Restless

I'm restless. The break room here at work looks out toward the airport, and I can see the planes after they take off. I think about the people headed somewhere on vacation or headed home after spending time at Sea World or Disneyland or Universal Studios. I watch as the planes disappear into the sky as they fly out toward the ocean, where I know they'll bank sharply, seeming to pivot on one wingtip, then level out and set a course for someplace north or east of here. I want to go someplace too.

Yesterday, on my way to work, I thought about taking a road trip. I'd need a month or more, maybe the whole summer.

I think I'd go to Glacier National Park first, my favorite place in the world. The road is closed by snow at the hairpin turn most years until about Memorial Day. But the bison should still be in the lowlands, usually close enough to the road for good photos. As the snow melts, they'll follow the snowline up into the higher elevations, and the moose will be more plentiful down below.

At Lake McDonald the terrain changes from pond-scattered grassland in the valley to tree-covered mountains where the road is named Going-to-the-Sun Highway. And it does.

Glacier wasn't named for the glaciers that cover some of the peaks, but for the way those peaks were carved by glaciers during the Ice Age. A river that might once have meandered through a valley, plunges hundreds of feet in a narrow cascade where the valley had been sheared off from under it by a glacier ages ago. The Weeping Wall is a place where ground water flows through rock strata that was stripped away, and the water falls down the rock face to the road. I saw it once in early November just a couple days before they closed the road for the winter, and it was a wonderland of icicles clinging to the wall.

Yes, I'd go there first, maybe by way of a friend's place on the coast of Oregon. After Glacier, well, I guess I'd head east.

I'm dreaming, though. Maybe. I have twelve vacation days available, and that would only get me there and back, with a little time to look around. I could ask for a leave of absence, I suppose, but we're short-handed at work, with one guy out on disability and another due to retire in June. I can't see that happening. Which leaves the "Q" word--the word I dare not say, because to do that would be foolhardy, and I try not to be a fool.

So now I'm torn, with my need for income fighting my need for something I don't even know how to name. And I'm not sure which need is the stronger one.