Sedona was so nice that I stayed a third night. The Estonian woman at the Super 8 joked about making me ask for another day in my room in her native language. I called her bluff, and asked her sincerely what I should say, but she waved me off with a laugh.
On the last morning, after putting in a few hours work, I took a short break with a two-hour hike up the trail to Brinn's Mesa, which afforded a splendid view over the valley and the town.
By early afternoon I was on the road southward on Interstate 17, following the valley of the Verde River and up over the mountains in the Prescott National Forest, a place for which I'd once authored the Wikipedia article years ago, during my intense Wikipedia phase.
The feeling of great peace mixed with youthful excitement about the unknown that lies ahead along the road that has first overtaken me outside Las Vegas, and which had been amplified among the rocks of Sedona, lingered with me.
Among the reasons I had embarked on this round of a road tripping, almost a year ago, was the explicit desire to rid myself of a ennui of stagnation and regret. I suppose I believed that it was a fool's mission, that all I would prove to myself was the impossible at this stage of my life of using travel to accomplish this type of transformation. I don't think I expected it would work, even temporarily.
As one learns as one grows older, recapturing the excitement of youth is at times possible but it has consequences. One tends forget that this excitement was blended with an anxiety of one's identity and place in the world that was not always pleasant. To touch again upon that youthful excitement seemed to always evoke that concomitant anxiety without exception. The dividends of the identity-security that come with age is an often overlooked treasure.
Yet I felt none of that anxiety. Traveling down the Interstate, free of worries, it was as if I were traveling the knife-edge of some equilibrium of both the excitement and uncertainty of the future but without the anxiety.
Maybe it was just the road trip kicking in, after so many months. Maybe it was Arizona. It had occurred to me that despite the seeming arbitrary nature of border lines on a map, that each State of Union seemed to bring to me a different State of Being, somehow, perhaps because I gave myself license to feel differently.
Arizona---was it the fact that I had no virtually no personal history here? I'd passed through a couple times, years ago, and each visit was brief and pleasant. For the most part, this place was a blank slate to me, I kept being carried back to the spring I first went to Texas, a whole new state to me then, when so much of my past (up until then) seemed irrelevant and far away.
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