Big Horns and Emptiness, Pt. II

 I continued on my way like this, without bounds to contain me, and found myself trailing farther along the foot of the mountain (but the mountains were everywhere, and everything), and the motorcycle man's sputtering engine withdrew into the depths of forever. The sun cast the shadow of the mountain creeping along once more. It curled round the bend of the earth 'til piercing the sky's lobe opposite where it fell, and pulled up from an envelope of colors, to blaze white heat on all existence.

Through the trees, I drifted into Sheridan, and sifted onto the packed streets of the city, out and about, seeking a place to fill water and get on once again. The place was bursting at the brims with people in creamy ten-gallon hats, and girls in western skirts, all for the annual rodeo just like Lemmon, South Dakota had been. It was bigger here, though, and there were more streets and sidewalks to be filled than that other small and sincere town. All the bustling made me want to hurry to the long climb ahead. I traversed a winding twelve miles through the town, arcing from edge to edge like a lost tangent, always trailing a line of cars. Finally I found the road that was supposed to lead me out. It was a dusty dirt lane going twenty miles northwesterly. I stopped on the edge of the asphalt and stood there, eyes half-open to the pale mountain, and felt like crying.

On the porch of a little white house beside the road, two ladies I hadn't seen sat, rocking in chairs, tending to a drifting conversation. They witnessed me in all my pathetic troubles and gracefully called out. I sauntered up and they were kind enough to answer my question, telling me the interstate was in fact the only paved way out. They waved me on my desultory way, with four sweating bottles of water, to jostle a final path across town. Once more, past the rodeo grounds and the endless shuffling march of cowboy boots, and I'd reached the interstate, which would turn and eventually take me to the mountain's chopping straits.

In the dirt at the foot of the on-ramp stood a kid, shirtless, and skinny, looking like a limp, tattooed noodle. His thumb probed the air, hitchhiking, or trying to anyway. A stream of cars and trucks drove right past him, drivers' eyes peeled intently to the sunlit road ahead, leaving him unacknowledged and without a glance of pity.

“I had another bag, but I lost it,” he told me, and thus he had no shirts. I stood over my bike behind him, trying not to interfere with his ride seeking. “I think the tattoos might be scaring off all the rides.” He seemed to have lost all hope, like he'd been fully spent from a lack of other avenues. All my shirts had been worn to the point of putrefaction, but I gave him what I could.

“They can't smell you from the car anyway,” I said, trying to hide my embarrassment.

“Oh, it'll help. I really just want to start walking the highway, though. You think the coppers'd care? I don't wanna get picked up by the cops. I may not be welcome,” he said this last with a vacant shake of his head, wide blank eyes pasted to the ground. How long had it been since he'd slept? His was not the easy way.

Day's heat kept on beating down. A guy standing exposed like this was likely to boil. I passed on to him one of the water bottles I'd been given, then rode on up the ramp, with his call trailing me, “You take it easy,” as he returned his tired face to the procession of blind vehicles.

Half a mile on, in the shoulder of the opposite way, a pony-tailed cowboy in Hawaiian shirt, wielding cowboy hat and shades against the sun, sat propped atop his bags, bearing a sign in his hands which read:

“EAST

JESUS

SAVES”

in black letters. I took heed and made signs to him with my hands, yelling, trying to ask him if he, too, could use some water. He came sprinting across all four lanes and the grass median, cardboard placard waving wildly at his side. He hadn't understood me. “I've got water, but none cool like this!” he told me with exuberance, “This is great.” The blessings of the ladies had been three-fold, now bestowed to all the town's wayward pilgrims, shaking through the Arabian day like beaten chaff on a threshing wind. The guy turned and sprinted back across with a yelp of “God bless you, man!” his loose shirt flapping.

There the trees came and the plains between me and the mountain stretched out, and I felt the land. We're all on some kind of hajj, waiting to be carried off by whatever swift stream of eternity might be sent, meant to uproot us. For some it fully requires a flood, breaking the banks and stripping the soil from our foundation. We all stand like trees, pleased to keep our supply of the transcendent trickling into our roots from underground, feeling firm and fertile without necessarily wetting the feet. It's just those rare, solitary ones who bob precariously with wide eyes on the water's edge so meaningfully, when they stare out on the white, froth in such an unsettling way, groping and churning at it, simply trembling for the singular moment to come when they shall be bound away and submerged up to the mouth, nearly drowned in the pain and rapture of holy bliss. They are the ones who stir the vision that, in apathy, had nearly solidified before you, and it's then that you see what's really going on. It's then that you realize all the sublimely hectic motion that's filled your distracted eyes all along. I wait for these people all hours, for their willfulness strikes me like a force, rouses me, and tells me “Now's the time! Jump!” and they take me twisting into the unknown, bound forever wherever we ought, purified before the divinity, screaming to the water Epictetus' words, “I am of the same mind; I am one with Thee. I refuse nothing which seems good to Thee. Lead me whither Thou wilt!”

