JUNE 26, SUNDAY

TIME

I feel as if I have been on the road for several weeks, certainly for a couple of weeks. My son Tom and granddaughter Hannah driving me down to Greenville to the Amtrak Crescent that didn’t get there until 3:30 a.m. seems forever ago, certainly two weeks ago but closer to a month. But when I count back to where I ate each evening I realize that this is only my sixth day on the road. How can that be?

This is not the first time I have had this feeling of time shifting when I travel. What I feel as time is almost a form of science fiction time travel instantly into the past or the future while people on earth stay on earth time. When I have gone to India with a group of students, with every day a new experience, the feeling I have when I get home is that I have been on an odd kind of time travel. Six months have gone by for me while here at home only eight weekends blipped past. It is as if I made a giant loop in time, rejoining everyone else who has only moved a little ways down the straight line of clock or calendar time. I had made a loop of six inches and rejoined them after they had moved an inch. Often the time was so short for the people who stayed at home, doing the routine things that people do to get through the week, that they didn’t even realize I had been gone. Also, even more disconcerting, when they found out that I had been gone to India they didn’t ask me what I had experienced in India, they acted as if India and that huge loop of time when I had been gone didn’t exist, and instead told me about the routine things that had happened to them in the brief time for them that I was gone most of which I could have anticipated without them telling me.

So the same thing is happening again. For my old men’s group that meets on Friday mornings at 10 at the River Ridge McDonalds, I was there last week but gone this last Friday. Three more weeks will click by and I will be back. Nothing will have happened in Asheville in the meantime and they will have hardly missed me if they miss me at all. But for me, already, three or four weeks have gone by and by the time I get back I will barely able to remember back when I left and will be full of stories that no one will have any interest in hearing not realizing what my time travel has been.

So if any of them read this I will give a little taste of what this expanded time travel feels like. I just spent two nights on the train in a reclining seat, sleeping quite well and marveling that all I had to do was sit still and the northern border of states would pass by outside me. I would be for a while in North Dakota, of all places, and then in Montana where I haven’t been for 60 years and barely remember. Everything was new and strange.

Now I am sitting in Glacier Park Lodge just outside Glacier National Park on a bright sunny day. In front of me is a pine forest of the kind that is found on Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the Eastern United States with the plants and trees of Canada left there after the last ice age.

And in front of me are the jagged peaks of the northern Rockies which were recently piled with snow as a storm front moved through. For the last few days I have been gliding through dinosaur country. At one point all of the northern plains that I was looking at were under a sea and then became the home to all forms of dinosaurs whose bones are everywhere to be discovered.

Talking about loops of time, this all happened over millions and millions of years until the great explosion 65 million years ago that wiped out all of these dinosaurs and opened the way for bigger mammals like me. All of this happened over eons and eons of time, of the gradual mutation after mutation of evolution with many more dead ends than successful survivals. This is a loop so large that it makes my 85 years on earth just the blink of an eye. But as I’ve sat here today looking out at this range of mountains in a lodge that was built over a hundred years ago to give a destination for railway visitors to visit Glacier National Park I am transported in space and time. The train station is just in front of the Lodge which now has the charm of being a very old heritage hotel which takes us into the past. The water pipes are creaky and the Wifi doesn’t work and my cavernous room was chilly last night.

So just sitting here today I have slid into the very distant past and the not so distant pass and the entire day, because everything is new and stimulating, has been as long as a week in Swannanoa with Ingles on one corner and CVS on another and so little going on that a day seems only ten minutes long.

I know this is hard for people back on earth to understand, but this is the way it feels, and is why being in the Glacier Lodge, as expensive as it is, is so stimulating.