Sisters, OR

I arrived yesterday to a police car special that lasted through the night, a sting that had flashing lights skipping all over the sides of the roads. South of the weigh station I set shelter without even a filtered headlamp and felt my heart quicken to the strobe of police car lights moving through the ponderosa and scrub, cedar and brier. It was the blackest night waiting on the coming storm. No blue and red flashing lights came for me. At Bronco Billy's I worked the chatter out of my lungs to a bar of men happy to chew on fresh road stories while I ate a burger and fries from the locals menu, and sipped re-fills of a dark micro brew that had my eyes flickering to the moving light of the large flat screen television in the corner that nobody was watching. Sisters is a landmark, a compass check, a place to exhale before falling off the map for nearly a hundred miles of snow and mountains with a blizzard on the way(at least an expected blizzard).
In many towns across America I am a juggling three legged dog that strayed from the circus. Here in Sisters I am another ornament dangling from a tree on the green. I am as expected as the cloud of mist after each cold exhalation. In Sisters, even with CrowDog bulging at the seams on my shoulders and a stacked travois following hip behind me, I blend. Tourists stare. Locals engage me in conversation to place me on their mental map, and wish me well.
It is a new sensation to feel nervous before leaving for the Cascades. I have lived in eight feet of snow in the New Mexico Rockies; lost finger use to find them again after a thaw through two winters now and this is the third. Bullets spit around me in the desert, and then I slept from exhaustion beside a jagged bullet hole in the foot of the tent. As they say here,"This is not my first rodeo." Still, in a frozen tent under the red filter of headlamp and cold tired reasoning I move over this next stretch, this last big stretch of open land before the walk concludes some five hundred miles later in Washington's northwest point. Maybe it is a mental spillover from being a combat paratrooper in the 82nd. As troopers we all feared the last jump, saw friends die on the last jump, heard of the colonel poured from his boots on his last jump. In my kit I count blocks of cheese, and check two stoves like parachutes. When the green light comes tomorrow morning I will jump...or walk. No matter how long I live I will never forget those four seconds that occur directly after leaving the airplane...the proverbial perfect airplane...that I hear falling in jungles from time to time taking all on board. For four seconds a train is in your ears, your stomach-so close to vomiting after running ground contours for hours to beat radar-moves into your narrowing throat, and you wonder-over the years of a single moment-is this the way I will leave so much undone behind? You think,"I could have done better." And falling and praying are one.
In Sisters Coffee Shop I wash my socks in the bathroom sink and shave with soap and a plastic pink razor. Again I smell the cedar of old smoke billow up from my shirt as I lean into the sink. "I move well in winter," I say softly to myself. "Food tastes better." There is an older man in the mirror smiling the way I used to and he believes me.