Editor’s Note: It is cool dow at the farm, and it is crisp and evokes the feelings Marlow described brow. I could not free more with his account of the dawn coming up, if not like Mr. Kipling’s “thunder across the Bay in Mandalay,” but it is a perfectly serviceable morning. We have “Sprung Ahead,” many clocks chosen to be reset at random. I really wish they would just not fiddle with things. I think I just go the last of the “Fall Back” setting taken care of last time I was down here. I say, just leave it alone. Time waits for no one.

– Vic

Sunrise over Two Dog Flats at Glacier National Park in Montana

I was the son of a son of a son of a sailor. From the time I was a small boy I wanted passionately to see the world . . . and while I was at sea or on the road I wrote down what I saw . . . on scraps of paper that I found along the way.

Those paper scraps I unearthed decades later and began to transcribe them and match their stories to photos I took or post cards I had bought now and then.

Here are a few lines of one partial transcription from a stay in a western National Park that I found on an old discarded laptop that I thought to be inoperative. It hints at the immense beauty that lays beyond the safe, small towns of our birth.

“Today’s sunrise made me think about how things were when I was ten . . . I loved to lie awake in bed . . . just before the sun was up and before the family was awake and think of another exciting day ahead.

Like then, today I rose early and did not wake any of the snoring cycle trash that were strewn about the small rustic cabin. I left the room to get a better viewpoint of the vast world resting outside. Just as the sky began to turn pink, there was a great stillness . . . that gave way to a rustling in the trees. Then the sound of a single bird — peep.

I went further through tall pines along a grey rock gravel road with my boots crunching the rocks as I strode. The sweet fragrant pine scent slowly became infused with the smell of bacon, eggs and buttered toast as I became aware that a clearing was ahead from which a hidden path would lead to a distant concessionaire cafe in the park.

The air became crisp and cold as a brief breeze passed by. I stopped in the clearing and watched the sun slowly rise from behind the mountains. The birds were pecking away in the dewy field.

How could I contain my happiness?

I was nearing 60 years old and I still knew so little of the world beyond the backyard garden of my home town.

There I stood because I had chosen to travel the seas and lands beyond the place from which I sprung. To be sure, I had had much to lose and did. But, thankfully young men don’t think like that.”

Rustic Cabin at Rising Sun Inn at Glacier National Park

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