WhiteCrow Walking

Jackie From Dinosaur-land...Please Re-email Me

2010-06-21T17:17:00.001-05:00

Hello Jackie,
How's this for a personal note. I know you said you e-mailed but it fell through the cyber slot and never arrived. Since I think it is really important that we stay in touch I am leaving this memo. With so much going on it is important that like minds stay connected. Hope our trails meet again.

Jesse WhiteCrow

I Thought I Heard You Talking But It Was Only Me

2009-07-14T20:42:00.004-05:00

The rabbit hisses on a bed of garlic, onions and spice. One shot; the sound of a cough and then thanksgiving. Necessity was absent, but it is coming so I open old skills hesitantly. It was a warm life running at sunset and then a pistol sprinkling a little blood where the mountain lion hunts. The rabbit is young and small but can feed me for two days over rice. This is the salary I get without counting hours or braiding my hair with a silk tie of conformity.
The observing setting sun knows what is coming and says nothing as I wipe my hands on sage and green denim, then spit wipe my knife.
Last night I bought you and your new wife a simple dinner in a Tex-Mex diner because I was in your feet not long ago; though I didn't catch cars with my thumb. You knew about the coming storm and that conversation alone was worth a table and a glass of water that wasn't rain rolling off of canvas. You knew of the season of the fig tree though your words became tired quickly, the way the road ages even a good conversation; and two people have conversation on tap...they know nothing about fasting without words for weeks and that kind of wanting. And then you and your packs,and a boxed guitar I never saw outside its casket, are in my truck and I take you three miles away from town and questions so you can sleep in a quiet free camp. Some people need lights of the streets to sleep, and I wonder about this as I leave for my trailer across town.
This morning I brought donuts to the camp I delivered you to at the cotton wood grove on the Big Horn River. You were already gone though I wasn't to meet you till ten. After I walked down to where you tent was and studied the flattened grass to know your night and morning, I ached into the sunrise toward the Wedding of the Waters and hoped I'd find you both assembled there with packs lazy in the park. Last night's dinner was good-bye unspoken.
I ate two of the donuts and hated the warmth of the perfect morning dough. Hands sticky, I talked about leaving to my heart until there was no place to go except to step my shoes into the deep brown river, and rub my stickiest fingers in a fist against my chest.

Breaking Trail (2)

2009-02-04T15:14:00.004-05:00

In Cody Wyoming I step out of a coffee shop across from the Irma, a hotel/saloon. A rugged unshaven cowboy getting out of a large pick-up walks up to me. "Hey, your the man that walked across America." It is not a question.
"Out of all of the states, out of all of the miles and years you've walked across this U.S. of A. and you picked here to scratch out a home and write in?" He smiles hard enough to rise the peppered curtain draping over his upper lip. "Well, that there says something I tell you. Yes sir, That says a whole lot." We are standing where Sitting Bull once stood while considered the same setting sun. We are standing where Buffalo Bill Cody walked his horse toward the bar for another round of stories and moose steaks. We stand on historic land as we cut our heels across conversation about this big sky country; a place where grizzly and elk haunt the same mountains we saddle and pitch tents, and where a rifle in the rear window of a pick-up truck is as appropriate as a wide brim beaver hat weathered and riding three finger widths above our eyes.
Massachusetts is buried in ice and snow far behind me; buried like an outlaw gun. Seven months of too much solitude and a gnashing winter is over with few good-byes and no need for a rear view mirror. It was time to escape west between storms, between changes in political offices. I was born in the state of Melville and Rockwell, Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, and walked the liberty land of Lexington and Concord, and the harbor of the Boston Tea Party that apparently needs to be fed more tea. The nation is changing, and Massachusetts is lost in an ocean of anti Patriot laws and staggering taxation. Having walked the freedom road, I too have changed during my years without goverment regulation and wide open spaces. Ah, I've always colored outside the lines of the settlement. It was time to move to where some freedoms remain, and where six hundred thouusand people in the state of Wyoming mean less for mindless regulation. 5 people per square mile. FIVE. I think there are more horses than people here and a camper in every other yard. So much in this country is changing drastically. It is good to be under a wide forgiving sky, and know that for now I can breathe easier.

Snowed Under

2008-12-22T13:58:00.003-05:00

All of my hopes of beating the snow out of New England are dismissed under two feet of the white stuff. With jobs going belly up across America I was cautious to leave the minuscule salary I have coming in for the few hours I offer assistance each weekend. Now it is too late to leave. There are times when we are in places that are less than desirable. The trick is to find the reason, the covert blessing even, if it is at all possible.
At zero degrees outside I wake up in the vintage airstream. Even with the furnace on low it is 32 degrees inside my twenty foot home; this in spite of the insulating drifts of snow. My blanket is frozen to the wall at the foot of my bed. As I heat water for coffee beans I've just ground I know I have to thaw the venting windows before I turn the furnace up higher or the fumes will...well, it wouldn't be good. "Should have gone with the tiny wood stove," I mumble to myself as I turn on the lap top that I'm certain will shiver and sputter for an hour or more before it'll think of writing.
Like Minnesota, and the walk before that, this too will lapse into memory. Sometimes that is enough of a foothold to stand on while we wait out a less than ideal situation. It will get warmer. The snow will recede. I will get west. The book will be completed. Guess the big delay is that 'the book' is still happening; the visiting bears, washing my crockery at the river beside my trailer in banks and boulders of snow, and contemplating on all that brought me to this forested island of Otis. I am as unplugged as a man can be...next to my prior life of 3 years in a tent. All the news I get here is still second hand and old. When power goes out for days into a week, little changes in my routine. The river still brings me water. I retire in curtained and unheated section of my silver trailer so no fumes can dispatch me in my sleep. Meals are simple wholesome quiet affairs spent alone or with a beeswax candle and a book I am in love with.
It is time to be where I am for this moment, and I am thankful for all that I have to be here, for in a unique way I am rich. I walk to visit friends that tell me their stories both lived and those kept as pet dreams. We eat and laugh without clocks watching. Once a week I buy a tall bottle of beer to carry home and nurse for three days in a hand blown glass with a white crow carved deep in the side. The bears have found their own slumber on the east side of the uprooted tree, or perhaps in the hollows where the boulders are raked together during Creation.
In a week it is New Year's. When we need time to think, ruminate, focus, and the world takes our wheels away along with all of the roads leading out, it is a perfect time to be thankful that we have been saved from ourselves. Of course I would love to be with you now, and caress a thousand other adventures, or sit beside a humble mountain fire and listen hard, no, harder...but then again, I would not be writing this down. No. I would not be writing down.

This Leaving Place (II)

2008-11-14T16:15:00.005-05:00

This dirt road is a sharp smell of rock before it is a throated sound under another pair of exhausted shoes. Rain waxing and waning has had my legs swimming for two weeks in the cold bite of freezing water that melts leaves. It must be therapeutic; attempting to warm these wet socks dry walking this deciduous road as seasons merge. Leaving is a place I must go back to if I want the light returned to my eyes. The road knows me and counts my steps out loud in reverse; circling words that never land. Days till leaving. Days until knowing. This mouth of gravel is tallying, discussing. My ears erases and subtracts pauses spent in thought from miles served. The wet polished shine of the dirt road licks around another turn I must decipher before I can turn back toward my silver home by the river. The turn pouts where water has risen to cross over, then relaxes its mouth again into a line that is not partial to anything but the next mile, and then the next.
With what I earn in a day of light carpentry I could nourish a month of walking. This will forever be what I use to measure employment against now. In a week of nailing two hundred year old 26" wide pine boards, training saws down chalk lines and spitting out antique nails I could have a hot plate of greens, heavy bread, and a shingle of meat every day for half a year, and morning oats boiled soft while I wait for the sun to take the hat from my head. The road knows that I am an agitation of thoughts; senses the internal gravity pulling me toward where I should winter; knows I prepare my leave from where I have patched and processed.
Leaving is the lover as I entertain: have entertained in a while, and this intimacy I have with leaving, well, it's right there next to sublime... at least until I can't get my fix....another town, a strangers voice over a chipped porcelain cup, and all the uncertainty in the world. Alone beside a cold river is no place to sit and listen to rocks until spring. Soon the ice will move away from stone, cover the wide calm bellies where the fish nudge death, and then the rocks too will sleep.
Dark at four o'clock. These were hard months walking year after year when winter threw its white skirt over my head and made me dizzy with dehydration, and beauty, and hunger. Sewing seams that torn to a fray,and shucking chapters off second hand paperback while I read myself warm could eat only so many hours while I shivered on earth; the cold of the grave crawled up into my bones, my breath snowed down on my face, and there I slept. It was the cold that would always save me though, each winter as it filing all intention down into a black well of delicious sleep oiled with indistinct memories free of agitation and remorse. Winter saved me from thinking myself broken, and the cruel way a mind envisions the idyllic comfort of warmth always dancing with two good blankets always just out of reach.

Our Breath Before Us

2008-10-22T14:35:00.004-05:00

Flurries fall as I talk to you on the phone outside the airstream. It is too cold to talk long standing just in my capalene underwear and I'll lose you if I step inside the trailer, so I talk faster and skip words I think you know. I can feel the Arizona sun in your voice while hearing the wind blowing in through the open window of your car into your upbraided hair. The bear visits me now nearly every night, as does the sleek black porcupine that comes to my door asking for the tips from my okra and the peelings from the onions just skinned for a stew. The bear is apple fat and too curious so I watch him: I watch the killing frosts make him brave.
Where will I go from here that won't be a stepping down; that isn't moving into a dank room with windows painted suggestions on concrete?

BaseCamp writes to me from the mid west to tell me that half a year has elapsed since I put CrowDog to rest under a winter coat worrying two hangers, and an elk skin shirt I painted for a month yet never wear. Without saying a word I look over my shoulder toward the computer as if it is the dog that is misbehaving on the rug: causing me to write so little in so much time. It drops its eyes. My eyes soften toward it. Both of us are being bad on the same patch of rug. Summer is spent. The computer is patient; then it bites. I am a man designed for adventure and making Hemingway scribbled notes in a Moleskin pad yanked from my coat during a reservation mock up of a bull fight. Domestic I am not.

"Where will I go from here", fills every hour of my internal banter? "When will I know I've arrived," is the next question? I talk to the bear now as it turns back at the old stone wall by the creek, then hesitates. Its round face blinks at me; asks if I want it to stay. Fear is like any high, any trick. After a while it no longer accelerates the blood or unsheaths any new emotion. The bear sits on rocks heavy with brittle white tripe and thirsty moss. I am not fool enough to feed the bear, or incited enough to send it off to where I should be following. I had a dream while on the walk. Maybe I told you about it? A large griz had me on the run until I sought a hide in a large hollow tree. As I climbed high into the inner tree the bear plugged the mouth of the tree with its upper body as it tried to lash out at me with claws and teeth to pull me down. Retrieving a pistol from my coat I shot down at the great bear's skull. Without ceremony it went silent in death below me, silent as a prayer; and in dying it sealed my fate to perish in the nailess coffin of the tree. When I awoke I was gasping for air, and certain that if I ever took the life of a bear I would lose mine in the exchange.

It is easy to be unafraid talking to the bear on the stone wall when we are both soaked in darkness except for this one hard beam from my flashlight. I don't wake my pistol any more to go walking at night. There is the scent of being brave, but this is not it. When a person is looking for answers, direction; it is no foolish thing to be in the dark with a bear that listens to my voice move out to it as it sits on the stone wall by the creek, and our breaths dissipate between us, and return anew. The leaves are breaking down, already a month past pretty. We are both hungry, this bear and I, both wondering if we should venture into the tangle of woods, or move toward the soft rot of apples and the yellow light that falls out the windows from the warm houses in the valley below where we know we don't belong.

Leaves Coloring Water

2008-09-07T17:40:00.008-05:00

Summer months in the Berkshires have passed by with pages written, then re-written as I reside in my '48 Airstream with living easier than I can remember it ever being. The young, and age weakened maples already garnish reflecting ponds with red flames that will soon engulf trees and water in canopies of fire. The F-150 pick-up I left behind during the walk has become wormwood waiting on a grave, promising to take me nowhere; so I put dollars away and watch local driveways for a clunker to purchase that can ferry the Airstream and myself west before winter tucks me into New England without safe wayfaring options being again available until spring thaw arrives, and my convictions to travel undoubtedly weaken.
These are simple peaceful times of predictable pleasures; coffee sipped while proof reading chapters in the coolness of morning, watching wild turkey and deer nudge apples outside my windows, and meeting the few friends that still reside in the area to share fires and popping clams on grills until evening becomes early morning and hardwood ash...and of course I am delightfully reunited with the delicious sound of rain on the airstream roof chanting me through night of sleep. It is a good time to take stock of blessings, and consider each sip of cedar with renewed gratitude as I size up tumble worn sweaters that begin to take on an autumn appeal I couldn't imagine feeling weeks ago. In my small silver longhouse everything that decorates the walls has a list of stories that come down to me as I write and prepare for walks (and on those rare occasions that I linger between being awake and approaching the blank canvas of sleep. New walks begin to murmuring in my ears when it is late and all else is silent, and I am most vulnerable to suggestion. America is still talking to me about winter farm houses twinkling across three fields, and weaving steps under the smell of laundry on a drying line. Although I thought my wayfaring lust would be silently content by now a voice I can hear inside my head is whispering "There is so much more I need to show you. Is this what you walked over eight thousand miles to find? You are resting Jesse. Writing,...and resting, just as do the birds that align their thoughts toward migration. It is good to heal your feet and get some of the words out of your head so you can forget and remember. Just don't forget that you have found your voice, your calling, and your voice is in the leaving."

Writing For A Fall

2008-08-02T08:31:00.004-05:00

Evenings are usually my strong suit. The air is cooler, and life outside the airstream is quiet. Only the river moving past appears to grow in volume. Blue berries are freshly picked and in the frig for breakfast, while tea slowly cools inches from the mouse I scroll words with. As much as I love to write, it is heavy labor to keep myself behind this desk as I write down from journals a thousand reasons to begin anew. Selling possessions at this sale and that is a contagious, infectious way of seeing what I own, or I'm owned by. Now I sit on the couch and wonder if I need to own, or be owned by anything...if that is all the sea and land that prevents me from returning to the great red road, and writing again with new stimuli. These are grand considerions I place on myself, the incredible yoke of owning nothing, and the marriage of leaving without one thought looking back: nothing to be stolen, lost, rusted to worthlessness (like my truck that now coughs down the road), stored in rented space for mice to dine and nest, and/or beg relatives for half room to harbor boxes to open someday...if someday ever comes again.
Returning to the Berkshires after nearly three years of walking is the Rumpelstiltskin of my life. I go to the markets when I want and need no food in hope of seeing a face that will welcome me back; that will remember my leaving and beg for an account. No familar faces come at me hungry. The rare faces familiar yawn a greeting as if I have stepped out and then returned with a drink. If you are about to leave all that is for three years abroad, do not take one step if it is merely to feed the imagination of some great return. I will tell you now that the curtains will still wave you in but all occupants will be different, even if they are still there, especially if they are still there. The spindly fibers that will be the same are simply the long term props, and they offer little to comfort a soul with hunger for a house. No. It will never be enough to return to if you too follow my leaving. But leaving for the leaving? Now we are drawing with markers and bright paint on the end of sticks and anything glourious is possible.
When the walk was almost over I promised that I would sit down and write this book before I take on another adventure; before I stand up and push in the chair...or sell it to buy new boots. Keeping promises to myself, and others is how I finished the walk. It is how I will finish the book. Come spring I do not know if I will be barefoot in a field of berry bushes, or somewhere closer to leaving...a leaving that really, is going home.

Raising The Dead (Edit, take two...or three)

2008-07-21T13:43:00.007-05:00

The '48 Airstream is now my home, while everything that does not make the cut into this reconstituted life; boxes that have patiently awaited my return, and an odd assortment of treasures carried over from my life before the walk receive price tags, and sit on Saturday morning tag sale blankets in hopes of adoption. Even the rifle I loved weighs too much with burden of bullets. What was a sweet taste in my mouth has become sour. Walking I was less alone simply because I had not arrived.
Everything now has the rose and thorns of old memories, associations that usher me back to what was before, little lives that went jaundice and died before I could live this one. Ghosts of three winters past pull their sheets off and stomp their feet in hour after hour of deafening memories silence. I am really alone for the first time since the walk ended, and the initial curtain falls hard. For three days after I arrived back in the Berkshires I sat on my half moon bed without taking food or water, letting a thousand memories feed on me until they had their fill on what was my flesh, on what was the pink of heart and lungs. When I was reduced to bone, I stood up slowly, got dressed, opened all the windows, and then I looked for writing paper as tea water called from the stove.
I phone the paper to work up a story, but there are are new stories involving shootings, fires, or who will be the new president. There is always a new shine to tend to. It is time for me to write from journals and look at pictures to show you, while I wonder if I should sell everything that I own under this humid sponge of sky ...knowing that I can live on ferns and turtles, and the emergency reserve of a gold coin sewn into the tongue of my boot. A seductive autumn that is already nudging the valve off inside the stems of maple trees is weighing clothes I think to keep.
The good thing about all of this is it is all transitory. Nothing I touch is solid. There is peace in my perspective where there was once urgency. There is no place that I have to be. The only employment I hold is to my self. There will be colors to startle come late September. A creek that runs past my trailer runs cold even in August, and somehow, across a mottled quilt of country that I now know intimately, I got your letter today.

Shining Time

2008-06-15T09:17:00.008-05:00

There can be no harder way to sit still than to write about the joys of a journey; to chew each day from journals ten inches deep with all of the people that were once strangers, coming to life again. Once I can get myself to sit still and write, I am excitedly turning each page, sinking again into the cypress swamp while I portage CrowDog over my head to save myself redundant miles of road, skin out a frog that is as big as a plate as I give thanks for his buttery legs, or make camp under your field of apple wood knowing your trees will erase the cumulus clouds of my cook fire. As soon as I start reading, my feet(feet that once complained for the loss of all luxury)get to where they can barely be contained in the crib that is the space under this desk; heart joins feet, lungs inflate as if preparing to sing, and I am certain that I am only strong enough to write a little while longer before I am a once again life simplified and buoyant under a backpack with a world filled with possibilities known only to the living, running for the door with my favorite dirty hat girdled under my chin by cord.
Two weeks. In two weeks I am gone from Minnesota, a Minnesota I have grown to love, pulling a wagon east (with a jeep)to Massachusetts to reconstitute some kind of life from boxes of memories, a motorcycle, Airstream, and a truck I am afraid will drink too much. In two weeks I say good-bye to Basecamp with completion in our eyes, and a unique sadness smooth and proud on our faces. From Maine to Louisiana, Louisiana to the Arizona border of Four Corners, north to Montana, west to the Oregon coast of Newport, and lastly a wandering line up to Cape Flattery and the end of well over eight thousand miles of walking. Basecamp and I have kept our promises to each other that will forbid us from ever truly being lives unrelated again. It is summed up in the one word that is in calligraphy in the white gold ring she gave me when the walk was completed..."Always."
Life is a funny creature. There is no figuring the depth or marvel of its plan. With Alexcia and her new husband Paul, I prepare to head east. We share dinners, go to plays at the Guthrie Theater, and thus begins a new chapter in this wonderful life. In the end (that is really the beginning), Alexcia and I are allowed to be the cherished friends we were alway meant to be outside of parental constraints, and this is all the joy in the world.

And So This Is Christmas, In May

2008-05-27T10:01:00.008-05:00

In four days, it will be a year ago that I walked into Thermopolis Wyoming. The longest stay of my walk across America was spent in Thermop as the temperature rang up to 110 degrees and all the grass turned into sand. Two months after the walk was completed finds me again in Wyoming, except now I carry a small backpack, and although the calender nudges me to return to my writing in Minnesota, there's no urgency to walk into the Rocky Mountains again as another winter approaches...( it hasn't stopped snowing here yet from last winter). I've made my way back to Wyoming to return an unfired .44 mag that I unsheathed twice to hold ground against a couple of grizzly's that proved to have no threatening interest in me. I also returned to Wyoming to touch base with the family's that opened their lives, hearts and homes to me. It was in Thermopolis that I lived with the pastor's Ron and Debra Higgins, stripped and shingled their roof, and bonded with the Higgins family and the surrounding town of Thermopolis
It was young Jessica and Ian Higgins that came up with the idea of throwing a big party to celebrate the holidays I spent alone on the walk, and that idea was all Debra needed to deck the halls. Last night in Thermopolis Wyoming, friends came out of 'Dinosaur Town' to join in a feast of pork tender loin in peach apricot glaze, shoot me with streamer popping firecrackers, tell of new paths and roads that have been penciled into their tomorrows, and open their presents wrapped up in bows.
As I look around a jubilant table of friends, I can not help but shine bright. Jessica Monday catches me starring at her after she closes her eyes to a flavor across the table from me. She gives me an expression that is an embrace, hearts bound in likeness and a promise of words that in time will be the new movement under our feet. Lisa and her mother Mid are dressed up in red and green, and smiling through red glasses of punch. Ron and Debra Higgins are making a toast that bookends all the emotions, the reasons that we pool around this island table of Thermopolite friends, and how lives have sewn been together by a man walking through their lives. Ian sits beside me and grins up at me like it really is Christmas and he is glad for the eating of it, the unwrapping, all is collected, at peace and good. Everyone is buoyant on the great smell of pumpkin pie, pork happily tender and sweet to the fork, almonds flickering in a sea of green beans, steaming wheat rolls, and real mashed potatoes speckled with the color of the earth. It is a meal of flavors and faces I have missed for so long. It is the gold ring I found in the snow on the last pass over the Continental Divide. I am again in the hot air balloons over the Rocky Mountains flying on a childhood promise.
This is not the brown Thermopolis I walked through, or the scrub grass of a blistered road to Cody. Every thing is mint, sage, forest green, and the delicate pale leaf hue of life just stepping out into the sun after a long winter white.

Under A Weaker Sky

2008-05-11T23:02:00.013-05:00

The play Gem Of The Ocean is over, as is the dinner that was at Alexcia and Paul's, eight miles away from Joppa Lane,where I reside for another month. Funny how life pulls some strings together, and unties others. These are tender times I wouldn't trade for the world. In some ways it is dying off and seeing how the living take our place after we are gone. I find it a kindness to see Alexcia happy; to see her new life sitting around glasses of wine and the good clatter of people eating through smiles, and our dogs peaceful and tired on the floor. In a week she will be legally married to Paul. Saturday.
They dropped me off tonight under the green canvas canopy at Joppa Lane and backed slowly up the road to change in direction before driving home. Home. I watch as if they can see me standing here in the dark; watching because that is what the dead do. It is not like sadness though. Mostly, it is watching somebody you love win. It is smiling into a city night sky that is as weak as I am and I'm thinking that this one wrinkle that I made has been forgiven, ironed out with bigger hands of purpose. One thing crooked has been made straight.
After Saturday I alone am WhiteCrow again. In a month I head east with a box that will be the unfinished book under one arm. Alexcia tells me that her father forbids me to take my log cabin that I constructed, then I helped built his barn to work off the materials; forbidden am I to even step onto his land to see it. I wonder who is the elder and who is the prodigal son. Sometimes we all fall down. Three winters have come and gone. Some winters never leave even when the snow goes under ground.
It is good to see Alexcia, and the dogs we shared. The dogs have grown plump living away from the running fields of New England. There are days I think of dating again, but I know this is the time to be quiet inside, and listen. For three years I walked across America, talking to the earth and the wind to keep silence at bay. Now I am in the company of people from time to time, and I just try to keep my mouth still. Spring is kind. Under an open window I lie in my tent and hear what was. There are always things to miss, simple things like the one room log cabin and the sound of rain talking on the porch, the smell of deer stepping on swamp cabbage. Everything is different now.

Nevada Community School

2008-05-09T12:16:00.005-05:00

(Portion of letter re-printed with author's permission.)

Hi, Jesse - I'm at my computer listening to the thunder and rain outside my window and reflecting on our wonderful days together. The children were still buzzing today about you and your message. I was with a group of students who didn't hear your talk but saw you walking in the hallway with your gear. I spoke about you, your dream, your message; they were so attentive. I know they'd love to meet you, too! I promised them I'd get a copy of your book to their middle school library and let them know when it is available. I stopped by Kedra's class after school (the young teacher with the two children who teaches 1st and 2nd grade kids) and she already had displayed the pictures she took (she'll send you a copy). She said she had children write more about your visit than any other experience they'd had this year. I got goosebumps! When I told our principal about the connection the students made between you and their math problems, she teared up. Her comment was, "I don't know where you found him, but I'm sure glad you did. I've never seen the kids more enthralled. He gave them so much hope." So . . . whatever is next, your walk has already made a difference in the world............ once again, thank you for taking the time and energy to come to Nevada, Iowa, and share your journey (both walk and life) with us. Love, Judy

Days move past too quickly. The school in Iowa is already behind me, and I have more faces to miss. If there was one element, one thought that I hoped to give to the Nevada students it was the ability to believe in whatever unique dream that lands on their immature shoulders, blooms in their minds, and the courage to embrace it...no, the permission to embrace it. If I have given hope to even one student, that whatever can be dreampt can be lived, then I am thrilled. I received as much as I recieved. Maybe more. Now with the physical journey behind me, it is easy to forget the pulse of the walk...if I allow time to take its toll and fail to do my homework of writing the book so much will be lost.
There is nothing like a school full of energetic inquisitive students to remind me what really matters. I don't usually run to adults to hear about the magic and passions of life, and to see an electric gleam behind the eyes. Children want to know that Huckleberry Finn is real, and there still is a place Where The Wild Things Are, that the whole planet isn't plastic and domesticated behind barb wire and regulations (that succumb to even more laws daily) . Sitting here all day at the computer is easier Now...because I see more clearly that it has mattered to you.

Last Snow

2008-04-26T06:35:00.002-05:00

What was promised has made the field outside white again. I still sleep in the tepee tent by the open window on white carpeting so I felt the weather coming in, felt the lite down bag begin to work at keeping me unaware of cold falling down. Writing the book is learning new skills, and abandoning trails that lead in circles, over paths I didn't intend to take. For a week I walked around this desk and drew maps holding pictures of where we met. It wasn't until I told an old acquaintance about my journey in three sentences and saw her eyes glaze over that I knew I had to sit down and capture what it was that I experienced before time erased the details and stunted the passion. When we finally realize we are going to die we sometimes become the most worthy of living
Everyday I am with you now as journals are gleaned and poured over and I am so thankful, still sitting on that stripped roof beside pallets of shingles watching dog eared tar paper talking to the wind while you compare your road to mine until we are both longing, and yet know we have chosen our roads well. I can't carry every act or gesture into print and this is some level of sadness, as if you'll think I don't remember your couch and waking to your children staring inches from my face, as if you didn't open your Mexican pantry and tend to me with sardines and hash while your tractor froze to the field.
In a week I go to Iowa to speak to seven classes at a school in the town of Nevada. What is not in print, what you can't know is that you'll be there too. Not a hand is raised or a question taken in that doesn't make me reach back to the time when I was in your town, and slept under your sky. Already I have talked to many schools across America and it still takes me days to come down again. To talk about ones passion is to smile until the face hurts. There will be another journey. For now I cut, paste and remember laughing with Amish children, and the joy of eating a whole coconut custard pie while sitting in a snow bank watching your buggy trot past.

Gear That Made The Grade

2008-04-15T09:01:00.006-05:00

Taking things out of the Dana Design Long-bed external frame pack(CrowDog)it appears to be time to make lists of the gear that earned their keep. The entire blog is printed out inches thick. Pictures fill ten disc's and journals still hold to their dozen tall stack in wait to be tugged and filtered, enhancements and the knife. It has begun.

Katadyn hiker pro water filter and storage sack.(I also used a First Need water filter but changed over after the second filter went belly up in Louisana due to stagnant crawling slithering water. No way to really back flush the sealed system.)

Polar Bottle was a gift in the Sawtooth Mtns. It is a plastic water insulated water bottle with a nipple that can be removed and cleaned then replaced. Nice. Helped keep water water in a frozen tent, and held off some of the inexhaustable sun.

