As you approach Albuquerque, just beyond the 100th longitudinal meridian – the dividing line between east and west – the light changes, the horizon retreats, the emerald greens turn minty, and your heart opens a little. At the Texas panhandle, the ground takes on a deep red hue, and by the time you reach New Mexico, the colours have become psychedelic. You’ve arrived in the west.
And
When Beauvoir first arrived in the US, she wrote about seeing “all of America on the horizon. As for me, I no longer exist. There. I understand what I’ve come to find – this plenitude that we rarely feel except in childhood or in early youth, when we’re utterly absorbed by something outside ourselves … in a flash I’m free from the cares of that tedious enterprise I call my life.”
And
When you find yourself gazing at the horizon as the sun rises, each little sage bush with its purple shadow stretching into a seemingly infinite sandy blur, a quiet descends. Everyone feels the power of these landscapes. Maybe that’s what’s unique about road tripping by Greyhound. There are other places we think we’d rather be, but here we are in the moment, trundling along all of us together looking out at the same earth, breathing the same air, all of us knowing deep down that where we are really is where we’d like to be.