This country of ours is as beautiful as the person who views it wants it to be. That is what I have discovered.
I love driving across Wyoming. There are almost always herds and herds of pronghorn antelope and I actually spend more time looking at the landscape searching for the antelope than looking at the road ahead of me. I'm very lucky there is very little traffic in Wyoming. That's not to say that I don't ever watch the road in front of me... that would be crazy! But I admit that I don't spend as much time as I should.
I recently spoke with a friend of mine that has been driving truck for 19 years and when I described the antelope I was seeing he said, "meh." He was so blase about it that I was devastated. But then I have to remember that he's been driving these roads for 19 years and he's probably had his fill of antelope.
Then one day I get a text from him. He was driving across Wyoming and saw a bull moose near the Elk Mountain stream. He sounded awed ... as much as one can sound awed in a text. I happened to have been two days behind him along the same route, but by the time I got there, there was no sign of the moose. Naturally. I'm still hoping I'll get to see one.
In the springtime, Kansas was the greenest state I had been thru until then. All the fields were an emerald green - at least on the east side of the state. I now know that they were green because they were still growing. Now that the crops are ready for harvest, or nearly so, they've begun to brown and all that beautiful green is gone. I'm glad I got to see it when I did.
If it wasn't for this job, there are many things that I would never get to see or experience. I still haven't seen Mt. Rushmore, even tho I was within 25 miles of it. I have not yet seen the Gettysburg battlefields, even tho I was broke down for two days just 30 miles from there. But there will come a day when I'll get back to those parts of the country without a ginormous truck to maneuver, and I'll get to see all those places that I'm keeping notes on.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying every part of this country that my job takes me to... even the parts I get to see every single trip.
