Mr. Carolina loved seeing places he’d never seen before.

He wasn’t too interested in cities, but the beauty of nature really got him excited. Faced with a new landscape, he would shout, I fuckin’ love seein’ shit I ain’t never seen before! Sometimes, if I were driving, he would maneuver his upper body out of the van’s passenger side window Dukes of Hazzard style and shout his joy into the wind.

I had the honor of driving him into New Mexico for the first time. Mother Nature put on a fantastic weather display for us. The sky turned the deep purple blue of a bruise at its peak. Lightning zipped across the sky, and the rain came, heavy but brief.

I fuckin’ love seein’ shit I ain’t never seen before!

I introduced Mr. Carolina and those other traveling kids to my favorite natural hot spring that night too. New Mexico offered a lot of new nature to see.

The next day, driving from town back to the hot spring, we saw a rainbow unimaginably vivid. It looked like what one would get if one handed a box of crayons to a second grader and asked him/her to draw a rainbow in the sky. This rainbow had an extra zing, a certain energy to the colors that made it a rainbow among rainbows. I was driving, and I still regret not pulling to the side of the road and taking a good, long, uninterrupted look.

I fuckin’ love seein’ shit I ain’t never seen before!

It’s going on four years since I traveled with Mr. Carolina. I don’t even know where he is these days, but I’ve never forgotten his joy in experiencing the new. So many times since we parted ways, I’ve come up on a new, beautiful landscape and gotten excited. While the beauty I see every day doesn’t necessarily diminish, there’s a jolt to seeing something fantastic in nature for the first time.

I fuckin’ love seein’ shit I ain’t never seen before!

I went out on a short trip the other day and took a route I’d never been on before. I saw so many new things. In a tribute to Mr. Carolina, here are some of the landmarks I laid my eyes upon for the first time.