Broke(n) Down In Cody

After all these faithful miles my cracked bank card refuses to work although it took three teller machines to confirm it. "Show me the money," fails to fill my wallet for the first time. My brow gets white cold even though it is 97 degrees. A bank debit card has been my lifeline, rope cut and the quick fall into uncertainty begins although I push in buttons all the way down. Alot of phone calls are made that do little to quell the fear of being broke by the time I'm somewhere near the Crow Reservation --this becomes a possibility. If this glitch happened in my old home town this would be of little concern, here it is the fuel line being cut on a sharp turn heading again into open land. In New England I would call a familiar face in the teller office and order another bankcard, then wait a few days for the hard plastic card to arrive via mail. Out here I make phone calls, bend the old card to try to get it to work one more time, and try to move past being anxious. I call basecamp again, write an e-mail to my ex-wife Alexcia then phone her, and pray for a replacement to find me before the two hundred dollars I just borrowed evaporates in the 100 degree high desert heat. I get word that the bank demands an address for my account to be active; Big Brother wants to know where I live. An address? Once again the rules of This System demand that if you have money in a bank you must have a home address even though I told them before the walk began that I would be walking across America and this was the bank account just for that. "No problem sir,you can use this card all across the nation," has become a problem two years into the journey. I'd drop Legacy Bank stationed in Great Barrington Mass. if I could. It is once again the old adage 'don't change horses in the middle of a river crossing,' even though I have no intention in carrying a lame horse another thousand plus miles to northern Washington. Necessity is the mother of invention...now, where to call home?



The road here was extreme. I had grow soft in sixteen days of healing and roofing in Thermopolis, if roofing is taking it easy. The sun has grown angry though. At 22 miles a day pulling 150 pounds and melting another 60-70 pounds into my shoulders via backpack I cannot pour enough water into my mouth even while I'm drinking the hot water directly from the 3 gallon tank after the fist two single gallon jugs are spent, squatting under my green and tan golf umbrella that's mounted to the frame of my pack. My head will reason toward anything for just a moment out of the consuming rays I can still hear digging into the open range of sand and rock where the grass grows thin. Even the rabbits have grown stupefied in the heat and refuse to run. As I pass they throw dirt over their fur flopping lengthwise like cats trying to choke a herd of biting flees. To walk this land in this heat is to lean over the edge with the great possibility of falling down hard in a treeless forest...never to be heard.

Cody Historical Center: I touch bronze, covet feathers gleaned a hundred years ago, marvel at plains grizzly claws six inches long, then camp by a river waiting.... I have not come to this building by chance, or this city for that matter. Thousands of miles and twenty states ago I knew that I would be standing here soaked in history. I study the cut of an eagle bone whistle for the third day in a row and remember my grandfather sending me into the forest in Becket to retrieve a piece of striped maple so he could teach me how to make an eagle's cry. I remember tapping the bark off with a mallet to notch the sweet wood inside, cutting my hand and for the first time not crying. I was just a boy then and had never seen an eagle or heard its chirp, the same golden eagles I see almost daily now. I had put my homemade whistle into a glass of water by the sink every night so the bark wouldn't crack just as my grandfather instructed. I remember when my grandfather died. My whistle had begun to grow a fine net of roots and I couldn't decide whether to take a knife to my living whistle or bury it in the field down by the creek and listen. The more I walk forward the more I go back.

From gallery to gallery I wander the town of Cody. Ruffin Prevost, a reporter for the Billings Gazette,and I meet at the Maxwell Restaurant to work out a story for the Gazette over lunch. I am offered a room for the night as well as a ride about town on his wife Michelle's vintage green bicycle whenever I want to use it while I am here. Ruffin tells me about the Fourth of July in Cody being something not to miss if I could wait out the week. I have walked too long to run for the northern Rocky Mountains just because they are there and need to be saddled. If Cody has a song to sing, as I know it does, I will be here to listen. Snow in the Rocky Mountains is still some distance off. I am more the grasshopper than the ant if there is music.

Update..Bankcard Reactivated