Month: September 1999

This place looks nothing like the Moon, unless the Moon is made of blasted chunks of tar glued together by Dr. Seuss. When it was named that must have been the strangest place they could think of, but now we’re too familiar with the good old Moon, we’ve seen too many pictures and so must go farther out — this place could have been pulled down from dark Pluto or somewhere beyond the rim. The Craters of the Moon are 84 square miles of black madness.

There are signs of volcanism and heat in the earth all across southeastern Idaho. I stopped in the town of Soda Springs to see their “captive geyser,” which shoots 100 feet into the air every hour but comes out of a pipe stuck in the ground and is controlled by a timer; the heat and the pressure in the water, though, are natural. Then I passed a town with hot springs which I swung through just to make sure the springs were properly fenced off and controlled and there was a high enough admission being charged so I wouldn’t have to bother stopping- they were and there was. Just past Blackfoot I saw the first old lava beds along the road, instantly and startlingly recognizable as lava but pale with age as lichens, grasses and bushes coated, poked through and surrounded the broken pieces of flow. The lava beds are vast, stretching across the land and swallowing whole rivers: the Lost River flows into the lava and falls under it, disappearing from the face of the Earth for 120 miles until it resurfaces as a series of springs.

But at the Craters of the Moon the ground turns black. I passed through a wall of twisted black rock 20 feet high that rose up without warning like a goblin fortification. I didn’t believe it was natural — I thought it was rubble bulldozed into piles when they made the road, but the piles went on and on in a black sea of shattered debris. It was bulldozed thousands of years ago by flowing lava. The whole landscape looks like it just stopped smoking.

One expedition to the Craters of the Moon estimated that the volcanic activity that created the area occurred 150 years ago. That’s what any reasonable person would conclude; the lava looks brand-new, vivid, dark, and perfect, every ripple and fold looks fresh-cooled. There are some trees poking through, though, so 150 years seems just right to have allowed them some time to grow, but the most recent lava here is 2000 years old. In human terms that’s so very long ago it’s hard to believe, hard to imagine that the land has not bothered to recover in all this time, but in rock time the lava has just tumbled out of its dark bed in the earth and hasn’t even woken up yet. At North Crater time has been frozen stock-still and has not so much as ticked over in that 2000 years: the crater at first looks like a big bare black hill until you come around to where the side collapsed and burst outward from the weight of the lava within, and from there you can follow the arc of the flow around the hill and into the valley. The chunks of the crater wall were carried by the flow and now tower above the flat lava plain like monumental sculptures of forgotten mineral heroes. In the Devil’s Orchard are more such crater pieces.

Up close the lava does reveal colors: dark red-browns, orange-browns, chocolates and streaks of an oily blue sheen run through the brittle, airy rock. Whoever conceived of them in darkness had never actually seen colors, so understandably the best they could manage were these shades of black. Some of the pieces are as light as wood, pocked with bubbles, and make a high, glassy “chink” sound when dropped. Still trying to warm my hands from the cold ride, I read the signs and learn Hawaiian words to describe an Idaho landscape that looks like it fell from the stars. Pahoehoe (pa-hoy-hoy) is the smooth or ropey lava that was fluid until it stopped and cooled, while aa (ah-ah) is the lava of jagged broken chunks that looks like a fine-grain boulderfield but is really a kind of flow made as the crust cools, crumbles and is ground into pieces by its own motion while it is carried along by the still-molten lava beneath it. Much of the pahoehoe looks like burned dough, twisted, knotted, and billowing.

There are three spatter cones in a row like science fair volcanoes 50 feet high, formed by gurgling lava throwing globs of liquid rock up to form a rising ring around the opening. The middle one looks like a pile of skulls. There’s a path to the top from which I can look down its cold throat. Visible down inside the cone on the right is dirty snow, not from this year but left over from last winter.

Inferno Cone is a smooth cinder cone of fine particles like a giant rounded anthill. It looks like it’s dusted with tiny patches of snow which are actually small pale plants clinging to the gravel. The cone is deceptively massive and I can’t hear my motorcycle from the top, but I can see out across an ink-soaked landscape that’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.

