Not all who wander...

Not all who wander are lost. And not all who wonder are crazy. One of the things I am finding I enjoy most about retirement is having the time to think about things I never had the time for when I was working. I've always been a wanderer at heart and I've come to find that the wandering of the mind is called wonder.

This last weekend I spent time camping, hiking, biking (and yes, wandering and wondering) in Goblin Valley State Park. Goblin Valley is about an hour southwest of Green River, Utah. For those who have been there you know what a special place it is. It was my first trip and I went specifically to film the rock 'Goblins' that abound in this secluded park. It's not a huge park but it makes up for its relatively small size by packing in a combination of great hiking, beautiful mountain biking trails, spectacular scenery, and at night a sky so full of stars it takes your breath away. In less than an hour one night I watched no fewer than ten satellites mosey across the starry backdrop only to be chased toward the horizon by the far faster, but more elusive, shooting stars. In the middle of this high desert with no city or even town lights to invade the show the night sky is not far different than it was for Native Americans gazing up five hundred or a thousand years ago. The park itself sits in a basin that millions of years ago was an inland sea and to the northwest the San Rafael Reef gives proof of a seashore where million-year old ripples lie frozen in time.

As I sat in my chair late into the evening gazing at the heavens Hurricane Irma was roaring across Florida after wreaking havoc across the Caribbean. Whether one believes in global warming or not most of the changes the earth goes through make a human lifetime less than a blink of geological time. The rocks around me, themselves once lapped by gentle waves of a bygone past, bore silent testimony of what can happen over enormous amounts of time. Even the starlight entering my wondering eyes was years old taking that long at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) to reach me from those distant suns. They say the universe is expanding at a rate that means it will continue to expand forever. I wonder what it is like at the very edge of the universe; what is is our universe expanding into? If you were on the farthest star at this farthest edge and looked out, what would you see?

The Voyager spacecraft is man's most prolific wanderer now traveling beyond the sphere of our planetary system at a speed of a mere 40,000 miles per hour. I wonder what will happen to Voyager when it is as old as the rocks that stand mute about me. While I'll never wander a billionth the distance of this intrepid emissary of mankind in my wondering I'm looking back and waiting for Voyager to catch up. In the meantime, I've got a bike to ride...