The redwoods are grey; they might be as red as blood on the inside, but on the outside they’re a bright, vibrant grey. It’s as if after soaking in the fog for thousands of years they’ve taken it into their bark, protective coloration for hiding in mid-air. I don’t know what they might be hiding from, but if it scares redwoods it scares me.
There’s no telling what might be in the fog. I was going to ride down the Oregon coast, but when I got there it was gone, eaten away by fog. The sun, too, had been devoured; shaking with damp and cold I headed inland to where it was beautiful and warm. I tried for the coast again in California but with the same results, dark wet dusk at noon. I skulked inland, watching thick white tendrils writhe blindly across the pavement.
The redwood forests were Atlas’ secret project so he could release the sky and go home without Heaven and Earth colliding. The grey trunks rise evenly upward, vast, columnar, and spire-like, mighty with grace. They’re 5, 10, and 20 feet thick, 300 feet tall, 2000 years old; the massive, shaggy bark is thickly fluted and rises skyward in slow spirals. Walking between the trunks has the feel of passing through architecture, although each trunk has the beauty and presence of sculpture. The ground beneath them is open or covered with giant ferns.
The rivers are open too, with wide grey gravel flats. Ravens float along these corridors, filling the mists with prehistoric croaking calls. The whole place is a time capsule from an age when everything was dinosaur-sized; the redwoods once spanned the whole continent when the climate was more humid , but now they huddle in a thin strip along this coast where the fog helps mimic the moisture of that ancient climate.
The Avenue of the Giants is just a road, but it’s a road on which I feel like I’m riding a tiny toy motorcycle surrounded by matchbox cars. It’s a modest, quiet road anyway, but as it winds delicately between and around treetrunks a lane or two wide it feels like little more than a paved path on the forest floor. The treetops are so high up and far away that I have to stop to look up and see them, where they’re not invisible in the mist.
I thought I knew what trees were, but these are trees and yet they seem like something else entirely, things so big and glorious that I can neither see nor understand them all at once.
Twilight comes early along the Avenue, so I easily hide my motorcycle behind a tree and roll out my sleeping bag among the Giants’ toes.
I dreamed of flying, mostly when I was a kid, but the dreams were always strange. I didn’t fly headfirst and lying down like Superman or any of the other flying people, I flew upright as though standing, and never more than a few feet above the ground. Sometimes I’d have to flap my arms very fast, desperately fast just to attain that meager altitude and I’d always think, “Ofcourse it’s work, why would flying be easy?” Once I was airborne, though, I could coast and shoot over the ground at terrific speeds, floating up and down hills. When I’d wake up I’d wonder why my dreams always had to have some strange twist like flying upright, but within the dream I was oblivious and felt only the ecstatic joy and elation you’d expect to feel when you’d finally remembered how to fly.
My first motorcycle was a fluke. I didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle and didn’t know anyone who had one. The only time I’d ever been on one was as a passenger for a mile or two and I hadn’t really liked it — I thought I was going to fall off. I’d always had a vague idea that I’d like to learn how to ride a motorcycle sometime before I died, but I’d always had a vague idea that I’d climb Everest before I died, too (until I read Into Thin Air); neither were burning desires. But when I saw a 1976 Honda CB 550 for sale at the end of my street for $250, I bought it and pushed it home. My main motivation was that I needed a vehicle and the motorcycle was cheap.
I went down and got my learner’s permit which, incredibly, made me road-legal for a month. I spent a couple days staring at the bike until I felt pretty sure I knew how the controls worked, then one quiet evening I went for a ride.
I rode for years before I realized that riding was the uncanny fulfillment of my own strange dreams of flight. Upright and arms outstretched I shoot through the air, just above the ground — I don’t usually have to flap my arms, but sometimes they get as tired as if I had. And riding often is work: pushing into a cold wind I’m propelled by equal parts gasoline and will. The ecstasy is there, too.
Beyond the point-by-point parallels, though, it just feels like flight to me. It feels like those old dreams. I don’t know why that should be.
Riding south through the hills along the Willamette River, I swoop and bank through the warm air of Indian Summer and count myself lucky.
The power of suggestion is mighty: as I rode across Idaho I couldn’t shake the idea that everything was colored in shades of potato. Even the overcast sky seemed like the bright white inside of a potato. When I crossed into Oregon the spell broke and the high desert suddenly seemed golden, tawny and beautiful, the same colors but with better marketing. The banks of the Columbia were rippled and veined as though heavily muscled, and golden ridges ran down to the water like giant lions’ paws. The river lay like a dark blue ingot cradled in tan velvet.
Interstate 84 across Oregon was rife with produce. When an onion truck passed me, it smelled so sweet that I almost sped up to follow it; I’m glad I didn’t because for the next 100 miles there were onions all along the road so it must have been dropping them like bombs. I stopped and cut out a sweet slice to fend off scurvy. Then I started seeing corn that must have been thrown off by another truck and I managed to collect four ears with minimal highway burn. They made a great dinner.
I’ve been staying with a friend in Portland for many days now. It’s a great city and the weather has been wonderful, but it’s well past time I got going again.
Even if someone stole my last dollar, at least I could understand that they thought they needed it. Theft is what I’ve been worried about all along, always trying to judge where it was safe to leave things unguarded on the bike and where it was better to take some or everything off. I’ve made it without a problem so far only to have my mirrors smashed in a random and infuriating act of vandalism. One mirror was shattered and the other was broken right off the stalk. The bike was parked on the street but in a nice enough neighborhood, surrounded by new Beetles and Saabs, and it never even occurred to me that my little 20 year old Japanese motorcycle would be the target of someone’s pointless destructive impulse. At first I thought a car must have backed into it and knocked it over and that’s how the mirrors had broken, but no, there were no signs of it having fallen and no reason for both mirrors to be damaged. The only explanation was that someone had just pounded on the one and then the other (the missing mirror eventually turned up a block away, crushed flat from being driven over).
It’s really no big deal, they’re easily replaced and not very expensive, and my particular angels got hard to work and a few days later a friend of a friend actually found one extra motorcycle mirror in their basement that fit. It’s even better than the original because it has a longer stalk so it can better see around my shoulder. I can rig something up for the right-hand mirror. I still get angry when I think about it, though, it’s just the principle of it, it’s obvious from a glance at my old worn-out bike that whoever’s riding it probably doesn’t have much else; why kick somebody when they’re down? Who’d do that? It makes me want to kick back, and hard. The only thing that mitigates my frustration is that there are a lot of crazy people on the streets of Portland, mutterers, mumblers, and madmen, mostly homeless, and it might have been one of them. I reach for that explanation because it’s the only one that makes at least a little sense.
I rode out to the coast today. The state is a see-saw hinged on the Cascades, high desert to the east and wet green woods to the west; the western edge must be either pinned down by the ocean or weighted down by the giant trees. I stopped to look at a spruce tree that had a trunk at least 15 feet in diameter, bafflingly colossal, more like a wall than a tree. A lot of the trees don’t stop at having green needles but go on to have green trunks and branches too because they’re covered in thick moss. Along with the ferns carpeting the ground that makes everything green, a sculpture of a forest made out of astroturf.
I’ve touched salt water in three cardinal directions — to the east, north, and west of the continent. There are 32, 735 miles on my odometer, so I’ve come 8, 473 so far. I’ve been on the road for two months.
There are only 132 dollars left, which means the hour is growing late.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Badlands of South Dakota.
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.
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.
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.
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.