The back of a roadside life vest was cut and sewn into a seat pad for all of those thousands of rest stops where I sat on every nasty, cactus spike as well as snow bank. Priceless!

Snowpeak has been gold to me. I carried a double walled giant titanium coffee type cup that served for every eating task that wasn't consumed straight from the pot, as well as the french press I designed for it. It never failed. One of my truly prized pieces of the walk. I engraved the exterior with a diamond bit and trinkets(old earrings and rings I was given along the journey) decorated the handles. Native art in the most modern/traditional tradition. It was lost for a month early in the walk(left on the back of a gas station tollet).I wailed in a frozen pumpkin patch. Stripped of art and enhancements it is a sixty dollar cup with tax. Have I mentioned that I love it. Even a tooled sterling and ivory lid to keep the coffee hot. That's love.

The MSR fusion two man tent was a bit stout in weight...but it took me in and out of every extreme. I had nearly 2' of snow on the roof at a time and 70mph winds(separately) and it held firm. Even saw me through a tornado...squished but sprang back. 27 people died that day. I had no idea how close I was to joining them. (TN)When the tent just plum wore out I sewed it into a new pack cover. Having a brown tent of pack cover is extremely smart. So often I wanted to become a knoll of sand ..so I did. This tent was my favorite and an absolute blessing.

Small zip pouch with assorted teas...all decaf for evenings around the fire or talking softly to maps, considering roads to hoe, and journaling. A nice coming down after a 25 mile day carrying 70 pounds up a slow grade that never ends.

Separate pouch for water bottle...it stunk but it was what I had so I endured never finding a better replacement. Dana Design. The one I began with died In the searing south. It was perfect.

Evernew titanium deco tea pot. The lid loves to hop up from a good seal as the water heats. I always grumbled over as I shoved it back with scorched fingers..but I really like the pot. The round belly bottom third makes easy cleaning and allows me to fit A lot of food in a small container. Constantly in use. Needs decorating...I'll get on it.

Each yoke shoulder strap has a pouch. Both are nearly white now. They were black. Here is where I put my 82nd Airborne Division patches/and rank. They got my hand shaken a lot, especially in Texas. Nice. The pouches were so nessary, so part of a working system. For toothpaste and a brushing, camera, and lip balm nobody wants to drop the house every time you down a Snickers.

One small Sea To Summit water proof bag. This was a last resort dry bag. I don't think I ever pushed its limits but it always gave piece of mind;vital papers, pictures, sage, bear claws, windproof matches, pack towel,beaver teeth...you know, the usual.

I love titanium but a good fry pan is a must for a pancake junkie so I took a saw to a nice aluminum pot and made a fry pan with a coated finish that loved to make great cakes as much as I love eating them. 8 ounces but love is love. I made the handle out of a wooden carving tool handle, brass tacks and aluminum muffler tape. I tried to walk without it for a few weeks. Boy, those were long weeks of muttering bad words at a too thin pan that burned batter on contact. Out of a pack towel I sewed a cover for my good fry pan. It protected the cook finish...and I could decorate it.

A first aid pouch crammed fat with all kinds of goop and body patches I never used.

A glow in the dark frisbee was my dinner plate. I rarely used it but sometimes I was sharing a fire and offered a dinner. It was nice to pull out my hand carved bear spoon and frisbee...and happy smile wired to my stomach.

Most always a gortex parka and pants. I used a marmot rain coat, and north face pants that were too thin for even the dullest briar.

All fabrics were/are earth tones. Never did I want to advertise my place in field, woods or desert. This military mind set served me greatly...probably saved my life.

A lot of gear I handmade or tweaked beyond the term of simple so I can not fairly say that I used a standard.... Often standard was over produced or wimpy. This is where passion and experience come in.

The sleeping bags changed depending on season. Through out LA. and a lot of serious desert I went without a sleeping bag. In the Rockies I sometimes carried two. (one very light weight to double up with). I only used down. This takes special care. Because this was keeping me alive I find this care to be a small tax. I used primary Feathered Friends -30 sleeping bag and a 20 degree Mountain Hardwear. Both were flawless.

Except for winter hats I always wore a Tilley wide brim hat in cotton or nylon. They are expensive but do what I need and replace for free. The sweatband needs special care or it smells awful day after day in the desert but most people are less a stranger to soap than I was. I just couldn't afford to waste water washing. When I washed a pot I drank the water. On filthy days my legs got one cup of water to come clean. I hate sleeping with my legs sweat/filth welded together.

Though I carried a bug head net it was unness. When the flying devils got too intense it was usually tent time and too @%##!** hot to re-breathe what I just steamed out into a fine mesh head cover at 120 degrees.

MSR makes a folding spatula. Nice. A must have.

Just before the end of the walk I was given a three quarter length Thermarest pad that went through a flood. I got 'let down' by so many inflatables I shrugged that I'd try it. It was the only one that didn't fail. I was sooo happy. I was sleeping on a hard solid Thermarest on feet of snow before that and nights were painfully long. Not good.

Carring a couple of very large clear strong plastic bags that saved my sleeping bag in extreme rain for 2 months straight. Now one seems a smart staple.

A golf umbrella saved me from life as a raisin and rain down my spine...high winds.. forget it. Lost my prize umbrella in Idaho. I walked back up a canyon 8 miles on suicide turns only to see it had been adopted. Gone. It was 500 miles before I got another large umbrella from a kind postal employee. It wasn't a Gust-buster from Brookstone like the one I lost but it was some protection in the land that never stopped raining.

The titanium flask from Snowpeak was a gift in Penn. from Basecamp. I kept it filled with Capt. Morgan spiced rum when I could to celebrate great turning points in the walk and share with special people. Now I can't look at it without seeing the hundred faces that sipped from it. It became incredibly valuable..and will always be.

Basically the clothes I wore was the bark and the dog. I did carry a fleece sweater/windproof, several scarfs, and socks. Nothing cotton. Period. The socks were usually Workwear with Patagonia liners. Four pr. of each. The Workwear socks are similiar to Smartwool but a bit lighter as I have hot feet and size 14 shoes are hard enough to find in West Nowhere.

Gaiters were a constant to keep out stones, ticks, rain, sun and keep socks cleaner. Funny thing is that many people looked down their nose at them. "Why do You wear Those things?" As if the way they asked would have me running for a trash can to dispose them. Never. They work, and work hard. I wore through two pairs. One pair was Mountain Hardwear. They were the toughest. They hide a knife and a gold coin well too. If you have to ask... I am not airport friendly.

The cedar flute I made before the walk and its case did the whole walk. I didn't always take it out( as my playing will attest) but I loved that it was ready to compliment any season or mountainside .....batteries never included. It has similar stories as the flask.

Food food food. A lot..well almost all of my food came from Mom and Pop's dusty shelves across America. Yes, the reporters got this right, I did catch and kill to eat but we're not talking moose here...the other end of the telescope. Couscous, instant mashed potatoes, jerky, dried corn, oatmeal, Bisquick, chili peppers, rice, and everything I could glean from the land. Everything.

A couple of pens, stamped postcards, and scrap paper made up the office. Nothing fancy. Maps of course, and an always present journal by Moleskin, in a cover of beaded buffalo skin I made for the journey that only got more beautiful. Worthy of holding every story I was given.

A small titanium Snowpeak (sierra type design) was the work horse of my kitchen; coffee cup for strangers, pancake batter, mix bowl,and bath cup. Fresh (when possible) coffee beans were crushed in my double walled titanium cup with a stick I cut daily. As wood became less abundant I carved a nude woman out of gifted scrap mahogany. Her name is Latte' and in her hand she holds a miniature version cup. Through years of cook fires and tumbling in leaves and back into the pack she is the deepest brown to black and heavily oiled from coffee beans with a carved feather in her waves of hair. She is very high in caffeine.

Carried are two headlamps. One ties to the pack frame and blinks when the road is hazardous. Petzl is the maker of both and one is fully adjustable...although the blinking when the battery is low is plain stupid. The human eye will overlook a light in the woods. Nobody overlooks a blinking light. From a broken tail light I carved a red filter. That helped.

If I detail this to death I could write all day so I will round it off.My only surviving camera is a Casio 6.o mega pix digital. I love it. Tiny and great. The resulting photographs I captured are super. You'll see. One stove are a titanium Primus the company gifted me (the only company that gifted me anything) that runs on those small pressure gas cans that screw into the stove. At 2 1/2 ounces it is a constant back-up...and in months of rain the only stove I use. The titanium Sierra Zip stove is another item of love complete. I cooked with everything from moose dung to pine cones that fell on my grandparents grave when I visited for tea and thinking before I started walking. The stove runs a very small blower in the bottom of a double wall pan that has holes in it. It is a hot blaze when tinder is set inside and a flame is added. For 90% of the walk I carried no fuel. BLISS! The stove is highly decorated with a sterling war metal from my grandfather, metal tag from the year of my birth, and a silver plate marking the journey across America.

Yes there is still more...but to tie up the bag I will just add the knives I carried. For more than the first half of the walk I carried a Pipe hawk I made before the walk, weapon, tool and pipe I did rarely smoke with sage,cedar bark, and sweetgrass.

I Bartered an old blade and a gold coin for a Jefferson Spivey Cross Country Saber Tooth Knife in Cody, WY to stand off bears with.(designed by a man that rode a horse across America) I'd lose but I'd stand ...and did stand. You only run when there is somewhere to run to. I loved that my index went through a hole just short of the long razor edge so even in a struggle the retention remains. Of course I brass tacked the rosewood grips. Sadly I lost a couple blades, but adopting a few that I was given by friends including a Cold Steele knife Trail Master that was made for an adventure. The MercWorks pocket knife got attention when I pulled it out, and it was all business, truly my intimate knife that was made to gut and skin, set emergency snares, and out survive us all.

With all the laws regarding firearms and state lines I will dance over this last topic by saying I carried what I could when I could. In the south west I found a .22 against a rifle was worthless. Then, that's another story.

New Snow Rising

2008-04-11T18:38:00.015-05:00

Eating a scone, I move to the sliding glass doors that open to the balcony, chew without tasting; taking in calories I am no longer desperate for. Dry swallow swallowed. New snow is falling down, moving through the trees wearing that familiar white lace and pearl gown I used to watch her disrobe just for me. Being inside while it snows, drinking this tea...watching her, this woman of sky, move while unaware I'm watching...I feel like I am with another lover three stories up, yet alone. I am cheating on her in secret and it is only wounding me. I am behind glass standing on white carpet. She only knows that she knew me well more than a few yesterdays ago. She only knows it is spring and we had the last three whole winters together before fingers that held tight, opened. She is a more subtle memory now, delicate, a whisper turned down low and smelling slightly like ice breaking evergreen. Soon she'll be reduced to just this memory note. Who I was has also evaporated, risen up through the ceiling vent to the outside world, up past the yellow, red, green and blue kite abandoned to struggle in the leafless treetops outside this door; a reduction of myself putting everything tied by one strong string waiting on the next passing wind; putting everything into the ink of a pen.
The book gets louder, more demanding. Thank God. I can't bear another brush of soft suggestion. The floor of my room is thirty five maps moving toward a bed I won't lay on. The desk is feathers, a snake rattle, the first moleskin walk journal open, spine broken, and twenty pieces of longing; confessions shaped into bone, an ounce of Canadian gold sewn into a boot toe, silver beads separating claws on a string, and a worn pocket full of trinkets that smells like walking in a humid summer. If I just get it down on paper I can start to breathe deeply again knowing I no longer have to carry this all inside, hands already full and spilling.

Becoming Unplugged

2008-04-03T22:18:00.008-05:00

There was a part of me that was going to give this text up. There is a pile of journals on the floor twelve thick and I haven't re-read a page. They are thoughts digested and I have to chew these feelings now. Why not share the flavor; meditate on the texture, the grain, and try very hard not to swallow until I know if it will nourish me, sour my blood, weaken my bile. Or worse.
How do we come back...really? Crawl up and out of the forest floor trying not to wake the sweet gum tree beside us? Comb the desert and three years of wind and silica from our hair using a brush with two broken teeth (a brush that sheaths a hidden knife)? Pretend ignorance until we forget what we've learned? Do we sit in a dark room until our old distasteful habits call out our name in a voice that sounds like corn husks falling on flagstone and then let the old habits spoon beside us until they smell comforting again like a reason and a cause to regress; and worst of all, they again smell safely familiar? Do we disregard praying for everything and become thankful for nothing because... well. lets face it, we have so much? Early on I believed that I had enough time to figure it all out, to make a perfect peace in a littered skull; sweat out salt until there is no more salt to give my shirt. The few pictures I carried were enough then, a folded dead marriage, an old lover lost, and a grizzly claw stained with my grandmother's red paint, a 14k gold watch whose guts fell out within the first miles of the walk so I glued in a round quarter size mirror where the face was and then rarely looked in it again.
Maybe we will all sit down together when the music stops and there will be enough chairs, and I won't feel this 'ashes, ashes all fall down' feeling coursing through my veins. Time grows comfort.
Today I staked open maps with blood lines running through the heart of each state I walked through and thought that it should have taken longer to the point of cursing the miles I hurried through. In another pile newspaper stories, old but new to me, flattened one another with their weight. My eyes in all the pictures, at least they looked like my eyes, all have 'the look'; a cross between falling in love...and just falling without consideration over gravity's intent.
If the preparing to walk America was important it is even more important to write the last pages.... the long awaited kiss felt round and full. Will the man get the woman? Will the castaway 'get rescued' and leave the island without forever looking back? Now that our character has learned how to travel in time, can he be at peace living in the present?
This must be one of the short comings in living a dream designed by a child, for as a child I never designed in a return. The walk was my Radio Flier, a wagon that could take me away perpetually from sadness to bounty, from neglect(even when self induced)to embrace. The walk was the air in the lungs of Simon Birch; promising myself if I went under the surface of the pond over and over, longer and longer, extending my ability to hold my breath, I would never again have to surface and plead for air. Now I know that all along it was the walk itself that was my home. There was no destination. No longitude or latitude crossed bars setting a cage for me to fall into. When I walked I belonged.

The Morning After

2008-04-01T19:56:00.003-05:00

As I begin to gather and separate I realize I will not carry away everything that has taken place. Everything that has taken place will not live again in the book, for whom could carry the weight? So I write little things; notes between classes that in some way prepare me for the real assignment. Maybe if I were to really talk to you I would never mention the pants that I wore for three years, the dog cuff I made of tooled quarter inch leather and wore to fight roving strays, or the 28 pairs of boots I killed. Maybe I would just talk about the comfort of a good chair, and how special it is to not look out for ants before I sit down, and no longer needing to dust off my pants when I stand. Maybe I would just sigh a lot and you would think I was just tired. I have learned another language since I left you. That means I have gained another soul according to the old men. Mostly I am quieter now having heard all of my conversations as of yet unspoken, and in that I can remain silent a lot more, and need to be right a lot less.
The day after the walk ended I did walk into the ocean. I had to. You understand. I would still be there if I didn't..and then again, that would be alright too. Now though, I am in Minnesota and no longer wet in ice water to my thighs and sticky with salt water over sweat. Even though it is not detectable yet, not to our eyes, photographs have already begun to fade; soften at the edges. That is the difference between yesterday and today and it carries a new pang.
The morning after I went to to the school in Clallam Bay where I was asked to speak for twenty minutes. Hours later I was gratefully still speaking; in the gym talking to the bleachers of faces, standing in front of crowded class rooms and meeting halls and making children giggle in the over-flow rooms as I told them about how large swamp snails tasted like toes. The childhood delight of a month without a shower. With my words I took them camping with no end in sight. With my words I took them to 'where the wild things are' and they all wanted to know what we'd be eating come dinner time.

Evening came in bearing a privilege I will always greatly treasure. Polly of the Makah Tribe helped organize a dinner to honor my journey and the tribe embraced me with freshly caught fish cooked traditionally into a soup, buck skin Indian bread, and wild blackberries over cake and whip cream. The women of the tribe danced the shaw Welcoming Dance to the singing and drumming of a tribal brother and we were all transported somewhere ancient. The elders told BaseCamp(she joined me for the last miles and to drive me to Minnesota) and myself about the old ways, and the strengths and challenges facing the tribe today. As I stood as requested to tell some of my stories I received many gifts to include a homemade drum made from wood and stretched over with raw hide, a tribal sweatshirt, miniature paddle to connect the tribes relationship with the sea, and a string of olive shells beaded and placed around my neck. One of the deepest joys was the nodding approval of the elders as I told of simpler things regarding the walk, the quieting of my heart, my new found relationship with the earth and my survival largely based on the old ways that appear now largely ignored.
Later in the night, when my flute was silent and stories tired, I lay on the floor in Polly's den beneath the wide old growth cedar planks painted traditionally with eagles and long beaked birds, ironing out the days events into terms I could relate and remember. Mostly I lay there and heard my friend Kirin talking her sleep talk over on her sleeping mat. I smiled and wondered if I missed something that kept me from sleeping. Had the Creator given me a sign, a new job and I was too tied up in myself to listen? Surely He would get my attention if He desired it. On the walls above me eagle feathers hang down shining like scales. I know this is where I come from and I can smell the rightness in it, this is my world and I smile without moving my face.

Alone With Your Drum

2008-04-01T16:25:00.007-05:00

Walking the final miles to Cape Flattery was all the rose and thorn you'd expect with nearly three years of walking coming to a conclusion. My emotions were as tender as my feet. No. My emotions were my feet as final miles, laced with gravel, scuffed under me.
It was rumored to be so, but I was still surprised when I got to the Cape and the crashing ocean was three stories down cupping in and out of the cliffs. Untouchable. In the morning I will move around this wall of stone because otherwise tonight the thought of not touching the water would steal my sleep. Tomorrow I will walk into the waves. Tomorrow I will rise and walk into the ocean with the sun rising on CrowDog. Today though, together with a few friends we drink the bubbling glasses of wine and I pour an ounce over CrowDog as he leans against the protective coral of fence that keeps up from falling into the rock and ocean below. CrowDog is just staring at the ocean silent as a stick. CrowDog still looks strong, ready, perhaps a trace disappointed even; as if I had not dreamed a journey big enough for his metal shoulders, as if I had not taken in the width and stability of his frame, or mine, and I kept the sun off his cordova nylon skin through three years of sun only to now let him dry rot away in some tired closet. "Why stop," he asked simply without moving, without mouth, without looking at me. All my inner protests are weak; not protests at all. Looking out at the same lighthouse island, past the same crockery of stone far off, garnished in waves and softened by the coming sleet storm, I too begin to wonder through the sweet flavored plastic smile of my cup. CrowDog carries the last full journal so I don't have to tell him about the book I need to write. No need to preach to the choir. CrowDog whispers so only I can hear,"Then what?" Any answer I give short of walking on I know would have no pulse, no possibility of being believed so I just listen to my half circle of friends as today's miles drain from my muscles. BaseCamp Kirin (changed her name from Betty), Lisa from Thermopolis WY, Stan (a new friend), Polly from the Makah tribe witness the last hour of the walk. They soften the sound of the ocean. They soften the tide roaring in my head. The sound of hundreds of coastal birds looking for a mate stills nothing. Sleet begins to pelt onto my hat and then pushes us back into the woods. From no one direction the settlement calls out. The domesticated yawn of predictable days and weeks already makes requests from far away in a voice I had forgotten but never missed... from far off on the other side of the woods it stretches out. In a couple of days I will be in north central America surrounded by boxes overstuffed and spilling socks and sleeping bags, shirts and parka's, cook sets and trail worn high-lighted maps . I will find your address and write you a letter with missing words because my mind will be running too fast. I will call your radio station and tell you the world isn't flat and you won't believe me. On my bedroll in a tent set up in an apartment in MN. beside a perfectly good bed, walk-in closet filled with my gear, and my own bathroom I will lie on the perfectly flat floor with no pine cones knuckling my shoulders and hear my heart complain. There will be no smell of earth on my hands and I will not hear the rain tapping fingers over my head, or punch out at mice in my sleep. Nothing will be wet in the morning.
Tomorrow I will start looking at pictures to show you, and begin the careful task of remembering...so very afraid I'll forget.

All These Words

2008-03-27T14:42:00.002-05:00

Yesterday is working toward memory but I can still taste it, feel the eagle feather presented to me by Polly and by the Makah tribe, hear the great inner silence that comes internally before any great passing comes up to our feet.
This entry will not be enough so I will write it again, and again until I can set it down, make tea, and step over the distracting smell of clothes that are too clean and begin to carve out a book that kicks fiercely within me. Today I have spent at the Clallam Bay High School talking to one class after another, until I am in the gym telling stories to row after row of new faces and the reach of questions. I am hearing this new voice come out of me for the first time. Today is the first day after the walk. I am talking about bears, showing strings of ivories and playing the same worn cedar flute but this voice, this voice is new. I don't know this me. I don't know this voice, this man. He is braver than I am. He is stronger. He is already trying on new boots and countries between words he speaks, and I wonder about our future, our next road.

Mountain to Blue

2008-03-24T19:54:00.000-05:00

To the left is the Olympic Rain Forest that spoils its rain on me. The ocean comes in between the trees and then it is gone again like the ravens that are always searching. 19 miles of the walk remain. I could walk that in my sleep, and I will.

Port Of Angels

2008-03-22T12:17:00.002-05:00

Port Angeles, Washington

The islands are behind me. Miles remaining are in the double digits. Neah Bay. Cape Flattery. If I could get lost, take a wrong road that would spill me a thousand miles away; call on that part of the brain that makes the lost walk in a slow arch of circling confusion, then I would. This is normal I tell myself for the hundredth time. There is a ship that is coming to make my rescue from this island and I am seeing myself running to hide behind a palm, camping deep in the rain forest to avoid detection, chewing calories slower so I can listen.
Yesterday I saw a homeless man and I dug in my pocket. I ask about his sign, as I take in the sprawl of his belongings that lie scuffed by the Walmart entrance. "Oh, never mind about that. It looks like you've come a long way. A fellow man of the backpack. Bet you have stories to tell?" He is smiling through heavy stubble and takes my money without looking at it, without thanking. Somehow he makes me lonely. Somehow he makes me miss sitting by a river and the thick confusion of trees I often call home. I walk away without saying anything, feeling him staring me down the long grade toward the city.

Couchland

2008-03-16T16:29:00.003-05:00

At Zippy's Java Lounge yesterday Marilyn asks me to speak at her coffee shop gathering scheduled at four tonight. With all my socks oiled with sweat, clothes quickly losing the illusion of clean traded down to a woven dishcloth wrung around fermented sleep and the grimy spittle of a thousand semi's roaring past, I measure distance I need to travel against the memory of dryer fresh socks and a shave. Some decisions decide themselves. I can walk faster if need be. I cannot walk myself clean, and since giving presentations about this walk is already contracted into my future (for which I am thrilled), I embrace the opportunity. Given a couch and a bowl of cut fruit, I am again a guest.
Later tonight I will catch the ferry in light rain, and stare into the evening water that is as black as a crow's eye. It will not be the first time I set camp in the dark on a field I have never seen, or squatted under a small dock where the mud flats wane. So I sip from a blue cup that isn't mine and just let my mind wander back and forward again, carried by some inner tide that looks forward to all the questions, questions that will remind me of all the little roads I never wrote down.

Catching Waves

2008-03-15T13:54:00.005-05:00

In a few minutes I walk to the ferry, set down CrowDog, feeling I have left something undone; a forgotten fire left burning back when wood still took to a match. For a day I have been lost on the coast though unconcerned as I moved miles along a river I couldn't cross. My maps are poor, ignorant of detail, tears folded on tears. Walking against traffic it is easy to miss signs.
Last night I slept under the perfect mouse trap, a fat barn owl that promised to safeguard the remainder of my cliff bars, cheese and jerky after enduring mouse raids three nights in a row. If I do not mention the weather, it is raining. It is a constant;not rude or aggressive, just the sky breathing in and out in a damp cool room.
From here I take in some islands. From here I walk through this vapor coming up out of my coat knowing I will again be clean soon. From here I begin to relax my grip on measuring the weight and longevity of everything I own. From here I see myself with new eyes that are easier on my history, steps missed and stumbled along before this road soften on the edges, back before all these roads walked.
There is a hard apple in my left coat pocket, almonds dry in the right. Even while walking I am sitting down and the sun refuses to tell me what time it is.

Duvall, Washington

2008-03-12T16:28:00.004-05:00

The cadence returns, the click of poles, the pattern of thoughts. Television has taken away my cloak if invisibility. The kind and curious stop throughout the day to take pictures. At C.C's I 'm given the largest mountain blackberry ice cream cone I have ever seen, and plod on down to the library sugar drunk. It is nice to have conversation seek me out on the road. Nice to hear confirmation that it matters, even this late in the game,.. especially this late in the game.

I got a note from a kind person saying that she wished she knew that I was in need for she would have raised money for a tent and a sleeping bag. The gear I have is worn and tired, but I have all that I need...though I am warmed by your concern. The only thing I fear now is weathering the end of this journey, not rain or the last snows of winter, not here, not now.

Sleep comes slowly now so I drug myself walking too many miles, and still the end of the walk keeps nudging me awake. In the back of my mind I weigh the few investments I have made in my old life and wonder how many roads and countries they could purchase. 'Do What You Love And The Money Will Follow' I read long ago, and I believed it then without proof. Now I have proof and I question the constancy of the rising sun. This is my heart love though, and I ache at the thought of leaving it. This is the song I was meant to push out of the pink of my lungs. Yesterday the thought of money quickly came to mind, walking this road north toward Monroe and the islands. In a few steps I found eleven dollars. After all this time, after all of the prayers answered you would think that I would relax the grip I have on the controls (controls that Have no real control) and trust that I will be given what I need when it is time...when I reach the ocean I will receive wings...or be taught to swim. First though, I will be given a computer and a pen, and then I'll take your memory out of a pile of books and listen.

Yes. I miss Roslyn.

*** Please Note

2008-03-10T00:32:00.002-05:00

Although I take great joy in all of these notes along the backroads and small towns of America, this is not the final product, this is not the book. After the journey's end, which is coming on fast, I will be melting all ten journals and all of these blog entrees into a book or two. What is rich will be richer and in color, what is...not, will be set aside and hold onto in memory.

If there is happiness that comes with this walk ending it has not nudged me yet, nor left a promise under the parka that is my pillow. My legs will stop because I have reached the ocean again, because there is a book to write, because I have an old lifestyle to turn into script so I can walk again...and eat without measuring days in my wallet. It has been three years since I have worked for money and not just volunteered, and through this I have lived mostly on my savings. My bank statement is thin but still has some manner of pulse that I now need to blow life into. Already I look at new gear and hear soft music playing as a wind machine lightly blows loose fabric from bolts of gortex and rip-stop nylon, while I inhale the scent of the next adventure. I allow myself this amusement, this placebo of freedom remaining to a walk that's ending. There was a time when I was afraid to begin walking. Now I camp outside the settlement, and feeling insecure I move closer to the trees until I am in night shadow. Still I listen as I wait on sleep. No answers have come yet and I wonder if I should pray for a window or a door.

