A year before the pandemic, Madeline and I rode past Ojai, up and over the Pine Mountain pass, down into the desert, out to the Carrizo Plain. A fault line runs right up the length of the plain, creating a shallow jagged canyon that’s invisible until you’re right on the edge of it. The sky opened full on the wild flowers, the white soda beds mirroring air, the small, darting creatures. We made camp in the foothills overlooking the plain, where we talked and dreamed and the dreaming resembled planning. 

     The plain is a vast bowl of native grassland, ringed with mountains that shelter all sorts of hiding, endangered things. On our way out of the plain we went down into that fault line. Dropped below ground into the crevasse of the fault and the world disappeared. A peninsula of eroded earth reaches into that cleft and we scrambled up to stand there, in the middle of the fault, in the center of the plain. Everything was quiet and still. I asked Madeline, spontaneously, to marry me. 

     So in some unspoken way after that, the dreams became plans. We’d get married. Then we’d go. From the West and everything familiar towards the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Pamirs and Karakorums, the Himalaya. Across the Karakum, Kyzylkum, and Taklamakan deserts. Up the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and Ganges, the Yangtze and Mekong. To Nagorno-Karabakh, Kurdistan, Turkestan, Jammu and Kashmir. Through empires and out to their margins. Europe to Asia along the Silk Road, connecting one culture to the next as we drive so straight away from home and for so long that eventually we’re driving back.