Crossing the Rockies: Day Two (9/24/09)

After dusk, when the sky is still lighted but the earth an indistinguishable mass, these mountains show their scale.  They tower impossibly over the creekbed where I sit by a dying fire.  Dark and inscrutable, they black out the starts.  Rows and rows of them.  Some named, some not.  How could a mountain care about something so ephemeral as a name bestowed on it by a species whose existence passes fleetingly below?  How long these mountains have stood, and how they came to be, are questions that humans may discuss in technical terms – sixty million years; orogeny; collision of tectonic plates – but that we cannot intuit.  The mountains are too different.  They stand impassive and implacable, and they black out the stars.

Duke came up limping today.  We started well – after Duke and I walked off our initial soreness, Duke trotted ahead of me for much of the morning and early afternoon.  He sniffed the shrubs we passed and peed on the best ones.  We climbed up the Cottonwood Creek drainage until it ended, then took a shortcut through the evergreens where the road bent double on the far side of McDougal Gap.  The wooded downslope was as steep as I could handle, but Duke moved down it with enviable adroitness.  We rejoined the road below McDougal Gap and followed it down Sheep Creek.  We’d passed over McDougal Gap through the Wyoming Range; next we would tackle McDougal Pass in the Salt River Range.

But during the afternoon, I kept thinking I saw Duke limp on his left-front foot.  Then I’d watch him, and he’d walk fine.  I’d check his feet, see nothing; press on his pads, he wouldn’t react.  At 4:30, I saw it clearly – three steps with a noticeable limp on the left front foot.  A hiker has to take care of the feet on which he depends, so I picked a nearby campsite and we stopped.

I checked his paws again.  At first I saw nothing aside from some superficial cracking that had been there all day.  Then I saw a tiny spot of blood on his right front paw.  I must have misjudged which foot was hurting.  There was a tiny cut, about half a centimeter long in one of his toe pads.  I rinsed it with water, treated it with iodine, then covered it with antibiotic salve.  I didn’t have any moisturizer, but since Duke had some cracking in all of his feet, I smeared all of his pads with chap-stick.  We’d rest the afternoon, I thought, and then get going in the morning.

But Duke grew more tentative on the paw.  He stopped following me around camp as I set up the tent and cooked dinner.  He moved when called, but hesitantly.  When he sat, he held his right-front foot off the ground.  I doubted he could go in the morning.  We could rest for a day, maybe.  Not move at all tomorrow.  But would a day be enough for his paw to heal?  I had hoped to get going tomorrow, to reach McDougal Pass and the Salt River Range by tomorrow night.  But that might not be possible.  It might not be possible to hike further at all.  We might have to hitchhike back to the truck.

The fire was out.  I picked Duke up and carried him to the tent.  I wondered if we could make it.  The mountains stood dark and silent, and they blacked out the stars.

Route for Day Two.

I picked a pretty steep shortcut.

Duke wonders why I stopped and pulled that silver thing out of my pocket again.

Crossing the Rockies: Day One (9/23/09)

With my hands on my hips and Duke wagging his tail beside me, I looked out over the water.  Our packs lay on the dirt behind us.  This spot will be a great camp, I thought.  Near Cottonwood Creek, but elevated above the creekbottom so the bugs wouldn’t be too bad.  On the west side of the drainage, so the sun would hit the campsite early in the morning.  Nice flat spot for the tent.  And best of all, it overlooked a beaver pond.  This area would have been trapped out of beaver in 1833, but the dam was a reminder: this is what the trappers were after.

Below me, Cottonwood Creek twisted and turned as it slowed from a busy mountain steam to a meandering flatland creek.  Loops, cutthoughs, islands, oxbows in the making.  Waters swollen behind the dam.  Along the creek’s banks, and for a few hundred yards in either direction, greenish-yellow willows grew so thick that they obscured the creek until you climbed above them.  Above the willows, the drainage’s slopes supported tawny grass speckled with olive sagebrush.  Higher still, the sagebrush steppes gave way to deep green conifer forests.  Above the forests – although I couldn’t see them from my camp – gray peaks shouldered their way into the sky.  Triple Peak to the south and McDougal Peak to the north, the Wyoming Range’s guardians of McDougal Pass.

Cottonwood Creek, seen from my camp.

It had been a tough day.  The first day on the trail always batters a hiker: legs unused to walking, lungs unused to altitude, hips unused to supporting a pack.  We had hiked about twelve miles, mostly on a gravel road with little change in elevation, but the sun had been hot – eighty degrees or so.  Duke was carrying his food in his pack, and had borne the weight well.  He was tired, and had lagged behind me in the late afternoon, but there was no sign that the weight had bothered him.  Tomorrow would be harder for both of us, I knew, but after that our bodies would begin to adjust to the workload.  It had been a good first day.

Satisfied, I turned toward my pack to pull my tent off my pack.  And the son of a bitch wasn’t there.

My pack was lying on the ground – but no tent.  The strap that held the tent to the pack hung loosely.  I looked around the campsite.  Maybe I had removed the tent and forgotten.  But the baby blue bag wasn’t there.  I swore.  This was important.  I wasn’t going over the mountains without a tent.  I threw my hat in the dirt and stared at it.  “Duke,” I said, “this is a bad start.”

A few miles before reaching camp, Duke and I had turned off the main road.  We followed an old road that crossed Cottonwood Creek, and then paralleled it for awhile on the opposite bank.  But then the road veered to the north, so Duke and I had set out across the sagebrush steppe to remain on course  But the sagebrushes were set so tightly that Duke, with his sidesaddle pack, couldn’t squeeze between them.  So I removed his pack and carried it as we turned back toward Cottonwood Creek.

First, however, we had to get through the willows.  They were thick enough in places that I could barely see five feet ahead, and the grew as high as my head.  So I crashed through them as best I was able, with Duke following.  Mud sucked at my boots and willow stobs jabbed at my chest and face.  Occasionally I found moose trails headed across the creekbed, and although they were soggy I followed them where I could.  I found a place to jump across the creek, then crashed my way through the remainder of the willows to the main road on the other side.

That, I figured, is probably where I lost my tent.  Somewhere in those damn willows.  I stuffed a water bottle and my GPS into the detachable head of my pack, intending to take them with me as I searched.  I had about two hours left of daylight – not much time.  I would have to quit the search with enough time to hike back to this camp before nightfall so that I could build some shelter from pine boughs, fix dinner, go to sleep and head back to the truck in the morning.  It was a mile or more from my camp to the spot where I’d crossed through the willows.  There was probably not enough time to find the tent, I thought, but I would have to try.

As I was checking the head of my pack for emergency supplies, a white truck drove by on the main road and slowed.  The driver’s window was down.  I hated to hitch a ride – Walker didn’t have automotive courier services – but I time was short.  Without a tent, this hike was over.  The driver looked at me.  I considered it.

“Hold on just a minute,” I shouted.

Mark Hamilton, who was bow hunting for elk, gave Duke and me a ride back to the point where I’d left the willow swamp.  I told him about how my tent had fallen off my pack, and how I thought it was probably somewhere in the willowed creekbed.  He asked where I planned on hiking to.  I said the far side of the Salt River Range.  He shook his head.

“Well, I’ve got a spare sleeping bag, but you don’t need that,” he said.  “I don’t have a spare tent.”

