The view through the windshield (with a glance in the rear-view mirror)
Jeff, Brent, and Kara look ahead to the semester on the road.
As we start our journey this morning, we thought it would be appropriate to share some brief pre-trip thoughts from Brent, Jeff and Kara. Here’s a view of what lies down the road—from the folks who’ll be sitting in the drivers’ seats.
Brent - A steady double beating heart
We rightly celebrate our camp kitchen and the meals that emerge from it. Usually just before sunrise, soft clinks and bumps will alert people that it’s time to wake up. First, water for coffee gets set to boil, cereal, eggs, and bagels get pulled out of coolers and bins and set out on tables. Not long after people emerge from their tents to start the day.
Then, sometime around sunset, the kitchen comes alive again. It isn’t quiet, but boisterous, energetic, alive with the experience of the day. All of the coolers and bins are wide open as all manner of food gets pulled up while the cook-group prepares a feast for the group (maybe a guest or two). There will be music accompanying the dance of dinner prep, along with laughs, stories, jokes, and questions about spiciness. Then, for a few moments, it’ll be quiet while 18 hungry people nourish themselves at the end of the day. Then the dance will resume with dishes.
The kitchen is one of our beating hearts. It’s the one we love coming back to; the one that gets all of the praise. The steady beat of joy (sometimes quiet, sometimes loud) frames our day and ties us to each other.
The other steady heart of our trip doesn’t get the same praise, but it is no less important, no less central to the function of the trip and our experience. After coffee and breakfast in the morning; after the discussion of what we’ll be doing and some questions to consider throughout the day, the calm of the morning will be interrupted by a loud “Ok folks, time to get into the vans.” The enthusiasm will inevitably feel forced.
But the vans are also integral to the production of our community of curious people. They don’t feel like “class,” but they’re the place where some of the most important conversations happen between small groups of people. They are our study room and library. They offer refuge from weather in the middle of the day. They move us from place to place. They are the less celebrated, even unloved heart of the trip. The beat that moves us. I can’t wait for that first time I get to shout out “Ok folks, into the vans!”
Jeff Nichols - Unknown Unknowns
The best part is not knowing. We’ve got a detailed itinerary, of course, and a long list of people we plan to talk with – experts, locals, and elders. We’ve got vans and a trailer, tents and sleeping bags and kitchen gear. We can go just about anywhere and be self-contained. But we don’t really know who we’ll meet, what we’ll do, what we’ll see, or what we’ll hear, and that’s what has me excited. Maybe we’ll lie on the sand by the Yellowstone River, fall asleep to train whistles and coyote yips, and wake up to pelicans skimming over the water. Maybe an old friend will stop in the middle of a trail with a grin and tell us how as a 14-year-old, he sheltered under that very rock and stayed dry while his sisters got soaked on a different trail. Maybe we’ll boot ski the Grinnell glacier. Maybe we’ll watch a fat black bear graze the slopes of Mt. Rainier. Maybe we’ll race across a field on our knees picking onions. Maybe we’ll hear how the Bundy occupation at Malheur couldn’t disrupt years of cooperative work. Maybe we’ll invent a stupid, hilarious game with a football and a frisbee and an unprintable name. Maybe we’ll watch Tremors where it was filmed, a few miles from the Manzanar internment camp in one direction and the place where Los Angeles swiped its water in the other. Maybe we’ll listen to a Diné song and the rustle of dried cottonwood leaves when the singer finishes.
But we might not do any of those things – that was last time. This time we’ll do, see, hear, and learn different things in different places from different people. And we’ll make new memories and have other stories to tell the next bunch. You should’ve been there, we’ll say, it was great.
I can’t wait.
Kara - A once in a lifetime experience
When I was a student on the Westminster expedition in 2017 I continually tried to remind myself that this was a once in a lifetime experience. A year ago, the last thing I expected to be doing this fall was packing my bags to join Brent and Jeff on a second rodeo with a new group of students and a handful of new destinations. One of the things that makes the expedition so unique is the people we speak with along the way. They root the trip in place, experiences, and questions that we may not think to ask with an outside perspective. The most memorable parts of the trip for me were the interactions with people, their stories, and the experience of learning about a place from Indigenous people and locals. We may get to speak to some of the same people in 2021 as we did in 2017, but they will have new stories and experiences to share.
The one constant throughout the semester will be the people that make up the expedition team. By the end of the first expedition we came to know ourselves as the Coyotes, a goofy, fun loving and curious group. I can’t wait to see how the 2021 group forms and becomes its own traveling family. Over the next three months this unique group of self-selected adventurers will teach us about living on the road, about working with other people, and reveal new sides of ourselves.
After a year of isolation, I am ready to meet a new group of people and form lifelong bonds and memories. This remarkable departure from average life is truly a once in a lifetime experience, even if you get to do it twice!
We’re can’t wait for you to join us on our travels. For now, the best ways to do that are by subscribing to the Substack and following us on Instagram. We’re also going to play around with tiktok (it’ll be a grand messy experiment) and we hope to add videos to our youtube channel somewhat regularly. Or, maybe, just maybe, we’ll find in person out on the road somewhere.