Every time I go to the supermarket, any supermarket anywhere, I stare dumbly at the same magazine covers in the checkout line: Cosmopolitan, TV Guide, Enquirer, Weekly World News. Presumably so does everybody else who has to eat, and as easily as that another brace of junky, useless information is casually transmitted throughout the culture. Strangers a thousand miles apart could recognize this month’s Cosmopolitan model and her outfit equally well, while in the middle of the continent there’s a giant patch of night tattooed on the Earth that sits silent and unconsidered.

Dinosaur National Monument is a trifold wonder of which dinosaurs, incredibly, are only one part. The place encompasses the confluence of the Yampa and Green rivers and spans 40 miles across Utah and Colorado.

In 1909 the paleontologist Earl Douglass found a set of eight Brontosaurus tailbones protruding from the top of a ridge here. The ridge was a 150 million year old memory of a river sticking sideways into the sky: the sandstone was once a riverbed in which many dinosaur carcasses collected in a tangled mass — the bones fossilized, the sand became stone, and the earth rose and tilted so the graveyard strata were angled steeply upward.

People quarried down into the hill and pulled out skeleton after skeleton of lost monsters, dragons that for millions of years had been remembered only by the rocks: Camarasaurus, Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, Barosaurus, Brontosaurus. The names are incantations that I knew much better when I was eight and the world that is seemed so inadequate; I would’ve given anything to wish flesh back onto those bones. Now it seems like the past is a sleeping part of the present and maybe it’s enough that the mind-blowing dinosaur world is encoded within our own as memory and possibility.

They’ve set a building into the rock over what’s left of the fossil quarry, and what’s left is amazing. It’s a great cut of the hillside roofed over, a plane of stone 55 feet high and 200 feet long that shows a slice of what’s still in the earth. It’s a wall of humongous bones and rock rising at about a 60 degree angle; the bones are myriad but collected more densely in a band that passes from the upper left to the lower right like the Milky Way. There are dinosaur skulls and legbones and still-connected chains of vertebrae, twisted backbones and pieces of giant tails. There must have been a tremendous mangling of giant bodies to create such a wild constellation of bones on the wall — they didn’t just keel over and become buried, they were rotted through and torn apart and mashed together and even then still doomed to motion within the slow taffy-like currents of the rock itself.

Outside beneath the sky there are petroglyphs, old pictures chipped into the cliffs by the people who lived here 800 years ago. We can learn alot about these people from their art, such as that they had wide triangular shoulders, swollen square heads, and usually two horns although some had three horns, or floppy ears, or giant insect-like feelers. A few even had arms sticking out of their butts. Many had the power to spontaneously create small galaxy-shaped objects while others liked to touch large spikey balls. Another popular activity was shaking lizards and tiny people out of circles. Of their pottery we can say that it generally exploded. Also, some of them wore necklaces.

It’s hard to take the petroglyphs seriously. Although they have a strange beauty to them they seem so haphazard and disorganized that I automatically think of them as graffiti, which they aren’t. There’s real graffiti next to them, courtesy of modern visitors, and the modern efforts are feeble lazy scratches that barely show up, the crooked initials and scribbles of vandals, while the petroglyphs are chipped deeply and deliberately into the rock and are still clear and vivid after many centuries. In contrast, we’ll be lucky if in 800 years our cities are anything more than smudges of rust in the dirt.

They took a long time and alot of work to make so they must have meant something, but to me they’re inscrutable. If they’re organized I can’t see how, but maybe I am too much afflicted by rectilinear order. We are image-adept, image-savvy, living all our lives midstream in a wild torrent of millions of images that gush from television screens and float up off magazine pages and crash down on us from signs. Even text is a chain of letter-images that pour through us like frames of film generating an internal lightshow; it’s hard for me to stop and look deeply through a petroglyph that seems as simple and guileless as a single letter, a couple bent lines joined, a spiral. Complex image manipulation and interpretation are second nature to us, but maybe an image was a stranger thing to them, an exotic technology of thought fascinating enough to be locked in stone for a lifetime’s contemplation. Or perhaps they just had an aesthetic that’s strange to me, an aesthetic of jumbling and freewheeling geometry.