I thanked him for the ride.

“Good luck,” he said.  He drove away.

Duke and I set off into the willows.  I retraced steps as best I could – this moose trail looked familiar, these branches were freshly broken at a man’s height, I think I might have stepped in this puddle, I think I crossed the creek upstream of here.  But it was guesswork.  My GPS had been off as I crossed the creekbed, so I didn’t know where I had gone.  This was, I thought, a fool’s errand.  But I couldn’t come up with any better ideas, so I kept looking.

And in about fifteen minutes, there it was.  A baby blue tent bag lying on a patch of grass.  I picked it up incredulously.

Back at camp, at the bottom of the hill by Cottonwood Creek, I squatted in the grass to fill water bottles.  I submerged a bottle and felt the chill of the water on my hand as I waited for it to fill.  It was nearly dusk.  The bottle gurgled full.  I lifted the bottle and screwed on the cap.  Water dripped from the bottle onto the still surface below.

“I guess you found it,” someone shouted from the top of the hill.  I turned.  Mark stood at the hill’s edge, near where I had pitched the tent.

“Yeah, I can’t believe it,” I shouted.  “Hey – thanks for coming to check on me.”

“No problem.”  He waved dismissively.  “Good luck.”

Later, I stared into the coals of my campfire and thought about good luck and kindness.  Both exist, and no amount of intellectual cynicism or mean-minded ugliness can eradicate them.  An irreducible minimum for good in the world.  The campfire light flickered on Duke’s sleeping body.  Good luck and kindness, just floating around out there waiting to find you.

That’s a good thing, because sometimes you need them.

The hike for Day One.

My camp, and where I found the tent.

Duke sleeps in the grass where we stopped for water in early afternoon.  Duke is a purebred lab, but for reasons no one understands his legs only grew to about two-thirds of normal lab length.  His street name is Lowrider.

Success

I thought I had a pretty good tan on my forearms, but most of it came off in the shower.  So much for looking like a sun-beaten traveler.

Duke and I made it across the mountains and back.  We were gone six days and five nights – four nights camped out on the trail, and one night camped along the road while hitchhiking back to the truck.  No injuries to man or dog except sore feet.  I kept a journal while in the mountains, and I’ll spend the next few days converting my notes to blog entries, then post them in several installments.  So the next few entries will describe the hike across the Wyoming and Salt River Ranges.

Now I’m going the Green River Bar for a burger and some Pabst Blue Ribbon.  I didn’t get showered up for nothin.'

Duke and I after we got back to the truck.  He's wearing my sock because of a sore paw.

A Google Earth image of our approximate route through the mountains, viewed from the east.  The closest mountains are part of the Wyoming Range; the further set are in the Salt River Range.  I actually started hiking in the plain, east of where this map picks up.  Total hiking distance was somewhere around 45 miles.

Top Ten Ways to Stay Awake when Driving at Night

10.    Take drugs.

9.    Listen to Limbaugh.  Some noise is so jarring that it can’t be tuned out.

8.    Think about sex.

7.    I knew a guy who said he would take off all his clothes and stack them, article by article, in the seat next to him, then put them on again.  I haven’t tried this one, but if you do, be careful about getting pulled over.

6.    Play chicken.

5.    Light a stinkbomb.  Or, travel with a flatulent dog.

4.    Moon a cop, then drive really fast.  A high-speed chase will get the blood flowing.

3.    While wearing long pants, roll down the window and rest your left ankle on the rearview mirror.  On a warm night, the ventilation feels nice.  On a cold night, you damn sure won’t go to sleep.

2.    Instead shutting both eyes, rest one eye at a time.  This is also a good way to practice winking in case you get a hot nurse when they take you to the hospital.

1.    Bite the wheel and steer with your teeth.  Especially effective on gravel roads.





POSTSCRIPT.  Right now, I am backpacking in the Wyoming Range and Salt River Range.  I will probably be gone on that backpacking trip for a week or more, so this blog entry is one that I prepared ahead of time and scheduled to post in advance.  I’ll start writing “live” posts again when I’m back to my truck and computer.  While I’m gone, there will be no new blog entries for Saturday or Sunday.

Routing

The Walker Expedition left the 1833 rendezvous site on the Green River / Horse Creek alluvial plain and headed west to the headwaters of the Bear River, where they stopped to prepare provisions for the remainder of their journey.  That means the Walker Expedition crossed the Wyoming Range and the Salt River Range.  Today, those ranges are encompassed in the Bridger-Teton National Forest.  I will cross them too.

So I spent the morning and early afternoon in my Pinedale hotel room poring over maps and talking on the phone with Forest Service officials.  There is no record of where Walker crossed the mountains – we only know that he did cross them – so I had to pick my own route.  I started flipping though my paper atlas and paper BLM maps.  Clicking back and forth between the Garmin topo map on my hard drive and Google Earth.  Uploading maps from the computer to my handheld GPS.  Matching landmarks on one map to landmarks on another.  Finding a trail over the mountains was not easy.

So I called the Forest Service, and spoke with a guy named Nate.  He was incredibly helpful.  He pointed me to a Forest Service road called the “Lander Cutoff” that passes from the flatlands near the rendezvous site to the far side of both mountain ranges.  It looked to him, and to me, like the Lander Cutoff was the only trail passing over the ranges.  The other trails stayed on one side of the mountains or the other.  So I decided to take it.

It was, in some ways, a disappointing decision.  The Lander Cutoff became a wagon route in the mid-1800s – after Walker had crossed the mountains – and is now, for the most part, a four-wheel-drive trail.  There are parts where a hiker can take shortcuts not available to trucks, jeeps, or ox-drawn wagons, but for large portions of the trek, I’d be hiking on a road.  And the history of the Lander Cutoff was disappointing: it became a wagon route long after Walker passed through the area, but I had no evidence that the route was even known to white men in 1833.  Nevertheless, it appeared to be my best option.  And it was plausible that Walker knew about it before it became a wagon route.  So I packed for a seven-day hike, loaded my (heavy) pack into the truck, and shipped out.

Before leaving Pinedale, however, I visited the local Museum of the Mountain Man.  I got there half an hour before closing time, but the lady working the reception desk let me stay a little later.  I saw the rifle of William Craig, a participant in the Walker Expedition.  I looked over some beaver traps to see how they worked and inspected the gear that mountain men wore.  The museum was well-stocked, well-kept, and helpful.

As I was leaving, someone saw my Athens, Georgia tee shirt and stopped me.  James Thomas was a Georgian by birth and had retired out to Pinedale.  He sat on the board of directors of the museum.  As I was telling him about my book-writing plan, a gray-headed guy walked up and introduced himself as Sam Drucker.

To be courteous, I paused my story to ask Sam if he was familiar with Joseph Walker.  “He’s one of my heroes,” Sam said.  Sam was an archeologist with an interest in the fur trade of the early 1800s.  He had excavated a livery stable at the site of Fort Bonneville.  It didn’t take long to figure out that Sam had more to tell me than I had to tell him.  I brought my story to a quick conclusion and started asking questions.

I told Sam that I would be leaving in the next couple days to hike over the Wyoming and Salt River Ranges, and asked if he had any idea what route Walker had taken.  He confirmed that no one knew the route for sure, but he offered to give me his thoughts.  I waved goodbye to James, and Sam and I walked out to my truck to look at maps.

