dirt track itself appeared no longer distinguishable
from the parched desert floor, I finally began to feel apart
- that horrible, but wonderful, realization that I could die
out there if my car broke down. Only when I felt secure this
was the case did I stop my car to breathe in the scene before
me.
The horizon appeared endless, a stretch of sky rent in two
by thin wisps of cloud that separated evenly to reveal a bluer
shade of blue than I had ever thought possible. I was alone
- "home," but nowhere near home. I was greatly disappointed
then when a Toyota Land Rover pulled up. The Land Rover stopped
and an older man stepped from the car.
"Thought you had it all to yourself?" the man asked,
with an accent I couldn't quite place. "You from around
here?" he asked.
"No. I live on the East Coast," I told him. "Two
thousand miles away. Closer than your home, I suspect,"
I said trying to be folksy.
"Just a bit. I'm from Wellington, New Zealand. You've
been?"
"No, I'd love to though. Closest I came was sharing a
room in a hostel in London with a guy from Wellington . .
.You wouldn't happen to know a fellow named Lance Grohl?"
I asked, half-joking. "He was my London hostelmate."
I try to avoid the cliché in the telling of this story,
but there is no way around it: he almost fell over from shock.
Lance was his son. It is true: coincidences can happen anywhere,
but our little game of connect-the-dots spanned three continents
and over 20,000 miles. Isn't this, after all, why we travel
- even if we haven't even left our home country?
© Evan Balkan 2003, All Rights Reserved
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Travel Writers: Kiwis in the Painted Desert by
Evan L. Balkan
