By Betty Miller Conway
It came the day I was at the Painted Desert--a strange kind of feeling that began with funny jitters in my stomach and then washed over me with an emotional slipstream of vague uneasiness. I attributed it to the heat. After all, it was 108 degrees in the desert! The sun shimmered off the multi-hued sand and rock formations that had been eons in the making. Salmon pinks, blue-grays, and beiges melded in a way that made me feel small and insignificant. The sheer magnitude of that wide expanse of beautiful earth was enough to make anyone feel strange.
So I shook off the feeling. I looked at my daughters and smiled, watching them pose with petrified logs, pretending to heave them over, just as they would have done years ago when they were small children. The sun bore down with relentless clarity, but their smiles flashing against the harsh landscape made it meaningful. Soon after, we were back in our air-conditioned car and moving on to the next destination. Nevertheless, all of us were struck by the immensity and stark beauty of the desert so different from the verdant green mountains of our North Carolina home.
We were on a whirlwind tour of the Southwest. My youngest, Carolina, had accepted a position as a park ranger in the mountains of New Mexico. As a recent graduate from college, she was eager to begin this new chapter in her now-adult life. Olivia, Mary Ellis, and I decided to join her on the drive westward, and then fly back home. We were excited at the prospect of visiting the Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, and the Grand Canyon while in the area. It was a girls’ trip since Walton graciously offered to stay home and tend the farm. Leaving the farm for any length of time is a bit stressful for me. I’m always convinced that there will be a horse or dog emergency while I am away, or that maybe a tornado will come and blow it all away! But knowing that we were leaving it all in the hands of the official Caretaker made it much easier.
My daughters and I had never all been on an extended trip together as adults. Without Walton, the vacation planning was decidedly less than methodical. No paper maps, bird guides, or binoculars took up room on the dashboard. Instead, we threw caution to the wind and relied only on the GPS as we sped down Interstate 40 in my old white Subaru, now a child’s hand-me-down, while listening to Carolina’s special trip playlist. Despite the many miles on its odometer, the Outback was still going strong, and thankfully the air conditioning was still ice cold. We took turns driving 85 miles an hour all though Texas, Oklahoma, and much of New Mexico singing Wide Open Spaces with the Dixie Chicks in unison (well, somewhat) and steering clear of the cattle trailers and speed traps on the highway.
The wide-open spaces must have gotten the better of me, at least for a little while. The feeling came back, this time in Flagstaff, Arizona. No heat this time; instead, we were in a quiet cabin in the ponderosa pines. It happened right around daybreak. The light was beginning to filter through the pines, and I could hear the chirps of the spotted towhee just outside the open windows. It was beautiful, but the quietness of the moment made my heart catch. Suddenly I missed the sound of rain falling, our collie, Piper, snoozing by my bed, Walton’s snoring—even that early rising red rooster crowing under my window. Then it hit me what the strange feeling was: I was homesick.
It had been so long since I had been homesick that I had almost forgotten what it felt like. I remember feeling a bit unwell and emotional as a kid sometimes when I was in an unfamiliar place and out of my comfort zone. Certainly, I remember other kids on overnighters waking up in the middle of the night with terrible stomach aches, crying and begging to go home. I never had anything so overt, though. My parents always joked that my first word was “Go!” and that I had been determined to go ever since. And that’s true. I do love to travel, to see new landscapes, have new adventures. Being in motion is good for me but occasionally, even in adulthood, when the motion stops and things get still, I get a lonely, achy feeling.
I’ve recently learned that the Welsh have a word for this kind of intense feeling: hiraeth, which is loosely translated as a blend of nostalgia, yearning and homesickness, a “longing to be where your spirit lives.” Although I am not Welsh, that seems to capture the deep, almost undefinable sense of loss and love that occasionally overwhelms me when I am far from home or far from the people I love.
But there wasn’t much time for retrospection and loneliness on this particular trip. That morning, I lay there for just a few minutes, then got up, made the morning coffee, and called home to make sure that a plague had not swept through the farm leaving death and destruction in its wake. The outgoing message on the answering machine, albeit in my own voice, was at least a small comfort. So then we were cleared to spend the day touring the Grand Canyon. And the next day touring somewhere else, then another place. I never felt homesick on the trip again.