I told Sam about the route I planned to take.  “It’s possible that Walker went that way,” Sam said.  “But the Lander Cutoff didn’t really get started until later.  There’s some other pass that is more likely; it’s on the tip of my tongue . . .”

I spread the BLM map on the hood of the Subaru next to my truck.  The edges of the map fluttered in the wind.  I smoothed the map and looked for any trail besides the Lander Cutoff that crossed the ranges, but found none.

“McDougal,” Sam said.  “McDougal Pass.”

We found it on the map.  From the east, there was a solid red line, indicating a road, that led up through McDougal Gap and headed toward McDougal Pass, then petered out into dotted line, indicating a foot trail.  From the west, a red solid line headed toward McDougal Pass, then became a dotted line.  But the dotted lines didn’t connect, and neither reached the spot labeled “McDougal Pass.”  Both dotted lines stopped a few inches short.

“McDougal Pass is the most likely route,” Sam was saying.  “It could have been the Lander Cutoff.  But McDougal Pass was an old Indian trial, so it would have been there when Walker was there.”  He had his hands on his hips, remembering.  “And also, somewhere up there, there’s a sandstone quarrying pit where either the mountain men dug stones to build fortifications against the Indians, or the Shoshoni dug stones to defend against the Blackfeet.  If it were me, I’d bet on McDougal.”

“Alright,” I said.  I checked the map again.  “So, if you’re me, and you walk up this path . . .”  I traced my finger along the red line approaching McDougal Pass from the east, then stopped where the red dotted line stopped.  “What do you do when you get here?”

“Oh,” he said, looking at the map.  He held a corner of the map back against the gusting wind.  “That will be tough.”

But that’s where I’m going.  There’s a drainage leading down from McDougal Pass on the east called Bear Creek, and another called Willow Creek leading down from the pass on the west.  My best bet is probably to travel along the drainages to the extent possible.  Still, I will have to cover some ground to connect the two.  The headwaters of the drainages are only a couple kilometers apart on my map, and the topo lines between them look manageable.  My plan is to mark the headwaters of each watercourse on my handheld GPS and try to bushwhack between them.

I’m betting that Duke and I can do it.  It won’t be easy.  Duke and I are, after all, Georgians unaccustomed to fall hiking in the Rockies.  And it will be cold – it was 20° at dawn this morning in the flats.  It will be colder in the mountains.  Neither of us are as accustomed to the altitude as I would like.  I’ve got Raynaud’s Syndrome, meaning that my hands get really cold really easily, and Duke has the beginnings of dysplasia.  So it’s not a sure thing.  If we can’t make it, we may have to turn back.  But I feel good.  We’ve got the right gear, our planning is as good as it can be, and I think we’re psychologically equipped for the trip.  (By which I mean, I am adventurous by nature, and Duke is a dog so he doesn’t know what he’s getting into.)  The time for adventure has arrived.

And I am excited.  This beats the hell out of the Lander Cutoff.  That plan sucked.

Sunset from the truck's parking place on the night before the hike.

POSTSCRIPT.  Right now, I am backpacking in the Wyoming Range and Salt River Range.  I will probably be gone on that backpacking trip for a week or more, so this blog entry is one that I prepared ahead of time and scheduled to post in advance.  I’ll start writing “live” posts again when I’m back to my truck and computer.  While I’m gone, there will be no new blog entries for Saturday or Sunday.

Green River Bar

After pausing on the hillside to write last night, I stopped into Daniel, Wyoming to get that burger.  The place was called the Green River Bar.  I’m glad I stopped.

I ordered a burger and a PBR and sat for awhile at a table against the back wall while I waited on the burger.  There were eight other people in the place, all bellied up to the bar – the bartender, three folks talking about oiling, a woman who announced herself to be drunk, the man she was talking to, and two gray-headed men in cowboy hats talking about cattle.  I sipped my beer and watched the football game on a TV above their heads.  There were a couple empty stools between the oilmen and lady who had described herself as overserved, so when my PBR got down to the dregs, I took a barstool with the oil folks on my left and the lady on my right.

“Another one?” the bartender asked me.

“Yes ma’am.”

When she came back she asked where I was from.  I told her Georgia.

“My ex-husband was from Georgia,” she said.

“I hope he was a good guy,” I said.

She frowned.

“At least for a little while,” I amended.

“Yeah, for a little while,” she said.  I told her it was the little while that was representative of Georgia, not the afterwards.  We talked about Georgia in the fall, moonshine and retrievers.  She brought me an excellent burger on a styrofoam plate.  The lady to my right told some anecdotes about honey-flavored moonshine that a guy from Utah had made, and apricot flavored moonshine from somewhere else.  Mississippi, maybe.  The ‘shine was damn good, she said, but it would knock you out.

Eventually the lady to my right and her husband stood to leave.  As she walked out, she bent toward one of the gray-headed men in a deeply creased white cowboy hat.  He lifted his face to hers, and she kissed him on the lips.  She left.

The bar had thinned, and Karrie asked if I would like to meet a salt-of-the-earth, honest-to-god cattleman from Arizona who “came from the dirt.”  I was finishing my burger, but I said sure.  “Jeb, this is Dude,” she said.  “Dude, Jeb.”

The guy in the deeply creased cowboy hat had a long thin face that had seen plenty of sun and wind.  He wore a denim jacket over his blue jeans, and his nose pointed to the left.  His heeled boots were the lace-up kind that cattlemen favor over the slip-on kind that Hollywood prefers.  He extended a weathered hand to me.  “Pleased to meet you,” he said.  “Dude.”

Dude wore rose-tinted wire-rimmed glasses a little like John Lennon’s.  He asked about my camper – the folks in the bar had seen me pull up – and I told him I was living out of it for the next few months.  It was convenient to travel with your home on your back, tortoise-style.  I told a story about how my buddy Ben and I had spent a couple nights camped in the parking lots of bars in Alaska.  Karrie told me I was welcome to camp out in the Green River Bar’s parking lot that night.

“I’ve got two horses and two dogs,” Dude told me.  “The horses make me less mobile.  I have to use a trailer.”

Dude was raised working cattle on a ranch north of Tucson.  He was in the service from 1955-57 as a paratrooper with a unit that merged with the 101st Airborne.  Since then, he had moved around a good bit.  He had lived around Daniel for three and a half years, looking after someone’s cattle.  He liked it here, but the winters were cold.  He’d stay awhile longer, probably.  He had a fifth-wheel trailer parked in his sister’s backyard in Arizona that he could go back to if he was broke.  I asked him where the cattle that he looked after were, and he pointed through the barroom wall.  They were still at summer pasture.  Soon they’d drive them to winter range.  He told me about driving cattle though Daniel’s main street, and calling the cops ahead of time so that they could block both ends of the road to slow motorists down.  I asked if they used four-wheelers to drive cattle now instead of horses.  He shook his head.  “Too damned dangerous.”

The football game on which Karrie had a bet riding was ending, and I was mostly finished with my second beer.  I stood to leave, and Dude pulled out his wallet and laid his money on the bar.  When the game ended and Karrie won her bet, she brought me a check.  She asked Dude if he was leaving.  He told her yes.  She leaned over the bar and kissed him on the lips.

