Driving and Thinking

Sunday

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The open road: heading north on 101.

When I travel for travel’s sake I never get homesick and I never have any desire to return. When I am eventually forced to return, I feel as though the life that ought to be mine has been rudely and abruptly torn from my grasp. I have had a very different experience, however, with the conferences I have attended over the past four years — 2011 100YSS, 2012 100YSS, 2013 Icarus Interstellar Starship Congress, and now the 2014 IBHA Conference — following which I have had no desire to stay any longer and am very ready to come home. I haven’t even had the desire to extend my stay and turn it into a kind of vacation; I was simply ready to leave, and that is a new experience for me.

There was a forest fire north of Willits, with fire crews and helicopters actively battling the blaze.

Coming home in this case means driving back to Oregon, since I drove to San Rafael for the conference. It would have been shorter and quicker for me to head to I-5, but I chose to head north to 101, which is a more scenic drive. Like walking and horseback riding, driving can be a meditative activity — at least, before it has gone on too long and one feels sore after many hours of sitting in the same position. And just as one may choose to meditation in a scenic location, I prefer the meditative activity of driving in beautiful surroundings.

Driving through the Avenue of the Giants.

And I had a lot to think about in the wake of the conference; now I had many hours on the drive back to Portland during which to think about the presentations I had attended. I had by digital recorder on the seat next to me, and whenever I had an idea I dictated it so I wouldn’t lose it. I not only learned a lot from the conference, but I learned something from the contrast of this IBHA conference with the other conferences I have attended. That was unexpected, as it hadn’t occurred to me that I might learn anything in comparing and contrasting the kinds of presentations given at different kinds of conferences. In any case, I am working on a lot of ideas that the conference has given me, and I hope to turn many of these ideas into big history-related blog posts in the near future.

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Scenic Humboldt County, where my maternal grandmother spent some years of her childhood.

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