Wet Moose In My Pocket

2008-03-09T18:11:00.011-05:00

The race is over at The Brick. Hands that feel like mine, and move like those of a stranger push gear down into the floor of my pack. This is the time that I am least aware of the value of socks in zip-lock baggies and the weight of envelopes stamped but addressed to no one. Leaving is many faces saying good-bye all at the same time even though I am alone in this one moment before I am again separated from companions entirely except for my own words blowing back on me, the imperfections of memory, the constant subtle seduction of miles unwalked beckoning me on.
You would think by now that I would be a master at disconnection. I thought I would be like that by now too. No matter how we exercise some muscle groups though they never seem to gain the girth and strength we desire, the speed of reflex, the mass of true confidence.
For three races my carved boat with a paper moose riding solo won clear victories. Then my hand carved maple 'Northern Expo' got caught up at the launching gate while the boat to my right went on to cross the finish line with my boat just beginning to figure out what direction the water ran. Race after race went on without me until it was time to put N.E. in the water again. This would be my last chance.
The death blow to my little craft happened in a great race though. My little craft 'Northern Expo' was blundering about for half the course, front to rear, bow to stern it turned in a little dance, and then, finally, at a start it woke up and slammed the accelerator down, caught a breeze, began to kick all four Flintstone feet. Out of nowhere my little craft raced up on the competition and drew to what looked like a tie from my vantage point just as we hit the checkered spittoon finish line. It was ruled that I lost so I put my wet boat in my pocket and felt a pout come up to my face... then I laughed. It is funny that a 3" boat and a stream of water can regress us to being 5 years old even if just for just a moment. In a few minutes I was rooting for my new friend Marilyn's boat called The Skillet. There was a tie, and another tie, and then victory. A hundred and seventy five dollar victory. I delighted in a celebratory hug and a Roslyn micro brew!
Now there were some of the most creative boats, hours at the kitchen table with paint,glue, carving knives, band-aids flagging primary fingers; all bringing to life some incredible ideas...and then there were wooden drawer knobs and plastic Happy Meal toys, and painted sticks, and a rubber 8 ball tossed into the race. Being a purist at heart I was glad a carved 3" wooden boat won. Since the whole idea of the regatta at The Brick sprang up from drinking a few beers and racing popcorn and wooden matches for the prize of a single cigarette or a local draft, an attempt to kill the taste of Tuesday afternoon boredom, I remind myself it's all for fun. In a 23' long running spittoon that runs under patron feet the length of the bar I guess anything floating downstream in a race is worthy if you have a hundred and fifty people cheering and everyone is glad they're here.

Larry, owner of The Brick, orders our table a round of drinks, shrimp and steaks, and for a little while I am family. Stories move around the table until we are closer, allowed to understand paths chosen and not, what it is like to own the famous Brick; the line of separation is not as wide as I once believed--the line that separates one life from another. Somewhere in my televisioned brain from the 90's I am still doing a series of comparing and contrasts with Northern Exposure but I have new faces now, new stories from people I already care deeply about, and brighten to see on the street.
We always remember how we fell in love with that special someone, the coffee shop she walked across and how all the world filled with perfumed music only we could hear, and to this one crystal foundation we begin to attach our lives, placing each stone hand. Roslyn.

Moose Walk

2008-03-07T14:07:00.004-05:00

Yesterday my friend Jan and I were heading up to Speely Beach when we spot the crew from Seattle, King channel 5 filming on Penn. Avenue Roslyn for Evening Magazine. Part of me wants to approach the three men working cameras and light reflectors. A larger part makes me do nothing, so it is only with a few prompting words from Janet's good intention that I am scribbling out a few details of my walk on a piece of paper and moving toward the men standing across the road from the well known camel mural. After a brief wait while John Curly gives details about Roslyn to the rolling camera, the four of us are shaking hands. Half an hour later I am outside The Brick with CrowDog strapped on and buckled to my back and a big kid's grin drawn across my face with a Sharpie marker.

Tonight on The Evening Magazine at 7p.m. I will have a small spot answering a few quick questions about this transcontinental walk across America. Oh, I pull out all the wrong words. A cold stole my voice so I sound like I ate a sock, and my clothes look like they have just tumbled out of the dryer but it doesn't matter. I am in Roslyn.
The camera rolled as I walked past the Northern Exposure totem pole, away from the camel standing in the Roslyn palms. Somewhere inside me this kid I used to know is sitting up straight and beaming with a thousand new eyes. For ten minutes of filming I am the stoned moose from Northern Exposure walking on four wobbly legs (two are hiking poles), moving past century old facades, feeling nothing but this huge glow in my chest that is leaking out in my expression. Janet is on the sideline shining at me with her camera moving on and off her pretty face. In my head I sense the Navajo children standing all around me, each one moving toward the movie camera toward their own reflection. I smell a thousand campfires burning and the punk of damp wood stuttering toward that burn, Amish families I stayed with are smiling away from the lens but still smiling modestly into their clothes. Cajun music swarms around my head in a small cloud of spiced wasps, as I look up at the long beaked bird grinning down at me from the totem pole, feeling every river I have ever crossed moves in and around my feet. How funny it is that I used to think I could walk across America alone.

Regatta At The Brick

2008-03-05T16:02:00.003-05:00

Saturday is the boat race at The Brick, in a 23 foot running spittoon racecourse, so I am working out my 3" craft design on paper before taking the knife to wood. Ideas are wallpapered in yellow paper stick-ups all over the inside my forehead. It is the twentieth year in a row of the spitoon race, and the reason I extended my stay....the excuse I used to extend my stay. The only race of it's kind in the world in a 115 year old saloon is here in Roslyn. The race lasts until early evening followed by 'The Brick Nautical Ball" at 9 p.m. with live rock n' roll music and dancing. All this plus food and a bazillion people yelling for their team. I don't care if I win.

Six hours later and my bruised fingers hold my carved moose in a bowl of water. Two other creations sit and watch knowing I didnn't pay attention when I read the rules. The moose is too wide. Maybe he doesn't need ears.

Leaving On A Sunday Morning

2008-03-05T14:42:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I took down the sign on Dr. Joel Fleshman's office and brought it inside to dry out before it's rejuvenation, NORTH WESTERN MINING CO. The quarter inch plywood surface is beginning to delaminate into tan ribbon candy. The back structural frame is solid. Years and weather have consumed most of the white paint and black lettering so that it is more like a sign of suggestion than a statement, edges softened like memory. Marianne Ojurovich and her husband Joe own the historic building used in the show Northern Exposure, and they allowed the crew to use the building through years of filming. Now it is Cicely's, a gift store that is set up in the barely altered set interior of what was once Dr. Joel Fleshman's office. Yes, the dismal paint and torn wall paper in dreary sand tone is still there, the same depressing blinds rattle the front door when it is opened or closed...and it is absolutely beautiful to any Northern Exposure (N.E.) fan; and with the snow melting and summer coming the fans and tourists will come back --by the bus load.
As is my nature, or the nature of this journey, I wanted to get beyond the peeling paint and old stories now accurately know by only a few concerning the N.E. years. Within days of my arrivial I volunteer to redo the famous mining company sign and paint the facade of Fleshman's office. The weather slows and stalls the paintbrush with rain then snow and back again as the days begin to get warmer. Quickly Marianne becomes a good friend and we cluck away hours and through days. I sit at Marylyn's desk(the one used in the show) and flip through years of filming photographs taken outside these windows, in these streets and I am thrilled to have this passage, this invitation to share the N.E. years although my arrivial is late; a dozen years since the cameras stopped. Marianne makes tea for us in what was the exam room and taps the play button on the compact disc player. The opening theme for N.E. hums its drum beat and harmonica out to our delighted ears. Boom Ba Ba Boom Ba BA. Stacks of N.E. t-shirts and shining moose coffee cups underscore where we are. Across the street and to the left the camel is still walking through the palms (as on the camel cigarette pack). "People say to me,'oh man, I bet you just about hate that soundtrack from N.E. by now?' And I tell them straight out that I love it, I loved N.E.... this store is my way of keeping contact with those that loved the show too,"beams Marianne through morning sunshine blinking off her glasses at me. I can ask Marianne anything about N.E. and she never tire of my desire to travel back. Joe and Mariannee's son Steve was in nearly 50 shows as an extra and she becomes even more illuminated as if back lit when she tells me about the eposodes he was in. She is a sweetly proud mother.
No longer will I just watch reruns as a spectator when I leave here and so many are to thank. Just as I am now known here, the town shares its secrets and backstreets with me. Though I have no idea where I'll call home after the walk, this town, 'Our Town', already has a large place in my heart that will use its gravity on these feet.
Constant filming, a crew and sea of cast and support crashing in and out of Roslyn weekly frayed more than a few nerves understandably. Not everyone here grins when asked about the years when the series was being filmed here so I listen silently often and I'm allowed to understand the frustrations of not being able to get your mail because they are filming The Running Of The Bulls, or a chainsaw is asked to keep quiet with a few twenties so a scene can make a deadline. I am sure with a half dozen years of fulltime filming in a very cozy town 'the moose' could get old no matter how endearing he is.

Walking Roslyn

2008-03-01T20:17:00.006-05:00

Roslyn has not been just another town. After an interview with the Tribune Mayor of Roslyn Jeri Porter presents me with of pounds of dried meat and several pairs of hiking socks that are gifts from the town. I feel very honored. In another day I have a choice of places to stay, one friendly face after another telling me stories, the town's history, details about the Northern Exposure years, the ebb and flow of prosperity, residents, record snows, and where the mercury settles during the short fruitful months of summer.
Just as a television series has a cast of people, the set location is also an performer, a face that displays the emotions brought out by the lighting crew, season, music, and the actors moving in and out of each frame expressing their words. It would be difficult for me to think of a television series that used a setting more favorably, more inventively than the producers of Northern Exposure did when they put Roslyn on CBS for six years as the town of Cicely, Alaska. Even though the cameras have moved on, the expression of the streets, the tangled jingle of car keys and evening conversations spilling out of The Brick at closing time, the string of pearls under the full moon that is the historic buildings of Pennsylvania Ave(main str.); paint worn down to wind polished wood, the quilt of stone patch cemeteries upon the hill past the Roslyn camel in palm, and the facades of KBAR radio, Fleshman's office, Ruth Ann's Central Sundries, the barber shop and too many other locations to list, these pieces, these fingerprints remain. This town is an loved actor long after the show is over, I can't help but to remember as it worked the camera though much of the make-up has been removed by years, the progress of new town construction moving through the woods, and the unbiased weight of weather and age.

At 2a.m. I am with CrowDog leaning against the totem pole on Penn. Ave. The cold night air moves easily through my thinly layered clothing till my body shrugs warmth against it though I hardly notice. My natural stance has become somewhere just outside comfortable; too cold, wet, hot tired, under fed. It is no complaint, rather the edge on my thinking, my appreciation level over every gift, every blessing. Usually I am in my tent or some form of shelter by this hour; vapor from my breath annoys me by hanging repeatedly just in front of my face so I blow downward as I exhale into the open throat of my coat and untie the flute from the frame of my pack. Behind me, behind the totem pole is a new ugly lumber barn that shines vulgarly of new plywood, disrespectful of its surroundings so I don't allow myself to look there as I move the brass reed on the cedar pipe over the square hole that will channel the air and then I tighten the brain tanned leather that holds the reed and a carved Coyote Oldman fetish to the flute body. My breathing slows and deepens. This is the reason I am here at 2 a.m. This one glass plate of silence waits for me. Lips move over the tapered red cedar end where the New Jersey bear fat has been polishing a glow into the wood from nearly 3 years of rubbing on my right shoulder. Eyes close as the first notes move away from cold toward warmth, a weak puff becoming strength, becomes a current washing between buildings as if they were stones in a river bed. Nobody is on the street. Nobody is listening. This is when the cedar sounds the best, when the prayer has the most power because I am only playing to fill my soul, and all the roof tops and tributaries that lead up, up into the range of snow anchored to stone. I am up against the mural and curling back from glass storefronts, moving around the corner windows where the lighting falls out onto the sidewalk and waits. With eyes starting to open I am walking my gaze over a main street I have seen through countless reruns inside the plastic frame of television. The sound lifts the fine hairs on my neck where I am no longer cold. I am going back farther and then I am there; back before Iris Dement closed the doors on Cicely's last season singing poignantly the sweet sadness of 'Our Town'. The snow banks are more blue in the starlight, the facade of Roslyn Cafe is a hum of red florescent lighting lifting up from the door entry sign blushing the stonework from underneath. My eyes are too weak to memorize a feeling, still they strain outward then retire to close, then peek again. I have walked many of these roads now. I have stood at the fence of Maggie's house watching her porch light remembering, and I have counted the logs of Maurice's cabin then turned down the hill to watch the wavering light from over The Brick. As I put more sound into the air I realize no matter how much I take away I will be leaving more of myself here like these notes spilling away into the sky.

Roslyn Exposure

2008-02-29T01:08:00.008-05:00

It is rare that I am in a town long enough to see the local paper hit the stands with a fresh interview painting my face somewhere upon the newsprint. When I am still on location I am excited, and yet there are the parts of my body coiled in a worrisome cringe; what sentence have I left open for misinterpretation, will three years of walking and writing about it's people be reduced into a 4"x4" frame with all intentions assumed and dismissed.
Jim Fossett from the NKC Tribume was an animated and enjoyable interviewer that hung on my every word, having driven directly to the Roslyn's City Hall across from The Brick to jump on the story. Even with the best of intentions some things get misprinted along the way. This is my journey though, my passion, so I will just clarify some points, remaining very thankful to Jim for his interest in this story.

The article opens up with a note from Ed Talhone, a trails expert at the American Hiking Society saying as many as five people hike across America each year. (What makes someone an expert on backpackers, or hikers that don't follow prescribed trails? As Einstein said, "genius is following your own trail?) Five people may walk across America on trails wobbling from coast to coast taking far less than 3 years ...but I have not walked trails across America or walked straight from A to B. I have walked 8,000 miles of small town America, blue highways, very limited trail use, gravitating toward places that caught my heart and imagination like here in Roslyn, Washington, Louisiana, New Mexico, and the mountains of Virginia where I sipped moonshine and smelled the heady sweet smell of corn mash coming through the trees. I have walked for nearly three years and still I heard about the fat man walking for months to lose weight. I know all about the man pulling the cross and where he was almost beat to death on Pig Alley...because I walked that street alone too. I have never met another man that walked this journey of three years and 8,000 miles with stops no more than a month long, and only one of those. (It was only in Thermopolis WY that I ever stay in one place that long.) Peter Jenkins is the only man I know of that walked a similar trek back in the seventies and I admire that, but I walk alone and it is 2008. Walks of this length are done very rarely, especially with a book of America always part of the original intention.
So, the shape of the walk is more of 'W' which was planned from the beginning, though the details of the walk are made along the way based on the seasons and the people I meet more than anything(although I often seemed to hit the worst of all weather wherever I walked).

I would love to agree that people fed me frequently. This is not true though, I was not even invited into a home until I got to PA. and I started walking in Maine, and most of the open land of the west is just that, miles and sometimes into a week before I'd see a lone ranch house.

It was in New Mexico that I was shot at. Although only once, 13 rounds with a rifle. I still can not hear a car backfire or a hunter shoot without new sweat instantly cold on my brow. My tent was hit that evening with one bullet and I was in that tent two hundred yards out against the mesa and shear rim rock walls without a stick to hide behind and bullets slapping around my head peeking out the tent flap door. 120 miles of empty desert still had to be walked through to the next town, Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Never did I break into anything locked...not even a fence. I did untwist barb wire to get to a windmill water tanks. This I have done many times and would have perished without.

Thank you again Jim Fossett for your time and labor. I talk fast and put out alot of information even when I am being recorded. This is all I do. After three years of walking and working across America I have not earned one dollar. Not One. Though my savings is battered it is this money I earned before the walk that I live on and that provides my food and provides for my needs. To be able to do this walk, to work in your fields, pick your fruit, level the door of your house, shingle your roof AND KNOW YOU, I have given my labor, my knowledge. I talk fast because this walk is the one thing that I know after three years of living it.
I am in Roslyn now and for this I am blessed.

Chest In Snow

2008-02-16T14:32:00.003-05:00

Passing through charming Eatonville where nearly everyone says hello and the rain goes unnoticed. Homes are lively colors and nature moves its hand in and out of yards. The snow in the last pass is behind me now and I regroup. It was an old granular snow that graveled repeatedly into my boots to soak my sock. The road narrowed as the plows loss a hold and the white line that held my route was buried along with the guard rails/
Earlier I gave a completion date. It was written in snow. There is no logic now except I still move under clouds toward a town that is making me work for the knowing of it. Once I either get to the little town of Roslyn, or surrender to lost trails I will give a more accurate date to hit Cape Flattery. This is the walk...the walk takes me.

Fork In The Road(2)

2008-02-12T16:20:00.004-05:00

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.

Winter Unkind

2008-02-08T21:20:00.001-05:00

(** 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.

Walking Down

2008-02-01T15:33:00.000-05:00

Although I climb now into Mount Rainer before again hooking toward the western coast, I am winding down the walk to Cape Flattery on the Washington N.W. coastal point. In approx. 5 weeks the walk will be over except for the last ten to twenty miles to be shared. (Of course this date will be fine tuned as I leave the land of extreme weather for the coast of rain so completion plans can be made.) All are welcome from across America to come and walk this last day(or as much as your comfortable walking)as I take the last steps to the sea. Some have already made plans, and there are those that would love to be there but are unable. I will be beyond thrilled to walk the last miles with those I have met across this country of ours. Even if you are unable to make the distance to northern Washington I will carry names, faces, memories of all of you that have shared your lives and personal America with me. This has been the walk based on a child's dream. This has been the walk of a lifetime.
I will update dates and information as possible.

(Taken from the children's book Paddle To The Sea)

For that instant he looked like his own paddle.
There was a song in his heart.
It crept to his lips.
But only the wind and the water could hear.
You little traveler, you made the journey, the long journey.
You know things I have yet to know you little traveler.
You are given a name , a true name in my father's lodge.
Good medicine little traveler.
You are truely a paddle person.

(As read by Chris in the Morning, KBHR radio, 'Northern Exposure' ep. The Final Frontier / Paddle To The Sea)

Leaving Vernonia (3)

2008-02-01T14:07:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow I leave camp Isakson and even if the weather wasn't this rain, this perpetual wetness, there would still be an internal pang to compliment leaving. Another connection has been made; another valuable bead on a story belt, a belt now heavy with blessings...wealth beyond the value of currency. For a small town two months after a 4'deep flood, shops and homes with a river running through them, Vernonia has been one of the most receptive towns in western America. Standing in front of the town market spoon deep into a can of cold chowder I watch several locals look curiously at CrowDog, preparing to ask the usual spin before placing me and this journey in a box to make them feel more comfortable. The difference in Vernonia is that I am not placed in a convenient four walled container. Bill, proprietor of Cafe' 47, gives me a strong hand embrace and promises dinner on the house that evening, anything on the menu is mine for the asking. A few hours later I am elbows deep in tender wildberry glazed ribs, potato chowder that is both smoke and a ember of warmth lingering on my tongue,sweet peach cobbler and ice-cream that is a pool of sugar rising in steam, and the folding and unfolding of maps with adhesive fingers. A glow of temporary star status emerges as my autographed picture on walk cards is mounted on the wall over the dining table I've engaged for dinner, right beside Buffalo Bill Cody and several native chiefs in all their pre-reservation glory; all within a wall of Americana artifacts.
We are back at the store now though and it is still afternoon. Rhonda Isakson is moving past me fast in route to the thousand tasks that take up a day of a wife, mother, and working woman. When Rhonda asks an opening question at the storefront in passing she applies brakes to her feet, her day; becomes the lady at the well, and feels my thirst in the pulse of my answer. From taking pictures with her two children when she re-finds me at the post office I am given an open door into their home later that evening. Rhonda's husband is Christian, a fireman/emergency rescue worker as well as a triathlete who has shined through many Ironman competitions and understands intimately the rules of engagement, of living within a level of training that never ends. We bond within our first handshake, share an understanding outside of words, veterans that don't have to talk about the heat of fire and sacrifice, pain or isolation. The memory of it is a given, a mutual respect that drapes over into trust. Days here at the Isakson's have passed in five fearfully fast sunsets; the way I am afraid a lifetime passes after childhood is put away, and tomorrow I will walk on having been extremely blessed by my time spent here with Rhonda and Christian, and their seven year old son Ian and thirteen year old daughter Evelyn. Again I am handed a picture of family to move my fingers over and advance my understanding of the internal workings of love and commitment, family and gentleness being strength. Leaving for school, I am asked several times by Ian and Evelyn, "Jesse, you will be here when we get home tonight won't you? You won't leave us while we're gone? Right?"
"I could not, would not with a fox," I grin at Evelyn, and feel that old familiar hand open inside my chest, a hand dropping everything I know. A hand that will gather together again when I do leave, feeling certain I have lost something when walking away comes. Family. Even practiced, leaving is art best left to stronger men. I feel reserve unfurling. The precipitation on our faces is a premonition of the day to come. We have practiced good-byes every morning without getting the stronger for it.
Among too many gifts to count the Isakson's have also provided me with my 28th pair of boots, the final pair needed to complete this walk. The last pair of boots purchased by Chuck and Hanna(his canine traveling companion) on the east side of the Sawtooth Mountains have withstood more aggressive terrain and weather, swallowed more miles than any other boots of the walk. Now, with all the life walked out of them, I am taking off the Tecnica dog covers for the last time, surrendering the old skins into the new shoe box, remembering to pause and whisper thanks. Under rested shoulders I stitch the depression era Indian nickles that decorated the Tecnica boots (and many pairs before them) onto the new Merrell boot insteps. In three sleeps I will be in Washington.

Open For Comments

2008-01-30T14:01:00.000-05:00

So near to the end of the walk, I have re-opened the ability to leave your comments. Please use caution if you are asked to open a letterhead or go to another site as there are predators in the system that peddle their perversity even on blogs. This is why I shut down the ability to comment months ago.

I have missed your voices greatly, your encouragement, your point of view and wisdom. Welcome back. I do hope that this window to the walk can stay open so I can hear from you, your world, your voices from America.
Remember I am of course just walking and use primarily libraries to update. I do not have the ability to police this blog constantly. Thank you for your comments in advance. Soon the blog and all ten journals will be made into a book complete with amazing photographs of this great land and people. Until then, these are rough notes from my world to yours.

(All personal letters are still best e-mailed, or snail mail.)

Mountain Waking (2)

2008-01-29T17:09:00.001-05:00

(Vernonia, OR / 40 mil to Washington)

Most of the rain has been traded for snow leaving me to wonder if it was indeed a good trade. Nights move back into the 20's with a promise to fall colder as I continue climbing into the Cascade Mountain Range once again, this time toward central Washington to before mentioned Roslyn. Strangers warn me with big honest eyes, and then tell me twice, "Roads shut down this time of year Airborne. The snow they get up there will close you down too. Got snowshoes?" I squirrel food away in every recess of my pack, stretching pockets hidden inside pockets knowing I'll forget it and in that temporary loss is the trick, the Snickers bar I didn't know I carried eaten at 2am; re-learning what the previous winters have taught my fingers and heart, again the curling breath before me becomes the only company I keep, the only voice I have to step into.
To save weight I have left my large Sabertooth knife in Corvalis, zip wood stove I have also retired as dry twigs are part of past roads and drier forests. Memories now. I miss these old travel companions in a depth that would sound silly typed out. Still, missing is missing and evening camps with trips out into the dark unknown toward the sound of a river I can only hear in this world of moss and weeping forest growth makes my hands feel clawless and blunt. I depend on fuel tanks now and the stove the employees at Primus gave me as a gift when I was walking through Lander WY, a titanium 2 1/2 ounce dream of cooking perfection. Flawless. A four inch auto-blade is my only sword. Still, I ache to smell cedar smoke cupping up and around my face, the conversation of evergreen twigs giving up their stored sunlight, the turning of batter into hot cakes and searing the gift of an occasional elk steak.
On a back road outside Otis, a road I didn't mean to take, I find yet another bull elk. He is a huge mighty animal that broke against a car then took his last crippled walk into the woods. At near midnight with lite rain falling I am straddling the bull with tools I have made from blow down hardwood. Osa's blade circle cuts the skin around twin quarter size ivory upper teeth. With a round river stone for a mallet striking against a wooden chisel one ivory eventually wobbles free. Using all of my strength I roll the bull to the other side to again saddle it's shoulders. Tap tap tap. Wet faced I look up into the rain of night peacefully sighing that this is what I have become, this living in two separate times, an older time and occasional steps into the present; always the ease of old ways lovingly pulling me back from an edge I was never comfortable at. In an hour a small tent will be set across the field where I will sleep indifferent to the smell of a fresh kill and the likelihood of bears. In the morning I will step outside to a golden eagle chirping his exuberant thanks for opening the hide to his beak, his hunger. He'll hop about our find as if his painted feathers fanned open wide can cover 1600 pounds of elk until he is done feeding. Over a morning cup I will smell the slight stain of black red on my fingers even though they were puddle washed before sleep until they lost the adhesive quality of blood. In a pouch I count out twelve ivories; ancient power and currency to the Crow people...the part of the elk that survives decay when all other form of bone and flesh have gone back to the Maker. I tie them together, small skulls among red and silver beads; count them through my callus fingers without a need for numbers.
It is darker now; the three inch blade under old brown ivory handles working silently. I curl my fingers back because I will not feel a cut until morning dries and opens my skin, skin too lazy to bleed its own blood. Two trees away a raven complains in his sleep, "Kruuup," then returns to silence. The sound of ocean or of far away wind, or both, travel fields of marrionberry thorn and fat swollen bunch grasses, willow and adolescent bearded pine to tell me what they know about not being able to settle, to sit down in a forest and just let the leaves of autumn rest. Sitting on the elk that grows colder and now pulls my heat in, I palm swipe my knife clean and wonder if I am just circling mountains with no desire to land by this walking once again away from the ocean.
Walking toward Roslyn I listen hard with mental hands behind the backs of my ears because I have asked a question just before sleep and know the answer will wake me when it comes.

When Roads Break

2008-01-29T00:17:00.001-05:00

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.

Finding Frame

2008-01-22T13:38:00.001-05:00

Cape Kiwanda,Oregon

As I have earlier mentioned,it is the road that measures my feet and molds the trail ahead, inspires or rejects in something as simple and subtle as the pivot of a toe. When I pass the production site of The Burning Plain I stop to ask about the distance to a store, a coffee shop where conversation can sit down outside the reach of the weather. I mention that I am considering Walking through Roslyn, Washington(although at the time it is a weak thought)as one of the last adventures within this walk--and that it is far from a certainty.
I am talking to Joe Solberg and several men that are moving in and out of motorhomes and tractor trailer cabs, part of the movie set's transportation crew. As we talk about the miles, nameless towns, states less friendly, and crazies under my belt I learn that Joe Solberg worked support on Northern Exposure, all 110 plus shows produced in the six years beginning in 1990. A N.E.(Northern Exposure)photo book appears and I am verbally taken behind the scenes, introduced to the cast, told where they now and given sketches in words on the land I will be walking through...Roslyn, Washington...Cicely, Alaska. Each question I ask helps to form the next until I am afraid that I am eating too much of Joe's ear. Joe is as patient as he is kind; his smile is inexhaustible. It is hard to learn too much about something we love. We take a few photos together, talk about what really exists in Roslyn, chug bottles of designer spring water in rectangle bottles, and I learn that John Corbett (Chris in the morning,KBHR,) is in the production being filmed a few hundred yards below us on the coast. It has been twenty two years since I have worked on a movie set, throwing football with the famous between takes. A hundred dollars a day was good money then. I would have done it for free. Standing on the tarmac pull-off next to the motor coaches I feel the familiar pine return; the want to be where energy is created, a place where a person can become anything or anyone...the knowing that a I don't have to stand in the center of the fire to feel an inner glow radiate outward.
From Tillamook I'll head northeast, back into mountains and snow. Nearly thirty feet of snow fell in the pass just after I walked out of the few feet on Tombstone Summit. With this knowledge, I turn back in to what I know. Kit, the travois that I pulled through over half of America is no longer tied to my hips. Again I will sleep with the full weight of the cold. Meal time will often pass without exercising my mouth and I may again resort to eating sticks of butter to stay warm. Regardless of the saturation of my boots I will grin past the the deep ruts worked into my shoulders as I trek 75 pounds of support in external frame CrowDog and head toward a road, a town that reaches out to me.

