”Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw.
Fourteen years ago, I was driving along the Columbia River on the Washington side. I know this because of a photo I took, and which was dropped into my email as a memory.
I get these reminders daily – and they delight me. Many of these photos are similar in nature to the one above of the Selah Cliffs information sign near Yakima, where I took a hike on an interpretive loop, and a bit beyond with my canine companion Maggie.
I looked for, and found the basalt daisy that grows only in this area, and where other plants find it hard to survive. According to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, the Selah Cliffs is situated in one of the driest parts of the state, in a landscape of bedrock and talus formed from the approximately 12-million-year-old Pomona basalt flow. This basalt lava flow traveled from west-central Idaho to the Pacific Ocean about 373 miles, making it the longest known lava flow on earth.
As a wondering wanderer who now is mostly nesting, the memory of this day from my past enriched my present day, as good memories always do.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining. She also believes one is never too old to chase a dream.
Add Tucson’s Agua Calliente Park, where I saw this green heron, to the list of places to visit for beauty and birds. — Photo by Pat Bean
“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” – Confucius
Aging My Way
During the nine years I was traveling around America in a small RV with my canine companion Maggie, I was often asked what place I liked best. The question always had me stumbling for an answer. To name just one and leave out all the rest of Nature and man’s wonders just seemed wrong.
Everywhere, and I do mean everywhere, I went had its own kind of beauty. This was brought home to me at an overcrowded El Paso RV Park where I was parked on a cement slab with large RV rigs hooked up six feet away to both my right and left.
I was bemoaning the fact that I had been stuck here because nothing greener was close enough to reach before dark. And then I happened to glance outside my RV window.
Strutting across the cement was a California Quail with six young chicks following her. The sight made me rethink my idea of beauty, especially since one goal of my RVing years was to see as many species of birds as I could.
Meanwhile, here are a few other special places I’ve visited that have impressed me in one way or another – and where I got a new bird for my life list.
Maine: Acadia National Park, where one can stand on the top of Cadillac Mountain and be the first person in the United States to have the sun touch their face. I saw a black-billed cuckoo here.
New Hampshire: Flume Gorge, for an unforgettable hike and birds like an ovenbird and a black-throated blue warbler.
Oregon: Brandon National Wildlife Refuge, where my bird list grew by a pelagic cormorant, black turnstone and a whimbrel.
Utah: Zion National Park, a longtime special place for me, and where I saw a California condor flying overhead. These birds were brought back from the edge of extinction and I wrote about their recovery several times.
Texas: Brazos Bend State Park, even if an alligator sometimes required me to detour off a favorite hiking trail. It was here where I saw my first pileated woodpecker, a close look-alike of the extinct ivory-billed woodpecker.
And I could easily list another 100 sites without much thought. Look around you. Beauty is everywhere.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining. She also believes one is never too old to chase a dream.
Alligator stand-off in the Okefenokee Swamp. — Photo by Pat Bean
Aging My Way
While thinking about the chaos going on in America today, especially after the senseless New Orleans rampage, an image of Pogo came into my mind. In case you’re too young to remember, Pogo was a fictional opossum who lived in the Okefenokee swamp in a comic strip by Walt Kelly that ran from 1948 to 1975.
“We have met the enemy, and he is us,” Pogo once said — and that line has stayed with me ever since.
I was a faithful reader of Pogo from its beginning. The strip was written in such a way as to appeal to both children and adults, and I saw it both as a child and then as an adult who appreciated its political overtones.
The strip ran during a time when daily newspapers were tossed in your yard by a paper boy, including three of my own who had paper routes. The carriers were independent business owners who bought the papers at a discount price and then went around at the end of the month to collect from subscribers – and hopefully have a profit. It was a real-world reality for the youngsters.
I remember one cold winter, however, when I told them anytime the temperature hit freezing, I would drive them for their morning route. And since we were living in Northern Utah at the time, I found myself ferrying them around every early morning for a full month.
As for the cartoon’s setting in the Okefenokee Swamp, I thought the place was fictional until I came across the wetlands while RV-ing through Georgia. At 600 square miles, this valuable wetland should not have been so easily dismissed. I spent a day getting acquainted with the geographical wonder at Swamp Park, a Walt Disney like educational and tourist attraction located on Cowhouse Island near where the Suwannee River begins life.
Anyway, Kelly coined the phrase about the enemy being us for an anti-pollution Earth Day poster in a 1970 comic strip created for Earth Day, or so says Wikimedia. You didn’t think my memory was good enough to remember years, did you?