Some guys have all the luck.

The Green River Bar in Daniel, Wyoming.

 POSTSCRIPT.  By the time this entry posts to the blog, I will be backpacking across the Wyoming Range and Salt River Range.  I will be on the trail somewhere between five and ten days, and will obviously not be able to post live blog entries during that time.  So I've written a few entries ahead of time and scheduled them to post while I'm backpacking.  There will be no new entries for Saturday and Sunday.

Culmination

We found it!  But it took awhile.

I knew that the 1833 rendezvous, from which the Walker Expedition departed, met where Horse Creek and the Green River flow side by side in the same alluvial plain.  I located the watercourses on my map and drove through the plain they share, which lies southwest of Pinedale, sandwiched between the Wyoming Range and the Wind River Range.  But I found no marker memorializing the spot of the rendezvous.  I found Rapper’s Point, a national historic landmark overlooking the area in which the trappers met, and I found the historic site of Fort Bonneville, the fort and trading post near which the trappers had their rendezvous.  But I couldn’t find the site itself.  Discouraged with my maps, I looked across the plain to some hills on the south side.  I decided to drive up there so that I could at least overlook the rendezvous site, even if I couldn’t pinpoint it.

 Sign to overlook of Green River Valley.

 Site of Fort Bonneville.

On the way, I passed through Daniel, a tiny town whose only apparent commercial establishment had neon beer signs in the window.  I was thinking about stopping in for a burger after checking out the hillside when – there it was! – I passed the 1833 rendezvous site.  It was marked on my BLM map with an ambiguous picnic-table symbol.  I turned around on the two-lane road and drove into the site.  A gravel road led into a thick grove of cottonwoods and willows.

And that’s about all there was.  The gravel road made a loop on about two acres of land.  The cottonwoods and willows obscured any view of the plain.  There was a plaque, a whitewashed wooden outhouse, and a more dilapidated whitewashed wooden outhouse.  I inspected neither.  No picnic tables.  Duke and I got out of the truck and walked as far as we could without getting on private land – which didn’t take long – but I couldn’t see Horse Creek or the Green River.  Duke may have smelled them; I don’t know.

I stood next to my truck trying to think of how to properly commemorate our thousands-of-miles journey to this place.  Duke, who doesn’t worry about such things, sat on the gravel and waited patiently while I considered the question.

I decided to run around the circle.  I needed to acclimate to the altitude anyway.  So Duke followed me on my sprint around the gravel loop, stopping occasionally to pee on trees, then catch up, which he does easily.  I ran all the way around the gravel loop, then stopped at the camper.  I stood with my hands on my knees, breathing hard.  It wasn’t much of a commemoration, I thought.  But Duke’s bowels are stimulated by physical exertion.  He left an brown monument of our presence.  It was of impressive height, and shimmered in the slanting sunlight of evening.  We looked at it awhile.  Thinking it sufficient, we loaded into the truck and continued to the hillside for which we’d originally aimed.

I’m typing from that hillside now.  The valley below is beautiful, and with all of the cottonwood trees and grass it offers, the trappers likely had plenty of firewood and grazing.  The proximity of Fort Bonneville likely added security.  I’m tempted to say that the state of Wyoming ought to have done more to memorialize the spot, but – really – what were the trappers but a bunch of roughnecks getting drunk and trying to make a buck by overexploiting our natural resources?  So maybe not.

I think I’m going to go get that burger.  I wonder if the oilmen are still in town.

The hillside where I stopped to write.  In the bottom-left, see Horse Creek.  The 

Green River flows in on the other side of the plain.

Horse Creek.  To take this picture, I drove down a dirt road with houses on either side.  When I
stopped the truck and got out with my camera, a little blonde-haired girl waved at me from 
a window.  I think the sunken Jeep in the creek might be hers.

The Ties that Bind

There are two types of visitors to Pinedale, Wyoming: oilmen and tourists.  The tourist season is over.

So when I drove through Pinedale looking for a hotel room to organize my backpacking gear and saw several “no vacancy” signs, I knew the oilmen were here.  I could also tell by the trucks – the oil guys’ trucks are fullsize no-nonsense models; lots of four-wheel-drive but few leather seats.  A grayish-brown dust covers the lower two feet of the body paneling.  The trucks are never ostentatiously muddy, like a kid who’s been bogging, but they’re never clean.

So I don’t know why, when I walked out of my hotel room to find a burger and a beer, I put on my button-up Polo shirt and tucked it into my Carhartt pants.  I guess I got used to Georgia, where collared shirts are closer to the norm.  But when I stood in the bar on the main drag in Pinedale, leaning against the wall with a beer waiting for my hamburger, I was far and above the nicest-dressed person there in my collared shirt.  I felt a little self-conscious.

Most of the other folks were in sweaters or tee shirts.  They sat clustered around a few tables watching the Cowboys-Giants game.  I ordered my burger, took a number, then ordered a beer and looked for a spot to sit.  There were a couple chairs at the end of one table, but everyone at that table seemed to know each other, so I didn’t sit.  And there were some folks leaning against a wall by a collection of empty kegs.  I flipped one of the kegs over and sat down on the smooth end.  I had forgotten about the hole in the backside of my pants, but I remembered it when my butt hit the aluminum.

One of the oilmen saw me flip the keg.  “Hey, man, there’s some chairs over here if you want to sit down.”

I thanked him and told the keg had been cold on my ass.  I sat down.  His name was Clyde, and he was a Vikings fan.  Family from Minnesota.  We talked about Favre’s new uniform for awhile, then he asked who my team was.

“You aren’t going to like this, but I’m a Packers guy,” I said.

He said his wife was too.  I met some other folks at the table, and before long a young couple in Steelers jerseys sat down.  His name was Scott, and hers was Tatiana.   Another guy at the table had a Russian wife, and he paid Tatiana a compliment in Russian.  She took Scott’s hand as she thanked the other guy.  All of us at the same table – Georigans, Wyominers, Russians; oilmen, lawyers, who-knows-what.  I drank my beer and ate my burger and we all watched the game and yelled at the screen.

America.  What a great country.

Scenery

“Wow, that’s pretty,” he said.  He got up from his stool and took a couple steps over to see through the door of the café and into the convenience store.  “Damn.”  He put his hands on his hips and watched for a second.  The guy in the corner leaned over to see, and he nodded.

It was 7:30 in the morning and I was sitting at a breakfast counter in Centennial, Wyoming.  Centennial is not a big town.  There are a smattering of houses spread out among dirt streets on a hillside, a couple cafés, a couple bars, and a post office.  The only way into or out of town is along Wyoming 130, which leads through Medicine Bow National Forest.  The cafés, bars, and post offices all face Wyoming 130.  It is a one-street town. 

The guy retook his stool two seats over from me.  He had an unruly gray beard, wire-rimmed glasses and a deep, gravelly voice that sounded like he drank whiskey with prairie dust in it.  If he had range and a sense of pitch he would have made a great country music singer.

I took a bite out of my biscut and leaned over to look toward the convenience store.  I didn’t see anything.  I drank some water to wash down the biscut.  After awhile I asked, “what were you looking at?”

