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At the End of a Long Drive


Shreesh and Neena Taskar

We didn't make the decision, the decision made us. On October 20th, 2007, we left our comfortable city of San Francisco to follow a simple algorithm - go North till the road ends then turn around and then go as far South. In between those two points was the stage, the timeline, the space, where we made things happen and things happened to us.

The past is fleeting and the stories, the sights and the feelings are perishable. One sees what one wants to see, and perhaps we are not capable of more. We saw that people are kind and helpful even if they were not materially rich. Some we could understand even though we didn't speak the same language, the motivations of others were incomprehensible even though we did. In the end fragments remain - the smell of roasting chocolate, a flock of snow Ptarmigians on snow, the creaking of the rainforest, the rough feathers of penguins, and the intoxication of Curanto.


So these are our stories. Every time you visit the site you will see a random post below. Each starts with Lo que pasa es que...

That which sustains life

Oct 24th, 2007 by

Vat are you zinking about?

Contemplative.

A reflection on mountains and friends. 829 miles into the long drive. (Map this!)

Every time I pass Mount Shasta I feel a bevy of emotions. When we climbed it in 1998 we trained like we had never before and that was the beginning of our workout ethic. The training was long and hard and the climb was long and hard. In many ways Mount Shasta has given us our health and the discipline to maintain it. It is a gift beyond measure. The ice blue crevasses and the tumbled lego blocks of the ice falls were an added bonus. It is here where we discovered that we didn’t much like ice climbing, and how to travel on glaciers, and that a baggie filled with snow buried deep can almost hold the weight of 8 people.

Mount Shasta

A highlight of California, Mount Shasta towers over the surrounding peaks

Mountains sustain life. And friends sustain life. We are still close enough to our former city that many of our friends who used to live there have spread out to Portland and to Seattle. A cocoon of familarity and comfort surrounds those cities. After that we really venture out, to new places and new friends.

3 Responses to “That which sustains life”

  1. Fred says:
    October 25, 2007 at 3:45 pm

    A baggie full of snow can also cool a can of beer. A much better use IMHO.

  2. Shreesh says:
    October 25, 2007 at 4:37 pm

    heh, heh. Make sure it ain’t yellow!

  3. Pramod Taskar says:
    October 26, 2007 at 1:20 am

    Finally started. We are stuck in Pune and hope to return back soon. Keep in touch. Unless we make a valient effort, we cannot read your writeup as power failures in Pune are often and access to internet is limited. I have successfully block my worries about you two. Hope to meet you in Wyoming.

    Daddy

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