Travel, Truth, and Time

"Travel, Truth, and Time: Re-reading Travels with Charley on a National Parks Pilgrimage," The Limberlost Review: A Literary Journal of the Mountain West (20026-2027): 389-96.

I reached redwood country, about 100 miles south of the national park, along the Avenue of Giants. The sun, still high in the afternoon sky, disappeared under cover of these trees. I slowed and gazed. After a few minutes, I noticed a dumbstruck smile had frozen on my face, a visage that students once thought permanently a scowl. At the campground and on subsequent walks beneath the soaring canopy, I circled stumps, rewinding time not only to when local mills clanged loud enough to penetrate the green quiet but also to a time before America, but when the Prophet Muhammad preached and those stumps were seedlings.