Just a week ago, I was sitting on a large rock nine thousand feet above sea level on the side of a dormant volcano in California, with a spectacular view of high mountain lakes, and fields of pink-striped snow beneath me, and the Sierra Nevadas fading blue in the distance to the south. It was a view, and a perch, that I had never expected to acquire, and couldn’t have imagined at the start of a “wing it” vacation with my eighteen-year-old son only days before.
But there I sat anyway, with solitude and grandeur and incredibly clear air surrounding me, marveling that all had sparked this particular journey was five minutes of conversation with a couple from California at a scenic overlook in Yosemite who suggested that a visit to Lassen Volcanic National Park shouldn’t be passed up.
Tennessee William’s tragic character, Blanche DuBois, got at least one thing right in A Streetcar Named Desire, I thought as I watched a red-tailed hawk fly past at eye level and basked in the sun, waiting for my son to nimbly conquer the summit and bring back pictures. Depending on “the kindness of strangers”—at least while traveling—can often turn out pretty well.
I’ve made it a family tradition to take each of my children somewhere interesting “out West” for a week before they leave for college, and now this was the “caboose baby’s” turn. After summer ends, I’ll have an empty nest, and a lot of things in my universe will change. But this pre-college trip had been a fixture for years. With the older three, I had managed to visit the Grand Tetons, the South Dakota Badlands, the Grand Canyon (and rafted down it as well), the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, red rock canyons near Sedona, Arizona, and Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks in southern Utah.
The one thing that characterized the earlier trips, though, aside from a lot of hiking, was that I usually had a pretty good idea of where we’d be staying most nights. National parks, Indian reservations, hotels, they were usually waiting for us, guaranteed long before with a credit card.
