Roads Go Ever On

 

Roads go ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.

I've been trying to keep this blog streamlined, focused on certain streams of thought.   But you know what?   That is not really how I write, especially not how I blog.   I end up just not writing at all.  And while there can be a functioning blog without many readers, there can't be a functioning blog without writers.

Arriving at a destination always seems like a good time to take stock, and change how things are going, and write.   That is a thoroughly Tolkienian thought, though I suppose that the setting off part is where things change, and the return home is where you take stock, and pull out your pipe (coffee in my case)  and pen and paper, and start your version of There and Back Again.

We arrived back in California yesterday, after 5 months away, which is the longest we've been gone from this mountain place since it was built almost 3 decades ago.  Except for one other time, where we were in San Francisco for more than 7 months after the birth of our 6th child, who spent most of those months in the hospital.   That was almost 25 years ago.  

Looking out of our large great room window I see the perpendicular-gothic sugar pines and incense cedars, some 100 feet tall and not done growing yet.   My children grew up among these conifers, always conscious of everything outside pointing up to clear blue California skies, always in small but active human scale compared to the stillness of the biomass surrounding out log home.    It's very different from the rolling fields and sturdy oaks and clouds of Oklahoma. 

   Modern technology allowed us to travel over 1600 miles in 24 hours, and my son to travel almost 8000 miles during the same time frame, converging here in the Sierra Mountains.   There and back again is very different to us than it was for the hobbits -- Frodo and Sam apparently took nearly half a year to get to Mordor on foot, with various stops on the way, about the same time we've been gone from here,  and close to the same distance we were, too.  Bilbo's trek to the Lonely Mountain was apparently slower, 145 days to go less than a third of the distance.   The estimate is that the eagles only would take 2 days for the return, closer to our car speed.

The point here is that we absorb this transportation tech into our lives the way my children absorbed the constant presence of the towering conifers outside our window, but it's not often something to reflect on, not really.   I think it's the main reason I feel disoriented now though, a whole 4 books' worth of travel since Sunday, most of it spent just sitting in a car listening to lectures on the Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest.