Leaving Idaho

Payette, Idaho

It is funny odd to leave my world without clocks to enter a town and have a minute hand set on everything; an hour on the computer,lunch break for the post office employees, and meet with the press before they close for the day. It makes me sigh to be back walking the white shoulder line heading west. The further I get from a town the greater the silence and richer the rewards. The tent calls my attention to a creek on the far end of a field where raccoons roll over stones while working their mouths excitedly before they eat. Eagles circle the treeless roundtop mountains near the horizon until the setting sun makes them pink, then black. Eat when hungry. Sleep when tired and it is dark. And walk. Just walk.
I have saved one ounce of Captain Morgan spiced rum for over a month just for the border of Oregon. In a few hours I will be crossing the state line and grin till it bites deep under my ears. Miles have gotten harder. I take that back. I have worn thin. The cold comes up through the floor of the tent to pull at my bones and all my padding; flesh and closed cell foam has shrunk to skin. Without time to rest, or enough food to charge the machine I am in a constant state of breaking down though I will not stop...nor is there a place to. New pains move through out me. I listen, note and work around the twinge, the numb loss in range of motion that comes and goes in my right hand, a new graviety pulling inside. No longer do I tell myself, my bones and joints, that we have to hold on, we have a whole country to do. Now it is an easy kind approving voice,"We've done it, you've done it. This is where it all comes together. This is where we meet the water. This is the conclusion you saw in your mind's eye thirty eight years ago. You've done it." You can beat a dead horse but it probably wouldn't have died if it was told it mattered. Some times now when I stop under a tree or lone shadow of a broken barn I just breathe. In this way I hope to keep walking, and heal.
Tomorrow I walk into Oregon.