wheeled migration take 2

We're in Asheville, NC for a lunch visit with a friend. We'll soon climb back into Magnolia and continue on to Chapel Hill to spend a few days with Zpora before our whirlwind 3-day jaunt to NYC next week (in the car, not the bus!).

Hoo-boy, the adventure continues. Lots of diesel fuel burned. You see the beauty and grandeur of this continent while driving the roads scraped into her surface. You also see the impact of our human choices... miles of cattle feed lots with mudshitgoo standing room only... tractor trailer trucks carrying thousands of chickens in kleenex box sized cages with no room to move from their forced recline, every red beak turned toward the outside breathing their only "fresh" air of their lives; Now there's a very good picture of the TRUE cost of all that cheap meat that is available.

Wheeled Migration

We growled into action with the turn of the key and a plume of smoke - awakening from our winter's repose in Chico. Magnolia came as close as she ever has to being the “magic” bus as we picked up Riparians for the ride out between the now green and growing fields. When we arrived those fields were mostly fallow though with winter greens still growing strong. It was a tendersweet departure, hard to leave the sheltering walnut trees, friends and land - home, really. These migration patterns of ours are seeming like nomadic movements after all. We arrive and settle in unfamiliar land and community, tentative yet open, sending out rootlets, gripping the soil, greeting the neighbors. We get to know a place, make friends, search out the cafes, libraries and markets, then…we leave. What’s this all about?

In part, we’ve decided it’s about being At Home on Earth, this nebulous goal that we set for ourselves three and a half years ago when we sold our house and went wandering. What has seemed at times random and unplanned is becoming something tangible with color and texture and pattern. We are weaving strands of community in California, in New Mexico, in North Carolina, in Texas, in France, in Egypt and Morocco and, of course, in Vermont. A web is emerging (or is it simply becoming visible?). We are careful not to sever those strands when we leave, though there is some stretching and pain; it is growing more intricate and changing shape.



It was a dramatic departure from our home in Chico. The welcome rain that was falling in Berkeley changed to snow at around 6000 feet as we climbed over the Sierras. We rumbled slowly through, stopping frequently to sweep the ice and snow off the windshield (the broom being the only suitable implement).

We slept on the other side of the mountains in dry Nevada but with a howling prowling wind that shook the bus and especially the solar panel on the roof.
Before we left Nevada we visited this hot spring pool in the high desert near Meadow.

Our route eastward took us through the flowing glowing red rocks of Capitol Reef


The call of the rocks... on this day we left Magnolia below and set off on foot to feel them, climb into them...