Touching Waves

2008-01-15T18:33:00.000-05:00

Last night's camp was in an abandoned privy on the western border of Toledo. The storm was swallowing down town and turns in Rt. 20 with a big mouthful of water and I was walking blind just waiting for a semi to take me under its wheels, a distracted car to take me out in a wide turn. The defunct restroom outside the boarded up business called me back forgiving my revulsion. Covered in a rich deep ivy, door splintered, two toilets taken from the floor leaving rusted cast iron throats spilling up through the floor, a floor on it's way back to earth, it was haunting at best. There have been worst camps, rats included. They have been few. Choices were spent now though. On a plastic sheet I carry as a tent footprint I lay a sleeping mat and forbid myself to roll over and breathe only if I had to. The storm increased changing its medium to ice then back to rain. Spiders came down the wet walls and a rank smell of decay crept up and over me. Still, feeling safe I relaxed into something like a smile although more like a fist relaxing.
When morning came the sky had calmed to a sprinkle. Dancing Bear was visited again, coffee shared while I was interviewed by two radio shows and set up stories to be done with the Newport newspaper tomorrow.
Even though this is not the end of this journey or the last miles, I did step my wet feet into a wave as I trembled joyfully over a goal walked toward for a very long time. Tonight I will find a better camp and peer out over the ocean as I did in Maine so long ago. Tomorrow I head north toward the end of a dream.

Seven Miles To Waves

2008-01-14T17:15:00.000-05:00

Toledo,OR

Rain falls sideways, shoved by the unfatiguing arm of the wind. In minutes my legs are soaked shingling water into my boots that aim to never dry. Again rain, though variation on a theme. Yesterday was my first sunny day in a month dayly watering. At first the sun made me flinch the way a laugh does after a long sadness, the squint of it erasing cloud. Now in Toledo I stop in at the Dancing Bear Bakery/Coffee Shop to hear words spoken in a new voice. Over a bowlof chicken soup and a hot cup of house joe I give up stories while trying hopelessly to memorize smiles and the perfumed talk of women, Jodie and Shannon, two tables away. Only now do I realize that I am a song catcher of sorts, gathering cords knit into new stories so that you the reader can be here inside looking out at water falling hard against glass while you spoon noodles around and around in a bowl, temporarily shielded from this rain moved by wind while two women I will probably never see again open their unique voices, stamp their finger print of town and family just for me.
Two blocks away at the library I receive a bag of food from the Dancing Bear via Shannon so I won't go to bed hungry. She is wet and wind swept though she shines like a rumor of sun,"I am so glad I didn't miss you. If you weren't here...," Shannon's eyes are electric. I feel them as much as see them. She is gone back into the rain before it dawns on me to hug her,; to offer up some gesture that she matters, that this matters. I am staring at the computer and the clock and the computer screen, Just outside of camp I will sleep between fields odf water. Tomorrow I'll walk back and say thank you properly.
Thousands of miles after a sow bear gave me her claws to carry on this walk I still see signs that we are connected, and 'the bear' is still carved on my spoon, still watching out for this traveler. The Dancing Bear...how perfect.
In two hours of walking wet I could reach the ocean. It is not the way I have seen it. Under a bridge without a name I will make morning coffee from rain and pack up the kit that has seen me across America. Tomorrow I will put a foot in the Pacific
Ocean and turn to walk north.

Leaving Travois

2008-01-06T15:28:00.000-05:00

** 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.

Corvalis, Oregon** Season of Rain

2007-12-31T15:45:00.000-05:00

Outside The Beanery coffee shop a rare blue sky stutters into being. It has been raining since...I can't remember the last entirely dry day. All is creek to river, bog into swamp grass, the constant dripping into a world of forests carpeted in moss in every color plate of green. The tent that has seen me through most of North America, a tornado, bullet holed in New Mexico, beat upon by drunks, and draw upon as if they were walls of a cave on those days when feet of snow locked me within my humble shelter has gone to the knife. The MSR Fusion2 four season tent, a tent I would buy again in an instant, is now sewn and seam sealed into a brown rip-stop waterproof pack cover for CrowDog, and pouches to keep gear dry. The art of all things being open to becoming something else preserves my wallet and exercises my mind. In truth, the journal pouch, roof vent for a previously purchased one man tent I used just a couple months in Mississippi and Louisana (and will now carry to the end of this journey unless I find another MSR), and a personal rain awning that mounts to my Dana Design external pack frame(CrowDog)so I can sit in a waterlogged field and write and eat with food unpuddled. It is my way of not saying goodbye to a tent that has preserved my life. Goodbyes are stacking up now. It is in my breathing, th altered cadence my heart; a subtle tug of knowing I am leaving something important behind, Kit(the travois that I pulled sine OK) will travel no further. The security knot of self reliance that I girdled myself with begins to fray. Towns that were once a week apart will now offer up hot soup within a days walk. Conversation will begin to look for me.
For a week I have lived with Dave and Jeni Wells-Whitney whom I met in Bisbee, AZ ten years ago. At that time I was living in and traveling the southwest in an Airstream trailer. Jeni and Dave were roving in their VW bus and settled into a camp beside my silver bullet. In a short period of time we braided our lives into a gentle rope that has maintained through the years by notes, phone and letters. Just as Walton's Mountain was built into the sketch of the walk so was eventually arriving at the Wells-Whitney door before I wandered to the Oregon coast.
Meals have been rich and uncounted. The hollows spaces between bones begin to fill, sharp ridges between my ribs soften. Nightly we watch Northern Exposure re-runs for the first time on VHS tapes and our delighted bodies are cemented excitedly on the couch like children. I think of walking through Roselyn, Washington where the series was filmed fifteen years ago. I think of walking without ending. Relatives have been warmly introduced, and hands of Dave and Jeni's friends have found mine, removing yet more strangers from the world. There is a great pleasure tied to being introduced to the friends of those we cherish. In this world of great music and souls truly alive yet lost in the sea of living on a globe seven billion strong I am given the hands of those that have been winnowed from the masses with love;songs that I may never have heard on my own and this alone is a reason for celebration.

Oregon Blooms (second draft) Sweet Home

2007-12-21T10:24:00.000-05:00

"They'll warm to you, especially when you get to Sisters." It's the first voice I've heard in days and I am drunk on it, heady and slow to process. Even the sun is worn from a full day to mount one summit and it drops off early into a canyon of trees. Days of climbing with my head horse bent under a heavy burden have worn into me. I don't unsaddle my pack except to a give a gift then re-harness tossing my head from left to right as I cinch straps snug. This late in the day it is cruel to myself to set down CrowDog, and then once again shut down the lightness racing to my limbs by shouldering weight again. After a few more turns in the road lies a bed on stone and moss waiting on snow, waiting on me. My eyes are already combing the woods for it. Just shy of summit I'm crossing over I meet a couple with new backpacks half the size of mine and hanging far too thin. Its not enough, not here. It is clear that they'll be needing to hike alot on their thumbs if they want to reach their intention of the east coast with a world of winter weather shouldering in. Digging into my pack I find a large size Snickers bar. As I hand it to Rich and Linda, Linda's hand is out like the hungry mouth of a pup. The gift disappears into a magicians pocket I never see as her eyes, embarrassed by their own unknown hunger, come back up to mine in a soft expression of thanks that I except with a softing of my face. Her eyes fall to her hands and then the earth we stand on and rarely rise again. We all carry different scars. Gently I move my attention to Rich. My eyes shake them both down and their lack until I want to share my camp and the food I've pulled over mountains and through miles of uninhabited forest oblivious to weight and distance. Linda appears new to trail sign in the eyes and can't read intention. When her mate asks her if she'd like to set camp with me her vote vetos the thought. In a few minutes her vote has them walking away, plodding into the increasing cold and darkness that is ushering dampness around us fast, chilling sweat into dull knifes held flat against our spines, even a promise of better food fails to seduce her company, her conversation. Without intuition I would never feel safe out here either.
"Yeah, There's hard people to the east of this state but your heading toward people that will get you and dig what your doing. The people only get friendlier heading toward John Day, Prineville, and Sisters, all nice people. After Sisters...," Rich smiles,"No worries." Rich squints over the cigarette he is rolling, spitting a thread of tobacco he has licked free and again licks the thin paper and pinches his bronze fingers against his mouth into a roll. There is a truth about Rich, the scar from his forehead running down over his right eye into his cheek is like a line of red paint washes off with rain. Somehow it makes him regal and intense as if he is a shaman crossing mountains on a pilgrimage and only drinks rain and eats meal cakes cooked with trees hit by lightning. He is an old soul and we speak more with what we don't say than we do with what we do. The last of the day's afterlight showing silver in his long hair is as if inner light leaching out. He is brave wearing his hair lose I think to myself; a pistol in church. My hair is in a knot on the back of my head long unfed and broken after three years of starvation and sunburn, wind and the fraying caused by cracked fingers working a tangle free into wind while sage bush brushs my face with its easy 'everything is alright in the world' smell. I carry this top knot to remember the old ways. I carry it out of habit, and hope. It is a flag I won't be flying, but fold every morning in triangles and release into the wind at night in camp when I am with one with the wild things and hair is hair. Long hair has power in society, in the settlements of the settled. My not understanding this doesn't make it less true. It is a sign that I'm not totally broken, domesticated, an uncertain wildness remains making people nervous like the ink in my skin that is arrows and direction, force and restraint, old and never ageing. Rich and I talk until our feet begin to chain step in place the cold that is pooling beneath us. Linda is silently tucked into herself, hands wrapped in hands, never mouthing more than thanks and goodbye in soft breaths, and even then uses no volume. Rich rolls another thin smoke as I begin to move from their post on the guardrails with the smell of a sulfur match strike still moving toward my head like a thought unopened. Stepping from conversation I am moving from a good fire back to a cold I hadn't noticed before, not like this. I move alone into the mountains toward Rich's truth about kindness coming where little has existed, and hot tea I promised my hands they could cup around as the drapes of the forest closed around me for the night.

**

It would be a long list to detail all of the reaching out that has happened in the last days, weeks. The concern of the men D.O.T. plowing the mountain from Sisters to Tombstone Summit constantly kept me alive in their mirrors, outside the teeth of the slushy nashing of tire chains moving over mountain ice that once was tar, gifts of hot chicken and eggnog from David as I crawled from my caves of snow and brown nylon, escaped yet again from ice fields of rain over new snow over a foot deep as I descended into a new world of water constantly falling, collecting, adding weight, burden, a saturation no fire could consume. We stood in half circles, these plow drivers and myself, on pull-offs kicking stories with our wet boots until we were all adventures in a better season of bloom, all walking, all hunting elk, or moving through South East Asia, panning gold in Alaska. My pockets collected phone numbers, addresses, future plans to prospect in the fiftieth state, ideas bigger than the now dominant yearning for dry socks and for a sleeping bag that remembers to loft. The mountains gave up great friends and time to begin to ease down into the idea of the walk ending, down through all of the faces that have shown me their personal America and a slow sinking feeling that I soon will not be living this dream, this one wonderful slice of being.
Yesterday a green pick-up found me in the rain by mile marker #35. Two ladies from the Sweet Home School District No. 55 Transportation Dept. had been asked to retrieve me for a big Christmas meal at their main building/motorpool in town. With a comical pair of grins from tow laughing ladies that promise to return me to my location after the feast we headed for the absolute insanity of a room full of platters of steaming hot turkey and ham, all of the fixings, cakes and pies, fudge and sweets, and ...best of all, a literial pool of smiling faces all eager to talk, share, laugh and take me in like the saviors of norishment that they were. From town a reporter came with his pad and questions. Cameras flashed and talked their digital language. A hundred hundred questions were answered while I felt a roundness in my stomach, in my heart that I have not felt in a very long time. If a room can be love then I was in that room swimming from face to face, boyant in the silly joy of signing copies of my picture, and the constant reminder that these steps walked, all of these steps and stories, these faces, these inquisitive bright faces, everything that I had survived and been so blessed with...in this ending of the end to come in northern Washington matter. The Oregon that I saw in my mind's eye has found me and comforts all that has worn thin and is wanting.
With Cherl and Roger I rest for the night, fogged over with more food in my belly that I usually eat in a week. I am stranger but known, warm and dry and held close with every word spoken. The ladies from the transportation motorpool come to visit with excited faces. Walking through Sweet Home two young boys that look like my brother Steve and myself as children approach me as I walk into Sweet Home under my own power after being returned to where I was picked up. "Did you really walk America," a stunned boy asks through a face that tries to take in distance and time. Turning to look at them my heart melts into memory. In esy words I talk about bears and wolves, mountains and deserts, being empty to become full. Three busses go by and hook profusely. A seductive lady pulls up in a car and as for my autograph and the boyss gasp,"Everyone knows You. We have never met anyone famous>"
I sign cards for the boys with a warm face shining in memory, "In a few miles I will be a stranger again."

This is hurried writing, crude poking at words with a stick but I have miles to get back to so I can arrive in Corvalis under my power to see my friends Dave and Jeni. I will lose the trovois there. Many warm clothes will be set aside, their task completed. What was my sword and sheath, bear spray that only sprayed me, a pile of trinkets gathered and prickling with stories will come to rest in Corvalis as I prepare CrowDog (and myself) for the last four or five hundred miles of walking across America.

Sisters, OR

2007-12-13T18:06:00.000-05:00

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.

Into The Cold

2007-12-10T13:41:00.000-05:00

Prineville, Oregon

The stack of postcards and letters are placed in the mailbox, flag up. It feels good to reach back to faces and families I have walked away from; to affirm that they mattered, matter, and like Jessica Monday's gift of a thin red string she tied to my pack so long ago, I write to keep the string strong and avoid floating off into space from all those embraced.
"Jesse, before you go will you bless me," asks Rev. Janet Warner in gentle morning voice as she steps onto her frosted porch where I am saddling up to the travois and pulling straps snug on CrowDog? For two days I have been the guest of Janet and her husband Dan on the northern hill of Prineville. In all of my miles I have prayed blessings on many that have lightened my load, even if they just smiled. It has always been a whisper I quietly offer up into the miles of in between. This is the first time I am asked to bless and I feel a warm glow of energy come up from my chest though 30 degree air is moving into my clothes, emptying my pockets of wood stove warmth. I am honored by her request, and feel like I should close my eyes and talk softly, but of course I don't. My mouth stutters to a start before the feeling settles down. Janet saw me walking 16 miles out of town while she was busy heading west in her sedan days ago. The roads she drove became slick miles past my rest point so when she gave up her plans and shehe returned to talk to me. This is rare out in this open land...nearly unheard of by a woman. "I saw you walking earlier, and your load...I began thinking, surely this is a man with a story." Janet beamed up at me with her light energy spilling out the car window. Walking slowly to the car after setting down the can of ice cold hash I'd been eating in bliss being desperate for fat, my knotted leg mussels took me to the road. My story tumbles out effortlessly now so that no longer do I have to listen to my own words. My eyes are on a raven asking to glean from my lunch. Inside my shirts the sweat turns cold. After a few minutes I am offered an overnight at the Warner home some 16 miles away and it is afternoon. Not today I think to myself. At first I wonder if I will ever push in the phone number because I know nothing of Prineville yet. Food, washing clothes, the usual taxes wait to be paid. Thankful for a contact and a warm hand in mine saying a kind good-bye eases legs taking me back to sit on the earth and rattle the can with a spoon.
The miles do take me to Janet's home, shared meals, all of my needful tasks accomplished topped with two nights sleep indoors. My heart receives the spiritual conversations I hunger for like sweet fat. New friends enter my life, to include Cindy who blesses me with a gift bags fulls of treasures to eat on my journey, Smartwool socks and the platter of treats she created to polish my ribs with joy. Wow!
Will I bless You? Janet is the woman at the well, the land owner that calls in a fattened bull to be dressed for my arrival with overflowing dishes of sweet breads perfuming the air. I tell her this and how I pray for all that she has to bloom, to be enriched. Words sometimes crumble on front porches as I reach for straps that giggle and run behind my back while I turn and turn after them. In a land where I walked tired and alone I was given warmth and prayers. I will bless Janet and her home as I walk the road to Sisters. My words will be honed in my fingers as roads move under step, knowing through all of my troubles I am being lifted up, comforted and have never...never been forgotten.

Prineville, OR (pop. 9,990)

2007-12-08T15:14:00.000-05:00

Awaking to snow and the smell of cedar coming up from my layering of four shirts, I pull out from down comfort of my sleeping bag to the sounds of geese on the lake below. Pancakes are in my minds eye. I grin and squint at the first rays of sun in days. The campground is closed. It is no matter for I have no car to stall at the gate. My brake light that come in the evening is only a thought that says 'enough', 'rest'. It is too cold for the old ladies to walk their miniature dogs through the park and pucker their faces at me. Winter camp is free camp. This is the good fruit of winter coming down.
My legs moved fast to get here, away from Mitchell. They always move fast on their own accord when they have been slighted or worry; when they are running miles of rusted barb wire that is still as sharp as the signs, the never ending signs that have the words 'absolutely' and 'keep off' shoved together. One sign printed it out clearly on an old tree,"If you step on my land for anything in the next eleven miles I will have you arrested and fine you the max. by law $7,ooo. AND, I own the next eleven miles...both sides of the road. It was afternoon when I came to this sign. Picture Gorge just was completed in winding turns of sleet that bit the face and now the rain and wind were just reeving up to a hammer to make Oregon and Washington Coasts national disaster zones. I slept in a water ditch 4" deep on miniture islands of bunch grass and my foam pads, if I can call it sleeping. The compressed folded and released my tent over and over with me in it wearing earplugs. Big rigs blasting by on a road 2' away hitting me with a drumroll of slush. The food I bought in Mitchell in a store that has been a store since 1875 sold me hotdogs that expired 3 weeks ago, and bread that was a week past death and tinder dry. I tossed the other cartons I bought to save weight so I consumed some of the rotten food before I felt the knots enter me, spoil in me, and then I ran to every bit of sage brush with a white flag of toilet paper waving desperately behind me.
In Mitchell the postal service didn't like the name WhiteCrow, or the idea of a man walking across America, so the postal inspectors opened the box from Basecamp and sliced open all the zip-lock baggies of homemade peanut butter and oat cookies with a razor blade...then without taping their inflicted wounds, they re-taped the box. The large envelope from Lisa in Thermopolis, WY recieved a whole new large postal envelope after the labels were cut off the old, reapplied to the a new postal envelope before putting my now sliced open zip lock baggies of walnuts her mother included in the parcel for me...because we all know how much walnuts look like pot. Of course again nothing was taped up or any explaination offered. Some towns just don't pan out.

John Day /All Is Snowing

2007-11-27T17:43:00.000-05:00

This note will be short as the snow is taking the mountains, mouthing down the trees. Darkness is not far behind as all the air is already a silky silver. Thanksgiving did bring turkey. (Long great Story)The mountain passes did spank me with black ice to walk up peppered with God given small gravel that gave me the only purchase. I have been frozen and thawed, and it has been beautiful; a healing to my soul to be lost in trees again hearing a bear woof, witnessing the low flight of golden eagles touch across the fields then circle back to question this intruder.
My old parka just arrived in the mail and another mole skin (journal) arrive for this walk to fill...number nine. Lisa sends gifts from Thermopolis, and a box from BaseCamp so I stand in the snow with all my bundles eating nuts, and a foot long Slim Jim is dangling like a melted cigar from my chapped and cold broken mouth. In the store a pretty lady with a new French manicure catching light, and a perfume that kept nudging me closer asked me if I needed money. I just smiled, melting with the snow on my shoes. She smiled the way they do in movies for just a moment letting me take her in. "I need nothing."
Oregon moves past too quickly. I want to walk slower; to breathe and re-hash a few thousand miles of this trek onto more journal pages but when the trees thin nobody wants me in their field, nobody wants me peering into freezing creeks that run a white line far off into the bluffs touching their land. Here I have been told to get off land 'a friend owns.'( a major first). Here I have have had to pray to churches to flatten a patch of grass under stained glass light just to get through the dirt fields and cites around Ontario. I would write that I have seen hard miles. It is better to write that it makes my heart tired to be unwanted day after day. A very friendly state trooper stops to share the chill in the air,"Yea, there's a land issue here. They still have trouble with irrigation rights, and it doesn't help to have occasional pop shots taken at the cattle. We have an epidemic of barb wire fences. Up ahead...it's best to ask." (comments outside the town of Vale, Oregon.)
"You sure it wouldn't mess up your whole day just throwing you and all your rig in my truck?" He is holding the side door open with his huge smile leaning into the warmth waving out to him, knowing my answer is no and it pleases him to know I won't fall down.
"No, I could never do that. Not this late in the game. Never." I grin at him from under my hat. He's easy to talk to and the sincere warmth of his company is rare.
In all the sharp tongue towns, each of them, there is someone stepping forward to lighten my load, someone like the lady who had just lost her husband to death, "I was driving and just praying for some light, something good, something I could do. God said,'see that man walking, help him." The lady circled back and handed me some money and told me she thought I was and angel. I assured her I was just a man. Half an hour later the lady came back with groceries had purchased back in the city earlier, "Money isn't much good out here," besides Midge said,"I think you are an angel." Slowly Midge drove away, tears smearing the road as I sat on gravel to chew, to write. My bank ATM card had just refused me because the code numbers changed at my bank and I left town with only a little food and a whole lot of road. I was walking slightly worried. Some dark areas I walk through are to acceent the light.

Leaving Idaho

2007-11-14T14:51:00.000-05:00

Payette, Idaho

It is funny odd to leave my world without clocks to enter a town and have a minute hand set on everything; an hour on the computer,lunch break for the post office employees, and meet with the press before they close for the day. It makes me sigh to be back walking the white shoulder line heading west. The further I get from a town the greater the silence and richer the rewards. The tent calls my attention to a creek on the far end of a field where raccoons roll over stones while working their mouths excitedly before they eat. Eagles circle the treeless roundtop mountains near the horizon until the setting sun makes them pink, then black. Eat when hungry. Sleep when tired and it is dark. And walk. Just walk.
I have saved one ounce of Captain Morgan spiced rum for over a month just for the border of Oregon. In a few hours I will be crossing the state line and grin till it bites deep under my ears. Miles have gotten harder. I take that back. I have worn thin. The cold comes up through the floor of the tent to pull at my bones and all my padding; flesh and closed cell foam has shrunk to skin. Without time to rest, or enough food to charge the machine I am in a constant state of breaking down though I will not stop...nor is there a place to. New pains move through out me. I listen, note and work around the twinge, the numb loss in range of motion that comes and goes in my right hand, a new graviety pulling inside. No longer do I tell myself, my bones and joints, that we have to hold on, we have a whole country to do. Now it is an easy kind approving voice,"We've done it, you've done it. This is where it all comes together. This is where we meet the water. This is the conclusion you saw in your mind's eye thirty eight years ago. You've done it." You can beat a dead horse but it probably wouldn't have died if it was told it mattered. Some times now when I stop under a tree or lone shadow of a broken barn I just breathe. In this way I hope to keep walking, and heal.
Tomorrow I walk into Oregon.

Oregon In Daze

2007-11-06T13:53:00.000-05:00

Maybe you'll hear me as I cross the state line into Oregon and do a celebratory dance to rival all other state line dances that came before. It will not matter if it is snowing, or if freezing rain is plotting its way in rivulets through the layers of my clothes, adding weight to my pack. I will be in Oregon in days.
Washington will be the last state I'll walk across in the lower 48 yet it is, and always has been Oregon that has put the shine on the last months and miles. Maybe it is some of the stories from the Oregon trail, a trail I too have now walked some days on. Maybe it is the dear friends that live in Oregon I shared the idea of the walk with so many years ago that I now feel their added strength pulling me across these last miles, these last states. Maybe it is the ocean with its patient tide calling me coastal, calling me over last mountain ranges and some of the less than comfortable camps. Could it be my own heart sighing at the thought of being still, feeling that deep inside where all things go to sit and ruminate, sit and settle I have been shaking the globe to see the snow fall in a cabinless field for too long? There does come a tired that a night will not put a pillow under and heal.

Fire On The Mountain

2007-11-05T18:22:00.000-05:00

Crouch, Idaho

These have been the most captivating miles of natural silence, hundreds of years of life towering over me in ponderosa pine; the Salmon River to the Payette River giving some semblance of conversation and cadence. Another voice. These have been also some of the hardest miles. After leaving Stanley it was 45 miles until I saw a house, a handful and then I was winding through the paths of fires gone by, and light swollowing forest. It had been over a week until I spoke to another person. Nobody stops on these roads. Everything is post season. In an hour maybe three cars go by; a logging truck, and a couple of hunters with their quads bouncing truck beds. Most of the smiles have been packed up and boxed away until next year. I have never been so deep in forest, in bear, in the knowing that no net should catch me if I fall. As the sound of water is mine so is all the uncertainity of a lone ship on a evergreen sea. Days are becoming shorter and travels in these canyons hold sunrise off till after 1 pm. (I checked) I have walked long mornings with the still paralyzed fingers of a frozen dawn bent around walking sticks, holding only because they remember holding more than not. Morning coffee waits until a few miles are behind me, my body remembering to warm. Food lasts half of the time summer rations stretch, and miles have fallen from twenty something to hiking just over 10 miles before sunset; dinner made on the shoulder of the road so bears won't bother my camp. It always seems that there are a few miles more before dark; a promise of a better camp. Days of climbing, days of decent soak my back with sweat and freeze my scalp. These have been lonely hollow miles without perscription except the consumption of more miles, and the constant twins called Hope and Memory. In my head I write to everyone I have ever known then let them fall away. Inner eyes already see the ocean and beam.

Last night I slept in a bone yard. A mountain lion has been making kills(8 miles of canyon east of town) from a saddle in a ponderosa pine perched above a deer run 20 yards from where I staked camp. Large cat tracks move all over the hillside, in and out of piles of more pink than white femurs and ribs, broken skulls and fragments. I was past tired. Past caring. I was past everything. Fire was set so I could watch the ominous tree become shadow black against the evening blue sky, cooking beans and Ramon noodles with my back to the river. Branches cracked and moved under weight I couldn't quite see until I could see nothing and the head lamp became a soft voice in a concert of darkness. No lion came down.
With all of my tree watching and then tying the remains of a food bundle into another pine I scald my food to the thin titanium pot. Leaving camp for the river I found the river was 40-60'down a sheer cliff. Carry water was down to a quart. I scrub with sticks and sand until my hands cramp. Sleep.
Morning came with all fingers hammered in cold. I decided to stow, java up and then march out. With all of the lion activity and new sign around the tent I was glad I released the saftey on the bear spray. I had read about the the father and daughter mauled by a grizzley. They had bear spray but couln't get the saftey off in their understandably freaked state. It cost the their scalps and nearly their lives. Half asleep I knew I might fumble with cold fingers and... I was glad I took off the saftey block until I shoved the canister into its sleave in the backpack and the canister fired directly into my throat, nose, and both eyes as I bent over my pack still drunk on sleep and cold. At first I thought, "This isn't so bad. They must prime the canisters with powder to keep the jet clean." Then the walls came down and all breath was lost. My eyes became welded shut. My throat bled mucus. Although my hands we already near frozen they were not cold to my face. They were not cold against the inferno building on my face. The river was far away and the climb down without eyes would be certain death. I would never make it. Dropping to my knees I found the last of the water in my 3 gallon tank. Less than a quart remained. Cupping my pathetic fingers with water to my face the water would not stop the fire; would not subdue the melting of my eyes and skin, the boiling of my lips. Sainity has left me. I blubber and feel the last of the water go through my fingers.
It was then that I remembered the fly cover from my tent that I had just removed and set aside. It was pounds heavier with hard morning ice and my night of frozen breath. Without eyes I searched for it. I pried open the vice of my lids to bleeding light and staggered in pain. My hands were screaming in the cold. There is no saving words for the joy I felt when my hands found the nylon sheet of ice. I melted patch after patch of nylon fabric against my eyes and lips, inhaled, and began again. The entire brown sheet was a dripping mass of melted ice before any sainity was mine. My hands were frozen stumps that moved retardedly past feeling, and still flames licked from under the surface of my face. My eye lids swelled to fill their sockets. My lips rolled out past the profile of my face with their own pulse. My face searched the tent fly for a patch of ice I may have missed then sank into the needles and fire.
Hours later at the Runaway Diner in Garden Valley I order soup to get some much needed vitimins into a body that has not seen a fruit or veg in 8 days. Leaning over the bowl to smell the heaven of white beans and sausage a plume of steam rises up to my face. The fire began again. I decide to let the soup cool as I squint out the window feeling my heart move in my lips.

