Desert Dispatch 1

By Richard DeRosa

We arrived at our winter redoubt in Arizona about a week ago. We have made this cross-country trek several times and always enjoy it. Even look forward to it.

Each of us experiences it differently. And those differences have elicited some curious responses when chatting about it with friends, not to mention some friendly quarreling about when to turn on the radio to catch up on the news.

One of my quirks when traveling is to shut out the news as much as possible. I could easily drive back and forth across this endlessly beautiful and fascinating country without ever turning on a radio or sticking those god-awful buds into my ears. I am one of those rare birds who, as Thoreau put it so sagely in Walden, has “never met a companion as companionable as solitude.”