The Other Side of the Divide

It was late, very late..and we had been driving from Seattle since 5PM. We had no idea where we were- somewhere in between "nowhere"  Idaho and "nowhere", Utah. So we decided to call it a night. We drove along, keeping our eyes open (which at this point, had mostly become a mission of Mike alone as I had long ago lost the battle with my heavy eyelids) for suitiable roadside camping. Mike had assured me this was an easy task, that open space was nothing but available when you got out in the middle of rural divide. This turned out to not be exactly the case, we drove aimlessly for what seemed an eternity (though almost certainly, was only a half an hour). Ultimatley, we found a random pocket of earth belonging to nobody, and we hurriedly snatched it up as our own for the night. Waking up in the morning was a singular moment that irrevocably changed the lifestyle outlook I had been working with up until then.    

To be honest, when my eyes opened in the morning I had no recollection of where we had landed the night before. I quickly threw on some clothes and stepped out of the tent. When I stepped outside, the world immediately expanded before me, like a camera capturing the scene in a quick mode of zooming out. I too, zoomed out. 

I looked, I breathed, and I captured every untouched tree and grain of unharvested wheat growing wild along the roadside, all within seconds. I absorbed it with an immediate sense of shrinking self importance, standing against the expansive backdrop of a nature that could swallow me whole and nobody would ever even register it. I was struck with my smallness- with the realization that I was but another tiny, insignificant creature rolling over the grand landscape of a terrain that belonged to no one and everyone all at once. If you had asked my boyfriend where we woke up, he would’ve said, “Along the side of a highway”. To me, we woke on the other side of a mindset, on the other end of an existence where human beings and nature lived united in each other’s worlds. As far as I was concerned, we woke up in another universe, where I couldn’t locate any horizon to the land in front of me- it was all immediately vast, beautiful, daunting, utterly endless and laid out before me to touch, grab, and steal. 

The dirt ad sand between my toes felt like silk as I waded with complete, unquestioning contentedness into the nature that had just hosted me as its humble guest for a night.  The brisk and unadulterated morning breeze shifted past my face with no pretense or direction- it was cold and unapologetic and lifted me out of myself with a chill to the spine I hadn’t recognized or expected. I felt shaken, immediately standing on the other side of a divide which hadn’t been consciously created, but simply came into being at the very moment I woke up in the cradling, nurturing, unforgiving arms of the earth. I felt alive in an instance. To my boyfriend, it was just a night on the side of the road. To me, it was a turning point in my sense of place within the magnitude of this world.