The third marvel is the ground itself; I cannot number or name all the things the land does here. A few hundred yards downstream from my campsite the Green River passes between walls of stone so twisted and curved they look like the inside of a thousand-foot ribcage hung to cure over the river, striated with red and white sandstone like meat and bone. Canyons come naturally, hallways between the earth and the sky where every day the two can meet in neutral territory and talk together in the language of light and shadow; to get to the campsite I rode 15 miles of dirt road, up and down through this land’s varying palette of colors and forms, cones and canyons and ridges buckled and folded, in pink and pale and a stubble of green. Back by the highway lies Split Mountain, a sprawling convolution of stone so torturously twisted and torn it looks like the two halves of a vast and swollen wound. When I first saw it I did such a doubletake I almost went off the road- what is the rock doing over there?! One side rust and bone and the other cream and rose, inflamed and gaping and beautiful, angel-flesh, a cut in God’s side.

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I should’ve stayed, I knew it then as well as now, I should’ve stayed a week or a month or as long as it took. It was a perfect place and I should’ve just stopped and listened to the water and the bugs and floated down the river and walked up every canyon and touched every rock, should’ve tried to learn how to move that slowly and beautifully, but there’s not enough silence in me. I should’ve tried to soak some of it into me but I was too restless and not worthy.

As soon as I got back on the bike I felt better, less broken and sad. Maybe, like a wolf, the motorcycle has eaten my heart so that now I belong to it.

Trail Ridge Road passed through Rocky Mountain National Park from east to west and so did I. At its highest point the road was 12,183 feet above sea level which means that I’ve now ridden on two wheels higher than I’ve ever hiked.

The road was just a scratch in the rock, winding through the world’s teeth. Along both sides rose up slender poles 20 and 30 feet high to mark the road when the snow erases it; the buildings at the visitor center were similarly outlined. I looked down and saw a herd of elk a thousand feet below me- still two miles high, and they seemed at home. I wanted to spend a night up there somewhere since I’d never had the opportunity to sleep so close to space before, but the cold of a few nights ago and a mile below dissuaded me. I passed over the top and into the West, thinking that happiness is a fool’s game and the most we can hope for are alternations of solace and beauty.

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It was drier as soon as I crossed over and looked more like desert: more bare earth, more scrubby brush.The dark mountains were marbled with bright bands of yellow as if there were fields of giant goldenrod on the slopes; there was even more of a show than on the eastern side. I think there was another dazzling yellow tree working in concert with the aspens, something taller and shaggier and willing to work at lower elevations. The road played tag with the headwaters of the Colorado River.

It took all day to leave the mountains since they tumbled the length of the state. I’m not sure when I left them, sometime after the sun was gone, but I know I spent the night on a dark plain under a bright moon.

In the morning, just outside the town of Dinosaur, there were pronghorn antelope in the road: first a buck with short dark horns, then three does a little farther on. They didn’t run so much as sproing. Just beyond Dinosaur lies Utah, as well as Dinosaur National Monument.

I spent a night and a day in Loveland because I was waiting for the weather to change before I went into the mountains; the day before the road had been closed due to snow. Loveland is just a sprawl-town, but from there the Rocky Mountains dominate the sky. I drew another house and the next day was beautiful and warm, and as the day wore on I saw some of the snow fade from the high peaks.

As soon as I left the suburbs the earth opened up with a silent thunderclap and I rode right up the throat of Big Thompson Canyon. To either side of me sprang up mighty sheets of jagged, spiny rock twisting their way to the sky. It was late in the day and dark at the bottom of the canyon where the road and river wound, but above me the rim was lit and glowing with needles of golden stone. I rode upward in shadow until I found a place to spend the night.

In the morning my bag, backpack and bike were covered with thick frost, a serious frost with many textures, leaves and fur and hard nodules, beautiful but discouraging. It was hours before the sun was high enough to fall down over the canyon walls and melt it off so I could continue up through the town of Estes Park and into Rocky Mountain National Park.

Once inside the national park it was as warm as summer and a gorgeous ride. While the snowy peaks rioted all around the horizon, the sun on the aspens painted dazzling streaks of yellow on the lower slopes. The aspens are like birches with platinum skin and their leaves have turned a brilliant canary yellow for the fall; gathered in shimmering groves amongst the dark spruces and pines they seemed to pour down the mountains and break over and around the angular evergreens like water over rocks. The slightest breeze made the leaves tremble and flutter so that from a distance the bright yellow patches scintillated, crawled with motion, pulsed with light.