Blog Comments Down

2007-11-05T18:12:00.000-05:00

Recently I deleted all advertisements on my blog that snuck in. All of a sudden a vandal has linked countless porn sites to the blog. Hundreds. For now I have shut that door so I'll receive no comments on my blogs. I'll miss your comments. I can still of course receive e-mails. I admit that these posted sites were the action of a very childish person, but I am too far between libraries to play. My knowledge is limited as to the blocks I have at my disposal. Shutting down comments totally is my only known tool. Soon I will be done walking, drop the blog and concentrate on the book. Maybe another answer to the problem will present itself. Until then...

Thank You, Jesse WhiteCrow
Crouch, Idaho

Chuck And Hannah

2007-10-30T09:57:00.000-05:00

A few days in Stanley. Down time. When I got to Stanley I needed a washing. A rest. All supplies were down, internal and ex. The Salmon river, minerial springs with their natural roadside soaking rock tubs are behind me now. With four cars passing every hour it wasn't being too brave to shuck clothes and fall into the steaming water with the modest smell of sulfer and hot earth; roadside or not I was a regular
Outside a motor home pulling a pick-up and a Harley-Davidson Chuck flags me in for a brew. Conversation moves easy between two men traveling on a wing and no time piece. Meals shared become days of camp in the heart of a town that's rolled up it's carpet in exchange for snow creeping down from the Sawtooths. One store has a 40% sale on gear before its windows are soaped till spring. Chuck won't let me hem and haw over a pair boots still priced on the high side of the mountain for this long haul walker. I won't let Chuck rescue me from heals worn through even though the truck tire retreads less than preformed. "Alright," smiles Chuck as he takes command of the box of boots,"You promise to send me a signed copy of your book as soon as it hits the shelf and I get you the boots?" I think it is a question. I release the box and think about this being the first time I bank on a future after the walk.
Chuck and I are easy on eating up the days. Hannah, Chuck's dog and myself become locals...okay, we wander the streets and pause for this crossroad for three days. We are both divorced from wives, from homes we knew and trees we planted. Both beginning anew. Both ending all that was. Without words we both know after all these roads the pause is as important as the steps. In an hour we'll shake hands and I'll talk a loud good-bye to Hannah who can't really hear. I'll lean down into her black and graying shepard coat and again listen to good-bye.

You Gave Me This

2007-10-27T15:31:00.000-05:00

I read a letter from Adam that just arrived via e-mail, a man that I met on the Natchez Trace (www.fromflyoverland.com). Words are funny creatures. We all pretend they don't matter; sticks and stones and all that. But we are older now and know better. We feel the sticks, ducking stones without even thinking. The same is true for words of support, of recognition, kindness...hope. I feel it erase the wear of miles, soften the lines now softly mapping my traveled face. Thank you Adam for taking the time to lace my shoes, to tell me that you still hear me walking. That somehow it all matters. Maybe four months remain of this journey. Maybe. On the Salmon River I talk to the maroon headed ducks and we discuss the winter coming down before they wing tip across white water and river stone leaving me swirling my coffee cup in bank sand waiting for my fingers to wake to a cold retarded level of functioning.
Maybe that is the secret of it all; telling those that matter that they do....and it always has been. Thanks Adam...for walking with me in pictures from the Natahez Trace, wanderings in entries in old journal pages that'll be re-worked soon into a book, memories with that old red thread of kindred spirit linking us into the future lives of one another, into a constant pulse that makes up the blood of who we are; a coming home to self.

Stanley, Idaho Sawtooth Mtns. Range

2007-10-27T14:48:00.000-05:00

The mountains are astounding, stuttering to my feet as I make my way into Stanley. Impressed, I had to stop and just talk softly to myself,"It has all been worth it." A prayer turned inward and out. I have been told that so many places would show the hand of God, the beauty of creation. Finally I see the truth and words are not enough. I remember a young man biking across a few western states that I shared camp with in Lander, WY. He told me that he broke into tears when he peddled through the Grand Tetons and I internally rolled my eyes. Now I understand. Stone has been filed worked by the hand of God into teeth chewing curtains of snow biting up at the sky; shadows and highlights of eagles and the frozen waves of oceans born onto stone. For no apparent reason the lodge poles fall off my cart...poles that have just come through weeks of climbing mountains now for no reasons release themselves from binding of buckles and rawhide. Sometimes I am reminded to stop and be where I am. No leaving. No arriving. Just now. Just here. Gathering up my gypsy parts of my trovois I look up at the Sawtooth Mtns. and just stop.
In a small pub, in this small town (population 100) I milk a Sweetgrass brew with a new friend that saw me walking through the endless canyons into town and saddled me to an offer of a beer and a seat free of ponderosa pine needles. I will be alone again too soon. Conversation has become too rare. There will be other libraries I can rush into before doors lock for the day. Chuck pulls out his wireless laptop computer and the urgent need to be elsewhere evaporates.
My food sack is pushing the seams after living for days on remnants and spice. This store I was desperate for. Nothing lies ahead. Nothing is to the rear. What does exist is in the process of nailing plywood over glass. Closed for the season. Tonight I will sleep out here in these cutting mountains heady with snow. All urgency has been striped away. This morning it was 9 degrees in my tent. Some things I can't out walk.

Dugout Dick

2007-10-23T12:48:00.000-05:00

The retread skin from the semi tire is cut into heals fastened to my shoes with screws from cart tires, screws that held the retreads on my two wheeled work horse. Two lodge pole pines, water tank, food and a honed and chopped down game cart I ordered back in southern OK still tug behind me in addition to the 60- 70 pounds on my back. Insurance. No, out here,need. On a park bench I find a green fleece L.L. Bean sweater that takes off the growing chill. Down a steep embankment I spy a camp sleeping pad to add to the two I carry. I'm headed for Stanley. The coldest town in the lower 48, located on the spine of the Saw Tooth Mountains. Mountains? I have been in mountains for weeks again with no memory of coming down. Coming down is always subtle; little turns that don't pan out into valleys, I then rise again with the white chapped sheep as everything runs thin, food, clothing, shoes,knees and the conversation of self confiding in self. I don't remember looking up in days so I yank my Tilley hat up on my head like a bewildered cowpoke and take a bead at the snow caps that have come down to make my boots wet, a wet that won't dry. One snow storm has already shoved me off the road into a camp under bowed branches. No longer do I worry it out. Wood is gathered silently for the morning fire then set within the tent like an offering. At the Salmon river I look for tacks out of habit. Nothing comes this way. An owl tells me that I'm not alone and that with the wood that I have collected is enough.
Below the Rattlesnake Creek I am told about Dugout Dick,a man that began living in the mountains in the late forties. In 1948 Dick Zimmerman had completed his first cave home into the base of the riverside mountains. Without much of an internal discussion I was walking back up into the mountains to meet Dick. I hate walking miles in reverse. I hate missing important parts of America more.
For a couple of days I live in the caves of Dugout. It would take more than a library spot to fill in the pictures that are more mental than physical. The camera did flash many times, each time I looked at the picture screen it was tin, cold, nothing with warmth remained. I set down the camera and decided to just listen with my eyes, my nose, my gut. I walked away with a better understanding of everything I didn't want my life to lead to. I have slept in a thousand camps alone and never felt as lonely, raped in my heart to where I could taste sorrow coming up from under my tongue the way sickness does. There are places we go that our inner voice detests. It pleads with us when we arrive to turn around and leave. I sat in the wood stove warmed cave of stacked boulder walls, in where the chiseled walls began to hatch me inward. Deeper. I bent under the 12 volt light and talked to Dick about where all his years had brought him. Dick is 91 now and draped over a cane or walker when he moves. When he sits at his table of tin can meals, some open,and pill bottles. He taps his cane as he talks to keep my eyes on him. My eyes stray. All the pictures on his walls, the letters that have been framed, and memories that lean down just for him have all turned a flat black of soot; the same soot that makes Dick look like an elderly chimney sweeper with long white hair and beard caught in a wind no one can feel. Fourteen caves in all. Some of these caves go into the mountains more than a hundred yards all dug with out power tools. Timbers Dick cut from trees miles away and pulled to location with his horse and wagon. I tried to listen. I really did. 25 dollars a month to rent. A dollar for all the pictures you want to take.
I was watching starving children tell me stories,and already knowing the ending and trying to smile. There in tattered jeans, the once red coat and the red construction helmet oiled by fingers tared to perfection, black ankles, no socks, and knotted hands that can no longer play the guitar I fell down inside.

Two States and A Half Piece

2007-10-16T15:35:00.000-05:00

The mind chews on itself. Too many people ask me what is next, and for five hundred miles I have ruminated on that. For a long time I thought that I had such a long time so I wouldn't put post walking living to mind. The elk came down to water. The bear tore my food sack. Mallards followed me around my fire begging for Grape Nuts. Still I pick up what I put down. Maybe the soles of my feet are rounded for a reason; always moving into and out of form and function. Surely I will roost, write, soak until two hot layers or trail wish for the drain out. Settle? The knives I carry are way to expensive...especially at the rate the road takes them yet I persist. Somewhere in my old life I have several insanely expensive knives growing older, but they are not my knives. They have no stories. They haven't even cut my hand skinning a bear. They have not been palmed moving through cities back street dim when the thugs rooted me into a church. They have carved no spoons, made no snares, served no grouse or held buffalo fat in their seams. I am no good in the settlement of 9-5. Brass bells on my cart chime to bears on the roadside feeding on one of the roadkill elk I pass. This pulls me back. When I was three years old and before I knew of years the poor would come to our hillside in Peru just up from the creek. They came in rounded campers, silver canned hams, and shakey campers that I am sure shouldn't have rolled at all. They came to a relative next door. No, I knew they came to me. They came to fire; to sitting in circles where I was passed from lap to lap just like the instruments they played. My one leg was a cast to the hip so I was just in my underwear passed under moonlight gently, always movement, always music. I can smell those smells still, fires from townless people far away, sweet pipes making apples over my head and I want to be there under their hair, their spinning perfume of laughter drunk on summer new and winter loping. Many times I have lived under big roofs but I spoil, grow rancid. People always laugh at how I always have to point out an Airstream rolling down the highway, especially a classic. They see an old camper. I am looking at the people that held me up under moving skies and fiddles bowed in and out of the darkness. I am seeing travelers and I hear music healing in my legs. I have been the grasshopper and the ant and winter is coming.

Walking Down Clouds

2007-10-15T15:44:00.000-05:00

Salmon, Idaho Pop. 3,122 (National Geo. Mag ranks Salmon as the most remote large town in the lower 48. I believe them.)

All the mountains are ablaze. Blaze orange. Can there even be as many bull elk as there are hunters I wonder as the train of SUV's thunder past me with camo quads buckled to their backs? I flag CrowDog in orange to save skin. In the morning I still check for bullet holes again when the first rifles go off and walk around my tent with my head sunk into my shoulders. Boom, boom.
So much land in the form of mountains is all I walk for days into a week. It was silent until now except for the constant of flowing rivers licking branches and rock, and the tapping of leaves falling on tent fabric when walking miles stop allowing night to ease in. Now the mountains hum like a bug zapper hung outside the kitchen window. Salmon is the first real town in .....well, a very long time; a plush town where a man fresh out of the mountains can fill his grub list, drool over new boots(ones with heals still attached), and show off my earthy smell won on the Nez Perce Pass. Too cold to linger long in mountain creeks.
With so little time in a library to bring this text up to speed I must by nature of so much information leave large holes. It is still hard to move over some of the great beauty I have passed through without company for over a week, days pushed into journal pages while sleet salted me outside my tent in the mountains by a weak fire; sleeping in Big Hole Battle Field just into treeline to hear the lost Nez Perce wail through the night, surrounded by wolves that sang on and off all night moving in and around my camp like ghosts in mourning. Then there are the kindnesses that were offered up to me by strangers (Marc and his son and daughter) across the road from my camp that shared half their chardonnay, expertly seasoned grill cooked steak and clam alfredo that bowed the belly of the double paper plate, and then Rita finding me 120 miles away from her saloon, bringing steak and a full cooler to refresh me after a long day of hiking down the mountains from the border pass into Idaho..... my utter amazement is that Rita found me on the porch of a little store in North Fork unfolding stories to a group of hunters waiting on their Monday morning hunt.
Everyday becomes a story; a pile of round and sometimes crooked words that make up this series of adventure. The only thing that I am certain of is that I am doing what it is that I was meant to do, and this feeds both pen, and heart.

Found

2007-10-05T11:49:00.000-05:00

Although I don't have time now for details Ryan, an elk hunter from Sheridan, WY found my wallet and His kind wife mailed it back. Ryan S. found it in Medicine Wheel territory.

Early on I asked the walk for a gold ring to wear and remember the walk by wearing long after the journey. On my third time over the Rocky Mountains and the Continental Divide(right on the line) I stopped to make the first snowball of the season and there in the rain washed gravel was a 14k gold band washed clear of the sand. Perfect fit.

Winter Coming Down

2007-10-05T10:37:00.000-05:00

Dewey, Montana

The rain that has shadowed me for a week, and taken all shadow, turns to snow that removes the grain from wood on the fence posts outside the log cabin I have slept in for two nights. Snow comes like a hand over a mouth and everything is quiet, everything is waiting for a kiss, for a slap, for confirmation that if we put out our open hands we can handle this one moment of change. I am a dog that feels the clouds sitting over this canyon, yawning into the steam of optimistically strong coffee. One leg scratches the other. The dog in me sighs swallowing tastelessly. "There will be no escaping another winter," I think to myself out loud. I have been courting this since I sat out the fires in August. "I ordered this winter walk myself...just get through the sub-zero temps and the mountains. Just see me through" Grizzley's walk these roads and tackle the river. Forget about the map in the Tracker's Field Guide showing where the ursus arctos call home. I am not the only wanderer. Snow.
Raisins grow fat in hot water and cinnamon on the stove waiting for dry rolled oats to be stirred in. Shutting off the stove and my stomach I step out into the wet, into the cold weighing of everything through glassy eyes, then the unsuppressed shrug of it. All this leaving becomes easy, one cough that brings on another. Staying on. There is the trick. Feelings catch up whenever I sit too long at a table and I'm given my mind to chew on. Everything I tied a sheet around and sunk behind me eventually floats to the surface if the pot isn't constantly stirred by walking. So I stir. Tucking laces into my boots before stepping into them and pulling my hat down to keep my glasses dry I walk toward the saloon to see Rita, to hear her tell me to stay in her cabin for another night allowing the storm to move through the canyon; this white that makes what is already breathtaking become unbelievable. Rita is the owner of the polished bar of Dewey, the fire all the mountain moths dry their wings around wet from the hunt, wet for conversation. The bar took in 41 bullet holes the first season open. I am told the story and pointed to holes through pine boards and walls. We talk about having breakfast down the river as the snow moves toward rain and back to snow again.
If you told me this town was a prop from the Northern Exposure television series set in Alaska I would believe you. The log cabins facing the winding road have flat square faces as they did a century ago, bleached antlered elk skulls angle down like soft lights always illuminating lost hollow need over weathered boards I walk slowly beneath when evening comes...just to get this feeling right. Old pick-up trucks and campers that match the number of homes, exceed it, rest in the moving air timelessness, paint on old steel having gone appaloosa in weather and age even the dead looks picturesque. This is a place that you'd want to be hit heavy with snow so the whole world have to completely bypass and leave you to winter, to reading books on a bed of silver furs,the making of children and smelling cranberry candles and cedar logs burning, turning to ash till spring whimpers in a quarter year from now. We'd eat smoked meat fattened on alfalfa grass and tender sage. We'd talk about your grandfather's rifle, the way he wore that coat all year long until it became a continuation of his leathered brown skin. "It is good that some things never change," we say in soft paper voices as if the saying it secures some things in state for another year, another winter. The ivory that I have carried for a thousand miles would become two lovers I'd stain in tea. You would ask me to trade Osa's knife, knowing down deep that I couldn't trade it in spite of that look in your eyes. Your son would be holding the she-bear's claws I carried since Jersey, feeling stories digging through roadsides of evergreens in the remnants of fur caught between nuckle, sterling beads and cord. I would turn the dead tree that watches you undress through your window into a pine bear wearing claws around his neck and feathers gently lifting in his cape. If winter held us here.

Feeling Potatoes

2007-09-25T16:44:00.000-05:00

Walking into the glow of a full moon toward the Garden Cafe' I am adopted by a golden retriever that is delighted with company for a 5a.m. walk. He is attentive and well behaved though just slightly confused about where his home lies and I haven't the morning heart to send him scurrying with a blunt command I don't mean. I eat a ham and cheese omelet heavy with Kimm Brother's potatoes, the same potatoes I have come to know so well, and studied maps. I still see him sitting by my travous outside. Another bark. I try not to look up. Nic steps from his stove and pies to tell me my friend just went around to the backdoor to wait me out. Looking outside an hour later he is still waiting, still holding by the door. He thinks that I am his, and I wonder how I'll get out of town without this eighty pound stomach following me.
(Yesterday) For half the day I am separating potatoes from stone and making Hannah laugh as she works the conveyor belt of rolling potatoes and round field stones across from me. We remove rocks as a steady river of spuds rumble between us over a dry track. She is beaming light with sunglasses set in her dark hair over a John Deere hat that shadow water blue eyes. I am singing because I don't care and my mind is shuddering in time to the motors. I am singing to white noise. It does not matter that I am dry or throated. The electric motors are loud forcing a voice that is not mine just to break surface and ease the cadence of potato, potato, potato, rock, twig, rock. Thought turns to reflex and back. "Old black water keep on rolling..." I see Hannah's lips move softly as her hands move from stone to stone.
Hannah is one of those women that just can't look bad or ill kept no matter how her clothing tangles or the earth dusts her face and I study this angle of grace to understand though I remain mystified and content with that. She is eighteen and getting married in March. All her world is rising like dawn. We both are boyant with new roads in our morning hair. Each time we look at one another we smile a grin that exclaims that we are truly excited about life, the future, and it is contagious. I'm hit with a small potato and don't have to look up to feel her smirk.
I wish winter wasn't coming so fast. There are so many questions only time spent in one camp can answer. I am driven out to the potato fields by George, a cheerful part-time musician that looks like Jerry Garcia. He is a big man with a gentle cluck for a laugh. I listen to his travels and how he lost a hundred pounds to save his heart. It was worth saving. His voice is gentle. I try to see him smoking it up on a stage. All I hear is his smooth heart with the volume turned up and I listen as he talks tapping my foot. We watch the field, the lines of pale vines releasing the wet of last night's frost turned over and over as if we are watching the sea from shore. Tractors become a few small ships floating in a line of waves. A few birds fly over without looking down.
Riding shotgun in the blue tractor I feel the earth break behind us to the throat of the polished blade as the dump trucks fills with fists of rock and spuds on a field surrounded by a horseshoe of mountains dusted with snow. This is what I wanted, dreamt of and it passes so fast; to work with the people of the land, to taste the harvest in the dust coming up from my shirt, to be part of this truth of America, dirt cracking in the folds and wrinkles of my hands. It is a meal I have no control over and this plate moves away too soon although I am chewing in earnest, still taking it all in like it is my last chance to eat this particular confection and spice. And it is. Before I memorize all the names, clear the taste of earth from my palette my feet are talking about new roads and the return to strangerland, the return to being wet too long and yet another little pang of leaving dances in my chest. Have I grown more sensitive to these little leavings, or am I getting closer to heart, to a belonging that comes with being at peace within my own skin? I take lots of pictures but this is a weak placebo to a soul that wants to know these voices, these faces, this town. I worry about shredding my clothes on steel and rubber belts, wear on boots, the coming of winter, and think of walking down the same road I have just tractored....wondering through all of this thought... will tomorrow see me gone or smiling through this dirty face with the chill of morning settling in my hands?
Dark becomes light against the glass of the restaurant. The dog has forgiven his post and wandered off. The morning tells me that my only sweater is too thin as I shoulder Crow Dog, fasten the two wheeled cart to my waist and dip my hat brim down in the direction of Logan.

To The Smell Of Wet Leaves And Fresh Donuts

2007-09-24T17:18:00.000-05:00

Manhattan, MT

Waking into Manhattan is walking into a small town in Maine. I trip over the smell of donuts frying in a small shop as I enter town and forget to rest in the park although I haven't sat in six miles. My boots begin to dry. Clouds burn off on a large blue plate that has been hidden for days. Locals speak of snow and the predictions of the Almanac cement the incoming as I pound french fries and blink out the window, pleading for more time before snow is a regular. Debbie Wilbanks rushes out from her real estate office to catch me. She is warmth and smiles as I answer her questions about gear and tricks of my wayfaring trade. She eyes my cart and walking sticks admiringly. Her son Luke is walking around the world for the children of Africa. We part too soon for she is working and the phone won't sit still. Debbie is working and my stomach growls about its tax for labor given. At the corner dinner I eat turkey and swiss, slug three quarts of water and rise to find that Debbie called to cover my tab. I'm thankful, and glad for the excuse to talk with her again.

At the diner Garden Cafe' Nic, owner of the restaurant,grabs me as a guest for the night. I know little of Montana and welcome a table covered with maps, suggestions and talk of the artic wind to come if I linger in Idaho too long, and tales of our separate Swiss memories. Out behind the Garden, when no one is looking, I take the plastic bread bags out of my wet boots and wiggle my toes. Very high tec. Yesterday's core soaking miles are weak memory now. My boots begin to dry fragrantly and I wish someone would smoke a big cigar.

Beating Snow, Waving Good-bye

2007-09-21T12:45:00.000-05:00

This is my third trip over the Rocky Mountains; above Taos New Mexico, South Pass in Wyoming, and now the Rockies of Montana and Idaho. Each venture over the Rocky Mountains I have moved through snow, slept in snow, cooked on evergreen boughs so my small fire wouldn't sink into feet of hard pack. Walking across America was always a mental picture of my shoulder boards and pack shouldered thick with white down and a hat brim pulled down in white, apples that are nearly frozen against my teeth, and the smell of wood smoke coming up from the towns in the valley below. Yes, I complain when the water filter freezes solid so that I have to put it into the crotch of my pants to thaw while I drop camp just so I can filter water from a murky bog for oats and a much needed cup of coffee but the bruises are worth the beauty. I have slept beside elk under cedar, and have fallen in love with the way cars slow to pass in a staring Norman Rockwell whisper, moving past something of themselves perhaps they dreamt long ago, something lost or forgotten in most of us that still holds pulse. A separate time. I think I have fallen in love with the romance of everything appearing untouched, dangerous with lace along the river banks, ancient trees bent in pillows and blanket shards, all appears holy...alive.
Offered a ride back to Thermopolis then back to Bozeman, I have returned to say good-byes once again and prepare sun faded and thread worn gear for it's last winter of the walk. I hand sew another layer of fleece onto my sleeping hat, retread the cart tires for more open miles of market less open road with 16' bike tires I alter with my pocket knife and self tapping screws over solid wagon tires. From tractor trailer tread I carve new rubber tips for my walking sticks. The set of tips I carved out of road found rubber in southern Virginia just wore through after well more than a thousand miles(those bought in a store last less than 200 miles and are $8.95 a pr.). What takes days in a livingroom sitting at a table takes much longer sitting under a sun umbrella on an abandoned ant hill watching the world rush by, mindlessly poking fingers through sand looking for beads unearthed by ants. New leather becomes a sheath and gauntlet. Thank you letters are written and mailed in the same day.
Jessica Monday, a reporter from The Independent Record, and I became quick friends when Jessica interviewed me for a story months back. We sit the Big Horn River below where the river changes from The Wind River at the Wedding of The Waters. Her bare feet move in the shallow water that turns gray as my camera clicks at her. I failed to say good-bye when I last left town so I am thankful for a chance to sew up the oversight along with a list of other repairs;it is a chance to talk about what is to be in our lives and what roads brought us to this river bank with autumn floating downstream. I give her a piece of robin's egg blue blue jasper flint while I pocket it's twin to spark fires when lighters fail in subfreezing temps. We promise to stay connected, reconnect. This does little to the pang that comes when we walk apart for the last time. We both look back as we walk in opposite directions, laugh, and then turn into the separate emptiness that comes with last words before an ocean of time unmeasurable. We have shared food, bottles of wine, friends, zany photographs with tongues thrown out of the sides of our mouths, and truths said without staring at our feet. It will be at least ocean before we see each other again.
So many clothes. So few. I weigh with my eyes now. A scale is no longer necessary as I have measured ounces and pounds, grams and fringe until most of my gear is memorized. As I oil my knife blades I start a humble fire to sear pieces of steak to share with Lisa so she can taste camp before the day of my leaving. Everything becomes a last time. Last coffee press is shared; last pass through the buffalo fields by the mineral springs, the smell sulfur I have come to love, and a climb up Round Top Mountain to see darkness take the town of Thermopolis and lights begin to sprinkle the valley from the homes below. Last moments with the Higgins family pass too quickly. Young Jessica and Ian Higgins joke around me as I type a blog in their livingroom and they wonder why it takes me so long to write so little. My leaving is hard on them so we talk about everything but the walk...which of course becomes the walk. Ian no longer calls me Bearbait. I am told that he cries when I leave so I am gentle with him. "Hey Jesse," Ian calls out from his bike saddle that he has ridden beside me to our good-bye,"You got to see me being seven." Ian's birthday was just as I was leaving in August. It was his running joke that I had to return to see him being seven. His face is a sweet roundness that trusts and shines out at his world. A tender sun rising.
"Ian, I'll see you again. Be careful riding home." The words good-bye are weak and scatter behind his tires heading home. Ian is already a recognizable sadness peddling home on the empty street toward Pepperment Lane. I am taking pictures without my camera.
As I have written before, often times the walking is not the hardest part. Tomorrow I step far away into walking west; walking alone, walking heavy with memory, a series of memories that ironically make everything light...in a mind silently waiting on snow.

Bozeman, MT

2007-09-15T13:59:00.000-05:00

(Update of walk location.) Cooler days arrive.