The slopes pushed and pulled me, rushing me onto the heights. I wound against the road's current until, finally, I could see its coils rising up like a flat black snake, being woken and filled on the mountainside. The morning air was hot again and cloudless, the tendrils of the sun sweeping on the valley pitch. I rose and pressed on with exertion to the inclining switchbacks of the mountain flanks. Sweat spilled all down my back, so I removed my shirt and draped it over my neck, wiping my wet face with its sleeve. To my left, chains of motorcycles burred over the asphalt, pilots bearded and goggled; on the right, a metal rail guarded me from the sheer drop which poured down the range's slope. Nothing could keep me from the top. I was Moses, summoned to the peak for divine rites, inflamed hedges guiding at every turn.

I'd be hard-pressed to overstate the dwarfing I felt, carving the side of that mountain. Every incremental moment, tramping across the country, had been the accumulated bursting forth of everything that had come before it, and how much more so at the passage of a mountain. From where I was now, with a mere glance to the east, all the distance of weeks past unfurled like a receding fog, revealing what had been done. This was the ramification of thousands of miles compiled. It's easy to see why the gods speak from the pinnacles. Things become so obvious, trivial, stripped small in this context. This was Mount Sinai or Zion, Mount Olympus or Mount Ida, Mount Haku-san, Fuji, and Tate-yama together, Hara Berezaiti, Mount Kailash or Mount Meru, all of them stacked up (because, remember, the holy mountain is everywhere). Here stood the axis of all, the source and the funnel, the flourish and the end of everything.

Its folds pulled me in. For two days I rode between them, the grounds laden with forest. Pale barren lakes of meadows stood isolated in swaths and dispersed, all stretching over the plateau's undulating surface like a decorated sea in suspension. When the meadows spread up to the roadside, the dim greens, as seen from a distance, gave way to a prism of coloration. Wildflowers appeared from what once seemed plain: variations of violet, yellow, azure and white all quivering and throwing themselves upward from the grasses to the sky. And the sun fell slowly behind the boundless ridge, drenching the solitary peaks in orange. A dim, cloud-lit sky was streamed through with the shifting hues of a rainbow face, the rotation of colors rolling west. The clouds burned in heed of the lowering light, and paled.

At the pass, I paused. I'd been stopping all along, at whatever sights caught me, but here I could look on all of what lay ahead. This was the other edge of the mountain, inclining to the west. There was snow still, in drifts on the highest slopes, white against brown stone, trickling pure crystal drops. Swelling within me was all the same as before, when I'd gazed from the mountain's opposite side to the past, but this view was to be contemplated with the gravity of the yet-to-be-decided. I stood my bike alongside the rail and sat, and breathed, eyes closed. Over the mountain's utmost brim came a chill wind, giving a thin whistle to the ear like the flute of some spirit crouched on the hillock behind me, sending his song quivering to whoever might hear. The thin air filled me up. I couldn't ask for more than any of this if there were any more to be had.

Distance seemed to radiate from me into infinite regressions below. The land wrapped past the horizon, bottomless lengths sloping away, circling fully round the planet's circumference, and rising up to this peak from its opposite side. The earth's a teardrop, not a sphere! Steeped in so much haze and volume of air, it could almost have been that nothing laid below, and this was simply a mountain-tip floating on the sky. But in the dim curvature of the earth, everything could faintly be seen. There, far away and barely traceable, the mountains of Yellowstone merged to the sky. Each lonesome speck between me and that distant ridge, reduced to appropriate size, neared what it truly was. When you see something from far enough away, all its unique features fade, and it becomes a smooth part of the folds around it. We float around on the surface thinking we're something we're not. Together, we're something greater.

A minivan turned off the road and parked. Out of it came a family, but for one child who stayed behind. They walked to the edge nearby to look out. “Pret-ty neat,” said the mother, hands on her sides looking over the edge for a second, to the end of the earth. They all shuffled back into their seats and resumed their way.