“A girl.”  He seemed surprised that I’d asked.  “I don’t miss ‘em.  Times gets tough up in these mountains,” he said.  He ran a thumb through his beard.  “Sparse.”

“I bet,” I said.  “I’d think you’d get a few coming by in the summer, but in the winter – I could see how there wouldn’t be much to look at.”

“A few comes up in the winter from the ski resorts,” he said.  “Sometimes they come for the music.”

Centennial, he told me, had a pretty good music scene.  Apparently bands will stop through on tours between other places, or when a band is in the area to play at ski resorts but has an empty night on its schedule.  They’d get some pretty good bands, he said, in front of some pretty small crowds.  I said it sounded cool.

I was wearing a shirt from Athens, Georgia, and I asked if he’d ever been through there.  He’d only been through Georgia once and had stayed on I-95.  I told him about the Athens music scene, about REM, the B-52s, and now the Drive by Truckers.  He said it sounded cool, and I asked if he had ever been to Austin.

“No, my girlfriend tried to drag me down there once,” he graveled.  “But I’m not about to go to Texas, even it is Austin.”

“I like your style,” I said.  “I don’t care much about Texas either.”  I was about to tell him about a line from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley – Steinbeck loved Montana, disliked Texas, and wrote that Montana looked the way a small child would envision Texas if he listened to Texans talk – when the guy in the corner leaned over and looked toward the convenience store.

“Hey hey,” he said.

The guy next to me stood up to see.  “Oh, yeah,” he said, looking toward the convenience store and nodding.  “But she’s got her boyfriend in tow.”  He sat back down.

For a guy in his late twenties, it’s encouraging to know that grownups don’t necessarily act any differently then I’ve been acting for the last ten years.

From left to right: convenience store, café, and bar.  Centennial, Wyoming.

I have passed through Centennial three times now -- 1996, 2004, and 2009 -- and 

the population has remained suspiciously unchanged.

Rolling Out

Do you ever listen to yourself talk and think, damn that sounded strange?  It happened to me yesterday.

I was sitting in the grass eating a tortilla when, out of the prairie to the east, a red truck appeared.  I guess I hadn’t heard it coming over the windmill’s chugging and Duke’s panting.  The truck bumped along the bushogged cut that I’m camped alongside.  I stood to the side of the road and let it come abreast.

The people inside rolled down their windows.  It was a crew-cab Chevy with four older folks who were wandering around ticking items off their “Bucket Lists,” as the driver told me.  They lived in Colorado and had come to visit Nebraska’s “sand hill country,” which is apparently where I’m camped.  I told them I hadn’t known that this region went by that name but that it made sense, because the country was had plenty of hills and the soil sandy.  At the time it seemed clever.

They looked over my rig and asked if I had spent the night out here.  I said, I’ve spent a couple.  The lady in the back-left looked around the prairie.

“Did the traffic keep you up at night?” she asked.

She gave me a peach and four chocolate chip cookies, saying “I bet you don’t have these.”  I told her no, I’d been out of fresh food for awhile.  They asked if the water from the windmill was good to drink, and I said I hadn’t gotten sick yet, and asked me where they were on the park map, and I told them.  I told them about my quest for authorship, and they wished me well on my research, camper repairs, and writing.  The driver put the truck in gear.  He rested his wrist on the gearshift.

I had to make myself shut up.  I’d been babbling, I think.  They drove away, and the lady in the back-left turned and waved.  I think she thought I’d been too much in the sun.  I think she might have been right.

So this morning I am packing up and rolling out.  I look forward to the open road, a warm shower, and a laundromat, in that order – I crave the open road, a warm shower would be nice, but – I may as well be honest – I’d skip the laundromat except that flies are landing on my Carhartts and I spilled diesel on my best shirt.  The fragrance is a bit much.  A little civilization sounds about right.

Uploading a blog entry on Internet Ridge -- the image on the screen is a reflection.

My old friend the windmill.  Duke, who got annoyed with the clanging sound,

 would growl at it quixotically from time to time. 

My nine-day attempt to grow a beard.  Not gonna happen.  Razor time.

Fixing Sinks and Trapping Beavers: Why We Bother

I cursed so vehemently that Duke, who is a hunting dog and has heard his share of foul language, looked up from under the truck where he lay in the shade.

Four spring-loaded couplings hold my camper onto the back of my truck by attaching to four eye bolts that hang from the underside of the camper.  The back-left eye bolt attaches to a wooden beam that runs underneath the sink.  The sink had been leaking, which, if left unchecked, could have caused the beam to rot and allowed the eye bolt to pull through the beam.  So I spent an hour and a half this morning with a wrench, a screwdriver, thread sealing tape, and silicone caulk banging around under the sink, checking seals.  Then I ran some water through the sink while watching the pipes, saw no leaks, and walked outside to stretch and congratulate myself.  I glanced at the back-left eye bolt.  It was dripping.  That’s when I cursed, and Duke looked up.

I have been reading about the fur trappers and the privations they endured.  Packing metal traps and dried beaver pelts up and down some of North America’s toughest terrain.  Out at dusk each night in the fall and spring, wading in just-above-freezing water setting beaver traps.  Out at dawn each morning, wading through the same icy streams to check the traps.  Rheumatism was not an unfortunate disease for a fur trapper, it was an inevitability.  Yet the trappers kept trapping.  It gave them an excuse to live the free life they loved.

I spat to emphasize my displeasure at the eye bolt and walked back inside the camper.  I opened the cabinet under the sink and looked for leaks.  Water dribbling down a hose.  It wasn’t there before.  Must have run down from somewhere higher.  I ran my fingers up the hose.  Water all the way up, past the seals that I had re-sealed.  Coming from the top of the counter.  I clamored to my feet and inspected the faucet.  Some water on the counter alongside the faucet.  I unscrewed the spigot and checked the o-ring.  Looked okay.  I tried to remove the faucet so I could inspect it.  I couldn’t remove the faucet without removing two plastic bolts under the counter.  I couldn’t get access to those bolts without removing the sink.  I couldn’t remove the sink without uncoupling the drain hose.  None of that was going to be easy.  I could just forget the project, I thought.  I could have some lunch and a beer in the sun.

As years passed, things got harder for fur trappers.  The supply of beaver dwindled, then plummeted.  Once beavers were removed from a river, they could only repopulate the river from one of two directions – upstream or downstream – so it took time for beaver populations to rebound after hard trapping.  And demand dropped.  As silk hats replaced beaver hats on London’s most fashionable heads, the price of a beaver pelt in the Rocky Mountains sank from six dollars to less than two dollars.  Trappers needed more beaver to break even, but there were fewer beaver to be had.  Times were hard, but the fur trappers kept trapping.  Those drawn to the freedom and adventure of the fur trade seldom reacquired their taste for settled society.  They weren’t making money, but didn’t seem to care – it wasn’t money that had drawn them to the Rockies.

I removed the drain hose, pulled out the sink, and twisted at the plastic bolts that held the faucet in place.  They wouldn’t budge.  They were designed to be loosened and tightened by hand, but I couldn’t turn them.  I widened the bite on my pipe wrench and clamped down on them.  I twisted.  The wrench stripped plastic from the nuts.  Wouldn’t budge.  I tried again.  Nothing.  Whoever built my camper fastened this faucet onto a particleboard counter, which is cheaper than plywood but comes apart more easily and swells when wet.  The particleboard under the leaky faucet had expanded and put so much pressure on the plastic nuts that they became immobile.  Stumped, I sat on the floor.  I didn’t know how to repair this.  I looked outside on the sun shining on the prairie grass.  There was one beer left from the six-pack I bought in Alabama.

