MY FATHER, MYSELF

I find myself thinking about my father this morning, as I check back in on my story of my recent National Geographic/Lindblad cruise to Alaska's Inland Passage. My father, who died more than 20 years ago, was during his life time an inveterate "caravaner." Along with my mother and, for almost every year of our childhood, my sister and myself, he would hitch up the caravan...

This image is the best look-alike that I can find...

... behind whichever can he happened to be driving at the time, and head off to parts unknown--sometimes to England, Wales or Scotland, sometimes to the European continent. Every night we would "put the legs down" in some new campsite--we rarely stayed anywhere for more than a night or two--and settle down for a fine dinner prepared by my mother and, invariably on the Continent, a glass of the local wine (there were no home-produced wines in England in those days). The following morning, usually before breakfast, my father would sit down with pen and ink (and later ballpoint) to write down the story of the previous day.

Somewhere in the family archives--who knows where they are?--all these notebooks of barely legible scrawl must remain hidden to this day. My mother treasured them, and would surely not have allowed them to be lost or destroyed. And yet, and yet... likely nobody will ever again read these products of my father's irrepressible joie de vivre and his eloquent pen. Which leads me of course to wonder about all the time and effort I put into to the creation of this new travel blog. Even though it is out there somewhere in the blogosphere, and may remain there for decades--who knows, centuries?--to come, I suspect that it will remain eternally unread. Our little human sagas have little significance to anyone besides our little selves, and yet those selves seem mightily important--important enough to chronicle at such pains. Even the great sagas of our times--the presidents, the wars, the natural disasters, the continental population shifts, even the self-destruction of our species--counts for even less than the blink of an eye or the ruffle of a feather in the vast reaches of space and time.

And still, and yet... I write my blog, I write my travel log, as though my life depended on it. What strange creatures we are!