Leaving Travois

** Again I am in Corvalis, though I have now arrived under my own power. For a few days I settle issues with my tack, trying to make peace with walking in a perpetual state of getting soaked...and boots that will never dry until I toss them for the last new pair of the walk. Jeni and Dave and I enjoy the scents and servings of comfort food as we sit at the kitchen table watching the trees drip. Some times it is hard to get excited about 'camp underwater'. These are the last states, the last miles. I wouldn't trade it for the world...but a hat that doesn't drip down my neck and a sleeping bag that doesn't clot into tired pasta....priceless. In a couple of days I re-shoulder CrowDog and walk 60 miles to the ocean!!!!!! How can I keep from smiling.


After being brought back to Sweet Home to pick up the walk where I left off before the holidays I re-enter life I knew before Anadarko, OK --the walk before the building of the cart, the travois that I pulled across thousands of miles of mountains and desert, snow and burning sand. Even in this world of rain miles move quickly. I am reborn. No longer is there a padded willow branch gut tied to a lodge pole pine frame that bangs into my abs with every step, and shallows my breathing on every assent. For miles I am giddy walking on New Years's Day away from the warm people of Sweet Home, thrilled that I can muck across fields and puddle jump into abandoned barns to stash myself behind bails of hay till dawn, falling in behind nodding state tractors, falling on dry leaves as the world I now live in continues to switch over between spin and wash cycles, falling into the deepest sleep as mice crawl out with their secrets on feet that sound like more rain. Although I could easily grow melancholy if I begin to consider the years that my two wheeled kit (or Kit, as that is what I always called it in reference or command yelled out while walking through oceans of soft sand)preserved my life by carrying hundreds of gallons of water, nearly the same shifting weight in food, and a means to stand up to bears and lions without running being the instinct that punched my ticket. As with all my gear, a bonding takes place, a trust I feel I am betraying when (through no failure in gear performance)I walk away from tack knowing I won't return to it on this journey. Instead of adding weight to CrowDog with this line of thinking I ride the boyant feeling of being unyoked, untethered, being given once again the promised freedom of having wings. Yes, the fields are saturated and the river yawns outside it's banks. The song birds gargle more than sing, but I can bow under the giant Douglas Fir with a smile that I can just turn, at any moment I can just turn and this one shout in ability allows me to forgive the meals that I return to skipping routinely...just so that I can soon walk down to the ocean and turn freely to the north and these last miles of Washington. Maybe I will find that one shell that I will want to carry to the end, or really be able to turn and listen when the wind speaks about new roads and a new journey I feel begin to kick me in my sleep.