Hi, I’m Sasha! I write short travel stories you can read in three minutes or less, and if you’d like to receive them directly to your inbox on Mondays, you can subscribe with this handy button.
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It was our first Thanksgiving on the road.
We almost got stuck in the desert while dry camping in the thick sands outside of Joshua Tree. Jeremiah turned off our generator while our turkey breast cooked in the tiny convection-microwave oven while I was on a walk so when I got back we had lukewarm turkey and a lot of waiting to do. Our potatoes that I had packed had grown substantially - great for gardening. They were…. fine for cooking. (Fine is a stretch)
But that night, when I opened the door from our motorhome, a crisp magic waited for me.
“It snowed,” I turned over my shoulder to Jeremiah, “but it’s not cold.”
“It hasn’t snowed,” he said.
It was true. It could not have snowed. The temps hovered around the high fifties and low sixties. (Fahrenheit, that is.)
Bright white sand was lit from the waxing gibbous moon: a few days short of a full moon. Bubbles of chirpy joy sat in my chest - something akin to the joy of Christmas morning as a child. I’m not sure if I laughed, but my memory says I did. Memories are notoriously wrong.
The reflection of the crystals of sand played a trick, and I imagined it to be the first thing I could think of that looked similar. Snow.
There have been a lot of those experiences on the road. New sights that I don’t know how to yet compute, so I have related it to something I’ve previously seen, claim it to be so.
And if I have done that on my travels, I wonder how many times I’ve done it throughout my life.
Humans are incredibly good at generalizing and normalizing. Now, when I see bright sand on a well-lit night, I know it’s not snow.
But there are a lot of things that aren’t so obvious. Times when I can’t agree that it hasn’t snowed. These things take me longer to understand, to recognize the differences even when they are substantial. Give meaning to something when it isn’t there, or worse, the wrong meaning: the wrong definition. Snow to Sand.
When training our dog, we had to generalize commands. She had to know that “sit” meant whenever we said it, not just on a blue-and-gray rug in the corner of the living room. Sometimes it can be incredibly helpful to generalize, or we’d constantly be in a state of surprise or learning.
There are a lot of generalizations that hurt us though, and I’ve noticed that the more I travel, the fewer generalizations I make. After all, it’s really hard to make a snowman with sand. I’ve heard a lot of coyotes singing at night, but it’s important to recognize that while the howl of a coyote may be a similar sound to that of a tornado siren, it’s not the same… but that’s a story for another day.
Thanks for traveling —and reflecting— with me,
Sasha