But I do vividly remember Pogo. And I’ve often used his phrase about the enemy being us. It is quite applicable in many of life’s situations – and that’s kind of sad.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
As if by magic, a lakeside campground often turned up during my nine years of living and traveling on the road exploring this beautiful country. — Photo of my RV Gypsy Lee resting at Jackson State Park in Alabama by Pat Bean
Aging My Way
When I was traveling around the country in my small RV, I almost never took the direct route from place to place. An interesting looking side road always seemed more important than the destination where I was headed.
My mother told me this was a trait I had gotten from a grandfather who died before I was old enough to remember him. “He could never pass up a turnoff,” she told me on one of our back-roading trips to Jenny Lake in the Tetons, a place she fell in love with the first time she saw it.
Judging by how she enjoyed taking different routes to get there, I could just as easily have inherited it from her. I think that quite likely, because promising her a road trip to the Tetons was often the bribe that I had to make to get her to visit me from her home in Illinois to my home in Northern Utah, where Yellowstone was only a five-hour drive away.
My mother and I made many of those trips in her later years. I treasure every one of them, but especially those in which we got off the beaten path. There’s magic in driving down a road not knowing what you are going to see, especially when you stop and explore along the way.
As Ursula K Le Guin said, and I believe, “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters.”
As I ponder Le Guin’s words, I think of the journey I’ve been taking for the past 85 years. The destination I’ve arrived at is far from the one I envisioned when I took those first wobbly and uncertain steps along an expected path. Detours along the way — some forced and some on purpose – have put me where I am today.
And since I’ve come to a place where I have love, friends, a lovable canine companion who keeps my life interesting, and a continuing zest for nature and life, the detours along this hard-won journey surely must have had some magic in them.
What do you think?
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for the Story Circle Network Journal, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited). She is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
This is a Green Heron that I saw here in Tucson at Agua Caliente Park. — Photo by Pat Bean
Aging My Way
Since my heart attack, and the installation of three stents in this old broad’s body, I’ve pretty much nested. It felt like a major triumph when two months out I could drive again, even if just to the doctor’s, pharmacy, grocery store and library.
Then on my first real outing, a party accompanied by “the girls” – my granddaughter and her wife – I took a fall. It was a little one, with me going down on my knee, rolling forward on my left side and just barely hitting my head. In my younger life, I would have just gotten up and been embarrassed if someone had seen me.
But I’m on blood thinners and my head and knee swelled up to gigantic proportions, so “the girls” rushed me to the emergency room for a CT scan. I was fine and the swelling soon went down. However, I was black and blue on my left side from my knees to my head for several weeks.
After that, I was reluctant to leave my comfortable abode except for necessities. It kind of felt like I had agoraphobia. I decided I didn’t like it – and in response recently set a goal of doing one outside activity a week. Last week, it was a pool party at the same friend’s house, but because I was accompanied by “the girls,” it kind of felt like I was cheating.
This morning, however, I got up early and went on an accessible bird watching outing all by myself. The event took place at Sweetwater Wetlands, one of Tucson’s birding gems. Before my heart attack, I had hiked the trail around the small lake often but hadn’t been back in recent months.
While most of the lake had been drained in anticipation of the upcoming annual burn to control invasive plant species and mosquitos, there were still birds around. These are the ones I saw as I walked along the accessible path with my rollator – or simply sat in it and watched: Say’s Phoebee, Gila Woodpecker, Green Heron, Least Flycatcher, Western Kingbird, Cooper’s Hawk, Vermillion Flycatcher, Gambel’s Quail, Kestrel, Black-Crowned Night Heron, Mourning Dove, Abert’s Towhee, and lots of Mallards of varying ages.
The Cooper’s gave us a nice fly-about view, but the Green Heron, which flew in and settled among the Mallards was my favorite sight of the morning. These birds have been a favorite since I saw one sitting on a branch barely above the water watching the scene below intently. Its watch paid off as a small fish swam beneath the branch and quickly became lunch for the heron.
Watching birds is still about the only thing I have patience for. Now, as I sit here in front of my computer in my cozy air-conditioned apartment, I’m thinking about what I will do for an outing next week. Stay tuned.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for the Story Circle Network Journal, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
Yellow is the color of happiness and sunshine, both of which I intend to enjoy whenever I can. — Photo by Pat Bean
It’s morning. I’m sitting in front of my computer, writing. It’s exactly where I belong. And it feels wonderful. A feeling I haven’t had in quite a while.
