Road Notes: Green Bay for Lunch, Appleton on Christmas Eve, Brats and Packers, and Stealing Sand

The edge of a bay a hundred miles long; I’m speeding above frozen water that reaches gaping North, challenging my paradigms of what I’ve always thought of as beautiful and deadly. There is precious, godly desolation. There is a reason to live in a wasteland. To touch it, the edges of these things, deserts and tundras and bays that want to you to stride right down their frozen center until you must learn to swim. There is a reason to travel to these places, breaking your preconceived cell of where and what you are. There is a reason to sit outside Lambeau Field in Green Bay for just a second; it is the reason you should peer at each ocean or steal soil from the Vatican. It is the reason to weep when you stand on the soil of a country that sometimes does not see sunrises; it is the reason to weep when you know that country awaits your feet, yet your fear tethers you to the simplest plot of land.

Tonight, as I spend my first Christmas Eve away from my family and friends in Boston; as I feel the tug of distance snapping me toward home even as I sit here a thousand miles away and jotting; as I sip a stout in a reality, a reality that never existed before, that I have created by my new presence in this subtly archetypical place; as I open my head to all this I am hit with a revelation; an Epiphany 'tributary' stemming from the Eleven: State lines, countries, river bridges, border crossings, the consumption of local food in local places, changing your watch to reflect the time zone, losing sleep under an endlessly bright northern sky, writing postcard hellos by candlelight during a hurricane on an Atlantic island, taking trains to, from, within, taking planes and cars and sneakers, stealing sand from the Vatican, stealing sand from Laguna Beach, from both shores, East and West, of Winthrop, Massachusetts, from the scruff along frozen Green Bay, from the pink beaches of Bermuda, from the volcanic gravel of Iceland, from the rough scratch of Japan and from the scour of Cairo, as I grow, as I flower, this is what I plan to do, this is how I will dream and create and become a Joy Torch as I let my life expand, Big Bangs where my hands grasp, I will be as a God, uniting Heaven and Earth through stealing sand.

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