I used to pull picture books off library shelves to decide what vistas I longed to inhale, what routes I’d take through foreign lands, what hotel lobby would be just right for making a phone call to get a room at a youth hostel. Like me, perhaps you have furtively rifled through expensive guidebooks in the bookstore trying to memorize the 800 number for a key contact over there, far way, someplace else.
But now one can travel online ahead of time, or in real time, or even in place of ever actually leaving.
Yes, I admit to “leaving” a snowy Flagstaff morning for a webcam visit with the African penguins at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco. You can view them underwater, or in wide view, or from the biologist’s window. I did actually once stand amazed not 10 yards from the flopping, swimming, feeding penguins at the Steinhart. Their slippery black and white plunges lingered in my heart, so some days I happily travel online to return to my wonder.
Jellyfish, too. I met these astonishing moon jellies on a visit to Canada, and I can’t help it: When I want to visit with them again I put my Apple on the dining table and there where I might choose to have a real live Ann or Jayne for a hot cuppa, I have instead me with tea smiling at jellyfish in real time from a webcam at the Vancouver Aquarium.
Do other people plan around their daydreams, I wonder? Planning isn’t quite the right word I’d use for what happens for me. Vision hopping is what I do. It’s as if broad, flat lily pads with watercolor scenes on them float on the years of my future and I nimbly leap from one to the other. I fall in now and then, but once I got over my fear of getting wet with life it didn’t matter whether I was on a pad, or in the water or mid-air leaping.
I’m a desert-raised child finally visualizing water, I note. Through my 20s and 30s my daydream was a very small adobe along a saguaro-lined dirt road with an airstrip out back. That was the future I held to my heart. I’d live my pensive life open to some visitors, but not all. I pictured a piano inside. But I don’t play piano. (Ah, this was my first hint that daydreams, like night dreaming, hold clues to our deep hearts.) Maybe I wanted to attract piano accompaniment to my tentative playing of the cello.
Thirty years later I can say there have been plenty of dirt roads. Maybe fire lookouts have been that solo adobe. I still have a cello, but don’t play it perhaps because I never did find a piano player to join me.
But what became that desert dawn I craved where rosy fingers of sunlight stir the curved-billed thrashers to chatter? Eleven years of massage practice perhaps. Desert dawn stillness often suffused my massage room. A muscle releasing to gentle touch is not unlike a mariposa lily turning to track the sun.
Today by my typewriter I see an 8-by-10 color photo of my niece walking along that thin line of Kaibab Trail at Cedar Ridge. I’ve pressed a sticky arrow onto orange rock to point at her little blue form in that vast nest of cliff and slope. That could be me walking as a teenager into the realization that one could have a vision—I will walk to the bottom of the Grand Canyon—and then actually do it. And once you’ve done it, you are changed forever. Now you know you can make your fantasies real.
Walking in the Grand Canyon when I was 16 was potent. Walking there 40 years later with my sister and her daughter was another dream come true.
As I write this by the window I look up to see three 20-somethings stepping along Beaver Street toward downtown. One carries a cardboard sign on which is written: WALNUT CANYON. With daypacks and hats and lively talk they display a daydream in progress right outside my window: conservation workers on their day off seeking exotic destination. I hope they got there. If not, maybe they found their way into another adventure equally compelling. It only matters that they headed out. A leap made toward a fancy is a reach for truth one way or another.