Where The Eagles Land

2007-09-11T20:26:00.000-05:00

It is called Medicine Wheel now, but these are new words for a place that pre-dates the wheel and all that invention has driven us to. A day ago I walked this long gravel road to the sacred circle of stones and the circular rope fence of ribbons and bundles, feathers,bone and flint. A loud man and woman were talking and measuring into recorders as their cameras bit pieces and angles with all the worth of a dog biting air. Nothing more than their words was landing all around me so I left feeling more choked than revived, more frustrated than restored. This morning I discovered my wallet had slipped out somewhere in my recent travels. Although I believe I'll never see the wallet again, it's lose is the ticket back, an excuse back to the Crow Reservation, and to walk Medicine Wheel for the second time. Even with a small amount of money gone, veteran identification gone, license gone, bank debit card gone, and surely a few forgotten forms of information lost it is all worth it to be going back; to be seeing things again for the first time.
The feathers I have been handed by years of road, my hand carved pipe hawk of steel and hickory dotted with brass tacks, heart wood cedar flute, and several tools of travel are wrapped in red wood and tucked under my arm. It is a cold morning making the gravel sound louder under foot. Pregnant grey clouds are huddled above the mountains trying to stay warm as the wind holds a hand on my chest. Betty wishes me well and drives away to begin a telephone counsel with a long distance client. This is Basecamp Betty's last visit. From Livingston Montana where I was picked up days ago I will be returned and for the last time Betty will drive away with my seasonal gear exchanged for winter trappings. We rarely talk about it but it is there between us. The walk is nearing final states, final steps.
Again I begin walking the gravel mile and a half incline to the Where The Eagles Land. Along the walk I try to set down ego and worry I have carried from the car. Along the walk I try to come down and become still, to step away from this rabbit heart that beats too fast. When I get to the circle of fence on the mountain top a ranger from the park service is standing on the dirt road looking cold and hunched into his green coat. I am a layer of sweat, feeling fluid as the morning chill rubs off into a crocked squint. We nod hello's like gunfighters as I break left to round the circle of timeless stones. Once. Twice. I know what I am hear for. I approach the ranger to ask him to unlock the gate. Posted, "Only be opened by permit." We are reduced to words and another dry look. The gate is opened as if he has been waiting for me, or he is about to hand me a safe deposit box. The ranger's voice becomes far away. I hear the park radio talking about this man that has come to pray in the wheel and that sound too falls away. Sage,cedar, sweet grass and native tobacco are poured out of the red pouch I have carried every step of the walk. It is a small bundle that is the bed of the ten front bear claws from the black bear I de-clawed in Jersey from a pouched bear. The cold spark I strike is weak. It is minutes before I can smell peace, memory, a sense of home and a belonging to all the fires that came before me. The cold steel hawk swirls under a ribbon of scent, chokes and then offers up blue smoke for me to lean into as it combs over my hair.
Now I am in the center of the circle facing east; toward all of the miles I have traveled. I make a spark into flame again knowing only that it has grown cold. I am an even warmth although I have neglected to carry a coat. My fingers are careful with the honed edge of the hawk. The hawk edge tasted my blood years ago when I fit the handle to the steel head and it sank painlessly into my left thigh. Looking down at my leg I glance at the pale trace the gash left behind. So many stories.
When I unroll the red cloth to release the flute I am finally free of me, free of the skuff of the gravel road, the sound of cold hands busy getting warm in nylon pockets back far behind me on the path, and shadowed under the crowding of clouds above. The well traveled wood of the flute is dry and familiar on my lips. The bear fat I rubbed into it over a year ago is far from taste. It is warm rum to hear the the voice of the wood come out into the wind without being lost or stolen in the growing wind but this is not it's nature. As soon as I lift the musical pipe sleet begins to rattle on the stones, peppering my back, surrounding the notes of the flute with a sweet screening sound of a rain stick turning over and over in the sky above my head. Lifting the notes from bass to pipe, from highs to a tremble of warm blood rushing through viens the ice dances in round diminutive gravel all around me. Setting the flute down the sleet instantly ceases. Lifting my head I work my grin into sun bleached grass and ancient stone. Feathers, finger brush straight, are placed into the crevices around me, journeys remembered. Roads yet to be walked are prayed smooth. I move stones until the center tail feather from a golden eagle is an arrowhead lodged in the center stones of the circle. It is done. When I begin to play the flute again the sleet awakens instantly and pours little pebbles of ice from the buoyant clouds above. When the red cedar flute is set once again on the wool and thoughts of leaving begin to enter in the sleet abruptly stops again. Slowly I stand, waiting to feel my legs agree to walk. Careful to step on nothing I walk with my eyes on the ground. My feet step around tobacco bundles, past sweet grass braids and twists of black hair. I move over old particles of flags, dog tags and leather fringe bundles until I am at the gate and stepping through. The park ranger is the same man but nearly unrecognizable. A joyous child has stepped into his face. He rushes toward me. "Thank-you, thank you for the weather." His light voice shines from a bright expression. "People think I would love it up here all the time but there is nothing here to take in after a while when the weather is all sun and blue skies. This was magical. This is why I want to be up here." He is beautiful and younger than morning. I take his offered hand and say thank you to him.
I know better than to bang a rock with a stick and take credit for the water. Walking slowly down the mountain from the land of white rough stones, I am thankful, thankful that I was allowed to be where I was guided to be; knowing that something was waiting to be found, and something worried over being lost didn't matter at all.

When Leaves Turn, Livingston MT

2007-09-01T12:44:00.000-05:00

I come back down to earth, to eating without vomiting, and again dreaming about food after Basecamp Betty arrives with my winter gear and a few changes of my old cherished clothes so I can walk in luxury around these local towns feeling at home like I am sitting in an old chair for at least a few days while we visit and Betty plans her own mini vacation. So how do I thank this person that has traveled all over America just to bring me hazelnuts in the snow, bayou made ice-cream and brownies when I turned 43 in Louisiana swelter, and repeatedly took away my treasures, my journals, my worries in little brown boxes along with my self made pipe tomahawk resting on the backseat to rest until the deserts pass and bears and empty evenings on the plains came again to nibble on my ancient peace? The hawk has been returned and the coming of the last winter of the walk perfumes the mornings. "Soon," it whispers. I check the edges of morning creeks I lean into reflections over, knowing the clear skin will lace out from the shore in days.
I place jars of beads that I have been carrying(always exchanging my stash in trade and in use since the my first steps) into another box that will be driving away one last time before it is over. We are trained in this life not to measure all things for in so much measuring the towering level of loss comes in with a deep well of sadness. Do not to count the last meals with adored friends, last kisses stolen on the drive home, last moments before we turn and walk away from a forest that has past to pulp never to return...any season. I begin to measure though for I have time for it and I have become sometimes foolishly brave, holding this flask of walking up to the light to see how much is left in the bottom as I swirl these last golden fall months of walking across America. Betty believed in me, in this walk, since before the physical walk began and from that moment years ago she has thrust out her hand to help..even when that help was just the act of believing....just believing in someone has always had the power to change the world.I didn't know that I would need a base camp or that I wanted such a structure before I taped up boxes of socks and weighted stoves, and cut off toothbrush handles. Of course there was a time when I wasn't sure I would really across America as in NOW. What it was to walk across America, to put on a hat, shoulder a pack and place everything that I had ever known in boxes I may never open again.....would never open again with the same hands. Betty visits and I am losing everything. Days ago I lost the bear spoon I carved Christmas day in a PA barn the first winter of the walk from a scrap of mahogany. I found it on the Crow reservation by the train tracks where I made coffee and camp. Today my wallet is gone. I am moving too fast. I head back to Medicine Wheel to find my wallet, make another camp in the mountains. This time I will play my flute, listen and leave an eagle feather. It is easy to forget that just I can use a car for a couple days that I don't have to watch my steps, that I don't have to breathe. I will go back into the mountains and maybe I will never find my wallet but I have a feeling that that is not what I lost anyhow.
When I got to the Crow reservation I talked to one of the elders about walking the Crow land. I wanted permission. It was important to be welcomed, wanted in my gut.Howard Boggess looked into my face, beyond the patina of my teeth and this hair growing white. "It is all we really want on the board, to be asked, the respect of it. WhiteCrow? I have heard of this name. A woman in Pennsylvania sent me a link to your journey over a year ago when you were in her state." Howard looks like an elder on loan from from a movie. He is easy words, hands shaking many times, and a hand reaching out where many are reserved. Down at the creek behind Chief Pleny Coup's house I squat to wash off the buffalo fat, butter from the corn , and shine from fry bread that I have been given as in times of old. I was tired and hungry when I arrived. From the meat of a Yellowstone buffalo I was fed pink smoky meat and hoped that it would stay in my body all winter, in more than chewing memory. I have lost many things on this walk and they all bring me back to water and the slow realization that nothing is really lost that matters. I pin my card in the bush by the Chief's spring where all the ribbons are watching and walk up to the log cabin. The sun is going down.

Library....out of time.

Grizzly Steps

2007-08-27T14:54:00.000-05:00

Heat brought me down to the tributary that works through a cove of cottonwood and non-descript scrub that perpetually drinks from the shore of round rocks walking root to root toward the clear Yellowstone River a couple of miles north, the same Yellowstone I had just broke camp on. It is the same pass that holds bragging rights to Lewis and Clark having ridden their 49 horses through 201 years ago...and one month. I read the sign this morning mentioning Lewis on horseback chased a grizzly through the fields just for fun.
From where I caught the shine and sparkle of creek water in my titanium pot to filter into drink I can see black mud banked twenty feet down stream. Thinking that I should go check for bear sign in the damp mud I grab my camera and bear spray, safety off. I crossed a fallen tree and there beside my feet in the sucking sand that takes in my foot are grizzly tracks with water just now moving in. The bear, approx. 250-300 lbs. just left the tracks of a fawn it was following and the creek as I climbed down the bank. This is when I should have gathered up my tack and found the road 500 yards back. This is not what I did. It is funny how what we fear is just what the heart curiously beats toward. I tell myself I just wanted a picture. I do not. I put the camera in my pocket and the bear spray I slide into my back pocket. I want to move over fear and own it again, always it is the first time. Slowly my feet are moving on blades making sound, without my need to tell them. It is silly really, worrying about sound. The bear knows full well I was in his water, in his wood line, and now passing through his field to where the apples fall to earth on there own accord. Thump, thump, thump. I walk until I fell the slow rise of down hair on the back of my neck lift away from the sweat and trail grime of my neck. I walk until I heard a voice inside my head, and signs outside say stop, and now it is reasonable, not fear alone. A bush to my left was circled back to. I fell it. There is no noise to be heard. Only breathing. It is the only place that is silent as birds flicked everywhere but to my left. It is where I would have waited. Slowly I give a nod and backtrack to the creek without turning my eyes away from the brush, backtrack until my feet are wet and I can easily smell the heat coming off the blacktop above. Here I take pictures of bear claws that sank in the black earth and know very clearly I had traveled to Yellowstone, and off the map.

"Yep, I'd say your gonna see a few more grizz before you get yourself out of these mountains. Plan on it." (Farmer standing in his field offering up advice on my chances of running into bears as head west into Idaho.)

Big Timber, Montana

2007-08-27T14:19:00.000-05:00

At the North 40 coffee shop I order a muffin. Extra butter pools on the hot white industrial plate, waiting for the muffin to cool, waiting for the shakes to stop that flick my fingers like fly wings and for my thoughts to even out. Filtering water out of ditches has left me wanting, my head sun punched by heat that comes with perpetual walking that sweats my soul out through my brow and shirt. The day before yesterday I sat by the side of the road to bring my pulse back down, down out of my head into my chest. My boot was untied and I could not remember how to tie it again. I tried three times then waited as I sipped hot water that tasted like stagnant pond, leaves and old traces of lemon tea. By the time the coin of shade from a small tree had left me again in the sun I could remember the loop in lace my brother taught me 39 years ago; appreciate the need to knock on a door for more water... knock on a door when I saw one. Summer lingers on.

Legends...

2007-08-21T11:40:00.004-05:00

Bridger, Montana

Into autumn, into history, into the frames of movies I walk and everything is smoke riding on the tops of mountains. A week ago a black bear decided to attack a man sleeping in his tent past the point when he woke up screaming. Then the bear jumped up and down on the man imprisoned inside his tent. The bear wanted in to harvest the man, the man wanted out to preserve his life. Finally another camper with a baseball bat convinced the bear to run off.
I arrived in Bridger with the sun burnt into my face, deeper than bone. A couple of men gathered around me to say hello and ask if I saw the sight of the bear jumping in rage over his fresh wrap meal. I was in the next valley I explained, but word travels over these mountains fast. I tried to grin at the humor they found but it was weak with my mind placing my flesh, my bones under the same horrible force alone in some unknown camp.
Given a lemonade by one of the men on Main I lighten at news of a free park to camp in without once again preparing for bear...at least as much. The Crow res. is just to the east though the phone has yet to give me a human on the other end of the line. I consider Crow country. I consider winter coming soon with the same scale over my worn out map. Fire is all over the north and west; so much fire the Chamber of Com. tells me to head north until I'm touching Canada and then go south and west across toward Oregon as if I am driving a van. I lip the ice lemonade that is now more water than lemon and smell even in the heat the coming of fall, knowing neither man or beast can find reason in this smoke brought by wind. For now I walk north, talking to strangers while unconsciously pulling on my shirt tails that are still giving cooling moisture from the Yellowstone River I sat in miles ago. I am talking too much to myself these days, days of eating pan warmed flat bread on the riverbank, wondering which road I'll take..or which road will take me past fields of fat apples, and bears that lie like breathing grass, roads that bottleneck into walking suicide I find I shoot myself with over and over again.
Mornings are cool now. Stories, they are everywhere. Legends have lived here I tell myself. Legends of the fall.

Comments

2007-08-08T14:59:00.000-05:00

I believe I have opened the comment area for respectful use. Please remember that the blog is a rough field report of sorts. It is not the book that I will be writing about my walk solo walk across America. This blog is my gift to you and all those I meet along this road. This computer journal does not earn a dollar for me or the walk. I write because I want to, to say thank you to all those that shared an apple, a smile, a story,.....and most of all for those that believe in this journey of America.

Fire On The Mountains

2007-08-08T14:02:00.000-05:00

Before leaving town I visit fellow veteran Henry Bennett. He is a broad man that carrys the hunt in his shoulders, in his powerful hands. Into my right hand he places one at a time, a mound of bullets he has loaded for the gravest extreme. Grizz. Henry is a story waiting on a listener. I listen through fields and through hunts as Henry gifts a long knife into my left hand that he made from a file, then polished into a mirror. Henry smiles as he moves his pointing finger near the hilt. "What I like most about this knife is that it doesn't read CHINA across the blade," Henry grins at me like a young soldier, like an old friend I had forgotten the memory of. We are standing in and out of his front yard, and then we're thrown into Montana's back country dressing elk with no other voices for a hundred miles, at once I am alone looking back, looking forward, looking inside for a compass with magnetic pull. Nothing speaks. Here I have been adopted. Here I have been given many faces pleading concern up and out through their eyes, watching me prepare to leave, porch and curb, from experience and innocence fingers are folded and unfolded, shuffled like cards nobody can turn over except the digital movement of time. They want to save me from the road, from myself. They want to see me fulfill a dream far from just started, and yet I see them stare with a mouthful of words they can't say or swallow and I understand. I can't swollow either. I will listen more in Cody.
The newspapers all talk about the fire coming down from the mountains, across the high deserts and open plains into the course I've plotted. Homes are abandoned with little hope and some given to fire. This of course means the bears that sought food and seclusion in the woods now flee hungry and scared into a path I have yet to break through. Parades are over. The Gift of the Water celebration in which the Shoshone act out the giving of the mineral springs in Thermoplis to all mankind to use free of charge for all time has passed. The tepees have been dropped, and all the golden eagle feathers have walked away. Fattened pigs have been auctioned. Schools begin to pull boys up out of the fields, and girls from their saddles. Somewhere geese prepare to move into the sky and I feel it.

Return to Cody

2007-08-06T11:33:00.000-05:00

After two months of listening to the summer sun bake sand to glass, I step into the early morning air of Thermopolis and smell the gentle slight perfume, the coming autumn caught in the north wind. It is time. By mid-week I will again be yoked to cart and shoulder my pack in Cody, feeling my legs grin toward new miles, new towns, and adventures ....and the 30 miles until Montana. Montana. This will be the last northern state that I will walk across before I ascend Washington's northern coast in winter. From Montana I will spill across Idaho's farm country, gravitate south through more desert to southern Oregon and northern California, then my eyes, legs, and heart will rise in the cold of snow as I straddle ocean and shore to Washington's coastal peak.
The fear I held for the grizzly has been replaced with wider eyes, and ears that reach out to decipher every sound, sounds I don't know I hear. Free range fire eats roads and forests in my direction, then there are wolves, bears, crazies, snakes, drunks, lions, the need of water and the hope for a camp I will survive nightly; I set it all down and prepare to walk away without looking back at my gutted pile of worry. There is only room to carry what I now own. What I own is that I have come this far. It is enough to carry with the feelings that come with so many good-byes.

Reunion Weekend and 109 Degrees

2007-07-21T11:02:00.000-05:00

Across America high school alumni are remembering faces of classmates from so long ago. I see notes on the doors of restaurants offering specials for class reunions and it sends my mind skidding back. On the road today a disguarded sign read 'Class of 1957,' and I remember my graduation of 1982, the long string of leavings that began then, that brought me here. Hotels bear signs welcoming us all back in time complete with smoke-free rooms and HBO, back to a place that no longer exists except in old yearbook photographs and the romantic moving pictures of our personally edited memories.
Twenty-five years ago I graduated from Housatonic Valley Regional High School in Falls Village, CT. I was told then that the years would fly by after that warm June afternoon spent sitting in the sun on gray medal chairs under a blue board hat waiting for my name to be called. Before I knew it I would be a quarter of a century away looking back over my shoulder, over my backpack, wondering what roads my classmates had taken; people that were once my Venus and Pluto, people that were all of my earth, and the young women I was too afraid to talk to that made up the stars in my Berkshire mountain piece of sky. Where had the universe gone in twenty-five years, the universe I knew? Years have evaporated, flown by until I start palpating the vein of each of those expired years, and all of the volumes of change that coursed through their thin walls of illusions, of relative safety, of hope; lives of friends and relations that have ceased living, the promises we made that failed to rise with the yeast of our good intentions, the stories we tell ourselves that we no longer believe but begin to tell all over again, and all the tragic graves we dug for each of our untried dreams we set to rest before they were really dead.
Walking across America is alot of time spent thinking, remembering everything said, remembering everything that was said to me, to you, and four full oceans of forgetting. There are days I wish I had walked slower down the halls of my fluted column high school with my beautiful pimple faced friends skating around me in the vibrating expectation that comes with growing freedom and youth, walked at a snails pace listening to the inner ear roar of four hundred bodies trying to make sense of the nonsensible saturation of change between history class and homeroom, and the times that I wish I ran with my arms out, desperately pulling air behind me toward separation, toward the future and all its sythetic shine. There are the two girls I wished I asked to lunch, to a movie, kissed under the white oak tree behind room #133, and of course the bullies I wished I faced down but outgrew instead, back before the army made me shave a face that didn't grow hair, back before I wore the right shoes and found peace in my own cadence. Back to a time when school was really teaching me above all other things how life is about weaving people together, and how, just sometimes, it isn't.
Still the romantic, I think of the video I thought of sending to my 25th reunion explaining what I was doing, and wasn't doing anymore. I wondered whom would understand among them..then heard the fresh question in my heart,"Does it matter anymore?" Of course, sofly I heard my mouth say,"Yes,...yes it does." We became a family, as odd as any, my class of '82. We watched as seeds were sown into the chests of our classmates, seeds for college, seeds for military service, farms and mothers to be, drove our first miles in battered cars we battered into rust, found love and loss and its child ...hope, and our teachers stepped down from their clouds of separation and many became our friends, our understanding handed back to us in the first flame that would guide us into their world, into our lives, and we could never thank them enough, and that, in itself is enough.
I have walked myself into high desert in WY at 109 degrees and it isn't even August yet. Offered an open house with a.c. from new friends going on vacation, I thankfully wait out a week before I 'm again sipping hot water I carry in large sun beaten tanks on a cart pulled behind me, again sitting when spent under a large faded golf umbrella that is mounted to my packframe; a three foot round of nylon giving me a puddle of shade to melt into, and wait. For now, for this week, I listen to voices gone, hearts and trackless faces I used to know, and in comes a knowing that they are still a part of me, and I them. We were the Mountaineer's of Housatonic (river between the mountains), and have climbed the world because we had each other in blue and gold, in folly and grace.....and hope.

Griz At First Sight

2007-07-14T12:06:00.000-05:00

The first griz I see is a flash of bulk and a panned face looking in my eyes and then nothing remains. My eyes search and search, questioning tree stumps and sagebrush for confirmation. Nothing. It is outside of Yellowstone, ten miles east, and all the air is silver with coming darkness. It is their time. At four times my weight it is always their place, their time.
Montana is alot of hard roads to choose to walk through. Beautiful, but a dangerous place to back-country alone week after week after.... Studying a new map, unmarred by camps noted and kindnesses given or roads that grilled me, the mountains and the thick islands of forest of Montana that I will be hooking left through make me sweat in an air conditioned library. Offered by several people real firepower with it's burden of weight and the lightness of peace of mind, I consider both the anvil and the cost and walk away with nothing to fill the void. Men that live in these mountains, hunt these lands, know and share all the stories before the facts are scrubbed by government agenda and an often overly opinionated press against gun ownership, tell me to choose a caliber. "Do not choose between packing or not or we will find your bones." In the end I will not type everything until the row is hoed and I am beyond harms way with loan returned. All that I will put down for all to read now is this is partly why we have the Bill or Rights; the right to bear arms. Personally, it is part of what I fought for in the military; the right to freely choose, outside of any ruling government's good intentions and bad laws. Yes I have the pepper spray that should become a stone wall, a spear that has dispatched lions in Africa, and nearly seven thousand miles of hard training and near misses with man and beast rattling in my head and harness, but-an eight hundred pound grizzly unzipping my tent with it's claws has not been part of the equation until now. I have yet to meet anyone (except for the dim witted) that would take my yoke without packing authority...or should I call it a last chance just this side of prayer before dying.
One book after another I have studied breaking down bear attacks, and FEEDINGS. From the protective sow with cubs that can be two years old and wander anywhere around you so you can't help but be trapped between mother and offspring, to the predator bear that hunts man as a food source, my fingers have turned neatly typed pages to search for windows, hopes, answers and tactics to surviving. As in war, preparation is survival. I love bears too for they are the wild places, but I have also grown to like my funny looking face as it is, and have grown accustomed to breathing in and out without air vents in my ribs and my inner noodles dangling out. In the gravest extreme....I begin a new kind of walking, of sleepin in clothes rich with patina, of once again filtering water while doing a 'Where's Waldo' across the ridgeline. Through the land of Lewis and Clark I make camp and wish I did not mill alone by the fire.

Neck Silk Fading From Red

2007-07-10T15:26:00.000-05:00

Cody will fall behind within the week. I could write that it will be hard, it will be hot, it will be painful and waste words for these things are all a given. There is no way to know when I will be at a table again, any table and not sitting cross legged in the desert dirt tempting ants and scorpions to run up my pant legs and pierce my legs. It all comes back in less than a mile of walking. The road takes up where it left off. In five miles I will look as if I have never rested. In five miles I will listen to my body tell me about all the little things I will never see again. I am at Vail's Stage Stop Horse Hotel and come to love Paul's company and endless history lessons he offers up about Cody and the surrounding region. We toss broken bails to his prize horses of perfect lineage, scoop oats into an old coffee can and feel the cool wake of morning put on two coats too many as the last of white status clouds melt into blue heat. In a half hour hay is sticking to our necks and I am thirteen years old loading a hay wagon that moves across the July fields in a creaking memory of Becket, Ma. All of my life has prepared me for this land, these people of the horse. Liz and Paul's place is an old stage stop where Wild Bill Cody rested, Chief Black Kettle stretched his legs and history thicker than all time painted every cut of earth with memory. I am going back to go forward. Always it is this way. I make pancakes on gravel stones always feeling that people from times gone by are watching, approvingly. If we are silent, and very still we can here the land speak, telling us where we belong, and where we don't. It is there when we arrive at a new place. It is silently speaking when we leave if it recognises our stance at the fire, and how we left the large black spider living by the door just as we found it.

Well It's The Fourth of July

2007-07-04T23:32:00.000-05:00

Over Heart Mountain the sky spits and sputters in historic revelry that makes the heart of man and woman want to sky walk with equal freedom through Yellowstone, past the mountains that remember earth wild, across rivers of elk with thick velvet antlers two seasons from the shed, pass the borders that some agent of state has painted on a map in Washington, to an America that is still wiggling hard toward freedom that's really free. Firetrucks sing down in the valley in route to water some dry sage turning yellow red before the sky is another bouquet of weeping willow fire and then a report. Red, white and blue in flame. The Cody parades are over with a thousand thousand pictures flashed and micro chipped. The crowds have cheered and applauded until all of the participant's are full and thirsty for something cold to drink and looking forward to head tipsy conversation with new acquaintances.

Through morning hours we all brought our tack and floats past Buffalo Bill Heritage Center, back where the churches spill out into lines of tar on back roads with pretty shuttered houses winking from behind landscaping spoils we'd all love to call home except the sky hungry. "Too many trees," Paul smiles at me. You couldn't even see the stars if you lived here. We talk about New England and the oceans of green up in the northeast. Paul would drown there. I am beginning to understand the lust for the open land. My goldfish never grew until I gave them a pond in the back yard waist deep. Only then were they fish two feet long that ate frogs in one gulp that happened past. The right to bear arms is alive in Wyoming and nobody is mugged out here.
The ribboned pony carts braid through the crowd as we look for our numbers painted on the rim of the sidewalk that line us for the parade. I pass a rolling statue of John Wayne and smile though his hand is on the butt of his pistol. The Duke is the man of honor, and would be 100 years old this year. I walk past a flag for the 82ND and wonder if I should still drop and give one for the airborne. Crow Dog my pack prevents me. A man sees my old rank on my pack. "Morning Sergeant," he smiles. After a sea of horses fit with brown leather I am a backpack and cart standing by #91 waiting for permission to walk behind the Pizza Hut truck and commence waving to the gathered crowd like a drunk sailor leaving port. A nice lady steps down from the Pizza Hut truck and the piece f pizza that will be waving to the croud, handing me a coupon for free lunch somewhere on my travels. Smiling, I tell her I did think it was cruel to have me follow a float for pizza without the carrot on the stick giving up something. She laughs. I smile as I am putting the coupon carefully in my wallet and already smelling melted cheese and garlic mushroom sauce that's just aching to burn my tongue. Pizza Hut, 24 years in Cody. Strangers shake my hand from their mounts as well used horses fail to shy away in a thunderbolt like the cart horses in the Amish land of PA. often did. Some disbelieve I have walked America for two years and poke at me until I don't bite. Some believe and hope I believe them when they tell me that they wish they could join my leaving when the time comes but... Watching their eyes I know they speak the truth without unblinking. We all have different walks. I respect that. This is Cody. Tourists move in and out spawning through Cody, Yellowstone, and across America in climate controlled pods with flip down flat screens playing the Walton's television series, and Little House. Those that remain in their chairs and saddles through heat and the frigid winter winds are just leaning back in their chairs just like their teachers told them not to; hoping to fall...back to a simpler time, back to earth pelted under the sound of hooves running over open land where a broken watch is just as good at keeping country time as a top of the line 18k Rolex. My second watch died in the Rocky Mountains last winter and has gone unreplaced. In Cody just looking at my naked wrist and guessing is usually good enough. See you in the morning, before lunch.

Losing Callus

2007-07-03T00:05:00.000-05:00

It is after midnight and the parade, the idea of it, kicks my legs under the table. I know better than to stop for so long, the blood changes for the heart remembers, and punches hard in my chest to think of leaving again. Sleep? How silly. It is nothing to draw a sharp knife over and over across the hand. The body, the heart, the arch and heal all grow callus, grow accustomed to being without a tender comb of the hand. In the shower I see my restraint, my conditioning peel away from my feet to be lost in water, in the circle of the thirsty drain. Of course, of course, this is all of it. Birth pains. Dry laugh. Rather a push start to a laugh that won't turn over because of this fist in my throat that has me mouthing a index knuckle as remedy.
I have played one song, one song over and over until my heart is wet with it. Replay is pressed again. I can do a bear growl that makes the neighbor's lap dog hide behind the tree and whimper, yet plug me in to 2007 society, a landmass that I swim separate from and feed me too many emotions and I drown. It passes, given the sweet elixir of time, and it all passes. Hey, it all passes right? Outside of the weight of the sun furnace I walk in I have been shining for months. It is good to have a wet eye now and then, just for a bite, a remembering. Yes that is it, a remembering. It is all a women in the river walking toward me, singing over all that has floated past.

