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2005: The Best Year Yet?

© Gregg Pasterick

Just three days into 2005, my wife and I were relieved of our duties at the inn we were running on the coast of Washington. Any questions regarding how we ran the inn were answered by the judge who awarded us the unemployment compensation the owner attempted to deny us. The grinning and bearing and tolerating of a situation that was clearly in need of some serious antidepressants or a noose suddenly over with, we scrambled for a job that failed to materialize. Jobless but non-the-less feeling considerably relieved, we packed up our stuff and headed for Ohio by way of the desert southwest, our route intended to keep us out of winter weather as long as possible.

It was a pretty good trip at first. We drove down into Oregon, where we interviewed for a B and B job we decided against, then continued south through California, which was a too-short drive through paradise. At the bottom of the state we turned left, and headed for Arizona. Along most of the drive - the Pacific coast of Washington and Oregon, through the central Valley of California, and into the desert - there were wildflowers. In February.

The sight of those mid-winter blossoms was medicinal.

Eventually, unfortunately, we had to start heading north, which we did in New Mexico. The wildflowers and the balmy weather got left behind. And 2005 began to head south.

But what heads south hopefully bounces back up. Beginning with some grudgingly springy weather in late March that included my first Snow Trilliums, life began to improve. Our many job interviews landed us a summer gig in West Glacier, Montana, at the entrance to Glacier National Park. They wanted us to hit town during the last week of April.

Armed with a new adventure, we sped out of central Ohio in mid-April heading for Texas, where we hoped to catch some of the Texas Bluebonnets and Paintbrush. The Lone Star State was having another banner year for spring wildflowers, as was the Desert Southwest. Death Valley, in fact, was experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime explosion of botany.

Though we were too late for much of the peak of the Desert Southwest's botanical boom, we weren't disappointed. In fact, by the time we got to Montana - 16 days after leaving Ohio - we had counted nearly 400 different species of wildflowers along the way, from the few odds and ends in Ohio and Kentucky to the more colorful variety of Arkansas to those Texas Bluebonnets and Paintbrushes to the deserts of west Texas and southern Arizona, up through Saguaro National Park and across southeastern California, into the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, back into the central valley, over to the coast, into the redwoods and Pacific Northwest and across the Columbia River Gorge...

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