Fall is yellow here. As I hiked up to Andrews Glacier I’d periodically enter an aspen grove and be bathed in glowing yellow light. I didn’t think a hundred shades of yellow and green could be so beautiful, but they are, an exotic foreign cousin of a New England fall that clearly carries the same royal blood.

At one of the lakes along the trail there was a Trout Parade: every ten feet along the shore I could see a rainbow trout swimming in the clear, shallow water, each between eight and ten inches long. It felt strange to actually see wild fish since they’re normally such a mystery, living in a hidden world until they appear miraculously on the ends of clear blue lines. They move by flying or levitating but seldom rise above the level of our feet; there was a medieval cult that believed it was ok to eat fish since fish did not have sex and were therefore holy, created and stocked by God — sounds good to me, I can’t picture fish having sex either. If they’re going to just swim around out in the open, thought, pretty soon they’ll be as mysterious as squirrels.

I almost didn’t find the glacier. When the trail opened up onto a field of huge jagged boulders I could see a great mass of snow hanging high on a slope to my left. I couldn’t see any other likely candidates, but fortunately a neuron fired somewhere and I scrambled up the steep talus slope to my right. When I pulled myself wheezing over the top a green glacial lake appeared before me and the glacier rose up behind it in all its vast white bulk. Unlike snow that sits on whatever’s available and mimics the forms beneath, Andrews Glacier had its own shape, its own massive curved body that slithered down between the slopes. In the middle it rose in a mighty hump, and over the water it stuck out a wide curved lip as though to take a sip. Why worry about alien invasion when there are glaciers in our very midst, unstoppable monsters who could rise up, multiply and grind everything to dust like they’ve already done so many times before? I walked on the glacier some to show it who was boss.

In the late afternoon sun the lower elevations of the park were all spun from ancient metals: copper, gold, bronze and tin in everything, in the many shades of the open grasslands, in the turning leaves and in the rocks. I expect autumn from the trees but in grass it is surprising, and I swear the tumbling outcroppings of mountain rock have taken fall colors too.

On one coppery grass plain were elk. One group was hidden in the distant trees but the other herd was right out in the middle by the stream, about a dozen elk presided over by a bull with a tall and glorious rack of antlers. Every few minutes he’d bugle, a high thin sound but with rich undertones as if he wasn’t getting it quite right. It did sound kind of like a bugle as blown ineptly by a small kid, but it managed to be beautiful sound anyway and carried all across the plain. Sometimes his call was answered by another unseen bull, probably from that other herd, but nothing seemed to come of it — either they saved it for another time or they resolved it with sound.

I’d met some great people hiking earlier, but when they turned back before we reached the glacier I was forced to choose between human companionship and a large piece of ice. I chose the ice without even blinking, which has got to say something about me — but to my good fortune we bumped into each other later and they took pity on me and bought me a beer and some pizza, a holy combination. Estes Park is overrun with animals: first we saw three deer standing on a streetcorner, then later we saw a whole herd running through the streets downtown, then later still a bull elk with a huge rack of antlers stepped out into our headlights right in front of us. We stopped in time but the car behind us got rear-ended; no one was hurt, though, and it was only a rental. Then we snuck into and prowled around the sprawling red-roofed Stanley Hotel where Stephen King lived when he wrote The Shining.

Right now there’s a wide, bright halo around the moon, a hoop or cold crown that dimly illuminates some of the high, thin clouds that pass through it. It signifies ice in the sky.

On my third day in the Badlands I woke inside a sleeping bag covered with frost; the weather’s one thing I can’t defy for long. I was up before the prairie dogs and walked through Prairie Dog Town without incident. When I came back through later all the little dogs popped up and down out of the ground shrieking at me with the natural music of a fieldfull of car alarms. Now I understand the inspiration for that game where the gophers pop out of holes in a table and you try to whack them with a mallet — it’s actually an old western fantasy.

From the hill I could see the buffalo running around. I get the impression that they enjoy being buffalo, unlike cows whose body language says to me, “I’m just a bag of meat. I’d rather be slit open now than walk another ten feet.” The low quaking call the buffalo make carries eerily, so even though it wasn’t loud I could hear it clearly from a half mile away. Some deer disappeared up the slope above me; a coyote ran up the gully below.

