Walking Down Clouds

Salmon, Idaho Pop. 3,122 (National Geo. Mag ranks Salmon as the most remote large town in the lower 48. I believe them.)

All the mountains are ablaze. Blaze orange. Can there even be as many bull elk as there are hunters I wonder as the train of SUV's thunder past me with camo quads buckled to their backs? I flag CrowDog in orange to save skin. In the morning I still check for bullet holes again when the first rifles go off and walk around my tent with my head sunk into my shoulders. Boom, boom.
So much land in the form of mountains is all I walk for days into a week. It was silent until now except for the constant of flowing rivers licking branches and rock, and the tapping of leaves falling on tent fabric when walking miles stop allowing night to ease in. Now the mountains hum like a bug zapper hung outside the kitchen window. Salmon is the first real town in .....well, a very long time; a plush town where a man fresh out of the mountains can fill his grub list, drool over new boots(ones with heals still attached), and show off my earthy smell won on the Nez Perce Pass. Too cold to linger long in mountain creeks.
With so little time in a library to bring this text up to speed I must by nature of so much information leave large holes. It is still hard to move over some of the great beauty I have passed through without company for over a week, days pushed into journal pages while sleet salted me outside my tent in the mountains by a weak fire; sleeping in Big Hole Battle Field just into treeline to hear the lost Nez Perce wail through the night, surrounded by wolves that sang on and off all night moving in and around my camp like ghosts in mourning. Then there are the kindnesses that were offered up to me by strangers (Marc and his son and daughter) across the road from my camp that shared half their chardonnay, expertly seasoned grill cooked steak and clam alfredo that bowed the belly of the double paper plate, and then Rita finding me 120 miles away from her saloon, bringing steak and a full cooler to refresh me after a long day of hiking down the mountains from the border pass into Idaho..... my utter amazement is that Rita found me on the porch of a little store in North Fork unfolding stories to a group of hunters waiting on their Monday morning hunt.
Everyday becomes a story; a pile of round and sometimes crooked words that make up this series of adventure. The only thing that I am certain of is that I am doing what it is that I was meant to do, and this feeds both pen, and heart.