Across the Great Divide

We left Road Canyon a little too late and dusk was almost over by the time we got back to the truck. That kind of thing makes me nervous because, if you have a problem, you are going to have it in the full dark. In any case, we didn't have a problem, and we simply needed to drive 15 or 20 miles back to the pavement. As we went, in silence, with a little rain on the windshield, Ellen suddenly asked, "Can we have some music?" She wanted to listen to Nancy Griffith's Other Voices, Other Rooms, so we plugged in a cassette tape, and tunneled on into the deepening dark. At about that same time we came to a part of the road that was almost completely blocked by tumbleweeds. Having driven it before, I knew the road well enough not to stop, so we continued at a moderate pace around and through the tumbleweeds. Nancy Griffith was singing the Kate Wolf song, Across the Great Divide, and we all began to sing along as we surfed the tumbleweeds. It was a moment I'll remember for the rest of my life. To hear the voices of my wife and daughter—Ellen a little out of tune—singing with gusto, "Now I find myself on the mountainside/Where the rivers change direction/Across the great divide," as we bumped along in our old truck after a long day together was priceless. No joke. I would not have traded it for a million dollars. This is the stuff of which heaven is made: In a crappy old truck with a broken cassette player in the dark and the rain twenty miles from pavement, a family, fording the tumbleweeds and singing together.