Had to get out. Had to go, see, meet, and be away. Had to follow my fancy. So I set off on a solo road trip, 10 days, 1600 miles, to northern West Virginia, in a loop down to the south of the state, then north, past my entry point, through Pennsylvania to New York State, and so back home.
I had two goals, to get first hand knowledge of a place I’ve only known by reputation, and in particular the rail trails there, and to practice having conversations of exploration with whomever I met.
Hugely successful: learned a lot, saw and felt a lot, and made a lot of connections. My moods at the stop-offs in Connecticut with my mother and sister : from determined and somber on the way out to relaxed and triumphant on the way back. The last couple of days I’ve been trying to understand more about what the excursion meant and what it can teach me. Here’s what I’ve got.
Excursion is just the word: a going out in search of others and othernesses to encounter. A bit more than a Sunday jaunt by carriage to a local point of interest, but not as provisioned and planned and purposeful as an expedition. Excursion, a going out. There might be such a thing as an inner excursion: an inviting in. But in either case, the key is a journey into the out of the ordinary. (The word incursion has connotations that don’t apply.)
We can encounter others quite by accident, or without premeditation, but an encountering way of life is characterized by excursions we take deliberately to expose ourselves to others and othernesses to encounter, such as my quick and intense trip to West Virginia. Going to a museum can be an excursion, or a library, or visiting distant relatives, or camping, or a book or a line of inquiry. Even an excursion can be an excursion so long as its purpose is in part to risk of encountering others and othernesses.
On any excursion, not all encounterable others can be. Also we may encounter others or othernesses we don’t choose, or even wholly welcome. Still, the kind of excursion, its actual itinerary, the encounters that happen along the way, speak, in reflection, to our themata, that is to the themes of personal, perennial fascination that motivate our livingness. These themata, expanding and refining over the course of our lives, or sadly hardened over and desensitized, are places we can pinpoint as where freshness continually wells up in us.
So among the discoveries:
A visionary personal transportation system from the sixties, with four person, summonable cars running on an elevated roadway over Morgantown for West Virginia University and due to be up and running again this August.
A New Deal homesteading community called Arthurdale (the first of many in the country), championed by Eleanor Roosevelt, where former miners who had lived in squalor helped build the comfortable houses they then rented, were taught to grow their own food, weave, make pottery, a community with progressive schools and social gatherings including dancing (which Ms. Roosevelt loved.)
Neat little towns (cities?), Elgin, Lewisburg, Fayetteville, each calling itself the coolest small city in the state, each with interesting restaurants, and main street stores selling art, books, outdoor equipment, coffee, each with its own special events.
A community with the same name as my son, saying “Welcome to our Friendly Town.”
A tree with a thick rope swing suspended from a branch over the Greenbrier River (very much in spate).
A bucolic tree-line river bank and hillside where, a hundred years ago, was a clear-cut landscape of oil derricks and a huge oil refinery.
Among the experiences:
My first tree top zipline ride. Whoopee!
My first bike inner tube replacement on the trail (thanks for the advice to turn the bike upside down to reseat the axle).
My breakneck (felt like) slalom descent into Marlinton on a super windy, 9% grade road with a line of impatient pickup trucks behind me,
My scrabbling, scrambling, crawling, squeezing exploration of mossy passages and cool caves in Panama Rocks in western New York.
Among the connections:
Midnight watching Patrick Swayse in Ghosts with the excellent staff of the Scholar Inn.
Eating an ice cream at the table of two musical theater students who’d listened to the Phantom of the Opera dozens of times.
Hearing about lucid dreams from a young man in a restaurant who was starting his own tavern.
Chatting with a young couple from Ohio about the pleasures (and possibilities) of long-distance walking in France’s GR system.
Talking about religion with old New Hampshire summer camp acquaintances.
And so much more.
The sweeping hilltop vistas, the cozy valley towns, the meadows and fields, the sound of rivers flowing, the crunch of my tires on the ground stone surface, the pairs of talking women hard at walk, the acknowledgements of passers by on the trail, the white tails of the deer bounding into the cool forest.
I know that there is so much more to every place I visited than I saw or realize. Still freshness was present every morning, every evening, and at different times during every day, and I relished it.
So as I share the story of this trip with others (and reflect on it myself) and invite you to share your own, I see our conversation of exploration confirming three facts:
We all are explorers. We all have themata. We all go on excursions.
And the purpose of convex: encouraging more and more and more.