Journal 2025-05-05
Hello and howdy from (near) Hot Springs, Arkansas! I’m technically about 20 minutes away from Hot Springs at a different campground — the campground in the national park was (a) much more expensive and (b) completely booked up at the moment, so here we are.
Almost everyone here is actually in an RV. I don’t think I’ve ever been around this many in such full force, and it’s sort of strange. Almost entirely older folks, with the sole exceptions being what I can only assume are their grandchildren, and they have setup so full that I would not at all be surprised to learn that they live in these full-time. I saw the gentleman next to me pull out a leaf blower to blow debris off of his campsite. Meanwhile I’m just a schmuck eating PB&J and setting up my little one-man tent.
But it’s nice being out in the wilderness, I must say. Even with the other people round, it’s so quiet out here. There’s a lot of cloud coverage today, but I’m hoping that tonight I get to see some stars. That’s probably about half the reason I’m going out to such remote places, because the skies are so much clearer.
Plus camping is a bit of an extension of the sort of asceticism I’ve been looking for. It’s sort of the modern American version of being a wanderer, like Basho or the Indian ascetic yogis. About twenty minutes outside of Birmingham, I really did feel my spirit start to lift. I don’t really have a great sense of why, but being on the road, getting out and going somewhere else is really moving to me. Just the feeling of going is big. That’s why I like all of these treks — they don’t keep you in one place for too long. I spent a month in Tokyo a little while back, and even there, even in a place I was genuinely excited to be, I felt like every few days I just wanted to pick up and see the next town over.
I think it’s because when you’re more transiently visiting a place, you’ve got a bit more permission to open up. When you’re in your hometown or in a permanent place, everything you do feels more permanent, like each memory you make in a certain place permanently stains it in a way that you can never get out. There’s so much more empty canvas to see, and if you never see that particular spot again, that’s all well and good. So it goes.
Plus there’s always the feeling of doing something new. Doing something new with the body feels like it more easily opens up to doing something new with the mind, with the attention. When everything is familiar, it’s more difficult to really see it with fresh eyes, and so we start to look for distractions. We like the novelty, but when the novelty isn’t there in the real world, we may instead grasp for it in other places — in whatever vices we have: TV, video games, alcohol, and so on.
This is what “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” does so well, and generally all of his (I keep forgetting his name, sadge) poetry really does — it evokes that feeling of having been in a place for forever, and yet still having the ability to pick out that one special thing, like the shining red of the waitress’ hair.
Blah blah blah, what else? I was driving down this little side road earlier, and I saw a fully-rusted cross with a bunch of hats laid on top of it. Probably one of those roadside memorials for someone lost in an accident, but what it evoked in me was seeing those little Jizo statues on the side of the road in Japan. I can imagine a Japanese person coming to America and seeing one of those crosses and thinking to themselves how quaint it is, how beautiful. They may think to themselves how interesting it is that that’s the way we remember people, how we remind ourselves that they’ve made their way up to heaven and watch over us.
Anyways, I’m just going to pound out the last few words of this. My next step is to take a bunch of this and collate it into an actual public post, the first of my travelogues across the US. It should be quick I think, just a few hundred words, on wandering and that sense of newness. Let’s see how it goes!