'Anything It Is That Makes You Smile'

2007-06-29T11:04:00.000-05:00

The days move quickly past in Cody, horses running down hill. A night at Ruffin and Michelle's flat in town becomes a few days staying with Scary Mary. Mary had owned a few shops in town that carried the unusual, the tie-dyed, beads and a fun comedy of oddities that didn't exactly blend in a town of bronze grizzly bears, cowboy boots, and elk ivories set in rose gold. Her 'hippie' shops were both called Scary Mary's. Though the stores closed after a run the name stuck with a town of endearing friends. Mary is a sweet soul perhaps a dozen years my senior, growing younger daily. No sooner had we met than I was offered the figurative key to her bead collection that she once used to sell, and a flat lawn in the shade to throw a tent under. Beads are one of my weaknesses, that and the art of puttering through a day, night, and down through morning. The first necklace I make is for Mary. I add a few sterling beads I bartered for in Taos, New Mexico and a tip from an elk antler found on the walk, polished and drilled then wore for a thousand miles. Mary is thrilled sporting her new necklace everywhere under the umbrella of her smile. I showed her the sheath for my spear this morning in passing. "Oh, you gotta bead it,"exclaims Mary as if to say,"What are you thinking, It's naked!"
This morning I make pancakes for us after tumbling down the stairs from the room I'm lent. The upstairs air is already down sweater warm in July, eliminating all fear of sleeping in too late. Today I'll call the horse ranch to confirm my stay there in a bunkhouse while in Cody, or the flat by the creek on the same ranch. Mary has become a happy laugh that I enjoy, and I know that we will spend more time together just turning over stories while the coffee beans swell under spring water as I come and go from downtown throughout the next week. There are so many threads to this walk, so many faces and voices that sculpt their hands into all that I thought I knew about America and people, and mostly myself. I know only that we all have the power to shape each other for better or worse with a look napped sharp like chert so I move my eyes carefully. Mary is good people.
When I left Thermopolis and Jessica Monday completed the interview she was writing about The Walk for the local paper Jessica stepped forward gracefully with intent; a soft voice moving closer from behind her beauty. I watched as she tied a red thread to the shoulder strap of my backpack while she set her eyes in mine. "When things get hard, when you feel alone, look at this red thread and remember that we are connected."

I have signed up to be in the Cody parade. Questioning vanity, I shrug softly into my shoulders, to myself. The walk demands that I step forward, never remaining just a witness. I will sweat with the hundreds marching so I too can feel I've earned my draft at the Irma when we all we smell is horse manure under our boots, urine on hot tarmac and sweat cooling our clothes. The last parade I was in, not counting the military(which was one long parade whenever we got stateside with bullets still in our pockets), was when I was peddling a red bicycle beside my older brother Steve's bike in Falls Village, CT, down the hill past Lee H. Kellogg School. I could smell the Suave in my brother's hair that reeked of spit sweat and strawberries, and the pelt of cut grass smell coming up from the manicured lawns in town. It was 1976 and flags were bucking in the wind from everything that could hold a salute or a birch dowel choked with twine and worthless yellow-clear tape that had string running through it. From our handlebars taffeta paper ruffled in small skirts and we were flying though town on tires we couldn't feel turning. It was 1976 and the nation was, for a day, smiling red, white and blue. Vietnam was freshly over and we had the world sitting by the side of the road in Falls Village CT. Everyone was waving at us like it was Christmas and they were believing.
Later that day I saw my first naked woman at a secluded swimming hole two miles out of town just down the bank from where I lived. She was tall, maybe twenty and a haunting street across from too beautiful, wearing just a lazy smile lit up bright, like her blond hair mimicking the shimmer of the river water moving light around us. She let me cover her with my eyes. She let me try to wiggle out words and blushed for us both when I couldn't, then she gave me her eyes again, softer this time. She was my summer of 76,and has been every summer since. She was walking across the water toward me with her long hair waving like all the flags of Canaan, and I was wishing that I had hair under my arms, and that I was suddenly taller. She was walking toward me with her eyes saying everything is going to be alright and I was believing.

"Here"s a wishing well
Here's a penny for
Anything it is that makes you smile
Every Diamond ring
Everything that brings
Love and happiness into your life (Emmlylou Harris)

I wanted to thank her with the appreciation of being a thirteen year old boy welded to her grace by my eyes while trying hopelessly to look away, failing ever so perfectly. Without words I think I did thank her. It was then that I knew that I had been right in believing as a child that making love to a woman was two souls singing back and forth in words nobody else could hear. It was the bicentennial year of 1976, I was thirteen, and I would never be the same, nor would all the water in the world. In two years I was to leave home forever, in five years I was parachuting throughout Central America in the middle of the night with weapons exposed and the smell of thirty men vomiting burnt into my battle uniform because we had flown under radar for the last hundred and fifty miles, banking low just over treetops until we all lost the fear of dying, of wanting anything in the world but to fall from those planes so the taunting of death would bite us through or release. When it the years in the 82nd Airborne were over and I was young too tired for being in only in my twenties I went back to that swimming hole, back to the swimming hole where the farmhouse used to gaulk from the hill, and could hear her sing in the moving of the water, "Anything it is that makes you smile...love and happiness into your life."

Broke(n) Down In Cody

2007-06-24T18:58:00.000-05:00

After all these faithful miles my cracked bank card refuses to work although it took three teller machines to confirm it. "Show me the money," fails to fill my wallet for the first time. My brow gets white cold even though it is 97 degrees. A bank debit card has been my lifeline, rope cut and the quick fall into uncertainty begins although I push in buttons all the way down. Alot of phone calls are made that do little to quell the fear of being broke by the time I'm somewhere near the Crow Reservation --this becomes a possibility. If this glitch happened in my old home town this would be of little concern, here it is the fuel line being cut on a sharp turn heading again into open land. In New England I would call a familiar face in the teller office and order another bankcard, then wait a few days for the hard plastic card to arrive via mail. Out here I make phone calls, bend the old card to try to get it to work one more time, and try to move past being anxious. I call basecamp again, write an e-mail to my ex-wife Alexcia then phone her, and pray for a replacement to find me before the two hundred dollars I just borrowed evaporates in the 100 degree high desert heat. I get word that the bank demands an address for my account to be active; Big Brother wants to know where I live. An address? Once again the rules of This System demand that if you have money in a bank you must have a home address even though I told them before the walk began that I would be walking across America and this was the bank account just for that. "No problem sir,you can use this card all across the nation," has become a problem two years into the journey. I'd drop Legacy Bank stationed in Great Barrington Mass. if I could. It is once again the old adage 'don't change horses in the middle of a river crossing,' even though I have no intention in carrying a lame horse another thousand plus miles to northern Washington. Necessity is the mother of invention...now, where to call home?

The road here was extreme. I had grow soft in sixteen days of healing and roofing in Thermopolis, if roofing is taking it easy. The sun has grown angry though. At 22 miles a day pulling 150 pounds and melting another 60-70 pounds into my shoulders via backpack I cannot pour enough water into my mouth even while I'm drinking the hot water directly from the 3 gallon tank after the fist two single gallon jugs are spent, squatting under my green and tan golf umbrella that's mounted to the frame of my pack. My head will reason toward anything for just a moment out of the consuming rays I can still hear digging into the open range of sand and rock where the grass grows thin. Even the rabbits have grown stupefied in the heat and refuse to run. As I pass they throw dirt over their fur flopping lengthwise like cats trying to choke a herd of biting flees. To walk this land in this heat is to lean over the edge with the great possibility of falling down hard in a treeless forest...never to be heard.

Cody Historical Center: I touch bronze, covet feathers gleaned a hundred years ago, marvel at plains grizzly claws six inches long, then camp by a river waiting.... I have not come to this building by chance, or this city for that matter. Thousands of miles and twenty states ago I knew that I would be standing here soaked in history. I study the cut of an eagle bone whistle for the third day in a row and remember my grandfather sending me into the forest in Becket to retrieve a piece of striped maple so he could teach me how to make an eagle's cry. I remember tapping the bark off with a mallet to notch the sweet wood inside, cutting my hand and for the first time not crying. I was just a boy then and had never seen an eagle or heard its chirp, the same golden eagles I see almost daily now. I had put my homemade whistle into a glass of water by the sink every night so the bark wouldn't crack just as my grandfather instructed. I remember when my grandfather died. My whistle had begun to grow a fine net of roots and I couldn't decide whether to take a knife to my living whistle or bury it in the field down by the creek and listen. The more I walk forward the more I go back.

From gallery to gallery I wander the town of Cody. Ruffin Prevost, a reporter for the Billings Gazette,and I meet at the Maxwell Restaurant to work out a story for the Gazette over lunch. I am offered a room for the night as well as a ride about town on his wife Michelle's vintage green bicycle whenever I want to use it while I am here. Ruffin tells me about the Fourth of July in Cody being something not to miss if I could wait out the week. I have walked too long to run for the northern Rocky Mountains just because they are there and need to be saddled. If Cody has a song to sing, as I know it does, I will be here to listen. Snow in the Rocky Mountains is still some distance off. I am more the grasshopper than the ant if there is music.

Update..Bankcard Reactivated

16 Days and Leaving. Thermopolis

2007-06-17T22:36:00.000-05:00

Checking in on a scale I see that I have gained eleven pounds in the two weeks and two days that I have been in Thermopolis. This is better than a thick wallet. This is far better than the full food sack I prepare for loading into my cart for leaving. My weight has stablized since the winter Rocky Mountains, but putting on weight while walking days into weeks into years is next to impossible. My hope is always to pack on a few extra pounds to soften the cut of my belt on bone. I pat the very humble roundness of my stomach, see in the mirror how my frame has put on a healthy bulk, and smile. One hundred and seventy three pounds at six foot. It'll do. I am ready for the northern rockies. I have come to know an exhausted man is brother to a coward. So is a man worn too thin. With every knife sharpened, new Samburu spear housed in a sheath, and bear spray is set in a holster on my hip as the first line of defense. I cut, sew, hone and discard as if it is the first day, and I have never walked before. The warmth of countless new friends in Thermopolis has made my pack put on some girth of its own. Tomorrow Jessica Monday from the local paper will photograph my leaving. As day becomes evening I know the inner truth that I will be re-packing a few miles up the road in a patch of desert where there is no wall clock or watch to pressure the speed of sorting. Now my hands move too fast. All I accomplish though is losing the right sock while searching for the left; speed reading books I fell in love with when weight wasn't a consideration, and saying good-bye to people I have come to love knowing I will see them in hours and cut myself again. Leaving is harder than walking.

New shingles bronze the roof of the Higgins home. Even with the stainless steel buckets of our conversation that allowed Ron and myself to milk three hours of labor into half a day of work day after day, trips for coffee and more drip edge to trim the roof, or a run for more rolls of tar paper, the roof is finished. The two layers of old shingles are carted away, My yes to help Ron in the end meant yes with no regrets whatsoever. For the first time in my life I was sad to see a mountain of shingles cover the black sky of new tar paper, and the ladder return to the hooks in the barn. It was last Sunday that Pastor Ron Higgins talked to the congregation about my leaving, called me forward for a united prayer for my safety on the road north, and Ron was moved to tears as his mind brought him to my eminent exodus. We live in a hard time for men to be men. We are afraid to love, and not to. And we are petrified to show love to another male? This is delicate set of razors to handle even with callus skin, if it is ever to be considered at all. A strike on the back or a hard grip of the hand held for that extra moment.....but love. It was a day ago that Ron stepped forward and requested a hug from me. I would not write this except that I am afraid that nobody would, so I make note. It was not a hug and then quick steps around the body of another , or a turn to leave after that uncomfortable silence. There was comfort in our embrace, an embrace before the coming day of good-bye, warmth of his cheek against mine knowing that we care dearly for one another without an eye on gain or show, seconds passed and I knew I was being healed just as if I was receiving an i.v. push of all the strength I would need to carry forward, a healing of all the unease that I had collected in these years of miles, in a life of no father and lost brother. Ron was saying that I mattered. For the first time in my life I was listening to myself becoming a man and we were only breathing.
More good-byes wait. A woman named Lisa three roads away, or a ten minute walk ( unless you miss a road at one a.m. as I did once...then it is an hour), has drawn close to me, and I to her. We talk about my leaving like two kids moving a sharp knife quickly between our fingers that rest on a pine board. One slip and....cut. Lisa works in the hospital. My leaving comes out sounding like surgery where everybody gets cut and healing is one long slow song we all move our feet to though nobody wants to dance. Nights out for dinners I dreamed of while walking have all passed into fresh memory. We sip wine at her dining room table while we chew elk, stitch leather for a new sheath I'll carry, and keep looking up at one another at the same time with weak smiles spent of words. "This is what I wanted," I whisper to myself. "To walk, experience other peoples lives, love........" A six year old has no flare for endings when he dreams. As much as I am saddened at the thought of my journey coming to its end, I am saddened tonight to see my shoes leaning by the door.

Please Don"t Save Me

2007-06-10T10:08:00.000-05:00

When I write of hardship, or the full taste of blood from a branch raking my mouth just after dark as I break into a forest only to find a flat where another bear has buried a quarter of deer carcus centered on the only free earth without prickly pear cactus; when I tell you about rattlesnakes I fill my cookpot with when all other food is spent, or the sound of pumas being loud in their soundlessness just outside the zip-lock wall of my tent, I am not asking you for a rope to help me escape. I am telling you what the ocean smells like knowing you are surrounded by sand. I am telling you that I have ridden beyond the horizon and have not fallen into space. We all laughed at the beliefs of ancient great explorers in elementary school, and then we grew up to believe the modern equivalant as we riddled our lives in harnesses to avoid walking into the unknown, the unpaved. I have talked to many people that have never crossed the state line of their homeland...and they are proud of it. They were not young, and I wonder then if they ever were. Then I remember pieces of myself not long ago removed to understand. It is hard to leave the predictability of a life gone static and safe. I am rarely safe.
A year ago on, early on in this walkabout, I was often asked how I 'got permission' to leave job, home, responsibilities that every man of forty years carries... as well as the 21st century life with its furious grip of the established norm. I was not asked by people that smile alot. At first I was angered by their beliefs, or was it their stab at my implied irresponsibility that makes me lie awake sometimes late in my humble brown tent rumenating over all the things I wish I had said?. Permission? Rolling the fotage backwards in my thoughts I reflect on whether or not I have ever been given permission to color outside the lines. Who took away our souls, our feeding of a hunger that roams outside the settlement of every man I ever met? Who cut the tendons above our heels and then demanded us to whisper when we knew we should be roaring? We watch Legends of the Fall and then go out and mow the lawn in flowered shorts thinking about a time in history when wild places still existed.

Trucks with ludicriously large knobby tires have bulldoged past me through many of these southern states, mufflers cut, modified to choke out in a voice that rattles plates on distant dinner tables like Harley Davidsons on parade: their perpetual longing for attention. Driver's just cutting in their first facial hair believe they are wild and on top of the world. When they pass me on the open road miles from where the sidewalks has given up and died into red dust they will stomp on the gas pedal as if they are about to shoot into space, and they do this infuriating act just for me. I wear just one earplug all the time for just such stupidity...and then it accured to me after months of muttering to myself in distain that they are saying that they are real men too, warriors. They are showing that they are saddled on their fierce steed and I am comparably little in there world; that I am a trite detail moving toward nothing...... until they are honest and alone late in their night of nights and years come to them, then they will don their pack named something other than CrowDog. and thump out to where the wild things are even if only in their minds. They too will follow whatever voice it is that separates them from the good intention of their flock, and for a little while, until sleep comes in and settles beside them, they will tilt ther hat against the sun and consider lions in the pale blue of sagebrush with purple bone branches. Silver bullets of ideas will be slid into their pistol cylinders as they chew a thin cigar they never light. They will not lie awake bored and glazed over until sleep finally moseys into their inner room. They will not have to roar their engine to be seen as a unstopable trumpet of life. They will grin through their tired happy eyes knowing, tomorrow they will brave on, answering that voice inside their head that is theirs alone. For just a little while in this 'sold our souls to the company store' world we can be free to cut our names into a tree in our mind's eye that will not blemish over or die. We can be walking with every explorer that has walked before us. We will throw down the dice each morning knowing that is is no matter what edge hangs on a blade of grass, or if one die falls on two dots or five, we are investing the talents the Master left us to care for. All may be lost and we'll still win. We will not bury our talents in the earth, under hard packed dirt and mouth fulls of 'Yes sir, sorry sir. I will try harder tomorrow." Only then will steriod trucks drive past me slowly and smile instead of stomping their feet on the excellerator.
Please don't save me. I am trying to remember things deep in my bones that used to keep me awake too. Out here I am home.

Up On The Roof

2007-06-07T09:14:00.000-05:00

Ron was puttering around his house when I rolled my kit onto the front yard to load up for leaving. My head was already re-packing Crow Dog, my backpack, and ascending the next climbing range out of Thermopolis. In the driveway a large stack of bundled shingles on a palet await a new life twelve feet up. Somehow I hadn't noticed them until now.
"Hey Ron, when are you going to get to the burnt corn flakes up on the roof?" Ron and I stare up at the roof and I feel my mouth open up and indirectly begin to offer to strip two layers of vintage sun toasted flakes and cut and set three days worth of ashphat rectangles with the addition of more shingles on the way. It is a simple straight forward roof with no obsene peaks or valleys. I think quickly of the road, and let the idea of leaving melt from my brow.
"Well, I have been waiting for cooler weather, and it wasn't a project I wanted to undertake myself, and...well, what are you saying? If your suggesting that you know how to roof and would like to volunteer to help me through this I sure wouldn't say no." Ron is a shining smile standing in his driveway. I smile back, already beginning to pull my cart on new tires reflecting the sun back into the garage. It feels good to offer up a service that is larger than carving a wooden bear out of firewood, or taking a frame off an old truck, mounting a bronze angle to a rock in a garden, or feeding horses for a week in an artic Oaklahoma ice storm. These were all roads before this one that blessed the giver and the reciever but short lived. Looking at the shingles, a task now ahead of me that I used to enjoy like a toothacke and have done at least a hundred times. I know this time will be different. Roofing will be stories and the making of a good friend with the company of Ron. There will be no shouting orders, no racing to reach a goal that constantly moves into a unrewarding distance, or moving under a tyrant while being reduced to slave status that guts my heart quicker than a sharpened spoon. "Work or talk. You can't do both.," was one of the constant montra's that took the light from my eyes, my day. I have left that world happy never to return. I will be working with a friend. We will sit on the roof and sip spring water while talking about our Creator, the value of a good truck, and a the making of a backyard fire out of cedar shakes that pile below us.
In the next week the roof will be stripped, sealed with new drip edge, new boots for all the piping vents, tarpapered, and shingled with each 75 pound bundle carried up a weak ladder between evenings of easy conversation as popcorn pops into a bowl, and little details in my gear are honed for the road ahead with a calming peace of remembering the wandering that brought me here.

Leaving is easy. The heart has its own cadence though; its own step. It feels healing to share a morning cup in Ron and Debra's livingroom knowing the roof is moving through its course toward completion, an easy transition from dry rotted boards layered over old asphalt shingles into a finished project that draws our lives together through rest and production, and a natural appreciation for being fully alive in this moment.
It is evening and the cheeseburgers spit on the grill while Ron and I act silly in the kitchen, laughing like punch drunk teens until I'm sure one of us just snorted. We have been on the roof all day and it is 7pm. We just came down...and we are just coming down. The roof will be done soon, and for the first time I feel a little sadness with its end in sight. I hear the road begin to whisper again with urgency free from its mouth. "There is no hurry. I will wait for you. I will tell you secrets when you return. For now, live this moment your in, enjoy these people I have brought you to. In a little while, I will show you more things than you can imagine. Remember, you have been alone a long time, and when you return to me it will sound the same."

Big Wheels for Cody

2007-06-05T09:33:00.000-05:00

After a gift night in a motel, I have spent two nights now with the Higgins family....movies, hot food off the grill, tea on the deck, and the sounds of family everywhere in broken conversations that sound just like summer, and all is well. Ron Higgins, the pastor of the Open Bible Church, has become a quick friend to the point that we have both regressed into laughing kids that are constantly playing off each other to the humored chagrin of Debra his wife. "I can't even imagine what it would be like if you two lived next door to one another." Debra smiles at our silly puns as she hands me many treats for the road that she has gone out and gathered, and a book that I have been longing for to read in camp. The warmth of this Wyoming family is a refreshing glass of cold water after nearly two large states of just moving through without being asked beyond one front door frame. It is hard to describe the intoxicating effect of morning bread rising to heat in the oven and then out in a smell as old as time, walking barefoot on carpet to the computer with my morning cup as Jessie and Ian, Ron and Debra's daughter and son skirt about ideas that go into filling a summer day without the tax of school.
Ron and I went on a field trip yesterday to find a new set of tires for the cart. Worland, just north of here by 30 miles, provided the raw supplies for new shafts, tires and of course we just had to peek in a few outdoor shops with new toys any adult kid would just drool over, from packs to rifles, sling-shots just acking to shard a window, and a hillside of new hats. I made fun of the long horn steer pin ( that looked like plastic ) on Ron's new hat until he gave it to me for my Tilley....whoops.
Yesterday Ron and I rebuilt my rolling kit with Ron's addition of much taller tires that would no longer need a running start to roll over three inches of sage beside a ditch.
It is near the hour to leave again. Young Ian has a cast on his arm that today he'll have checked at the doctors office. I remember the pathetic tender pale flesh,all tone and strength flown, when I had my cast cut from the length of my leg so long ago. Leaving is alot like this. The large protective cast of family is carefully pulled away with delicate intention and strained good-byes till, before I know it, I am naked on the walk again with my pack too heavy with new supplies, lighter with new memories, and under me... is all the road in the world.

Thermopolis,WY, A Church and a Prayer

2007-06-03T22:05:00.000-05:00

No matter how beautiful the world is that is spinning around me, the rain does fall too hard when it comes or for too long, and the wind moves through me until true warmth is reduced to memory, and the small Zip-stove fire warming water for tea dallies toward a boil. I have slept a night here under this road in a concreate pipe that I can barely sit up in, and I been more than thankful for it.. Water dribbles in with the droan of the wind that roams about with the lions in the sage, around boulders, forever hungry. Behind my head I put my water jugs and tie three silks around my neck to slow a possible bite, while at my feet are my staples and tack. There are no trees to taunt a bear with my food bundle swinging above like a pendulum, so the food bag is a cork in the pipe near my feet till morning. Pepper spray for bears(for any threat) rests by my head. Pulling my face into a shard of fleece blanket I found in New Mexico before the bullets, before the spring, I think of dry feet to come, and the loves of this life that I have wandered out of...too perfectly. It is the season of prayer; the season of need(...the season of perpetual need). My heart has been too tight for weeks. I pray for the fist in my chest to open,to relax and my intentions decend like a cold balloon. I pray and then I can sleep easily. Some camps ease the wear of the day. Some camps are just snakes, stone and sand that make the heart hurt waiting for morning to come. Always I am thrilled when morning wanders into camp with new promise...and it is always the same promise. Another road has secrets to tell me, strangers to meet perhaps, a bit of red fabric blow into the bunchgrass that I can knot on my pack as if if it is worth a trade in gold, a shard of bone to shape with my knife to ease my need to create, and just maybe a voice will visit me along this next road that understands this walking, and we will talk until the key is turned off and I can not feel this pack on my shoulder or this cart cutting over a hundred pounds into my abs over countless mountains.

When I get to Thermopolis I am again a filter that can hold no more road in my shirt, in my pants. I pray for little things. A store to come with cart tires to replace the two worn through wheels on my cart. Kindness of a stranger. Hope for a flat to set my tent on rare green grass, and maybe some good words will come to my heart that will feed the spiritual part of me that is now as hungry as the flesh. The twin cart tires are torn open, and heels have left my shoes.
I have checked every shop coming into town to no avail. Evening falls as I pass the Open Bible Church. The lawn is being mowed by Ron Higgins. I ask if I could safely sleep in the park. "Yeah, you could sleep in the park for a free night in jail," says Charlie, a kind face leaning against an old pick-up outside the church.
Ron no sooner meets me than he offers to let me set camp outside the single story building he is mowing around. In ten minutes the offer has become a hotel room. "Really Ron, I just need a place to pop up my house. I happy having grass under me."
"You wouldn't take away my chance to give a blessing to you and your journey would you? Let me give this to you. That ground must get hard after a while?" Ron is smiling as we load his truck with my gear, and I am still amazed at the power of faith.
Every prayer I have planted has sprouted a harvest bigger that the piece of fruit I asked for. As we drive to the motel I mouth the words thank you to the ceiling of the truck.

All my clothes are washed in the sink and hung about like twenty camp ghost wearing socks and fleece, pants and shirts worn through past being soft. Too happy to sleep, I flop about on the bed and make four pots of tea without the need of a fire. When the sun comes up I am just coming down.

Cody is not far up the road I travel. 80 miles or so. Charlie told me about the four or five separate griz he has seen twenty miles up the road from here. I have worn the fear of bears down just as I did being afraid of jumping as a paratrooper in my army training. At first, as a young soldier, I thought today I am really going to die. And then I jumped and I began to see and live in color, no longer limited by my fear. Rubbed with my fingers long enough, this fear of the great grizzly has become much the same, And so I walk with eyes open in a new prayers in my mouth that taste like falling.

Memorial Daze, Lander, Wy

2007-05-27T14:59:00.000-05:00

Two days ago I called my ex-wife Alexcia, touched her world superficially with kid gloves shaped into words. She is moving faster and faster toward becoming a stranger that she blames on her busy bundle of life as if once she ties it up with stronger string; ties tighter, and tighter still, she will then find the perfect hour and seven minutes to place to me a post that will smell of used to be's , and a strong wind of still caring. Her boat has sailing away and I am waving as if she is still watching. I ask about her engagement, her life with him and his two kids in Minnesota, and then I glaze over as she answers. My mind is only hearing fluctuations in her voice, old notes of pleasure and thought, still, in my mind, we are dancing on the kitchen floor in stocking feet as if our faces will be smile tight forever, though now the image is seen through gause. Forever is spinning down fast. I miss the sisterhood of my wife, sharing with my friend. Living is missing rooms left behind, and the perpetual closing of doors on still more rooms abandoned. This I know. And still, as fall becomes the winter, and spring asks everyone to forgive and forget into summer, I wonder about this road on Memorial Day weekend, and remember the staggering march that brought me here. In an hour I'll begin walking toward Cody. In a hour I will be under a fresh sweat and forget this field of red and white checkered picnic blankets, knowing that someday I will be on my own boat no longer looking back to see who is still waving, or not-- though it is a pathetic art lost on me...this pretending to be eating well while inside I am starving to death on shore.

We were a marvelous group of western travelers for two days, bookended by two chilly nights. We sat on the rubberized metal planks of the picnic table, talking until we were too cold to sit and talk any longer in the black that follows day, most of our good stories used up, and we were too lazy to reach inside ourselves and unpack more. Ted and Dan rode in on bikes just as the day surrendered under the slant of evening Friday night.
"I wouldn't set camp by that dirt road," I warned as Dan walked his bike under a roadside tree. " It's almost graduation and these teenster's think this strip is a proving ground. They'll run up and down this road in their mazdas and pickup trucks until road dust is on everything you own, and maybe toss an empty bottle at your tent just for good measure. Last night a man jumped on my tent under some kind of stimulant and began to scream and beat my tent with a big stick. It was about 2am. My head is tuned for bear so I was outside still wailing some battle call at the top of my lungs, a yell I carried out of a dream, past two zippers I don't remember opening, and ready to war. The man panicked at my rage and ran into a tree just behind him before I was awake enough to call off the killing of him, and some of the want. I was awake for hours after that. Yep, better to camp up by the treeline," I trailed off.
Dan walked his touring bike up the plush lawn to me, we shook hello, and the anvil of being alone way to long fell off my head. Steve joined us later, another bikerider touring America with a heart intent on living. We set our three tents in formation ready for a scuffle that never came, and began to open each other's life with camp spoons, lives we had been blessed to share for a night, and maybe into the next day.
I was sad to see Steve leave for Muddy Gap in the morning, sadder still when Dan and Ted left today, but thankful that I am no longer starving for companionship, being well fed with great company. I was given wonderful men to share stories of the road with, dog teeth barely escaped, kindnesses from little ol' ladies that cameoed their faces, and generosity on our hearts forever, and the lift that comes with being outside the system. I was given friends that understood the weight of constantly leaving..at least its flavor, it's sound for the road is still rather new to them.
Walking off into the same direction this morning, at least until that far away signal light,I watch Ted and Dan's sun brown backs become silver, then a white you could read by, and finally red. Their bikes went from silent width to a line, and then they were sitting on saddles of air soundlessly leaving, a turn, then they were gone.
Good things move away fast; fantastic things are a breath, a gust of wind we try to hold in our mouths, minds determined to never breathe again for fear of the loss of it...and then it is gone. The breath is exhaled and for lack of anything else to do, we sigh. Eventually, if we are lucky, and if we are easy in this life, we smile, turn, adjust our hats, and step toward the next breath, hoping.
The soft scuff of my new brass bells move under my holstered leather gloves. I cannot camp here tonight. The house is always sold when the baby dies. Nothing is as lonely as a picnic table after everyone has gone home but you...knowing they will never come back again. Trodding into a too hot morning I am glad I have no appetite to be in a camp with my friends gone. Just now, just for this moment I taste the good-byes, sweat in the mouth before the rise of vomit, or the thick bile of being alone is swollowed, and I hope not to taste it. I held their forearms with my left hand as we shook out out separations into instant memories, and we locked eyes one last time in sincerity. Two more pictures and then they are crushing stones under sharp tires as I walk slowly, too slowly behind. Tonight they too, like Steve's last night after a lone day of pedalling, will arrive in Muddy Gap to camp in a town of absence before moving on. They will be my index finger's length on a map from here by evening. I will have walked a thumbnail past being lonely. A thumbnail toward Cody.
We sat in the same smoke for two nights, cans of beer we made empty, and the relish of meals made like art we ate hearing our eyes roll up into our heads like window shades misbehaving, and then we smiled with mouths full of cheesecake and fresh cherries knowing we would never be on this same raft, in this field of sweet grass eating cherry cheesecake again hearing only the sun.

