Fork In The Road(2)

Jennifer asks questions for the local Morton paper from under a Gibson hair style that is pinned in dark boyant loops. Her face is cream around bright shining eyes. It is a good thing that I know most questions by heart or I would stumble profusely. After all of this time it is still a high to sit beside a beautiful woman and just breathe it all in. My mind memorizes the silk of her perfume and the way her hand moves a pen. These are simple things. These are everything. On leaving she touches my arm. It is a short hold on my upper arm. My mind is still there; rings circling outward from where the stone hit the water.
This is the junction in the road. This is when I climb into the mountains and life altering/threatening snow or head north toward the big city of 'Sleepless' on route 7. My heart is too tired to head toward a love story so I feel my shoes turn back toward rt.12 to White Pass as I type. After all this walking there is still something that pulls me deeper inward and outward. I have walked to Walton's Mountain and felt the love of those kind people that I touch home with. Here I am on the other side of America and another television family calls me closer. As much as we deny it, we are touched by the lives portrayed on our little livingroom screens. We want to hear 'Chris In The Morning' come over our radio, and fall on our heart's mercy as dark haired Maggie O'Connell scurrys from her plane to the store/post with mail for us. My heart is from old blood that is spawned on by the blood of my grandparents grandparent's memory.
In town at the diner one woman asks my age I was when I started walking. "Around forty."
"Ahhhh," she smiles down at her bossom as if I just spilled it out for her. My mouth is too small to tell her that it isn't that simple, that it isn't some mid-life walk toward being twenty again. It is everything I have been preparing for since I was a child. She already has the box she believes I fit into all taped up.
(2 nights ago)
Outside of town I clear sharp rocks under a bridge so I can lie down and sleep. The creek is so loud, pregnant with rain, that I need earplugs to close my eyes. I need to wash my socks, buy food and forgive myself for taking a knife to my valuable sleeping pad to make insoles for my severly blistered feet. New boots are slow horses to break. This is today's truth.
Days ago I gather the footprints of mountain lion that walked the snow around my tent as I slept. I melted this into water for coffee. Our ancestors once drank out of buffalo horns to gain the strength of the great beast. I do not know why I cook on wood charred by lightning, or smoke sage, cedar and roots dried from this journey in deserts past into blue smoke for my tent though a patina brown wing bone. Nobody is watching...that I can see with these eyes.

*** update

After walking into the rain and dark last night, climbing into the mountains and setting up the little lodge in waist high ferns I study the map. Roslyn will be 160-180 miles ONE WAY. I'll still have to hike out and the pass will surely close again. Plans change. Walkin 8 miles back into Morton I head up route 7 to routre 161 and Mount Rainer then some how around it to the town I have grown a passion for. Roads fall away and I will have to run by compass as I did in the desert of Utah without tar or peopled opinion pro or con. It finally feels right.