“We go forward,” I said.
I can’t describe it right. That’s the amateur part of this blog. I’m not a poet. But imagine if someone took all the colors of a bonfire—gold, rust, deep purple—and poured them into a crack in the earth a mile wide. There was no guardrail. No gift shop. No plaque. Just us, and the silence, and the feeling that we’d found something that wasn’t supposed to exist. blog amateur
For the first six days, everything went exactly to script. We saw the Petrified Forest (Dad took 200 photos of rocks). We ate at a diner where the waitress called us “hon.” We sang “Sweet Caroline” so many times that Sam threatened to jump out of the moving vehicle. “We go forward,” I said
“Alright, captain. You navigate.”
He smiled. I’d never seen him smile without a reason before. It changed his whole face. I’m not a poet
Finally, the road dead-ended at a view that wasn’t on any map.
“Preparation is freedom,” he said, handing me a laminated itinerary.