Landed In Lander, WY

2007-05-23T13:11:00.001-05:00

The sky pulls a mottled soot curtain from the west to east too full of promise, too full of rain. At The Open Door Cafe' I kick start my titanium cup after 125 miles without a store or coffee I haven't field ground the beans for. No complaints, being blessed to have fresh oily beans from base camp Betty. I am on fumes now, and the motor in my feet is tired of kicking on powdered mix food and the dusty remnants of old jerky from Oklahoma,...yes Oklahoma.
No mail waits at the post. Maybe a hello waits at the post in Thermopolis, WY.
No trees offer cover from the storm that took all night to crawl into town already dropping sleet last night as I tried to sleep under my nylon roof. Slow in, slow out is the old weather jargon. I'm going to get seriously wet. That mixed with subfreezing nights that solidify the top inch of my water tank and I see a long night awaiting me. The energy is fresh in Lander. Instead of being told by Jim Wynn, a field reporter for the Lander Journal, that I must go see that object, or travel over there...I am told I need to be right here. Wonderfully original. Jim gives me a map to the city park where I can stay for several nights and get to know the town that pulled me out of South Pass, Red Canyon, and through so many breathtaking vistas a camera simply nods at but never records. I am starved for words, for people, for the sweet nip of the familiar..or even an illusion of it before I am stranger to all once again.

The newest report straight from Yellowstone is 610 grizzly bears are in the park, not to include black bears. Cody, the town I have been aiming for, is said to have even more fine furred friends than Yellowstone as many bears flee the concentration of people at the park for the quieter outlying regions. Trooper Ed Sabourin of the Wyoming Highway Patrol is a state trooper that heard from a fellow trooper I was heading north. When he sees me forty miles above Rock Springs he pulls around facing me with his cruiser. I give my card and a grit laced smile. I offer my license. He waves his hand in a negative, and asks to keep the card. This isn't Oklahoma. We talk about the land, the journey, bears and family. With a serious face I am warned against traveling through Cody, being alone and on foot. The trooper is far from the last to give me heads up about Cody. I will see Cody, just maybe not this trip. Maybe I will meet a friend along the way. I hate to miss this gem of America being so close. I would regret it.

South Pass was a travel in time, a travel in solitude. How incredible it was to walk in the steps of the pony express riders, to sleep on the Oregon trail, and to sip water at the Parting of Ways while thinking of the lives that were once thrown together for a journey not unlike mine, and then at this point in their route they said their good-byes as some went on to California, others Oregon, and some took the Mormon move toward Utah pulling carts that look very familiar. (Yes, the cart is still a must for food and water, while I also carry Crow Dog, my pack.) The sadness hung in me for over a day for all those that I have parted the company of on this quest, so many souls reaching out above and beyond mere gesture. A Parting or Ways. I have begun to know that junction well in my life. In a couple of weeks I will be in Montana and still tying what little remains in my food bundle into any hopeful perch, then lying back in my tent wondering when I get up at 6am if I will have fresh coffee beans and cakes, and rasins in boiled rolled oats, or powered grass or sand and a shredded waterproof sack that smells like eating. Time alone will show the partings that await.

Rock Springs, WY

2007-05-11T14:15:00.000-05:00

I ran out of water 14 miles before I got to Rock Springs in the heat of it. Hole in water tank, and one tank split totally. Not Good in unsettled southwestern Wyoming. A blizzard in Flaming Gorge held me in snow cave with my tent as a liner...for three days under 18 inches of snow...plus more snow falling every minute; falling that made the tree which held my food a treasure hunt to find. That was a very long road ago as I walked among wild horses whose curiosity brought them remarkable close except for the black stallion that reared and cantered in circles two hundred yards out on a barren table of red earth.
Several storms have been on me with each mountain pass, making me tired of the deep white cold of it--and yet recharging my eyes with a unique beauty that drenched my soul.....and feet. I have walked the saddles taken by mountain men, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, better understanding their ability to lose a posse' time after time.
Never have I arrived in a town while being this filthy (the promised rivers were not), this depleted of food, water, and self. My pants are oil cloth I can fingernail a cloud into. My face is sandpaper adhered by the sharp bite of salt I replace on my tongue with sea salt from a vial I keep in my pouch on my waist, along with a stick of grease for my shattered lips, a gratitude stone that is half a flint spear point, and several beads I can't send away. Everything has gone from pale sand and rock to the industrial blue-gray of factories and fields of pipe. I am on the outskirts of Rock Springs. This is all I see. I see no springs with swimmers drying on boulders, boulders that squat in the unbridled sun. I see angles drawn by man, and earth being moved to be moved again so that it is in all of my mouth each time I breathe. I am a horse promised a stable after a hard 75 mile ride, only to see torn canvas feathering from an old wooden frame set out by broken tractors and barrels that can't hold water anymore. In a day I'll be regrouped from the hard walk from Vernal, for there is again nothing fore 60 miles before me, all the while the mercury rises. In two days I will not crumple the map and sigh into my cravat. In three days I will be wearing new shoes, smiling over a contented stomach, and not dreaming about ankle deep water softly talking roundness into stones. In days I will blink into a new morning with the draw of adventure eagerly waiting under the laces of my shoes.

Vernal,Utah in Route To Flaming Gorge

2007-04-30T16:47:00.000-05:00

Maybe it is forty miles to Wyoming depending on the hip of the road or the pass I take, if I ever set this map down that I have soiled and tattered nearly out of existence. Wyoming. It is a crazy loop of string in my mind that is trying to connect all of the miles that have brought me over America and through so many lives that I have no thought of forgetting. I ask everybody about bears, the powerful grizz, asking where exactly is the line in the sand. "Your on it," I am told. Fifty dollars worth of food shudder on my cart, worried that it will be taken in in one meal. Everything about me smells like meals eaten and the smoke of two weeks of cooking over fire with sage wood. Inside of me in a area connected to my fight or flight response is a shudder of my own. For weeks I have been practicing the string and bag technique once again, getting all that is edible out of my nylon house and into a tree. Every morning I find an apple, a bar of lavender soap (keeps bugs away), a bit of jerky, alright, and maybe one chocolate bar--dove dark. I have become my grandmother with candy under the pillow. I'll have to search my pack more carefully now. The grizzly has just been taken off the endangered species list. Have I been added to it?

If there have been lonely miles before now, this is the same flavor of land, the same sound of silence once I leave this town. A mouse found its way into my pack last night. I talked to it. A nervous skunk flirted at my door, gave a free sample of her spring scent, then waddled into the grass with my apple core. It was 97 degrees the day before yesterday when I called it a day at one in the afternoon. It was ten degrees on Indian Canyon, and I was covered with a layer of hard blown ice, a white out of wind and snow only a week ago and now my cheese sweats and my candy bars are sports goo in plastic pouches that still say Snicker's. I can only flex so far before the man in my head yells for a break, or at least a pause between extremes to get the anti-freeze glans set up to sweat like a fiend as I plod up yet another mountain or stone red mesa. While on the hellacious rise before entering Vernal I found a concrete underpass for water to flow when water is there to flow, and animals to move under Rt. 191 through. It became home for a night; an afternoon to polish found ivory elk teeth, write postcards to people I've met along the walk, and feel the cooling effect of a heavy sweat. What spring? Dinner was wild rice with fresh mushrooms, real montery jack cheese, chilies,scallions all folded into tortillas and spiced slices of cucumber and tomato. I sip tea made from spearmint leaves I found two nights ago by the puddled remains of a creek, and watch the rock formations change in the passing light through the end of the concrete pass. After all of this walking I have forgotten to feel lonely. I tell myself this out load, and believe it with a smile feeling the cold of the concrete I lean against enter my back. The boulders turn their faces to slate blue, wink , and then move over to reds and golds so hard to blend with a brush or knife on a palette in any believable fashion for canvas to remember. I listen with my eyes the same way we put on glasses to answer the phone. I listen harder.

Vernal is a sweet town in the middle of a boom running on the petrol demand that is in the drilling south of town, like so many southern states where oil and natural gas still rumble beneath the earth...only Vernal appears to spend some of its wealth back on its own in a good way; the college is expanding, new shops open and flourish. People are smiling. Houses are being constructed faster than a supple of wood can be shipped in. New pick-up trucks cruise the town, and it appears everything here in Vernal is blooming in richness for spring. Every boom has its cycle though, and then ...bust. A few people that I have talked to say that this ride has been a good one, and although it is due to bottom out, new money has made some great changes in this high desert town that are here to stay and it has offer some wholesome new blood to this town. The energy of the people here is easy and friendly with people sharing their town pride at the tip of a hat, and everyone has a favorite route through Flaming Gorge that they are just thrilled to pull up a chair, finger over a map with excitement talking about all the best vantage points I just have to titter above with camera at the ready....and my favorite topic, the glorious return of trees and rivers...at least for a while.

Making a Sketch

2007-04-20T12:10:00.000-05:00

From Helper, Utah I am heading north toward Duchesne, Vernal, and then up to Flaming Gorge where I'll cross over to Wyoming from Utah. From the land of compact car size bears and Yellowstone (no worries here,right), I'll head into Montana and Crow Country.
Winter comes early to the northern 48 when the rubber under my feet is the only transport I use so there are no quick get aways. Without much perceived delay in Montana I'll head over to Northern California/Southern Oregon and then run these legs up the coast up to Olympia National Park, Washington to end my walk somewhere in northern Washington on the coastal waters of the Pacific late this year or early spring. So much on this journey depends on the weather, and of course the people I meet along the way.

More and more people ask me what I'll do after the walk. Is shrugging an answer? Years ago I worked with people with special needs. On Saturday I would make a grand breakfast for six to ten of my smilingly buoyant clients. All the while as they lit into pancakes, bacon, berries, whip cream, coffee, and fresh orange juice they would be asking me about meals to come and the great eats we might have next week. There is so much on my table still as I walk north I cannot think about sitting down to anything else while all my heart is still romancing a freshly packed Crow Dog back under a sun cover (to save thread burn), and into another day of walking miles I have, in spite of all my tests and worries, come to adore. There are books to write, talks to give, friends to re-remember over a cold glass of green beer and hot wings, and the lazy ease of predictability, and the novelity of it to enjoy...for a while. Already I consider walking across New Zealand and The Land Down Under. Nepal? Perhaps I am also thinking of three egg omelette's with a mouth full of home fries. I think about not walking until all I can think of is this current joy, these people I have come to know, and so many maps that wait for my fingers to wander over. Inside I will always be walking regardless if these feet ever settle. I shrug my shoulders to the old man on the oak bench that is looking for warmth from a morning sun that is still too weak. "So ya gonna teach again when you settle this walk?"
"I wonder if I'm all settled out."
He squints over my shoulder, "I'd walk with you if I didn't have these legs."

Helper, Utah

2007-04-19T15:22:00.000-05:00

Heading north to Wyoming, back into the land of snow with a deep and complete longing for hardwood forests, less sand, as well as creeks to occasionally wash out a shirt and pair of pants. Yesterday I arrived in Helper (north of Price, Utah) with new shoes, new twin tires for the 150 lb. loaded cart , fresh food, decent shave, and five gallons of water --all ready to climb Indian Canyon high into the northern land above ( approx 8,ooo feet and up). Told to stop by the mission for a warm meal at the railroad and Helper museum, I do and a warm meal turns into a room for three days of rest, a couple of nights off the trail, another reporter stops by to laugh out stories with, new friends point at the mission wall map of America while we talk of roads to come with still the same original dance flicking in my eyes. In Helper's hay day the mission was a bordello and still holds that energy somewhere under its paint, as does the town. Early in the last century 27 languages were spoken here, and coal was the black coveted gold of the area that held promise and drew the people in from all over the globe. Walking the main street of the town (a current pop. of approx. 2,000 though most unseen) I peer behind smoked windows of stores and taverns that have saddled up and moved along down the trail. Even with many closed shops there are a few doors that open with smiles under tooled tin and copper ceilings, and the town has a facade to write home about, recently awarded one of the top old west towns in America. Nearly every building has an historical marker. In fact Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid lived in Helper for a term collecting information, before making a clean get away with $8,ooo in in a combination of gold dust and cash. The money was never recovered. Helper is steeped in history.
My large can of bear spray comes out of hiding from being useless deep within my pack, now ready for battle. I frown at all my food, food that I have adored through many a long hungry night as I stoked my inner fire through many dark hours to try to keep my weight up. I am sad with the fresh idea that we will no longer be tent mates. Now my food pack will dangle as a pinata' twenty trees away from the tent door(as soon as there are trees), and I will listen to every sound anew always wondering if morning will shine dawn on a mound of shredded packaging. There are to many miles to walk before the slack is taken out of my ribs to sleep easy while my precious food swing from a branch perfumed with promise.

Without Road

2007-04-12T16:02:00.000-05:00

Green River, Utah

From a little over five gallons my supply of water dropped to two quarts by the time four and a half days passed, uncounted miles wandering in the desert--walking over trails even the cattle abandoned many rains ago, and then I find their dead half engaged in the sand, and I keep walking certain of sun course, compass, and once in a while I swear I can hear the interstate miles to the south until the return of wind removes all sound except for its own chewing in my ears. No matter how certain I am of my navigational skills, when I leave the road to make my way to the town of Green River( because walking the interstate is illegal and there is Nothing else), all the little uncertainties of the world find a voice in me as water becomes sweat, and food becomes the memory of hard apples and cold cheese cut on a clean plate.

It is still funny without laughter the way this mind walks after me. Before I left the tar that runs up from Moab for sand, I found a sleave of new compact discs by the road. The first words out of my mouth were that I'd mail these to my brother Steve. My feet bite the ground. What happens in the mind that forgets the death of a brother twenty four years past? I reset my thoughts as a finger would turn forward the slow hand of a clock. And tomorrow, will I have to set my mind again? Miles have compiled the dead and the living so that the field is the same. Everything is memory from a land that no longer is in check. The world that I left, friends known, couples I knew as childless, and even my own marriage before its death, everything has floated away into an inaccurate soup.

The tires on the cart are worn through to the hollow the labeling said were solid. Soon they will fold open into uselessness. My shoes are worn to smooth rubber that prints every stone on my feet as I walk while the worn heels tilt my legs out to walk like a cowboy fresh out of the saddle. The largest water tank of three gallons drips like a faucet with a spoiled washer from a hole on the bottom I can not find. I am told the town of Price will have the fix I need for all my little ills. Sixty plus miles straddle above me before I'll touch down in Price. Another promise, another re-supply before I take my pen to map with total conviction that these distances are just variations on an old theme. It is not the same. Miles often no longer have flavor and little rewards are days apart, subtle as feathers falling in a sleepers room. These are mental miles; miles when the mind does not have enough to hold it down so that it is dayly wanders over years, relationships, brushes against the smell of sage warming in the morning sun then reels it back in a sigh, and now I am watching antelope moving too fast and far too close to my side realize, and somehow I never see them leave. Softly, very softly, all the world is humming as yesterday becomes today. I did sleep didn't I?

110 miles Till Water

2007-04-07T22:03:00.000-05:00

Still in Moab for yet another day that becomes Saturday night and too mush crazy poured on the road north from brown and green bottles for me to think of leaving until tomorrow. I will carry seven gallons of water in two tanks(so if one breaks I may still live). Four apples, 2# chunky peanut butter, raspberry jelly filled in old plastic peanut butter jar to lose glass, 10 oz. safflower oil, 2# Bisquick, 2# hot pepper beef jerky, 4 Ramon noodles, 1 1/2 # veggie burger dry mix, pepperjack cheese, assorted teas, 1 # whole espresso coffee beans, 6 bagels cin. ras., 2 tins sardines, 2 # rolled oats, two stacks of tortillas(20 total count), 3 large dark choc. bars, 6 cocoa, 6 breakfast bars, one titanium flask of Capt. Morgan spiced rum (4 oz.), 4 bags dried fruit and nuts.

Moab's Big Easy

2007-04-05T11:51:00.000-05:00

As the days move toward summer, I move toward two years walking, two years of living in a tent and making fires within the sound of the road moving past like insects I still pray never bite. Here in Moab I blend. This is a land where river adventure on watercraft, boulder bouncing in a steriod jacked jeeps for a week on Moab Jeep Safari, or canyon humping with rock jocks is all part of the landscape. Though I still look like I have wandered in from the Aussie outback with my 100 pound two wheel cart, and 70 pound pack high on my shoulders, Exofficio clothing, and wide brim Tilley propped up by two walking sticks, I am two looks and a return to the shot of espresso, or a turn and a nod in the middle of a conversation. It is good to just be though the cart is a bit much in the realm of society...and narrow sidewalks.
It is time to think about the life to come after I enter the third and last year ( or so) of walking across America. Many people already ask me about what I'll do after I peak out in Washington state with my feet in the ocean so far from the coast of Maine and the ocean where I began. As if I have been told that a child is on the way in the form of life after the walk, I can not fathom the concept until I see the swell rising; the promise getting closer. As these open miles pass, or fail to (as it sometimes seems), I move over possible names for children and new dreams, consider new places untraveled and new shoes I could ruin.... I am still a walker and know nothing of a week in the same bed or the smell of this skin stripped of trail dust and two weeks of oil and cedar smoke mixed with the sage tied inside the bandana around my neck.
Even now I am given new new worries, new trials to master as I tie concern into the brim of my hat with a tug that keeps the early morning rays out of my eyes. It is easy to see 140 miles of natures hardships and rich views before I make the next town somewhere above Flaming Gorge. The idea of buying enough food, the right food, and a mule's reasonable might to carry it keeps me here in Moab another day as I buy trinkets that please my heart's need to create, mail out gear I should keep, watch beautiful women walk by joyfully offering themselves to their sun god, and hope I can find a way to make six gallons of water weigh less than a buick.
These are the miles now where nobody stops. Days again without conversation. These days are broken into pieces of sky, holes in stacked boulders I climb and search like a squirrel, and snacks often have taken the place of meals for many times I have no energy to stir into one pot still like it is the first time...not unless I find a creek, or a small tree that moves like a sundress over barefoot roots in sand. Even the slightest tree has become a prized umbrella that I will offer up all my milage to just for an hour's reprieve out of the sun in which to watch the world pass by with thick lazy eyes and the easy swollow of water still cool from last night's camp.

Making Sand

2007-03-31T14:48:00.000-05:00

Monticello,Utah

Walking in from CO. and three days of snow laced with biting wind, I feel as though I have fallen into a furnace. Heat? This warmth, I know from past summer, is nothing. I buy a fresh bottle of white vinegar to cool my feet and the smell of sweat, and pack up all the food I can preserve in the growing heat to last me to Moab, Utah, just under sixty miles up the road, a road that divides my new world into of a palette of sand tones and rock that snubs gravity with boulders stacked to the sky in arches that makes me hold my spine just to admire them.

The road getting here has been a long chain of climbing up mountainsides that never let me walk down. Climbing, and more climbing, that pay off in fields of trees and the smell of Vermont in the spring coming up from the damp earth. Leaving Farmington, NM was the first time that anyone turned out to walk the journey with me. Very Forrest Gump. I had been on the local radio stations for several days talking to the Navajo Nation, as well as the people off the reservation on the f.m dial. When the morning came to leave I had a warm croud of smiling people to walk into the early morning air with. It was a walk first well worth waiting for that lasted hours longer than I thought it would... and still, it was still hard to watch them drive away. Cars and trucks traveling past throughout the day honked their support, and it was good humor for me to watch my new companions (that lasted half the day), huff and puff up a nice little mountain that twenty months of walking allowed me to overlook.
It was the Navajo people that came out in force to bring me water when road offered nothing, and after I was held sick huddled under the road for three days and nights, returning finally to the above world drained of water and all the heart energy I usually carry. Day after day a smiling family I never met before brought me staples from their world, even KFC, and talked of their lives in hogans without electricity or conventional stoves, took pictures, gave me arrowheads for protection, and tied blue stones around my neck. I was given many of their names to carry so that I had to write them down or lose them as I have so many things not tied down. Some faces that found me on the side of the road appeared disappointed that my skin was not red enough, or that I did not fill some mental image they carried of a mountain of a man that braves thousands of miles of danger without flinching. I flinch.
Most people that saw me smiled warmly, and that was enough. A blind Navajo elder ordered her family to take her granddaughter to find me when she heard me on the radio. She held my hands through the open car window as she cried when her granddaughters found me. She told me about the darkness of her own youth as she rubbed the back of my hands and pushed her words into my blood through my skin. She gave me two quarters and two pennies I found no way not to take, and I listened to her for many days after she drove away, and even dreampt we spoke in Navajo together and laughed until I woke up over a joke she told me. I woke up only knowing that we laughed.
Before I began this walk everything I held as self sacred was placed on the words of my father, a father that wasn't. We all need to belong, to be somebody, anybody. An inner structure has been rebuilding in me over these miles though. A grand side effect of the walk has been the building up of stone within me that does not worry about the motar of blood being from one people over another, or the type of knives my grandfathers wore when they went off to war. I have watched alot of fringe fall away from the sleeve of my coat no longer with concern. I have walked nearly six thousand miles because I said long ago that I would. Reguardless of where I come from, and what I have walked through, I am becoming real. I am coming home inside. I am coming home to someone that I have never been.

People of The Water

2007-03-15T08:40:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a blur of faces that I will hear in my head as I walk far into the growing heat of the sun. We don't wake up and plan to fall in love. We are running with our head down, or as in my case walking fast with a heavy load, and we trip with all of our perfect plans skidding before us in colored pieces of paper that no longer mean anything. After hours on the radio doing the morning show with Dana Childs on 95.9 Quick, and talking with George Werito on the Navajo station KNDZ 960 am I am off to speak at some of the local schools. I do not know that I will not come back whole, something that was once inside me will now trail behind...trying to catch up, but slowed by constantly looking back.
When I walk into the classroom of the Farmington Boys and Girls Club I see no relation, young men and women just stepping on the bridge that leads to being an adult, still carrying the face of a child in their hand, or arms crossed against the world that has already bruised them. I start to talk about where I came from and the memory I have of bones that have healed. Arms uncross. I am in all their faces, as they step into mine, testing the flooring for a trip wire with their questions. We talk about seeds planted inside us, inside them, fetal, husk unchallenged, arms-legs kicking and punching to nowhere. I water with words and love that I am just a man, no halo, no sword, no line of full blood honor that explains why I run the race. I come from broken pieces, shards of words that held like devil thorn, pains that now far under my skin. We are related. A tall fire burns in the center of us all as we sit with our brown, red, and white faces staring into the flames of the past, the future. What is dormant under our skin that our home fire is unable to see. What worth is packed in our small faces now so tight ready to punch out in defense? Everthing is rising in me, in them. We are all knees on a bed staring at a map of our futures with fingers tracing out hope.
I do not come bringing apples, or seeds. I have only words. "The seed is inside you I say," eyes unblinking. I have never said more.
When I leave I am given hugs I still feel when I am not breathing.

Paints His Face Red

2007-03-14T12:18:00.000-05:00

The radio show moved through the morning with an easy feeling. The phone rang over and over again with words of support, and one phone call came in from dark soul that thought I was running a scam. Even after all these miles it is hard to let things that have no value fall. I turn her words over and over-- something bad I just had to understand. I know my heart is too much Indian for some. I know I am too white for others. When I began the walk I needed the words my father spoke so log ago. Rasied through alcohol, abuse, divorce, I needed something brillant to tie my feathers to. How I would love to write that my father's words have been set on the earth and I have walked away. I have walked so very far, but still I reach into my shirt at 43 years old and listen to my father tell me that I come from a good place, tell me that this journey of walking among the people matters.

Smile For The Camera

2007-03-13T12:54:00.000-05:00

Not used often, my mouth stutters and bumps our words like the motor of an old car that is rarely driven. I stare at the television camera and hope that I make sense in this crossover from thinking to talking. Five minutes after the interview I find something stuck to my face, and remember to laugh at myself.
From a television interview with Valorie at channel 12 I wander down to KNDN radio, The Indian Station. With smiles and warmth I am talking with George Werito on live radio. George goes from Navajo to english throughout our imprompto talk over the air waves. He has a kind and easy way of moving from questions to casual conversation so that the mic melts away from in front of us. What has become 'same old' to me -- living the walk day after day, suddenly becomes magical and interesting again as I hear it coming back to my ears, and see it reflected through the eyes of George Werito. My plan was to rush past Farmington to head into the land of sand and too much sun--too little water. The walk is still teaching me that my plans are written on water and change with the tide. I listen to George talking in his native tongue with my name falling in amongst the words. Some of the greatest things that I have been given on this journey do not fit in my pockets yet I will carry them for the rest of my life.
I am brought to the Farmington library by Dana, morning show host from KWYK radio. This is far from just a standard library of dusty books on towering shelves. The glass panels found throughout the libray are sandblasted with traditional as well as historic native art the afternoon light wanders through. The rich red stone floors are marked to show where the sun will fall during the winter and summer solstice from the windows high above. The building is a piece of art and I want to explore around rather than sit in and write.
In the morning I'll be on the radio morning-show with Dana as a co-host for four hours, and then after hours of treasured visits come to a close I'll top off with five gallons of water before I head off toward Moab some 2oo-250 miles away, miles of desert sand and uncertainty, over the same course that the character I am endlessly compared to, Forest Gump, stopped running and went home. Bye Forest.
Basecamp Betty has come, shared laughs and great food and headed north again with most of my winter gear. It was great to see my good friend and talk about silly things only old friends can talk about without concern over boring any ears. Already I have a growing of things I'll need shipped to Moab, Utah. I guess my water colors have again made the list. Clocks have changed with only the night now causing a freeze. For a little while I will put my sweater on my head so I can sleep through the night. Soon I will miss these cold slumbers down by the creek behind where the scrub thorn grows. The sun is watching, and, as if taking the cue, summer is trickling in. Already I buy cheese ...and worry.

Walking A Dream

2007-03-04T15:10:00.000-05:00

Minutes are passing. A shower calls, a razor promises, still I have to share one last thing before I am again on the red road on to the Navajo reservation. Nearly a week ago I was coming out of the Rocky Mountains after yet another white out. I spent too much in a diner for breakfast, but I was days into being hungry and had debts to pay. When I walked back outside into the Chama cool mountain air I saw the hot air balloons filling with air down in the back lot. ........................................many pictures later, two days of flying Viking's hot air balloon under Wedgewood skies, and a whole new family of dear friends.....well, food for the book.
It wasn't until everyone was getting ready to pull away and say parting words that I remembered taking a hot air balloon across America was my original dream that I had as a child. The walk is rewarding me for following a child's dream. I bet I have too many pics of a little boy grinning foolishly from a hot air balloon with the Rockies blowing far off behind him.