Moab's Big Easy

As the days move toward summer, I move toward two years walking, two years of living in a tent and making fires within the sound of the road moving past like insects I still pray never bite. Here in Moab I blend. This is a land where river adventure on watercraft, boulder bouncing in a steriod jacked jeeps for a week on Moab Jeep Safari, or canyon humping with rock jocks is all part of the landscape. Though I still look like I have wandered in from the Aussie outback with my 100 pound two wheel cart, and 70 pound pack high on my shoulders, Exofficio clothing, and wide brim Tilley propped up by two walking sticks, I am two looks and a return to the shot of espresso, or a turn and a nod in the middle of a conversation. It is good to just be though the cart is a bit much in the realm of society...and narrow sidewalks.
It is time to think about the life to come after I enter the third and last year ( or so) of walking across America. Many people already ask me about what I'll do after I peak out in Washington state with my feet in the ocean so far from the coast of Maine and the ocean where I began. As if I have been told that a child is on the way in the form of life after the walk, I can not fathom the concept until I see the swell rising; the promise getting closer. As these open miles pass, or fail to (as it sometimes seems), I move over possible names for children and new dreams, consider new places untraveled and new shoes I could ruin.... I am still a walker and know nothing of a week in the same bed or the smell of this skin stripped of trail dust and two weeks of oil and cedar smoke mixed with the sage tied inside the bandana around my neck.
Even now I am given new new worries, new trials to master as I tie concern into the brim of my hat with a tug that keeps the early morning rays out of my eyes. It is easy to see 140 miles of natures hardships and rich views before I make the next town somewhere above Flaming Gorge. The idea of buying enough food, the right food, and a mule's reasonable might to carry it keeps me here in Moab another day as I buy trinkets that please my heart's need to create, mail out gear I should keep, watch beautiful women walk by joyfully offering themselves to their sun god, and hope I can find a way to make six gallons of water weigh less than a buick.
These are the miles now where nobody stops. Days again without conversation. These days are broken into pieces of sky, holes in stacked boulders I climb and search like a squirrel, and snacks often have taken the place of meals for many times I have no energy to stir into one pot still like it is the first time...not unless I find a creek, or a small tree that moves like a sundress over barefoot roots in sand. Even the slightest tree has become a prized umbrella that I will offer up all my milage to just for an hour's reprieve out of the sun in which to watch the world pass by with thick lazy eyes and the easy swollow of water still cool from last night's camp.