I returned to mine, too. With a bandana on my face, glasses, and hood on, I trailed the winding road down. Flying with full velocity, cold air burning at my cheeks and tears streaming, I came off the mountaintop to begin my wandering in the desert.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

Mato Paha and the Clouds

An aroma of warmth and dry floated on the air from the south over the grasslands. The fields shined gold under lowering light, shadows lengthening on the rippled landscape. From the side of the highway snaked a dirt road, two brown parallel tracks winding through the empty stretch toward the distant rays of the sun. It led through a space undeveloped, unoccupied, and relatively undisturbed, a lone island among quilted monochrome patterns of crops in repetitious rows I'd left in the east, behind me. This land held a diversity of life written with rhythm and order legible to the eyes of nature alone. I rode the bare ruts, climbed upward and coasted down from the hillsides. Moved generally west, off the map, knowing it would lead me right. Throngs of cows ranged on the slopes or stood in the crevices steeping their heads in scummy dark ponds with soft ripples round their faces. They'd bellow out to me in unison as I pedaled between them, some startling and some turning to me with their eyes wide at my strange intrusion.

The primitive road wound a ridge round a hillside, affording me a panorama on the open extents of the east, and then bent its broad face to the open south. I pushed up the hill, sweat spidering on my forehead. On the path ahead stood a jackrabbit. It, slender and tall, with long legs paralyzed, looked along the grassy middle of the road. Its probing nose turned to the side, and it watched me in its glassy black eyes' periphery. I came to a stop to study its shape, but the scrape of my shoe on the gravel sparked it to flight. It bounded away on all fours, hopping like a whitetail does in high grass. With its huge linen ears flopping behind, it disappeared down the hill into the shroud of blooming goldenrod and sagebrush.

Over the western hills the sun faded into orange. I set my tent juxtaposed to the hard white flowers of a hillside yucca, unrolled my sleeping bag over my pad inside and sat myself down. Lying back and resting my tired head on a bunched up sweater, I gazed up through the mesh at a bright pearl moon as it rose into the dark above the flickering eastern clouds. Tomorrow it would storm. Stars began to pierce the overhead darkness, one at a time at first as the last salmon hues drained from the sky, then came in a flood of pale light flowing like spilled cream along the plane of the Milky Way. Wandering cows murmured a song into the silver grass, moonlit at my hill's base, and the sound wafted through the night, lulling me into dreamless sleep.

The clouds overhead were overcast and dull. To the south the rain curved away from the sky, bending and flowing in heed of an unbroken wind. The two lanes of asphalt wound like a thread to the distance, withering to point of infinite smallness at the Earth's true horizon. Little raindrops dotted the pavement. Whatever dregs of hope I grasped at that morning under a dismal sky evaporated when the rain began to fall. It was always that way. There was no shelter in sight, and I wouldn't delude myself into hoping for any soon. I was able to see as far into the fielded emptiness ahead as I could ever have wished to, but it yielded no reassurance in these blank plains.

A rickety red and white pickup slowed into the opposing shoulder ahead and came to idle halfway off the road. A man wearing an old trucker cap and beard of deep gray looked out from the rolled down window and waited for me. Then, as I approached, in a kind of shy way motioned to me. I recognized the truck from a minute earlier when he'd passed me by, looking at me in his mirrors, and remembered that the bed had been mostly empty, so I went over to greet him.

“Not the best day for a ride. Where are you from? I'm heading east if you might be wanting a ride through this rain. Only looks worse farther on there.” He helped me to fit my bike in the truck bed atop some stray metal pipes, and then he cleared off the passenger seat of loose papers, some old batteries and plastic bottles, sweeping everything onto the disheveled floor with his leathery hand.

I introduced myself and with a warm smile and handshake he told me his name was Clay. A glint in his eyes and the congenial creases of his face betrayed a timid sort of excitement, and childlike delight at having some company on his lonely drive. He turned back to the road, “That brim of rock up ahead, you see, is called Custer forest. I'm really not too bright, you know, but I think going up and over that hill would not have been at all kind to your equipments.” Then he said curiously downtrodden, “But, what do I know?” The string of highway bent south, turning away from that eroded cusp of chalky gray spread which he had pointed at, prevailing over the otherwise flat horizon. At its foot the tranquil green of South Dakota bowed and was broken into rugged disarray.

Some time later we'd come nearer to the dark blue clouds and streaks of lightning hanging over the vast plain southward. Down in the distance a hundred miles off stood the lone peak of a butte with the heavy sloping shoulders of an idle behemoth, pivoting for long eons under the plied earthen crust. Its hazy blue figure dominated the landscape, standing above its less ominous flat headed brethren. “That's all the Slim Buttes down there a ways. And that, the big one, that's Bear Butte there, a holy place for all the Plains Indians. Mato Paha they call it.”