By then we were spending less time in the car singing about the desert and more time hiking and exploring those wide-open spaces and time-weathered rocks and canyons. That meant we spent an inordinate amount of time near edges: ravines, canyons, bridges, rivers and of course the most awe-inspiring one of them all, the Grand Canyon. The edges were dramatic! I’m generally not a fan of steep precipices; I used to tell people that I was not afraid of heights, just edges. Especially edges my young children could fall off. When they were little, I drove them crazy making them hold my hand when we were within a half mile of any potentially hazardous edge.
I remember that one time on the high trail ladders of Grandfather Mountain I became so anxious about my children that I became physically ill. Carolina was a baby at the time and sleeping in a pack on Walton’s back. Olivia and Mary Ellis must have been in elementary school. We were all on a ladder traversing a perilously steep precipice, and I made the mistake of looking down. It made me dizzy; even worse, at that moment I realized that everyone I loved most in the world—my entire world, really-- was on one rickety ladder a mile high up a gorge. My hands froze to the rungs of the ladder, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe. But there was nothing to do but keep going up, one rung at a time, until we all made it off safely. It took me a few minutes to stop shaking, and I remember Mary Ellis and Olivia comforting me, peering up at me saying, “Mom, it’s okay. Just look at how pretty the view is!”
It was indeed a beautiful view. The mountains stretched out before me like folds of blue velvet. A cool breeze fluttered up from the green lands below. We found a flat rock to sit on and had a snack, all together, all safe. Since then, I have hiked up many steep trails by looking straight ahead, not allowing myself to look down or to even think about the edge. (And by making sure we weren’t all on a dangerous ladder at the same time!)
There were no ladders on our trip this time, just steep, dusty paths dropping into ravines and vistas so powerful that I can’t even begin to put them into words. We hiked alongside ancient pueblos, into lovely aspen forests, rode horses on the mesas, and stood on the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge looking across the sunlit canyon. (Even with a railing to hold on to, I did not dare look straight down at the river!) In one of the most breathtaking moments of the trip, the girls and I sat on rocks right on the rim of the Grand Canyon and had a picnic. Cheese sandwiches and cold iced tea never tasted so good! It was hot, but the cool breeze rushed up from the canyon below. We gazed across that wide expanse and felt wonderfully small. Although I couldn’t help but squawk when Mary Ellis and Carolina scooted too close to the edge for a photograph, I did not have to insist that they hold my hand. In the end, I really think that they were more worried about me falling off the edge than the other way around.
The vacation came to an end far too quickly, and we had to say good-bye to Carolina so that she could begin her job. We left her standing beside the white Subaru waving, the mountains of New Mexico framed behind her. I knew better than to look back as Mary Ellis drove us away in the rental car. We flew home through busy post-covid airports and on crowded flights back to our individual destinations and adult responsibilities. The views from the plane were stunning upon takeoff but not nearly as satisfying as sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon in the cool breeze, all together.
Soon enough I was back home again to misty mountains and the wild but safe nooks and crannies of the Blue Ridge. I have seen many beautiful vistas all over the world, but there is none more beautiful than the silhouette of Hawk’s Bill and Table Rock against an evening sky when you are driving up the mountain towards home after a long journey.
It was good to be home again. Piper came bounding, happy to have her most reliable treat source at arm’s length again. The horses nickered across the fence. Miraculously, the animals had all survived a couple of weeks without me! It was high summer on the farm. The grass was opulently green, the cherries had already come and gone, and the blueberries were starting to come in. The leaf canopy in the forest was so thick that the light could only get through with quiet determination. Despite all the mowing and other frenetic farm activities, Walton had somehow found time to make cherry jam from the old blackheart tree down by the road. The ruby-red sweetness tasted like heaven as we shared a quick snack before bedtime.
Nevertheless, waking up at daybreak, I feel homesick again— lonely for the daughter I left in the arid mountains of New Mexico, for the one relocating to Washington DC to finish graduate school, for the oldest, already back at work in Raleigh. All adults now, far from home. I miss the irreverent laughter, the spontaneous singing, and the canyon walks where they all made sure I didn’t fall behind. Even more, I yearn for the three little bright-eyed girls who used to put their hands in mine so trustingly any time we were near an edge.
The light brightens outside and right on cue, that contrary old rooster starts crowing under my window. I cannot help but smile. Piper and I make our way to the kitchen, and I brew the morning coffee. After checking the answering machine to confirm that there is not an emergency message from one of the girls, I look outside to make sure that the rain overnight didn’t sweep the barn away while I was asleep. All good. I sip my coffee in the early morning light and start to plan out the day’s activities—one rung at a time.
