travel

Exploring my roots on two wheels

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Have you ever arrived in someplace new and felt like you have been there before? I think we carry memories of our ancestors in our genes. Given what people are learning about how environment and behavior affect how genes are expressed, and given that expression of genes might affect how people pass them on to their offspring, I think it’s no longer a big stretch to say that we carry bits of the environment of our ancestors in our DNA. I felt it in Scotland. In Ireland. And in Germany. And I definitely felt it in the Netherlands.

Cycling the pathways that connect Dutch villages sometimes felt like riding a ribbon through a series of fairytales featuring my great-great grandparents.

Based on my 23andMe results, about 50% of my DNA originated in people who came from northern western mainland Europe, in the region that is now western Germany and The Netherlands. (The other 50% is a mix of ancestry from Sweden, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales). This is not a surprise. My maternal grandfather was born in and spent the first 10 years of his life in the region that now forms the western border of Germany and the northeastern corner of Holland. My maternal grandmother’s family also originated in northwestern Germany before they became farmers in ‘South Russia’, what is now the Ukraine.

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Ghosts In the Shadows

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I’ve lived long enough on this earth to know ghosts. I’ve felt them, seen them when I close my eyes. Heard them when I block out all other noise. Ghosts are real. In my experience, they’re nothing like the ghosts depicted in Hollywood, which usually resemble something out of Dickens novel – ragged clothes and chains and dangling teeth.

They are times gone by. They are faded memories that suddenly adopt a splash of color. They emerge from somewhere deep inside you, dance around, then fade back where they came from. Ghosts are not necessarily scary, creepy, or lonely — at least my ghosts aren’t. They just need some attention now and then so that you can remember to live the way you’re supposed to live.

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In the footsteps of the dinosaurs

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The desert always help me step deep back in time. I love that I can walk in a place that has been shaped by wind and water and deep earth processes more than by life itself. These landscapes were sculpted long before there was even a whisper of human evolution in the global gene pool.

Arches National Park in southwestern Utah in late May is sunshine and blue sky and bright red rocks that cast long shadows in the mornings and evenings. It’s also small white puffy clouds and heat that bakes you from all directions. We are in the park before 7am and out on the trail not much later, so we can be done before running the risk of evaporating right off the sand and rock.

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Protecting our National Parks is an Act of Patriotism

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Some of my first memories involve riding on my Dad’s shoulders as we hiked past stinky geysers that shot mist and clouds high above our heads. I also remember staring into the abyss of a yellow-walled canyon, while water foamed and gurgled nearby, then raced over the rim. At night we had the thrill of sleeping in a log cabin with bunk beds – but Mom said I was too small to sleep in the top bunk. I was almost three years old the first time I visited Yellowstone National Park, on a road trip with my parents from California to visit my grandmother in Ohio.

Returning to Yellowstone’s stinky glaciers at a much later point in life.

We also took a helicopter ride over the Badlands (which were several years away from becoming a national park at that point). I remember wearing headphones that pinched my head as we swooped over a landscape that, to me, looked like a layered ice cream sundae.

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