When Roads Break

Supplied in likable Tillamook that I hated to leave so soon, I walk quickly toward closed Rt.6 where a landslide sent the road three stories down into the water. I walk 40 miles in 1 and 1/2 days just to get past the construction site where a crain squats in the center of the road, my need is to be at least to a point that I will not be ordered back to Tillamook. In the dark and through weak rain I shouldered on past closed stores, stores I depended on for more food and local talk. Their logic was no road, no sales, so I walk through days of silence listening to my stomach start to worry. It is a new haunt, walking on roads at night under the weak glow of an l.e.d. headlamp until my hips argue to swing no further; only then I crawl under a bridge in lion tracks and set a dry camp.