The face of bare rock, the dark forests and thundering clouds; all of it amid the scope of the docile surrounding plains put a shudder in me. The crown of Bear Butte penetrating a full and fecund sky breathed of pure beauty and awe. We continued in silence.

We came into Newell, a small town where Clay left me and my bike in the parking lot of a western style restaurant. I rode around searching for some kind of shelter from the rain while it continued falling in the streets. On the edge of town I found an old baseball field and in one of the dugouts decided to lay down on a long wooden bench. Rain drops drummed on the aluminum roof. It was a bleak afternoon and I fell swiftly to sleep wondering if it were possible that the sky, filled with clouds, might be blue when I awoke.

The sky stayed smeared gray, but the pitter-patter abated toward a pace I could stand, so I started riding. Belle Fourche (bell-foosh), a big town, cropped up with its buildings on the dark northernmost remnants of Dakota's Black Hills. I took indoors at the library when a second, thicker, downpour began to fall. All the contents of the sky seemed to be spilling out on the other side of the glass pane. Then sudden blue holes filled wherever variance formed in the overcast. Streams of sunlight fell from them on the town, throwing delicate street corners and vibrant shop rows and misty people with umbrellas to reflections in the roadway puddles, trembling. And a high wind blew me west, my tires spattering forth beyond the town roads, the cattle exchange, auto junk shops, to the highway again.

Blood beat in my veins as I pushed my pedals hard but in gust-driven ease. A stone littered hill rose on my north. I stopped and went towards it through a break in the barbed roadside fence to make camp away from the highway. Pulling the bike through the sparse grass I realized too late that the ground was unnavigable mud, my shoes and tires caked and heavy with sod. My bike no longer rolled. I heaved its weight a foot at a time back to the road, resigning to make my bed in the ditch. Purple sunset pulled under the uniform blanket cloud which rolled over all the west. Illuminated not far off by the fleeting yellow headlights of vehicles, was a sign: the bucking silhouette of a cowboy on his bronco over the glorious, bold title, “Wyoming”.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

The Kentucky Range

May 17

Met a lady at a library after I'd cooked lunch on some stairs beside the building. She stopped to talk, seeing the bags on my bicycle and feeling some affinity toward travelers. Told me she was from Asheville, North Carolina, a haven for swarming kids like me, gutter punks, hillbillies and all sorts together.

It's a place you just visit, though. If you stay too long you might find yourself leaving on parole.”

I spent most of the day after in the library while it rained. The sky was still spread gray, but the forecast assured me for not much longer.

May 18

I rode up growing hills through the morning and into the afternoon without much event. The light rain grew a bit heavier. Biding the weather I anxiously recalled the sun's scheduled return tomorrow.

Stopped half way up a hill I saw a man in a truck in my path on the shoulder, his brake lights lit red. When I'd gotten closer he hung himself out of his window a bit, looked back at me and yelled a muffled exclamation – “Ride?!” I stopped my bike behind his truck and he hung out a bit farther then opened his door and got out. His truck began to roll backward down the hill toward my bike and, noticing this, he quickly flung his right leg into the truck and onto the brake pedal. Now dangling half-in/half-out of his truck he threw it successfully into park and came out again. Ignoring his little fiasco I smiled at him as he walked down the shoulder toward me. He asked me more formally if I wanted a ride, telling me he was headed east. I unfolded my map. Raindrops began to spot its surface and he stuck his finger where he'd be going. I was headed generally northeast now and accepted, not wanting to become further dampened.

We got my bike in his truck bed and set ourselves in the front. He started to drive and we began talking about where I was from, what I was doing and where we were headed. He seemed more interested in conversing than specifically what I had to say. I asked him his name and he told me Gene.

He was a gruff looking guy. The reddish hair beneath his cap ran over his ears and in the back to the nape of his neck, the goatee covering his mouth speckled with traces of white.

In a deep Appalachian droll, every syllable resounding like a boulder plop in a pond, he told me, “I don't usually pick people up but I got a long ride home to a lady and my dog.” After a silence he told me he'd picked up a sixty-seven year old guy a couple months back harboring a backpack and a will see the world. The guy had said he'd been 'round it once before and figured he could do it again before he died.

