My Way Back Home

Listen while you read:  Live from the WFUV studio!

A ballerina in Phoenix
The pines up north
The sunrise from a highway
That was not there before

If I can place it all together
Make out the nature of the call
I start to feel the love and the silence
That's always at the root of it all

In my constant quest for truth
I am condemned to facts alone
And when my dreams all lead me nowhere
I won't forget my way back home

From the corner of a coffee shop
Or from the center of a stage
From the words used in a love note
Or from an empty page

While I struggle with these beauties
And my renditions end up dry
I'm like a bird that crashes into the window
That was drawn to the reflection of the sky

And the more I try to speak
The more I lose the earthly tone
And before heaven proves me hopeless
I won't forget my way back home

I admit that these answers that I seek
Are all to questions I've never known
But I pray to keep on looking
For as long as I can roam
And when the world finally fulfills me
I will not forget my way back home

~  Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes)

This gorgeous song is on Dawes' second album, 2011's Nothing Is Wrong. But I did not choose the album version. This video was recorded in the studio of my favorite public radio station, WFUV in New York. It's just Taylor on acoustic guitar with beautiful harmonizing vocals from his brother, Griffin.

So, after a spectacular last day in Seattle (think Space Needle, Chihuly, Museum of Pop Culture, Ivars on the waterfront), I'm back home in New Jersey, and my partner-in-crime is back home in Florida. Different landscapes, different emotions. We shared fifteen days, 3,620 miles driven in two provinces and five states (in two countries), dozens of national parks and forests and monuments, lodging in towns ranging in population from 47 to 668,342. We visited breweries, bars, restaurants, castles, gardens, and a silver mine. We traveled through mountains, switchbacks, forests, rivers, lakes, and plains by car, by ferry, and by foot. We danced on the sidewalk in Wallace, we hiked up a mountain in Banff until our knees cracked, and we applauded fireworks in Anacortes on the Fourth. We took turns driving. We laughed a lot. We slept well. We met up with six friends that we'd known in other places, and we met new friends over glasses of wine and pints of beer (and I asked every one of them, "What do you think of our President?") We discovered fried green beans and huckleberry ice cream. We read Rick Bass' book, Why I Came West. We tilted at windmills and yielded to bison in the road.

We went on a road trip. And we found our way back home.

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam.