Learning Las Vegas

Join me in reading my travel diary that opens on June 26, 2003, and you will see that “this was the wettest June in one-hundred years, and Central Park is lush and sodden as it prepares to host three-hundred people from twelve countries to celebrate the park’s one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary. My administrative duties on this occasion are over, and yesterday I found myself high-and-dry as I flew into wet Oaxaca where the much appreciated rainy season has begun. From the air I could see the cultivated fields: long, narrow strips of brown earth with a new green effloresce, almost luminous in its vigorous vegetal resurgence.

As an ardent New York City adoptee living on the Upper Side of Manhattan, I have regular contact with Central Park, which offers me, as well as many others who come from both inside and outside the city, an experience of unblemished nature amid recreational facilities. Habitual occupation of certain areas in the park by some people goes as far as taking nightly residence oneself within a secluded plot rich with tree cover and camping there for an indefinite time. Protagonists in certain books written primarily for children live in imaginary homes there too. But now, enough of that. As a native Texan and traveler with a great affinity for the American West, in 1988 I felt it incumbent upon me to enroll my sixteen-year-old son David Barlow in a supervised camping experience offered by NOLS (Natural Outdoor Leadership School) in the Wind River mountain range of Wyoming. Many mothers like me enjoy living our children’s lives vicariously, but in my case, two years after he got back home, I actually ventured forth into an unknown dimension of personal experience by following Dave’s self-discoveries through supervised wilderness hiking.