Staying close to home

I want to walk you down paths familiar to me, hoping that as you accompany me on these roads less taken, your eyes will see your own familiar places anew, refreshed, and you’ll fight to keep them.

May 19, 2025

View from my office. Those are cornfields beyond my “prairie.” Photo © 2025 Denise Elaine Heap.

Anyone who has known me since high school knows I love to travel. My parents’ graduation present to me fifty-two years ago? A summer in Germany. They knew what I liked.

After graduating from TCU, I studied in Augsburg for a year, followed by eighteen months working for a publisher near Stuttgart. First purchase both times: A Eurailpass. Once I could afford a tiny car, Stuttgart became jumping-off point for my adventures.

Those years were followed by forty more, working for American subsidiaries of German corporations (and one Norwegian). In every case, the highlight of my employment was the ability to meet face-to-face with coworkers in Germany and Norway, and of course, attach my paltry two weeks of annual American vacation to those flights.

Although I still enjoy the occasional trip to Germany or other points in Europe, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to explore closer to home. No matter where home is. Whether Pennsylvania, Utah, Ventura County, Nevada, or back to Pennsylvania, sometimes those 36-hour weekends held extra special meaning.

In Pennsylvania, every inch of earth is soaked with history. From pre-colonial to American Revolution to Civil War, Pennsylvania bears the strong imprint of who we are as Americans, and how we reached this place. Towns like Phoenixville bear witness to early innovation, where eighteenth century residents produced both steel and nails at Phoenix Iron Company (originally French Creek Nail Works).

As immigrants poured into the USA in the nineteenth century, Phoenixville manufactured not only nails, but Griffen guns (canons) and rifles, and the Phoenix column. The first likely changed the course of the civil war in the Union’s favor. The second enabled the construction of skyscrapers at a lower cost, with better engineering. The Phoenix column led to the development of the Phoenix Bridge Company, which vastly improved bridgebuilding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Utah offered some of the most breathtaking beauty I’d ever seen, with such variety that it was impossible to be bored. From the Alpine loop of Timpanogos, to Thanksgiving Point, to stunning national parks in southern Utah — what could be an inhospitable climate provided magic.

And Ventura County! There’s a joke you hear occasionally in southern California: If the pilgrims had first landed in southern California, there would only be one state in the USA. There’s a good reason it’s prohibitively expensive to live in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara: Casual beauty and a perfect climate, combined with a slower pace of life than its East Coast counterpart, New York City.

I watched the Rose Bowl with TCU friends in LA in 2011. The announcer stated, Today it’s 65 degrees and sunny as usual here in Los Angeles. While in Madison it’s 33 and raining, and in Fort Worth it’s 42 and raining. My friends said, “Oh great. Now another million people will move here!”

I also learned how to find tiny nuggets of beauty in and near Las Vegas the eight years I lived there. Early on, I would simply drive to St. George and southern Utah, places I already knew. Slowly I ventured out of my comfort zone and was shocked to find life in Vegas outside the Strip. I only went to the Strip when out-of-town visitors wanted to gamble.

This topic has been on my mind a lot recently. Last week I took an aborted trip to the Delaware shore. The scattered showers that had been forecasted turned into three days of heavy rain and thunderstorms. The extraordinary people at my hotel allowed me to check out early, with full refund for the nights I didn’t stay. (More on them in a later post.)

During the return trip to Gettysburg on back roads, I was moved to tears by the splendor of the country we call home. This irregular series — Staying close to home — was born. Rain and fog. Industry, farmland, military bases, roadside stands, Mickey D’s, East Coast diners. A wealth of people, all ethnicities, all religions, all ages, all political viewpoints. We wear our hearts on our sleeves.

I will write these posts with two purposes in mind.

The first is horribly utilitarian. I need to move my travelogue from Facebook, where I’ve “entertained” high school, college, and work friends for almost eighteen years, since September 2007. Now that Meta scrapes everything, my friends will have to come here for my trip reports. I’m deleting from that platform and posting both narrative and photographs here.

The second has far more meaning to me. I want to remind myself, remind you, what we are losing if we do not fight back, if we don’t preserve the “more perfect union” begun in July 1776, with Constitution penned in 1787, ratified in 1788, and in effect since 1789. If we do not protect our civil rights, our constitutional rights, our human rights, this unrivaled beauty will become a memory.

I want to walk you down paths familiar to me, paths I cherish, hoping that as you accompany me on these roads less taken, your eyes will see your own familiar places anew, refreshed, and you’ll fight to keep them.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Now more than ever

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