I spent all morning wandering through the grass. It was a great relief to walk through so much land just covered with wild grass, many different grasses of different heights and textures and colors flowing in the wind like hair. State after state after state I’ve ridden through land that’s worked so damn hard — we work every last inch, lash it down and harness it and make it work for us. Sure, we have to eat, have to raise food somewhere, but every last inch? Do we need corn EVERYWHERE? If it’s not corn, it’s wheat, if not wheat, then cows, if not cows then Wal-Marts. For at least the last thousand miles all the land I’ve ridden over has worn a mask.

Under the grass was clay, some white and some brown depending on the hill and height. The white clay yielded up smooth brown rocks as shiny as if they’d been lacquered and polished. The brown clay gave forth what looked like white quartz flowers in sizes from peas to potatoes, each rough with petal-like crystals packed against each other. Some had rose-colored crystals too, and some had rose and yellow and white; it took all my willpower not to pocket one. I only spent a few hours in the grass, drifting over the hilltops in the wind, but the wind made rippling streams and pools in the grass where time ran differently and I stumbled back to camp as tired as if I’d spent a whole day hiking.

The next day I rode through the Black Hills and past the giant heads of Rushmore and Crazy Horse. The land was beautiful and familiar, conifers-over-granite like northern New Hampshire, but this granite was whipped into high needles and fingers that rose out of the trees. The Black Hills used to rumble, but they stopped before anyone found out why.

Right at the entrance to Rushmore there were mountain goats in the road- ten in a ragged white goat-chain, the foremost almost to the woods while the hindmost was still just emerging… from the parking garage. They were utterly surprising to me since I’d never seen one before and it hadn’t even occurred to me that I might. They were gorgeous animals, bright white and fluffy and agile, showy ballet versions of regular goats. When I looked one right in the face, though, it looked like the Devil.

The Carhenge and Car Art Reserve sits in a field outside Alliance. If it was in South Dakota there’d be billboards advertising it the length of the state and once you got there they’d make you watch a movie about The Artist Jim Reinders; in Nebraska, though, it just sits there in all its whacked out glory- no admission, no gate, just a replica of Stonehenge made out of junk cars stuck end-up in the ground and painted grey. As if it just had to be made. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud and run around the whole place grinning like a fool. There are some supplementary works of car art; while the spawning trout is awesome, most of the others are totally inscrutable, apparently just excuses to beat the crap out of a car and then stick it in the ground. The welcome board acknowledges that beer was a factor in Carhenge’s construction. On the other side of the board are a number of displays about the real Stonehenge, as if the two are interchangeable, or maybe you might forget which one you’re at. There’s a “comment box”, a mailbox with a little sign that says, “Who are you? Where are you from? Where are you going?” which gives me the impression that the Friends of Carhenge are lonely.

After enjoying some fantastic hospitality outside Minneapolis (dogsnot chili, natural margaritas, and refrigerator pickles, with mandolin music thrown in) I shot west across the Minnesota prairie, passing Paul Bunyan’s anchor along the way. Once in South Dakota I engaged in some crude thermal navigation- I was cold so I headed south the length of the state, and whether by luck or location the next day was warmer as I leaned west on 44.

When I passed through De Smet, South Dakota, I learned that it dubs itself “The Little Town on the Prairie” for being the site of one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood homes. Last summer I saw the Anne of Green Gables House on Prince Edward Island; maybe I’m actually on a lifelong tour of Famous Schoolgirl Heroines and don’t even know it.

The eastern end of the state was full of water. Everywhere were ponds and lakes in the grass that came right up to the road; fences ran down into them and dead trees rose up out of their middles. I asked if these were all recent human-made lakes and was told that they were just wet areas still flooded from the spring. They’re only a long day’s ride from all that dead corn.

At the Missouri River the land collapsed, fell like a cake, deflated like a silk balloon to hang crazily over the strange bones beneath. West from there the land stabilized somewhat, flattened and smoothed itself, but never really got it back together again; then at the Badlands it all came apart anyway and those bones spilled out into the air.

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Coming from the southeast the Badlands first appears as a Wall of multicolored rock that rises up out of the grass. It runs for at least the 20 miles that the road follows along, and I don’t know how many more. The bands of color alternate between shades of coral and bone; up close, the Wall expands fractally into a maze of stone minarets, towers and cones, of vanes, ribbons and piers. It is breathtakingly beautiful and a great wonder.

