Chapter 1 – Washington

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”  – Miguel de Cervantes

As actors in this theatre of the absurd, it is only fitting that we take on tasks both monumental and profoundly arbitrary in our quests for the inherent truths and goodnesses of mankind. To meet a tree, tree to tree, a rock rock to rock, a wave, wave to wave, to reflect upon the impermanent and surpassing beauty that surrounds us, and in light of our own imperfection, contemplate the likeness of our own.

We take off on our quest in a manner fitting of beginnings, heading eastward towards the rising sun, each morning waking more eastward than the last, heading towards a home that will be different to the degree that we have changed upon our return. If our journey ends in peril, let it be a glorious peril, one fitting of fables and legends, perhaps a cautionary tale, and if in success, perhaps a testament to another strange and small step that humans have taken in the test of their hubris against the raw and barren boundaries that designate a life.

So much potential exists in the energy around us, so much life unfolding, so much hope in the hearts of youth and old alike, brimming with the unbridled individualism and tenacity that defines the American spirit, or the human spirit perhaps, so much life in the living, not easily to be dimmed. This is what we have come here to find, a renewed sense of self amongst the firs and pines, a slow enough adventure to be able to talk to our fellow man without the dim hum of machinery separating our conversation, a piece of glass holding back our sense of personhood from the world that knows itself in the same way that we do, and as such already, we have not been disappointed.

I feel a renewed sense of childhood, holding things both prolific and transient, unfathomable and at the same time within our grasp. Sometimes I feel as though I could have just as easily have been a stone, and not move for ten thousand years, or a tree gently willowing in the wind, watching the sun rise and set over the same square feet of earth, grounded as it may be, but for now, as a human being, with two legs that can turn beneath me, if I cannot live for a thousand years, perhaps I can travel far and wide, to see a thousand of miles of this brave and wild country, to get to know it as my own, a sprawling wasteland and utopia, one layered atop the other, from sea to shining sea. I’d like to see a thin slice of its vast entirety, feel it shrink inside of my hands, hold it close to my heart, and feel the pulse of the earth beneath me.

I can only tell a small part of this story, for only a small part of it is my own. The rest is yours, all of yours, for we do share a common fate, in all of our disjunct complexities, in all of our costs and burdens, in all of the weights we weigh upon each other, the land we share, milking and wooing our individual destinies out of a common cloth. I think collectively we are still deciding what it means to be American, and what it means to be a human being, reflecting on the strange paradox of our own existence. There are moments when it all coalesces around a certain center, and we give tremendous thanks for all of the energy that exists in the world, and just as easily, times when we feel it all slip away and the emptiness that can just as easily be present, claim its own.

As a matter of formality, perhaps something could be said about the meat and bones of it, about the course that ought to be taken, the roads specifically, the food and water and all else that will be witnessed in the coming days, and this will fall into place as it may, for a story knows itself only in its telling, and neither I nor you can be too sure which words will choose themselves. But unfold it will, in its due course, in accordance with the quick and changing weather, but for now, all stands in the wings, all waits to be expressed, all holds itself dainty, clean and starched, the linen and personalities alike. This then is those days, when all is well, a picture of idyllic idle-ism, a slowly inhaled breath, our youth begging the world for adventure, that we may take to the road, the pavement, our last thread of our collective commons, in the modern search for an age old quest for enlightenment perhaps, or if that too lofty a goal, a more sturdy frame upon our return.