“I'm  fixing a hole where the rain gets in

And stops my mind from wandering

where it will go.”

Starting out from Portland this morning, headed east in the Eurovan with a bike, kayak and backpack gear, and Walt Whitman, route and destinations mostly unknown. Oh, freedom!

This journey has been on my mind for awhile now, and it has taken more time than I had hoped and a lot of fussing around with matters significant and not so much to arrive at this beginning. So I feel a real sense of freedom, leaving behind the lists, with the things that needed to be attended to and finally, just going.

And I feel the freedom that comes with leaving home. We travel for many reasons, among them to reconnect with family and friends, to again travel roads and visit places we have known in the past, to wander paths and explore places we have never been, and to meet new folks along the way. Connecting, nostalgia, discovery, all well and good, and I'm on my way for all of those reasons, and more, but a fair amount of travel is simply just the urge to get out of the house and away from wherever we are, to be somewhere different.

And, if we are lucky, to be someone different. We say, without much thought, “wherever you go, there you are” and there is a certain kind of truth there, especially for those of us who have weathered into ourselves. We aren't likely to pull on a new personality as easily as exchanging gabardine slacks for baggy shorts. But identity is contextual: part of the the sense of folks from the west is that who we are is intimately bound up with where we live. Geography matters, landscape matters. So, leaving that home place, even for awhile, presents an opportunity to try on other places, and maybe other selves.

End of August and the light is long earlier, by late afternoon, the first sign of fall even before weather cooling and birds moving. A good time to travel, happy travels to myself.