This is the saddest Desto postcard you’ll ever read.
The sight of Horseshoe Bend probably takes nearly everyone’s breath away but it also took me to a surprising interior place. A place involving involuntary weeping. What is it about vistas like this one that evoke the deepest emotions? Sure, the grandeur and the unbelievable natural beauty and the majesty of the geological drama that created such a view are part of why it’s so spectacularly moving. And maybe that’s the whole of it for most folks but this kind of view takes me to a place of reflection and personal introspective thought that has NOTHING to do with the locale but everything to do with how lucky I feel to live in a time when travel to these remote spots is not only possible but easy.
I have no clue why, but this spot randomly makes me think about my old granmma.
It’s sometimes hard to believe but just two generations ago my namesake lived the whole of her entire life within about 50 square miles of the farm she was born on. (She may have once made a pilgrimage up to the Mayo clinic in Rochester MN because that was a travel Mecca for Norwegian farm families in Illinois back in the day, but in terms of travel, that was IT for Gram. Oh, Gramma got out to the Piggly Wiggly in town on the reg, but otherwise… travel just didn’t happen.
Very few people traveled widely in her generation. By contrast, we can hop in the car any old time we like and drive over to Arizona in a day, completely entertained by audio books on the car sound system and well fed by any number of not-too-terrible eateries that now cater to highway travelers.
It’s hard to say what Gramma would have said looking into the thousand foot drop carved out by the Colorado River in Arizona’s Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (had she ever ventured west of the Mississippi River). Odds are good though that she would have said, “Looks exactly like a horseshoe.”