Why did the trappers trap, instead of just wander?  It’s a seldom-asked question.  The trappers were in the mountains for the adventure, the scenery, and the near-absolute freedom that came with the Rocky Mountain fur trade.  With a few exceptions, none made any money.  When they did make money, they normally blew it gambling, drinking, and chasing squaws at the annual rendezvous.  Why didn’t they quit trapping?  The mountain men were famously self-sufficient, and needed little they couldn’t produce themselves besides a gun, bullets, powder, a knife and maybe an awl.  A mountain man could have worked for a short time in a town until he could purchase these few items, then set off into the Rockies to wander, enjoying adventure, scenery, and absolute freedom without enduring the drudgery of setting, checking, and carrying beaver traps.  But most didn’t do that, and when the Rocky Mountain fur trade died out in the late 1830s and early ‘40s, most mountain men sought other employment as scouts or guides.  Why didn’t they stay in the mountains and wander?

Abandoning the project felt wrong.  If I didn’t fix this myself, I’d have to wait while some RV mechanic got around to doing the job, I’d have to pay him, and the next time something under the sink went wrong, I wouldn’t have learned how to fix it.  I stared at the swelled particleboard awhile.  I decided to excavate.  With a hammer, chisel, and flathead screwdriver, I chipped away at the damp particleboard clamped between the plastic nuts and faucet.  I scraped away the lower half of the expanded countertop, leaving enough material to support the faucet but freeing the plastic nuts of the pressure that the swelling exerted.  I twisted at the nuts.  They turned.  I removed the faucet.  Inside the faucet I found a tiny crack in a clear piece of plastic.  With some silicone caulk it was watertight again.  Problem solved.

No, I thought as I sat outside in the sun, the fur trappers were not just wanderers or hermits living in the mountains.  They were men with a purpose – trapping beaver for money – even if the purpose was one they didn’t care much about.  I took a sip from my beer and scratched Duke’s head.  People, by and large, need to believe they have a purpose, whether it is to make money, rear children, disseminate a theological system, or write a book.  That’s why the question folks ask is “what is the meaning of life?” instead of “is there a meaning of life?”  We can’t bear to think that the answer to the second question might be “no.”  I took another pull from my beer.  It tasted much better than it would have if the sink still leaked.  It is true, as the wise men say – happiness can seldom be pursued directly.

Girding Up

Jeremiah Johnson
Made his way into the mountains
Planning on forgetting
All the troubles that he knew . . .

So go the lyrics to the soundtrack of Jeremiah Johnson, a great Robert Redford movie in which Jeremiah heads for the Rockies to become a mountain man.  Jeremiah is ill prepared: he cannot find food, his horse freezes to death, and his clothes are inadequate for the Rocky Mountain winter.  But Jeremiah meets Griz, an old mountain man who takes him in and teaches him how to live in the mountains.  In one scene, as the two are fleshing a grizzly skin, Griz points at Jeremiah.

“You’ve got some work to do,” he says.  Griz may as well have been talking to me.

And work is what I’ve been doing – mental, mechanical, and physical.  I brought two boxes of books and papers about mountain men and the Walker Expedition.  How did the frontiersmen hunt buffalo?  How did they store the meat?  What did they wear?  What did they do during storms?  How did they set beaver traps?  What type of guns did they use?  Where did they spend winters?  What route did the Walker Expedition take?  And how do scholars purport to know these things?  I’ve been working on these questions, taking notes, and making some progress.

Duke and I have been readying our gear and getting accustomed to it.  This morning, I strapped Duke’s pack on him.  The pack suspends two red pouches on either side of Duke’s ribcage and stays in place with three straps running under his torso, like girthstraps on a saddle, and one strap running across his chest and between his front legs like a horse’s breaststrap.  I loaded it up with water, my GPS, a notebook and a compass.  I also brought the booties I bought for Duke in case he couldn’t stay clear of the prickly pear cacti that I saw yesterday.  I laced up my own long-unused hiking boots, and Duke and I went for a ramble over the hills and ridges north of the truck.

Both of us walked well.  Duke didn’t mind the pack, and my boots still felt comfortable – no blisters or hot spots.  We saw a coyote, about a million grasshoppers, and a few doves that made me wish I’d remembered my shotgun.  I’m out of fresh meat and a dove breast would be excellent about now.  I saw two pheasants yesterday, but we didn’t bump any today.  I keep hoping that somewhere in my mountain man literature I’ll find instructions for rigging a snare.

But Duke had trouble staying out of the cacti.  On three occasions, I had to flip him over and pull out the spines with my Leatherman.  The prickly pear didn’t seem to hurt very much, and the spines were easy to see and remove (unlike, for instance, the cholla, which has thousands of tiny spines), so I didn’t put on Duke’s booties.  Duke is a smart dog, and I keep thinking that he’ll learn to avoid cacti.  Clearly, the coyote we saw doesn’t wear booties, and I doubt he runs around all day with prickly pear spines in his feet.

It was also a day of gear repair.  Last night’s mosquitoes alerted me to holes in the camper’s bug screens, so I patched a couple of those with duct tape and epoxy.  Because my carbon monoxide detector went off a couple days back, I also opened up the propane heater and stove and applied thread-sealing tape to the propane seals.  Then, to be safe, I installed a backup carbon monoxide detector.  I slept last night in my heavy down bag – the one I’ll take to hiking –because the nights have gotten cold, but I sneezed through the night and wheezed some this morning.  That probably means that dust mites, to which I’m allegoric, have collected in the bag.  So I’ve opened the bag up and lashed it to the hog-wire fence around the base of the windmill beside the truck.  I hope this prairie breeze will air it out.

I had no problems in this morning’s short hike, so I thought I was probably in decent shape.  But just to make sure I was adjusting to the elevation – I’ve traveled from the coast to about 3900’ – I stripped down to my boxers went for a run in the 80° afternoon sun.  And, damn – I have got some work to do.  I ran until my lungs started burning, then walked, then ran, then walked, then ran back to the truck.  I didn’t go far.  Duke trotted alongside me in mocking ease.  Basically, I got schooled by a slightly overweight Labrador with unnaturally short legs.  I am going to have to get into shape.

I am also going to have to adjust to bathing in cold water.  I dunked Duke in the metal water tank underneath the windmill, then pulled him out, lathered him up, and rinsed him by pouring water from my cooking pot over him.  The water was cold, but Duke took it like a man.

I figured I could too, but I appear to have overestimated my personal badassitude.  When I dunked my head in the tank, the water was so cold that my scalp actually hurt.  And when I dipped my pot in the tank and poured the water over my torso, I literally lost my breath.  When I poured the water down my backside, I actually got a cramp in my abdomen.  I was gasping the whole time.  Duke stood back and looked at me as if to say, “you [derogatory word].”