I got up before dawn to ride through and watch the light affix to this thing; the land smelled like fall and looked like an undiscovered moon. Many of the spires rose up out of the prairie like icebergs calved from the slow rock to be carried away by grass currents and cold wind; others looked like the steeples of windowless cathedrals that you could only enter if you lived inside the ground. In some lights there was a blue-grey tint that pervaded, but in others the rock took on warm fleshtones. There were even a few patches of mustard-yellow rock that lent uncanny completion to the rainbow: green grasses, bright yellow and rose stone, then bone-grey, then blue prairie sky and puffy white clouds.

Closer still, the surface of the rock was not hard at all but wore a skin of cracked clay that crumbled when touched. It was disturbing to be reminded that such a vast piece of stone architecture is just a transient layer of beauty on the move, a frail mud-mask illusion of permanence. I could brush the whole of the Badlands away with my fingertips and a little time.

As I walked along one narrow ridge I stepped over holes in the ground, some half the diameter of a person, some the diameter of a person, some twice the diameter of a person, all lined up like fingerholes in a clay flute. Each opening was a chute plunging into the ground and out of sight, ten feet straight down at least but deeper than that I couldn’t see.

There’s something more about the Badlands; finally laying eyes on the Wall, I felt like I’d come home. That’s crazy, maybe just a reaction to the soothing nature of open spaces, or maybe a place as beautiful as this starts to short-circuit the brain and excite nonsensical emotions. I’ve felt that way once before, in the desert: another stone-world. Maybe I was a changeling-child after all, and being raised by dogs and people was not enough to mask the grind and throb of heavy rocks in the streambeds of my blood.

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I swore I wouldn’t stop at Wall Drug, and since I’d skipped I-90 and hadn’t been brainwashed by several hundred miles of billboards I almost made it. But when I rode out of the Badlands I was frozen and the wind was a toppling wind, and Wall Drug was right there. I drank their 5 cent coffees all day and waited for the wind to change. It didn’t, so I scurried back to the Badlands. I try not to ride in wind that I have trouble walking in.

I had to face down a buffalo on the way to the campground. I wasn’t sure if the buffalo was going to yield; we stared at each other and both considered the fact that I was much smaller and not protected by the doors and windows of a car. It let me go, but around the next corner was a whole herd milling around in the road. At that point I learned that my motorcycle makes buffalo stampede; so far they always stampede away from me. I felt guilty at first, but since I can’t do anything about it I’ve come to regard it as good fun, and I think the buffalo enjoy running around.

The campground is in a hollow surrounded by open grassy hills and a stream cuts through the ground to one side. Three herds of between 20 and 80 buffalo drift within sight of the campground, surrounding it. Some, probably the bulls, stand apart from the herds and sometimes wander singly down between the campsites. My only anxiety is of being stepped on in the night.

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It’s dark when the wind stops.

I can hear an owl, and the low rumbling the buffalo make that sounds like the earth quaking. Occasionally coyotes sound off. The sky is so huge and bright with stars that the handful of constellations that are familiar to me melt away, lost in the finer structures of light like tigers in the grass. With no tent I can watch the sky as easily as sleep, and staring idly up I see a dozen shooting stars.

There’s not a cloud or blemish on the sky except a low glow that washes out the stars along the northern horizon. I’m so used to light pollution that I assume the light is from the town to the north, but that town isn’t big enough for such a glow and this glow is throwing shifting spokes and spires of light into the sky. It’s the Northern Lights, the aurora borealis. I have only seen them once before and years ago.

They are ghostly and faint, their features flowing slowly and best seen by not looking directly at; now they’re a low arch, now more like a ribbon, now they’re high pillars of light marking one of the old roads to the Silver City. In their forms and configuration they look much like the Wall.

As I slide into my third hour hunched over the table at Burger King, I know what they’re thinking — the employees at the counter who keep glancing up at me, the lady cleaning tables who has to keep going around mine, the mothers who warn their children away: How did a homeless person get a laptop, and what the devil is he using it for?

A few days ago I went for a swim in the Wisconsin River and came out feeling plenty clean. I’ve been spoiled by a lifetime of long scalding showers and scouring soaps — no one really has to be that clean. I soaked my clothes in the river and then tied them to the milk crate on the back of my Kawasaki (washer/drier) and had the sense that I was finally getting the hang of this. It was a hot sunny day and I felt great.

