Let’s hit the road
Welcome to The Scenic Route, a digest of serendipitous digression. I’m Bill Lascher — author of The Golden Fortress and Eve of a Hundred Midnights. Each week (for now), I’ll share some of the best detours, tangents, and side quests I've taken during my work exploring how where we’ve been informs who we are and what direction we might next head.
The Scenic Route lingers in ephemera and indulges in distraction for its intrinsic value. Too often we're told to "get to the point," but there is so much out there worth learning about. We can barrel down the road toward "news hooks," "drama," "relevance," or any number of manufactured destinations, or we can head toward wherever we need at whatever pace we deem suitable. I've certainly taken the scenic route toward launching this publication.
I first envisioned The Scenic Route at the end of 2019, but detoured when I became a parent at the beginning of 2020. I resumed my trajectory in the early days of the pandemic, when, two weeks after lockdowns began in Oregon, I wrote the first draft of this introductory message, still unaware what we would face in the coming weeks, months, and years.
“As our isolation deepens,” I’d written,“The Scenic Route will satisfy our need to travel beyond our typical experience, and to expose us to the unexpected bits of our past as we think about how it shapes the present.”
The "past" was already beginning to take on a new meaning. It represented a rapidly vanishing reality, at least for some of us. What we would soon refer to as the "before times" was the only reality most of us had known. Then we suddenly and collectively changed course from that reality into wholly unfamiliar surroundings. When once life's routines propelled us ever forward we stumbled ahead. Regaining our lives' momentum would require creativity.
“We need other, less obvious routes,” I’d written.
We still do.
We always do.
We always have.
In that early draft of this introduction I'd argued that distraction promised a sorely-needed refuge from that singular, anxious moment in which we’d found ourselves. I believed we'd find such refuges scattered along the less obvious routes through which we hadn’t previously thought to travel. I hoped then that the newsletter I’d envisioned might map such routes, or provide such refuges.
This may all be digressive indulgence, and I don’t intend to simply ignore pressing, immediate discussions of today's world, nor the shared challenges we face. Traveling side roads doesn’t necessarily mean traveling easily, nor journeying unaware of one’s surroundings. It just means traveling differently while fleshing out our perspective on the world through which we pass.
We who typically wander may sometimes opt for more direct routes. We who travel slowly may occasionally prefer to quickly reach our destinations. From my point of view, long-term resilience, if not success, requires flexibility of approach and of focus. I write with a simple, perhaps cringe-inducing and cliché, motive: to observe the familiar from unfamiliar perspectives and to familiarize ourselves with the unfamiliar, to broaden and deepen understanding of our surroundings, and to cultivate comfort in navigating the perpetual unfamiliarity that is life.
This is approaching self-seriousness, so I want to surface another intention for The Scenic Route that crystallized in those early days of the pandemic. To whatever scant ability I have to grant the following, I’d like you, my few or many readers, to feel like you have permission to lose yourselves in digression. In other words, take from this publication what you want.
I still believe that refuge is often found in the unexpected places we don't think to look, and I still hope The Scenic Route can become one of your refuges. Even as a “new normal” coalesces, our need for refuge persists. That doesn't mean we should turn away from the world, abandon society, nor ignore our lives’ pressing concerns. Refuge can take many forms, and what we define as refuge need not be static. For the moment, I personally define it as an amorphous space to recalibrate and repair the tools we need to effectively participate in society. The world continues to spin when we seek refuge, as it does once we’ve found it. We are as alive within our refuges as we are beyond, and as we are on all the paths we travel between our personal refuges.
The new normal is no uniformly shared destination, just as the old normal, the old reality, the "past" was never as concrete or singularly experienced as we pretend it had been. So why did we so desperately need to race toward some simulacrum of "normalcy?" Why does the next stop always entice us? Why don't we ever linger in what is?
I've criticized myself many times for taking more than three years to launch The Scenic Route. I need to stop that. Life was happening. Writers, myself included, often breeze past our surroundings as we race to channel our stories into the confines of inverted pyramids, narrative structure, and style guides, to say nothing of deadlines, word limits, budgets and attention spans. We’re usually forced to bypass fascinating material we see just beyond the guardrails as we hurtle along the freeways of storytelling convention.
We may be socializing, traveling, spending, and gathering again, but, unfortunately, many of us remain isolated in one manner or another. I hope you might share my belief that some of the best discoveries require little more than second looks at our surroundings and actually seeing what's right here at home. Scenic routes aren't about longer trips, they're about journeys that we savor. They’re exercises that train our flexibility to shift our paths when we approach obstacles. Importantly, scenic routes are low stakes; all they really require of us is to enjoy, or at least fully engage with, what we see as we journey and to, perhaps, revel together in that enjoyment, so, by all means, digress.
Meander.
Linger.
Indulge.
We have one life. Live it. I’m doing my best to do so myself, and I feel most alive when I let go of trying to get somewhere in particular and take more time observing the world through which I travel.
As I embark upon the Scenic Route, I look forward to sharing what I see out the window.