But all in all, I enjoyed the bath and have enjoyed the day.  After I toweled off, I stood still in the prairie with the grass beneath my toes.  As the sun and wind dried me, I felt cleaner and cleaner.  I thought of the lyrics of Willie Nelson’s hymn There Is a Fountain: “. . . and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.”  I guess I’ve got more stains than some, but groundwater and camp soap have made a good start.

Found the Library

I have just found my home for the next few days, and it is awesome.

I wanted to camp on plains like those through which the fur trappers passed.  When trapping parties or resupply missions set out for the Rockies, they usually left St. Louis and traveled up the Missouri, then headed west along the Platte River through what is now southern Nebraska.  Later, after trappers had mapped the South Pass through the Rockies, wagons followed the Platte and the path became known as the Oregon Trail.  Today, Interstate 80 follows the same route.

The North Fork of the Platte near Lewellan, NE.

I slept last night along a farming road just north of Cozad, Nebraska, which lies along I-80.  When I got back on the interstate heading west, then, I was following the fur trail.  But of course much has changed.  What was once wild prairie, thick with grass grazed only by buffalo, is now chopped into private acreages devoted either to intensive tractor-driven farming or heavy grazing by livestock.  Between the crops, the low-grazed grass, the fences and the pavement, the scene along the Platte ain’t what it used to be.

The closest big green splotch on my map was the Crescent National Wildlife Refuge, and that’s where I went.  I drove up about twenty-five miles of well-maintained dirt road to get into the refuge from Oshkosh, Nebraska, then spent about forty-five minutes bumping along a four-wheel-drive only road to make sure I was as near to wilderness as I could get.  The four-wheel-drive “road” was only a bushhogged track through the prairie, and the grass was so high that I had to roll my windows up so the grass seeds wouldn’t fly into my truck.  I was particular about the site that I wanted: I wanted to be way off the beaten path, in the middle of authentic prairie, near a water source for cleaning and bathing, in a place where I could get some cell service to update this blog, and preferably out of sight of the forest service tower that I suspect the authorities use to keep watch over the goings-on on the Refuge.



I found it.  My current spot is (or at least appears to be) in the middle of nowhere.  It’s tucked between a couple hills so it can’t be seen from the tower, and if I climb a nearby ridge, I can get internet service on my phone.  The grass is thick and tall.  Best of all, I’m parked right next to an old ranching windmill that still works – the windmill drives a pump which draws groundwater and deposits into a metal tank.  I can use the water for cooking, cleaning, or drinking.  It tastes clear and cold.  The coordinates are 41°44.489’ N, 102°22.643’ W if you want to look me up on Google Earth.

The view of camp from Internet Ridge.  You can see my truck, the windmill,

and the tank in the bottom right corner.

I’ll hole up here for a few days and research.  By the time I leave Crescent Lake NWR, I will have a fairly precise route planned over the Rockies, across the Great Basin, and over the Sierra Nevadas.  I expect that tomorrow morning I’ll itch to crank the truck and keep moving, but it’s time for a modicum of discipline.  For the next few days, I’ll have to put some salve where the traveling bug has bitten me.

Plains

I woke up this morning on the Kansas prairie and kicked off the day with a beer and a cigar.  I love the Great Plains.  They’re dustily honest.  The land is open and you can see for miles, uninhibited by the forests of the east, the mountains of the west, or the red rock mesas of the southwest.  The people don’t self-mythologize the way westerners imitate cowboys, southerners imitate rednecks, or New Yorkers act like they run the universe.  In the Great Plains, it’s all there for you to see: farming country spread far and wide, grain towers the most conspicuous buildings around, and people who don’t dress up for nobody.

Duke and me by a creek a few miles west of Cottonwood Falls, Kansas.

I had breakfast in the Highway House Café, which turned out to be my favorite type of breakfast place.  The laminate tables had been scrubbed so many times that the subsurface showed through and the booth seats were almost uncomfortable because so many customers had crunched them down over the years.  It was where the old men got together in the morning to drink coffee and talk about their health problems.  Six or seven old guys came in while I was there, and each time a new one walked through the door, the others greeted him.

“Hi, Jack.”

“Hey, John.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Well, I’m alive.  But my wife is going to need that wheelchair . . .”

One guy named Henry walked in, jerked a thumb at the parking lot, and asked who was hauling that camper around.  I said it was me, and he sat down across from me to ask about it.  He wanted one like it for hunting.  Henry was about sixty, and he leaned forward when he talked.  His belly touched the table and he clasped the thick, sturdy hands of a working man in front of him.  He told me about the café while I ate pancakes.  “That’s Doris, the waitress.  She’s a sweetheart, but she’s tough.  Real tough.  She’s had a whole bunch of surgeries on her hips, knees.  Still waits tables.  Been here forever.  She used to sit me on her knee I was a kid.”

I’m in Nebraska now, parked at the intersection of a couple dirt roads sitting on top of my camper as I write.  The sun was setting when I climbed up here, but now dusk has fallen and I can see the lights of at least five separate towns in the distance.  These farming towns are withering, but they’re wonderful while they’re still here.  Unpretentious.  Just farming towns being what they are.

Sunset from the top of the camper.

I’ve been sitting on top of this camper for awhile now, practicing to be a writer and wishing I still had that cigar.  I’ve watched a crop duster fly low over the field next to me and an older couple drive by in a dusty Chevrolet.  I waved to the couple, and they stared at me awhile then waved back.  These out-of-state people are strange, they probably thought.  Trying to be something they’re not.

 

Harnessing the wind: then and now.

Want to own a Kansas wind farm?  Go to www.KSWindFarmSale.com

for information this foreclosure sale.  Sale on October 6th, 2009.

Ozark Mountains

I didn’t know I would pass through the Ozark Mountains until I was in them.  Relics of the Ouachita Orogeny, a continental collision that occurred before reptiles evolved into dinosaurs, the Ozarks have slowly downwasted through millions of years.  They now sit unheralded in the middle of North America, overshadowed in the popular mind by the Appalachians and Rockies, memorialized only by a cheap brand of outdoor gear available at Wal-Mart.  But, as I discovered today, the Ozarks retain their own unique character.  The Ozarks are like the first hair you find on your shoulder when you turn twenty-five: interesting and somewhat surprising, although you realize that you should have expected it.

Unlike a hairy shoulder, however, the Ozarks were beautiful.  I drove thought them on US 63 last night and on Missouri 14 / Missouri Z this morning.  Yesterday’s drive was pleasant; today’s was enchanting.  The mountainsides are flush with green but too steep for the plow, so pastoralism reigns.  Alongside the road, oak forests have been intermittently cleared for pasture.  Irregularly spaced homes and wooden barns sit posed, waiting for a National Geographic photographer to arrive on assignment.  Horses and cows graze by the roadside, lifting their heads to watch ungainly pickup truck-camper combinations negotiate tight turns while distracted drivers from Columbus, Georgia look out the window.

At length, I wanted a break from working the clutch, so I pulled off next to a sign announcing a yard sale.  I guess I hadn’t really looked at the yard before I pulled over, so I was surprised when, after cutting off the truck, I saw chickens running all over the place.  A wire fence ran in no discernible pattern across the yard enclosing an area about the size of a putting green.  There were chickens inside the fence and chickens outside the fence.  Inside the fence, there was a blue tarp draped over an oval outline in such a way as to form a small pond in which a couple ducks swam.  There were also several birds that looked a little like chickens and a little like ducks but not exactly like either.