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I pulled over at a rest area in Bluff Siding, Wisconsin because my clutch suddenly had a lot of play in it, and I found that the cable was frayed through at the end and just hanging by two tiny strands of wire. I walked into town with my backpack on, my hands full and my saddlebags slung around my neck.

When I walked into The Refuge like this they asked me if I was moving in, so I told my story and asked if I could used their yellow pages to write down some numbers. It was Sunday night of Labor Day weekend so I was resigned to wait until Tuesday before anything opened and I could buy a new cable. It was quiet — of the five people there, one was the owner’s sister, one was the owner’s daughter, and one was the bartender. The bartender, Travis, was on the phone for 20 minutes before I realized what he was doing — calling everybody he knew to ask them if they had any old Kawasaki parts or knew anyone who did or anyone who might have an idea how to fix it. Most people were still away for Labor Day weekend so he had no luck. They let me camp out behind the bar.

The next morning Travis drove me all over town, first to make sure all the bike shops were really closed, then to check the hardware stores in case they might carry motorcycle clutch cables. I told him I’d need a bike shop and I’d just have to wait until Tuesday, but he insisted it was worth a look and he had nothing better to do. No luck, but on the way back he saw an old Caddy outside George’s Bar that he recognized so we went in and talked to Bud. Bud said, sure, he might have one in his shed, and told us to go on up and check it out — if it’d work, I could have it.

The Kawasaki in the shed was a tiny and ancient junker and one end of the cable was hidden behind the shifter housing so I couldn’t see if it was right. The screws in the housing were Hell to get off and we had to drill one of them out, and the cable inside wasn’t right after all.

But it was close. And it worked. Actually, it works great.

The total cost to me was two bucks for the beer. I offered to buy Travis breakfast but he refused. There are some good people out there.

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From Iowa to Minnesota to Wisconsin and then back to Minnesota I rode north along the Mississippi. I followed signs for the Great River Road and it was a beautiful ride: high wooded hills and low green marshes, rundown river towns and long lumbering trains. I was only on it for about 150 miles but that tumbled across a couple days, and I was tempted to turn around and ride the river all the way to the gulf. But I wasn’t ready to head south yet — I’ll be forced to soon enough.

In a grassy area on the west bank I cooked up some dinner on my camp stove. Great blue herons, monarchs and seagulls floated by in the cool breeze, and someone nursed a sweet-smelling wood fire just down the shore. Grand old trees stretched above me as I watched the evening sunlight lift off the limestone cliffs on the far shore, which glowed as warmly as the marbles of the Parthenon in a rosy-fingered dawn.

As I lurked outside of Minneapolis yesterday I looked up through a drizzling rain and saw a spectacular double rainbow. The lower arch was vivid and complete, stretching from ground to sky to ground; the outer arch was much fainter and faded out in places, the order of its colors reversed. A moment later the wind kicked up and the tornado alarms started sounding, then the water just dumped out of the sky in waterfall. I happened to be inside when the wind booted my helmet off the seat where I’d left it so it landed upside down on the ground like a bowl. In the next few minutes it filled with two inches of water and cherry pit sized hailstones; my gloves, which I’d tucked inside the helmet to keep them dry, floated in a kind of cold glove soup.

All that separates us is a thin layer of grime.

It’s been a week since I had a shower or slept in a bed. That’s fine as long as you don’t need to cross back over and be a part of society again, but I did need to. My back tire was bald and I needed a new one; since I’d resolved not to take the money out of the 751, and there is no other money, I had to work for it. I’ve been doing pen-and -ink drawings of houses since Bowling Green, Kentucky and across the length of Indiana. As in: (knock-knock) “Hi, I’m sorry to bother you. I do pen-and-ink drawings and was wondering if you might be interested in one of your house. Here are some examples of others that I’ve done…” They’re a good size for getting made into greeting cards.

But it’s hard to be taken seriously if you’re greasy, stubbly, your hair’s gone mad and you stink. I can’t even take myself seriously when I stink, and attracting flies is demoralizing. I’ve done the best I could, (shampooing my hair with the antibacterial hand wash in the Mcdonald’s restroom, then hunkering down under the hot-air hand drier because the nozzle doesn’t swivel), and sometimes feel pretty clean, but it gets a little harder every day.

