I’m not certain why it never before occurred to me that I could leave. Maybe we always had some type of prior commitment. Or maybe it was because it was a time of year I always associated with college co-eds in Mexico – buckets of margaritas and multitudes of bad decisions. Most likely, though, it was some latent fear – the voice of my mother telling me, “danger” as she read off the latest obscure headlines about women being brutally murdered by strangers at rest stops or cut out of their tents and sold into human trafficking never to be heard from again (both terrifying, and I’ll just add unlikely, prospects). But there it was, a gapping hole in the calendar that was labeled “Spring Break.” It had been a particularly long winter and I needed to go.
Almost a year prior I had stood on a mesa top with my father in the north-western most point of Nevada, and there on the horizon was a small spot of vibrant red. “That’s Valley of Fire,” my dad had said and I had nodded in agreement, pretending to know what he was talking about so that I didn’t seem out of the loop. You don’t want to be out of the loop on anything regarding national history or public lands with my dad.
What a beautiful place!