I told Duke to stay put and got out.  I realized the whitewashed house I’d parked in front of was part of the chicken-duck enclosure.  A ramp led from the ground to a windowframe through which chickens, ducks, and chicken/ducks moved freely.  They cackled and crowed and quacked at each other, chasing one another into the house or out of the windowframe where, if they were too rushed to navigate the ramp, they thudded dustily into the earth.

Where are the people? I wondered.  I wanted to ask them something, although I wasn’t sure what.  An old Chrysler LeBaron was parked in the yard, but it obviously hadn’t moved in awhile.  The junk set out for sale – old furniture, clothes, a stereo, a keyboard – looked like it had sat through a couple rainstorms.  I saw no one.  I waited awhile and, when no one came, I let Duke out to see if he would chase the chickens.

But Duke was better mannered than I had hoped, so we walked around the house together.  On the other side a large dog of indeterminate breeding ran frantically back and forth in a five-by-ten cage, barking.  There was more junk laying around – plastic chairs, tools, building supplies.

Some of these items, like the car, the house, and the stereo, were potentially valuable.  Some of these animals seemed to be pets, and others could have been a source of food or livelihood.  All of it was neglected.  Someone had, in the not too distant past, tried to sell everything of value, then abandoned the rest.  I wondered if drugs were involved.  Methamphetamine, maybe.  Maybe this wasn’t someplace I wanted to be.  I walked Duke back to the truck and loaded him into the passenger’s side, and was standing in the yard taking one last look around when a truck slowed down on the road.

It was a pickup with three guys in the front seat.  The guy closest to me had is window down.  He was skinny with brown hair.  “Need anything?” he asked me.  The truck stopped.

He spoke without smiling or showing his teeth, the way that I have seen meth users talk.  And I can’t say for sure, but it looked to me at the time like his cheeks were sunken.  I moved toward my own truck.

“No, I’m alright,” I said firmly.  The guy waved his hand forward and said something to his companions, and the truck drove off.  I got out of there.  The Ozarks are beautiful, but rural America has its blotches.

Mississippi Delta; Small Town Meeting

Duke and I had breakfast at daybreak this morning and were traveling soon thereafter. The woods were too thick to see the sunrise, but being on the road just after dawn is special nonetheless. The day is like a puppy; it has limitless potential.

I had mapped a route through Memphis on my GPS, but turned off of it so that I could have lunch in the Mississippi delta. I read a book about farming in the delta a few years back – High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta, by Gerald Helferich – and I wanted to tour the country. It was as flat as a pool table, and deep green – hearty crops rising from tilled soil, verdant trees and shrubs swelling from streambeds like bristles from a brush. I hoped to find a small café where I could eat a burger and exchange cordialities with some local folks, so I drove through several dots that my GPS had labeled as towns. I drove through Neuhardt, Brice, Midway Corner, Ninetysix Corner. But the Mississippi delta has suffered the same fate as other agrarian regions in the US; agribusinesses have replaced small farmers and the small towns that the farmers once populated have begun to die. Houses sit abandoned, silos stand in disuse, telephone poles lean across roads at precarious angles. I found no restaurant of any description, and scarcely any commercial establishments at all. I settled for lunch out of the camper, and after getting shooed off a dirt road that turned out to be private, I found an unobtrusive place to park the truck for lunch.

Lunch in the Mississippi delta.

A crossroads in the delta.  If you look closely, you can see traces of Robert Johnson's soul in the bushes.

After I finished my tortilla and beer, I headed north through Memphis toward my present locale of repose, Mark Twain National Forest, about sixty miles east of Springfield. I followed US 63, a wonderful road that took me through rural Arkansas and Missouri. In a small town along US 63 that I will not name but will call Willowbrook, I met a man who I will not name but will call Jeremy.

Dusk was gathering as I pulled off of US 63 to consult my atlas. I pulled into a municipal park next to a river, let Duke out, and spread my atlas on the hood of the truck. I had just located Mark Twain National Forest as a likely resting spot when a car pulled up and a thin white guy stepped out. He wore black shorts, black socks, glasses and no shirt. Duke trotted over to sniff him out.

“Is the dog bothering you?” I asked. “He’s friendly.”

The guy stood still and let Duke sniff him. He started to move but stopped again when Duke walked in front of him. “I think he likes the black,” he said. He had a thin voice and a trace of a lisp.

I called Duke over to me. The guy walked over to my truck. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“Montana,” I told him, not wanting to explain my full book-writing aspirations. “I’m trying to figure out where to stay the night, and I’m thinking about this spot.” I pointed to the green splotch on the map that denoted National Forest. “Is that a good place, do you think?”

Jeremy leaned against my grille guard. “I don’t travel much, so I don’t know,” he said. “But my friend has an RV park. It’s just down the road and it’s only eighteen dollars. They have electric and water hookups.”

“I’ll probably just keep going,” I said. “I don’t need the hookups.” I wondered what this guy was doing. It occurred to me that maybe he was gay and was hitting on me, but I dismissed the thought. Surely he didn’t drive up and down the road looking for stopped motorists to hit on. Maybe he was just plugging his buddy’s business venture.

He looked at the river. “Did you do any good?” he asked.

“I haven’t been fishing. I just pulled over to look at the map. Folks do a lot of fishing here?”

“The fishing is pretty good. The water’s clean,” he said. He pointed to the bridge over the river. “I used to jump off that bridge when I was growing up.”

“If it was warmer and I was a few years younger, I might take a jump,” I said.

“A few years younger?” he asked. “I’m almost forty. You’re . . . about twenty-three?” He was looking at the ground when he guessed my age. He didn’t even glance at my face to make an estimate. It made me think he had already considered the question.

“Twenty-seven.” I waited, hoping he would explain why he had stopped. He didn’t, and instead started cleaning the bugs from my grille guard.

“This is a pretty place to grow up,” I said.

He snorted. “There’s no good jobs here.”

“What do you do?” I asked.

He paused uncomfortably. “Inheritance,” he said. “That’s not a good think to say, but . . .”

“As long as you’re looking for a job, sometimes that’s all you can do.” He kept cleaning my grille guard.

“Well,” I said. “I guess I’ll head up the road . . .”

“That place you’re going is far. My friend’s RV park is just down the road. I can show it to you if you want.”

“No thanks man, I’m going to get a little further up the road.” I called Duke and walked him around to the passenger’s door. Jeremy followed me.

“This is a nice camper,” he said. I’ve never seen one on a Dodge.”

“I appreciate it.” I loaded Duke into the cab and walked toward the driver’s door. “You take care.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the RV park?” he asked as I rounded the hood. “It’s right up the road. It’s a good place if you just want to fuck— sleep”.

“No thanks,” I said. “You have a good night.” I got into the truck and shut the door. As Jeremy walked back to his car, I noticed an earring in his right ear. I watched and waited for him to turn his head, and as he climbed into his car, I saw his left ear. No earring.


* * *

It does not bother me that Jeremy may have been hitting on me. He suggested an encounter in which I was not interested, and I said no. He wasn't rude, threatening, or unduly intrusive. But I will say this: it must be tough to be gay in a small town along US 63.