WhiteCrow Walking

My solo walk across America began in Maine. I walked for nearly 3 years carrying a backpack and facing countless dangers, as well as met wonderful people I could have never made it without. From bullets to bears I moved through mountains of snow and across burning desert country. The end result will be a book, and the fruition of a childhood dream. This is a blog from the field with rough stories about my steps along the way.

08 February 2008

Winter Unkind

(** if you are curious and have time to do the net the www.newportnewtimes.com (Jesse WhiteCrow Walks America), newspaper did a story on the walk which includes a full color shot showing the map of the walk up to the coast of Oregon. Some details of the story are not accurate...but these were little details). The photo is of the map I still carry and update. It has seen much love, and enjoys being pulled out for story time or receiving any additional ink showing the basic line backpacked.


Coming from a year of walking in the American deserts it is hard to walk through a land where they measure the minutes of sun, the intermissions of blue between days of spoiling clouds. My thinking has undertaken a change too; it had to or I would be all for running toward a hot-tub with a handful of razors at this point. No matter how it rains I wrap all my assurance around keeping my journals and maps from absorbing the waters I plod through, and my sleeping bag is something only seen through a clear giant plastic bag, a bag I short sheeted a Tillamook park garbage can for(leaving an older and smaller black common trash bag in exchange). The luxury of a down sleeping bag against my skin is just that, a luxury, and one I can't afford. The sleeping bag nolonger comes close to enveloping my body. It has been reduced to a plastic patch of consistent warmth that I stake my life under--against hypothermia and somewhere just this side of cold holding tight to the one healing square of warmth I count on. It is not much, but I am thankful for the grace of this one predictability even in a well hydrated tent. This winter there are few sure things that are dry and all seams feel the strain.
Given a home cooked meal and a chance to dry a few pounds off CrowDog I wobble about the kind Hall household barefoot and light headed from the deep warmth of a roaring fireplace. All roads toward Roslyn are down, dead, shut, covered over, closed to me. Still, I talk to strangers as if in convincing them on my need to cross the range ahead I will receive the allowance I pray for, the pass to the lower 48th 'Alaska'. The weather channel predicts that the interstate may open by mid-day tomorrow; that the mountain passes may stop being covered in slides, and avalanches may stop moving houses off foundations with waves of snow. Interstates are of no use to me, and avalanches are the norm on all the central Washington roads I contemplate taking. This is the worst winter many can remember, people that have lived here all their life. Everything is off the chart...yet this has been the walk, this has been the America I've walked,...if there was an easier season for a region I walked through I seemed to have missed it.
Tomorrow I'll re-supply here in the town of Toledo, and head through the Lewis and Clarke Old Growth Forest as I pack northeast, and still on toward Roslyn. It will do my heart good to see the ancient giants, to get a better perspective of my little stroll and remember the length and width of the short number of days we are blessed to live and wander, next to my height of vain want.
There is too much rain to walk with my head down hoping precipitation stops, so I have stopped wearing self tinting glasses that only makes the clouds enter me darker than they already are.
From Morton I head north toward---I head north toward more thinking and serious snow, maybe more snow than I have ever seen. Maybe I will stay on east straight over White Pass. Something I can't quite comprehend calls me on into blizzards and multiple feet of snow without half the cold weather gear I pulled behind me and a pathetic one man tent that allows the wind and too much rain to leach through. I have returned to resorting to nature, natural land formations for shelter and shielding walls of blow downs with a new hunger, and new fears. Two nights ago I had my best rest tucked in the roots of an old growth cedar while the wind and rain chewed this world. For a night I was a squirrel even to the point of waking to eat a pocket of salted cashews, listening to the other trees moan and beat out their complaints in cold bone branches against one another before I curled into a deeper sleep among red knotted knuckles in a wet grin. Often what was land when camp was set is an island by morning. Several times I changed my mind at the last second and restaked my claim to see I would have lost everything had my heart not been troubled by a breeze or a silent voice I didn't knew I heard. Rivers and creeks rise a foot an hour without tiring so often it is common to walk on into the dark with a blinking lamp tied to CrowDog warning the world I walk the night road for sometimes hours before I will find a rise with a flat table of ferns, or an old inclined logging road the new growth has taken back in patches. The lines between brave and coward, fool and sensible are made liquid and unknowable. Miles move slower. Food becomes simple and I chew to get nowhere. I simply eat and hear my breathing before I begin again. Yesterday has spoiled away against any need to remember with concern and tomorrow may float away tied to the bottomside of a log regardless of how much I plan. This is not a bad thing, this being here, being here now on this side of some unnamed turn in the road working over a moist bagel and half a carrot I've carried for sixty miles, watching geese discuss the seven types of water in their native language, unconcerned with my listening. This is where their arrowhead flight has taken them with my two legs slowly following. The inner glue that holds all thoughts and reasons together has becomes weakened.
A week from the Isakson's and my feet are still dry in new boots though. This is a large thing to write. Right now this is so very much.