The Melancholies du Voyage

Recipe: The best beefless stew!

A bugling elk at the Elk and Bison Refuge at the Land Between the Lakes.

In each of our last two trips across the country, we visited the Elk and Bison Refuge at the Land Between the Lakes in western Kentucky. During that first trip it served as a test run to see how my dearly carbonated friend Emily would handle bison. She amazed me with her peaceful demeanor and curiosity when they came within steps of us. It was as if an entirely new self was revealed in the interaction. A baptism of being with wild things, if you will, revealed Emily Binx Hawthorne’s deeper truer self.

Whenever we visited the bison and elk, we’d then head west, passing through the town of Mayfield on the way to Hot Springs National Park. When we awakened this morning, I saw the unspeakable damage a tornado wreaked to Mayfield, and I grew still and sadder than I would have in the past. That’s what travel does to us. Foreign places, otherwise simply names on a map, are made real. We are touched by them, even if only p…