A few days ago in Bloomington, Indiana, I played make-believe. After a vigorous and refreshing shaving, scouring, and shampooing I walked around the Indiana University campus and pretended I was a real person who had a reason to be there. It was a beautiful day and the students were just coming back for the fall, so lots of people were just wandering around. I looked people in the eye, smiled, exchanged greetings and nobody flinched; I was careful that nothing about me said, “Last night I parked my motorcycle behind a piece of construction equipment and slept in the dirt next to it.”

Going door-to-door is gruesome — 99 out of 100 people just wish I wasn’t there. There’s a look in their eyes that tells me they’re not even going to consider anything I’m about to say; these are the same people who, if I was hitchhiking, would refuse to make eye contact and just shoot on by pretending I didn’t exist. Denied the luxury of just driving by, forced to face me, I can see them frantically scheming up an exit strategy, an excuse to get rid of me. Very few of them can simply say no, so instead they hunt for an excuse or justification. This is ridiculous because I make it very easy to say no to me since I don’t want to work for anyone who isn’t genuinely interested, but they’re so crippled by vague fears and suspicions that they can’t even hear me. There are only a handful of people who actually listen to what I say, then check inside their heads for a second to see if they really want a drawing, but they’re like rays of sunshine. After a long series of refusals all I really want is to be considered as another human being, even if they still say no.

But a little like hitchhiking, the few who say yes make it all worthwhile. They’re enthusiastic, thrilled by the idea, and happy with the result. It’s very satisfying to work for people like that, producing something that they want and then giving it to them directly. Drawing has been very satisfying work by itself, and even if they’re only houses I’ve been proud of every one. I hate to part with them so I make photocopies for myself.

I feel like a ghost floating through the strip malls and suburbs. It’s no place for a person with no job, no money, and no clean clothes. I should be out in the country, riding, but the suburbs are where the people live and the strips are where I can find clean tables in air-conditioned rooms to draw at. Finding a place to sleep is hardest here. My resolve broke down and I handed over $30 at a motel outside Indianapolis, but when I saw the room I turned right around, got my money back and kept riding; every surface was crawling with filth and the stink gave me a headache. The ground is so much cleaner, and free.

$30 was cheap. If you make minimum wage then a night’s lodging is at least a day’s wages, if not double or triple. That seems out of balance, since we all have to sleep. It’s not as though it’s a priviledge you want to work all day for- sleeping is a right. If you work at the Mcdonald’s on the interstate then you can’t afford to travel, only to serve those who do. And as far as I know, none of the chains do much better than $6 an hour, including Barnes & Noble.

I’ve spent the last four days haunting the same Mcdonald’s and Barnes & Noble (with cafe), drawing feverishly all day, working from Polaroids. The Mcdonald’s has a wall outlet I can plug into and read over my e-mail as a cheerful break, but the Barnes & Noble has a superior bathroom with fantastic paper towels. They’re white and soft like a kitchen roll, but tough as cloth like something I’d expect to find at a garage, something you can really scrub with. I have no qualms about imposing on Barnes & Noble since I’ve worked for that company for much of the past year, and I don’t feel too guilty about liberating a few cents of electricity from international megacorp Mcdonald’s (if I’m in an independent truckstop or cafe I always ask before plugging in and usually offer to pay for it). I have the sense of being in an economic landscape so rich that luxuries like hot water and electricity flow freely off the the mountainous megastores and fast-food chains. But no beds.

It is lonely. All around me are not just people, but interlocking webs of people who know each other, who work together or have friendships or romances. Everyday life flows along the strands of the web making it tremble and flutter. I pass right though it because I am just a one dimensional point, unconnected. I need solace and hope to find that in land, somewhere west.

They can say representational art is dead, but yesterday it bought me a new tire. I removed and reinstalled the wheel myself to save a few dollars. I did it methodically, by the manual, and it felt like a hot, grimy holy ritual as I removed and cleaned and re-greased each part, then slowly put it all back together again, tightening, adjusting, double-checking. That tire makes me very happy. I feel like I won it in battle.

It is September 3 and I am in Lafayette, Indiana. I’ll be here for about 5 more minutes. It’s taken me 4,190 miles to get here and there are 520 dollars remaining, but now I know I can make more if I have to.