The truth is, I’ve spent the past year slowly dying – and not knowing it. My heart was failing me, but without any symptoms, which I’ve been told isn’t uncommon for women, I simply attributed my sluggishness to being 84 years old, and a worn-out knee, which was successfully replaced on March 20.
Eight days later, I had a major heart attack, which in reality probably saved my life. Thanks to today’s awesome medical technology, I had three stents placed in my heart, and when I looked in the mirror this morning, I saw something I hadn’t been seeing for months.
A happy old broad, who will turn 85 in two days, was staring back at me. Hair mussed, wrinkles in abundance, but blue eyes sparkling and a smile that cheered my healing heart. And a saggy body that didn’t feel like it wanted to crawl back into bed and sleep the day away.
Picture of the Day
Gypsy Lee parked amid the cacti at New Mexico’s Pancho Villa State Park. — Photo by Pat Bean
To give myself an incentive to start blogging regularly again, I came up with the idea of sharing one of the pictures that drops into my email daily as a memory from the past. The one I’ve chosen today is one of my RV, Gypsy Lee, in which I traveled fulltime around the country in from 2004 to 2013.
She is parked among the cacti in New Mexico’s Pancho Villa State Park, a treasure located near our border with Mexico. It recalls a peaceful week there enjoying the history and beauty of the area and as always birdwatching, an activity I took up when I was 60 years old.
Gambel quail abounded, and there was a roadrunner that frequently perched on a fallen branch in full view of a window where I ate my morning breakfast. Thrashers, red-wing blackbirds, cactus wren and white-winged doves were often seen.
As I think back now on those treasured days, I’m ever so thankful I didn’t miss one of them. Life is for living as well as dreaming, although I think all my adventures did begin with the latter. If I had to mark a beginning to my wanderlust dreams, I think it began when I was 10 years old and read a book called I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson.
It took me awhile to figure out that one didn’t have to be married to have adventures, but we’ve come a long way since I read that book back in the 1940s.
And now, thanks to modern-day medicine, I’m hoping to discover that adventures are still possible for 85-year-olds.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
Cumbres Pass on an autumn day. — Photo by Pat Bean
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.” — Douglas Adams
Aging My Way
Some of my best travel moments have been the result of a wrong turn. One example is the day I did just that in Chama, New Mexico. By the time this directionless-nitwit figured it out, I was driving through a scenic landscape that kept me going forward with no intention of turning back.
Facebook, with its post and photos from the past, brought back all the good memories of that 2009 day, which had me driving through the 10,000-foot Cumbres Pass in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. It was a colorful autumn day, traffic was almost non-existent, and my then canine companion Maggie and I took a walk and breathed it all in.
Of course, I was driving and living in a small RV at that time, and had no daily deadline to meet.
In a way, that’s kind of how I’m still living my life in retirement — although without an RV. And by the way, I cuss out myself often for selling it, especially since a recent road trip had me realizing how much I loved traveling.
But the bonus of that trip was I came home energized, ready to get this arthritic old body out into the world more, something I was actually still doing until Covid hit and isolation and staying home became a habit.
It’s time to get on the road again, even if it’s just day trips around Tucson. To misquote Dr. Seuss, I have brains in my head, shoes on my feet — and I should know where to go. Maybe I’ll even be lucky and take a wrong turn.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
I walked past this tree every summer for three years when I was a campground host at Idaho’s Lake Walcott State Park. I call it the tree with a split personality. — Photo by Pat Bean
Aging My Way
When I read the following, I realized I had not yet hugged the large cottonwood tree that grows in my small yard, even though it’s one of the reasons I love my new apartment. Wrote Ayn Rand, in a book I read many years ago:
“It had stood there for hundreds of years … Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree’s presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.” — Atlas Shrugged (1957)
I bought my last home, the one I lived in before I sold it to buy an RV when I retired, because of the magnificent elm tree that grew in its backyard — and the tall ponderosa pine that stood in the front yard helped sealed the deal.
I admit it. I’m a tree hugger.
Looking at the photos I took over the years, I find many pictures that contain simply a single tree. Some of them famous, like an ancient bristle cone pine in Great Basin National Park which I stood beside; or the General Sherman Sequoria in Sequoria National Park, which I first saw when I was only about 12 years old.
Then there’s The 2,000-year-old live oak on Goose Island State Park called simply The Big Tree. If I had to name my favorite tree species, it would definitely be a live oak, whose branches seem to wiggle as they grow and can spread out as wide as the tree is tall.
Another of the trees among my photos is a big old limber pine I saw up near Monte Cristo in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest. My old bird-watching mentor Jack Rensel, who sadly died three years ago, called it the Old Dude, and said it had been around before Utah had gained statehood.
