I heard this poem on Writer's Almanac today and thought of my drive across Kansas and eastern Colorado on I-70 in the late 1970s with my buddy Steve Millener (now gone), one of my all-time favorite people. Both of us moving to Colorado together in his light blue Volkswagen Rabbit loaded with everything we owned.
Driving West
by Linda Pastan
Though the landscape subtly changes,
the mountains are marching in place.
The grasses take on the fading
yellows of the sun,
and cows with their sumptuous eyes
litter the fields as if they had grown there.
We have driven for hours
through bluing shadows,
as if the continent itself leaned west
and we had no choice but to follow the old ruts—
the wagons and horses, the iron snort
of a locomotive. We are the pioneers
of our own histories, drawn
to the horizon as if it waited just for us
the way the young are drawn
to the future, the old to the past.
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