Gene rolled down his window a sliver and lit a Pall Mall. “At your age I was chasin' women and drinking. Had a time of it, too. South Carolina's where they got Myrtle Beach, right? I think I'd like that there, just to sit and watch the women.” I chuckled and he responded with a shrug, “Least I'm honest.” Old habits die hard I suppose. He guessed my age right on his first try and went on, “Yeah, I got married at twenty-three. Going through divorce now after eighteen years.” It sounded like a sad story was there, but I didn't want to press him and the conversation began to die out as tends to happen when driving keeps on.

Eventually he stopped us at a gas station and asked me what kind of pop I drank. After stumbling a little I told him, with wide eyes and a smile, “Root beer, I suppose.” He came back out with a scratch ticket in hand, and a pop for me and himself. I thanked him profusely. Kindness seems to find you out when you've made yourself available. Gene was both kind and gentle. His soul and life was rooted in casual, unassuming mountain life. When we'd gotten amid the mountains he began to point out the places where strip mining was done and I asked him how he felt about it.

“Maybe if they reclaimed the mountain like they supposed to it wouldn't be so bad. Seems like none of these companies doin' the minings does what they supposed to. Doesn't seem right. In fact a bunch 'em gettin' sued now for it.”

He didn't say much more about it, but I felt he was disappointed more than anything else. Riding into the Appalachians I'd kept an eye out for any mountains missing their caps and had figured the people here would be angered and roused at the desecration of their summits, but I now wondered at the feelings expressed by Gene. Rather than unbridled anger I saw in him hollow disappointment. Maybe it's the nature of the people. Having invested whole faith in big coal business to enrich the place they'd become the subject of blatant exploitation for revenue. Now their betrayed faith condensed as disappointment and calm frustration in the face of a dominant enemy's established occupation. The people here are poor and don't possess the power to fight by traditional means.

Rather than hiring people to burrow into the mountains and extract the coal the companies come wielding explosive force to blow away the mountain tops, laying bare the coal. Through this process valleys are filled and sites oft abandoned to rot naked in the sun, a detriment to every inhabitant. The waste pollutes watershed streams and deters the established equilibrium held by the mountain's system. Reclaiming, as Gene mentioned, refers the expectation of the mining company to revitalize the peak and nurture it back into health and vigor, but this usually remains a theory rather than practice and even if it is carried out things can never be the same.

So the paper tigers are blown about by torrential corporate winds. Like mountains built of dollar bills the corporations themselves hold the power, quelling the cries of mountain valley dwellers. Their voices suppressed, the people resign to subjected disappointment, hoping and waiting in duress for the scales to be evened by substantiated law. And I hope with them from passenger seat solidarity.

The truck wound over roller coaster roads. The infinity of trees at the road's banks stood high under an overcast late afternoon sky. The mountain's carpet waved precariously but the mountains themselves stood still as the clouds and winds rolled through. Gene told me to let him know when I wanted off, but I stayed to the end of his drive. We were deep in Appalachia and he recommended I take the main way north. There were few choices anyway as most of the roads filtered onto the main way, winding through the valley bed.

He dropped me in a parking lot and thanked me for my company. I saw his truck drive off into a trailer lot across the street then went into the mountainside town. On a corner in the nearly empty downtown I found a guy in cop attire talking with another man. When I stopped and asked them about places nearby I might camp at they both set off in mountain-speak rambling every available option and their accompanying directions. I picked one from the many and a couple miles down the road found the park they'd described. The turf was soggy from the rains and spread out beside a swelled brown stream. I set myself up, laying my tarp and tent and dozed to pedal Appalachian valley shoulders at the Appalachian dawn.

The Half-faced Moon

May 11

In the morning when I arrived at the library Justin was waiting beneath a tree. He told me about his day before while we waited for the doors to the library to open at ten. Cars were gathering around with everyone relaxing in their car seats amid the cool morning air. When doors opened we went in and I worked a while on photographs, Justin looking through books or logging details into his journal.

We set off down the road again returning to the flowing uneven land and the swelling afternoon heat. What we had done the day before we did again, me going on ahead to Cleveland, GA where I began to scout for food, then hauling up a drastic hilltop library to read. A few hours had passed since I'd arrived in town when Justin bustled into the library with a slight look of shock draped over his face. He sat down “No I was not riding that long...” and went into his story.

While I had sat and read about the Hopis he had been riding, had taken a break at the crest of a hill and soon an ambulance rolled up top-lights twisting, followed by a police car caravan with all hubbub abounding. The whole procession had thought he'd been hit. He was in fact resting because he was feeling a little sick, so they went ahead and checked him out, giving the diagnosis: too little real foods plus heat-and-hills-on-a-bicycle disease (as christened by me) and then he was back on his way.