That’s just a sprout compared to the limber pine identified near Utah’s Alta Ski Area. That tree, named Twister, is at least 1,700 years old.
My cottonwood tree comes nowhere close to being as spectacular. And it’s fallen leaves have been a nuisance to sweep off my patio and to rake up in the yard. In addition, the tree is raising havoc to the sidewalk and my gate, as its roots stretch out to reach the generous irrigation water used on a patch of grass diligently maintained in my apartment complex.
I suspect the tree is a wanderer that put down roots a bit farther than usual from the nearby Rillito River, or perhaps another tree hugger planted it. A cottonwood tree can drink 50 to 200 gallons of water a day, which may be why the one in my yard is the only one of its species in the complex.
I’m thinking I should go hug my cottonwood before it’s deemed a nuisance and cut down as some other trees here recently were – after one of the trees in the complex decided to grow up into the living room of an apartment unit.
It’s an old complex, as are many of the trees that grow here, many of which are spectacular. Perhaps I should hug some of them, too.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
Forest Gump Point — Monument Valley from Scenic Byway 163
“There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.” — Josephine Hart
You know how you see something, and your mind gets stuck on it, and then you keep seeing the same thing over and over again.
That happened to me this past month. It started when I read an Atlas Obscura story about Forest Gump Point. The story was accompanied by a photo which showed a scene I had passed by at least a dozen times and had even stopped to explore a few of those times.
The Point, illustrated in the article, is the view one gets when traveling the 64 miles of Scenic Highway163 through Arizona and Utah, 44 miles of which goes through Navajo Nation land and Monument Valley. I purposely took this route many times — simple because the magnificence of the views awed me.
The red-rock mesas, buttes and spires are the remnants of rock formations that were over 25-million years in the making, according to geologists. Some of these wonders can be seen in the background where Forest Gump stopped running.
But long before Tom Hanks portrayed Forest Gump in the 1994 movie, Monument Valley was a favorite of movie directors. Probably the most famous use of the spectacular scenery was in the 1939 film Stagecoach starring John Wayne. It can also be seen in movies like The Searchers, The Eiger Sanction and Easy Rider and has even been featured in the popular television series Dr. Who.
In recent weeks, I’ve seen images of the scenic valley more than half a dozen times. Each time made me want to take a road trip – enough so that I looked at a map and discovered that it’s only 462 miles away from my home in Tucson.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, an enthusiastic birder, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
Watching the Sun creep towards the Watchman Campground at Zion National Park. — Photo by Pat Bean
Aging my Way
Not sure what my brain was up to this morning, but after reading some words by Eleanor Roosevelt — “You gain strength, courage and confidence in every experience … You are able to say to yourself, I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along” – I thought of a few things I had lived through.
Like falling asleep in a hot bath and dropping the book I was reading into the water. Or sitting out a windstorm in Amarillo and being thrown six feet onto the ground by a huge gust when I opened the RV door.
I guess what I learned from those experiences was to not fall asleep in the bathtub, and to stay inside when the wind was gusting. Of course, I did continue to read in the bath (it was a safety zone away from my five children) and I still go outside on windy days.
Knowing is not always doing.
Then I remembered a horrible, horrible morning back in 2009 (that was how I referred to it in my journal) when I was camped out in Zion National Park. I had spilled coffee grounds inside my tennis shoes, used hand lotion instead of conditioner on my head, and then discovered my RV wouldn’t start because I had forgotten to turn its lights off after coming through Zion’s mile-long tunnel. To make things even worse, I couldn’t find my driver’s license.
Then a friend came along and got my RV started, and then found my driver’s license. While he couldn’t do anything about my hair, he fixed us both some coffee – with fresh grounds – while I dumped the ones in my tennis shoes in the trash.
As we sat outside and drank the coffee, with a little Irish Cream added to ward off the chill until the sun creeped up and over the red-rock ridges to our east, I knew what I had learned that day. It’s good to have a handy friend.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is an avid reader, the author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), is always searching for life’s silver lining, and these days aging her way – and that’s usually not gracefully.
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“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Pat Bean is a writer, avid birder, hiker and passionate nature observer with wanderlust in her soul. She spent nine years living and traveling in a small RV. She now lives in Tucson with Scamp, a rescue who was supposed to be a Schnauzer mix but turned out to be a Siberian Husky-Shih Tzu mix who is as stubborn as his owner, her granddaughter says. She was also a journalist for 37 years, and can be reached at patbean@msn.com
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