My wife and I were recently in California for a conference in Anaheim, and strangely enough millions of people in a relatively small area makes for some interesting traffic. By “interesting” I mean a constantly congested chaos of creeping ebbs and terrifying flows. I’m still undergoing “unpuckering” therapy.

We landed at Los Angeles International Airport, also known as LAX, in which the “X” apparently is representative of whichever of your favorite expletive you would like to insert. It was roughly 40 miles from LAX to our hotel in Anaheim. A short jaunt in the mind of one that is comparing that particular distance to similar distances in upstate North Dakota, let’s say Lignite to Kenmare for instance.

This comparison would have been accurate if a stiff breeze had taken ahold of the Danish Mill in Kenmare and propelled it, dragging the city in its wake, to a quaint place along the Missouri River just north of Bismarck.

For pert near three hours we lurched along, bumper-to-bumper and door-to-door, shifting amid 6 dizzying lanes of a moving parking lot between speeds of 80mph and 10mph. After an hour of this I found myself desperately hoping for the 10mph parade route reprieves, and dreading the accelerations that the rental car wasn’t quite up to. I told Dawn we should have rented the Corvette, but it was a convertible and she didn’t want the top of my sparsely populated melon getting all leathery in the California sun. So it goes.

We mostly moved along in silence, as, other than randomly blurted curse words, the sensory overload and concerns of a fiery crash wasn’t allowing my prairie trail brain to form complete sentences in this 6-lane mangle of machines. All I could do to maintain some semblance of calm was to remind myself that there was nothing I could do about all the other cars and the manner in which the occupants chose to propel them towards wherever they were all trying to get to, and that they, like me, wanted to get to wherever that might be in a lifelike state.

Other than the soul sucking traffic it was an enjoyable trip, the people were nice, there was just too many of them. The conference was interesting, and having the opportunity to stare in awe at the vastness of the ocean with the one I love at my side was worth the risk of life and limb it took to get there.

Although the beaches and the ocean are a beautiful sight to behold, as I sat in the sand looking out as far as the earth would let me look, a familiar feeling came over me. A feeling of calm, a feeling of awe, a feeling of thankfulness and gratitude, a feeling I’ve felt many times looking out across the windswept landscapes of the Dakota’s. Landscapes where the journey is just as peaceful and serene as the destination.

These landscapes, from sea to shining sea as the song goes, don’t need us, in fact were most definitely better off without us, but we need them.