As I had rode those hills I had noticed a couple people sitting outside on the porch of a house. I'd passed by with a wave, but Justin had had the fortune to talk with them. Eventually after we departed and rode out from the town back into hills a red truck honked and pulled off into a parking lot beside us. We went on and saw it again later, pulled over on the side of the road stopped with a person leaning out the driving window. Two of the people he had met on that porch were inside and stopped us, both having wanted to see how far we'd got and how far we'd get before day's end. They introduced themselves to me as Lisa and Ed and told us they'd decided they'd be going into Dahlonega (duh-lawn-egg-uh) which we were also headed to. Mercifully and graciously they offered us the most welcome opportunity for a truck bed ride. Justin was beat and willing and I was a little confused and we accepted, all things coming together at once. We both hopped in, all things packed in around us, and westward-ho! we were, skipping out on miles of the up-down so tiresome on two wheels.

Trees and cars and distance flew by, us wind-in-face and all out content. As the slew of forest and hills slipped by I looked up into the fixed half-face moon, white against bright blue above. Everything went by so quick below the moon – seemingly monumental but in truth just a little cosmic body sitting utterly insignificant in the scope of all things beyond, and here it seemed to us as we sat in the back of that red truck that we ourselves were the point where all things came together, the historical path of every action in the universe converging here and now to get us a bit farther on under that insignificant moon.

The road went on and on and Lisa asked us if we wanted a ride a bit farther than Dahlonega. In fact if we wanted they'd be able to give us a ride into Ellijay. O mercy and grace! So the road went on a little more and suddenly we peaked a hill barren of trees and looked out on the expanse of hills behind and valleys ahead and the green carpet stretching out and rolling on like the vast ocean rippling up and weathering down through the span of the earth, the crest and trough of every age visible in its bending lines.

And at length and with great thanks we arrived in Ellijay at once feeding on the setting sun, impelled by the beauty of the town under the sun's orange gaze. We passed through it after Lisa and Ed had departed with biddings of bottomless gratitude and goodbyes. We meandered around its streets and stopped to peruse the intersecting Ellijay River as the sun reflected from its flowing surface.

After finding some food and packing it out (for eating after finding the spot for the tents) we headed into the hills for climbing. Night was coming and the woods lining every road was thick so I decided to change methods. Knocked on a door to a house in town where two tents were pitched in the yard and there wasn't an answer. So we went on. Two more homes tried and a number of vacant houses passed and no camp made. At the top of a hill on the right hand side I saw a van and a car in the drive way of a home, so I placed my bike at the foot of the driveway and went up to and rang its doorbell.

A man answered and stepped out asking, “What can I do for you?” I told him the general plans for the trip and he said he'd be happy to accommodate us with the side of his home proving a viable camping spot. We were both welcomed inside and we were introduced to his wife. We talked for a bit about our travels and they offered us cooling water as they told us a bit about theirs. His name was Jabez and hers was Susan. They had five cats walking the house, some of who had been taken on as strays and recuperated. Outside there was a rooster, who had come upon them a few weeks ago, battered and torn up when tornadoes ran through the area. He was at that time randomly dispensed on their home and they fed and took him also under their wing. During our talk they had offered us the opportunity to shower, and with our minds already befuddled from the day's surplus of kindness, we were taken completely aback.

We soon discovered also that they were more familiar with Alaska than either me or Justin as they had both traveled to Anchorage with a church group. Jabez showed us photographs he'd captured of the landscapes on a train ride through the invigorating wilderness, vats of ocean seeping away from land revealing the vein strewn mudflats beneath, mountains shrouded in a thick misty sky with white surrounding peaks and glaciers, elk and seal and wonders resplendent.

Just after showering, as I was going outside Jabez told me what he'd already told Justin. The way ahead on the road we had chosen was twenty miles uphill and would not be a wise path. This the way into the next town which was where he worked and he instead always took the road around as, at times, the road ahead was difficult even vehicles to maneuver. He then told me he'd already told Justin he could give us a ride into that town in the morning when he left for work. So we'd wake up with the caw of the rooster at five for coffee and departure.

The night closed with us setting up tents in their side-yard and eating our long awaited dinner. Night had fallen and each star above poked its little light through the dark canopy. With all of these things on my mind I set in my sleeping bag underneath my mesh tent roof and stared up into the sky. And that same moon, half-faced and insignificant stared back at me.

More pictures to view on my facebook.