Big Horns and Emptiness, Pt. I

 Heavy blue cloud bottoms dangled in the spilt sky. From the side of a mountain, the curving spectrum of a rainbow disseminated itself into the sprinkling raindrops as I emerged into the sun. The asphalt was dark and wet. Faded beer cans and cigarette boxes lay moist in the weeds of the roadside. As the clouds thinned and the air dried, the sweet scent of rain lingered on the fields.

A pond, refreshed after the shower, lay at the bottom of a slope by the road shoulder, with the roots of trees and shrubbery dangling on its glassy banks. Bustling bugs skimmed over the water, the footprints of them cast on the surface in discrete, shivering rings. Reflected in the rings were the clouds, retreating into the sky beyond the pale, green hills, hills, raised on either side with the road rolling between them. They had an alpine appearance, reminiscent of mountains, but the Big Horn range was too far for these to be foothills. All the same, somehow the old, overgrown scree tumbling down their sides, with their brims capped by a dark rooftops of evergreens, and the clouds clearing beyond them running like the mists of a recollected memory, was an echo of something greater, something dominant and immense, something unfathomable in the feeble shallows of a mind.

Gillette approached as I came from the north. My wheels crawled up a hill on its sidewalks as the road transitioned from countryside fields to the grass that's cut short. All the town spread out before me, opening up with the highway threading east-west through the needle hole of the city's middle, mingling among the fabric of the little brown buildings. This town exuded the color brown and seemed to say something of the quiet industry which tilled at its borders, sucking oil from the depths of the land to siphon to the rest of the dry country. Pumpjacks stood crowded in the fields with perpetually nodding heads, looking like dippy bird toys with a never ending thirst (because that's simply the nature of these things).

I went about the streets, refreshing my supplies for a while. Combustion and hustle that accompanies urban spaces went on in the open alleys and on the asphalt of every lot, not like in the density of a big city, but as in the sprawling epicenter of a vast rural region. All the land about here was unoccupied, this being the sole hub of a thinly sown wheel. The sun's orange light streamed over the surface of everything, igniting the streets and walls. I fell to the highway which pulled me with the rush of an evening river to feed on dry lands, and into the mountains, to be fed on in turn.

To the east, the sky deepened and the last pink drained from the far clouds. A jagged, white line heaved across the western horizon, the Big Horns' broad peaks dripping into the blue earth below, snowcapped and stalwart in midsummer, standing bright and wide against the wavering hues of dusk. It has a tangible power that fills and commands, that required my reckoning just as the night required my finding a hiding place and making it my bed. It would take another two days of riding, but I'd be driven by the mountains all the while like a nail into my sheath, to my intended post on the mountaintop.

The beauty of mountains is that even as trim, distant things, they are as overwhelming as anything could ever be. They approach slowly and patiently, never rushing a moment, but accepting time as it is. And they know time. They know it more clearly than anything our senses are able to describe to us. We have only an acquaintance with time, whereas the mountains have a kinship. I approached the Big Horns, slowly, but without hesitation. They had something I wanted.

Networks of loose, dry canyons tumbled down from the shallow-rooted grass along my way. The edges of the canyons raised me and dropped me into a valley before the entrance to the mountains, like the withdrawal of water preceding a wave, which you know will pound you to the sandy floor, but your insides fear and love it. The nimble waves of Lake De Smet pummeled a shore by the road, and I stopped to bathe, at the point where I could enter farthest from the querulous eyes of beach goers. Then I went on again, my skin chilled against the zenith sun, north toward Sheridan.

I rode over and between the true foothills now. Processions of pronghorns straddled the shaded open curves. In the groves of slender aspens, shaking in the glens, strode hazel does paralyzed by my passing or struck to pace, fading like wisps into the branches. The shadow of the mountains slowly wandered over us, casting every part of every thing in a thin blue glaze.

 A yellow butterfly lay torn on the side of the road. The wind flowed around it, causing the wings to flutter on its still body, spurring it into some obscure form of life in death. From around a bend came a sputtering sound, ushering the emergence of a man's form on a motorcycle from the line of trees. He came toward me in the opposing lane, strapped with leathers, opaque goggles on his face, blowing through the air. All the experiences that had ever passed through his eyes were hid behind those lenses. Something tripped in my mind that moment, a dormant revelation springing forth from deep recesses, where it had probably been quietly watching since my birth for the singular sliver in time to expand within me and overflow into everything I knew, and had ever known, or would yet know.

Everything happened simultaneously. All the distance between me and the figure of the man on the motorbike seemed instantly to collapse. I recognized an eagerness in the creases around his stretched mouth, and in the way he leaned forward, heaving himself to the distance like the entire span of the world couldn't come soon enough. There was a commonality, a unity even, in our profuse lives, in everyone's life. This was the moment when everything fixed became fluid and melted together. My mind opened up, reaching out with innumerable spectral limbs, and perceiving, in him and the thin air that hung between us, the truth which resides at the core of everything.

Every atom is hardly anything at all; all the things in physical existence are practically empty space (and who knows if the physical part's are even real?). All the emptiness I'd ever perceived was actually the fabric of everything; everything was effectively nothing at all. The space that stretched between me and the motorcycle man, between the trees and the mountains and everything else, no more separated one from the other than it did join us all together, and it's only a sad ignorance that keeps a body isolated from anything else. A body's just emptiness, anyway, just emptiness walking through emptiness, more nothing than something. We're each like the buttes or the mountain peaks, merely raised points in a continuous blanket of being, but we imagine that we're somehow distinct from the rest.

Me and everything else stretched together in that moment like taffy. The spaces didn't stretch between us, but stretched one into the other. Everything was me, and I was everything. I was a consciousness adrift. I was the motorcycle man going the opposite way, the opposite way being no different from my own, and my way being just as much his. And I was the ways themselves, no longer bound to a body on a bicycle. Everything was a puzzle falling together, the lines disappearing, and the fact becoming plain that there never were any lines, and no pieces, either, just the infinite tableau of everything at once. It was all an illusory cycle. The surface of the undifferentiated whole appeared on its surface to ebb and flow, but it was only a trick of the eye and the mind. All my superfluous motion these days was a stillness in reality, and the stillness of the mountains was perpetual motion. I wasn't really going anywhere, and the mountains already knew eternity. I was where I wanted to be and could never be anywhere else.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

Thinking Specks

 Wyoming came and then the swift mountains of lower Montana. Winds had brushed me through the briefest tip of Wyoming's northeastern extreme, just the corner of it, before sweeping me on to Montana, Montana announced by a dingy street sign.

There to the north of me was the first sight of her mountains, small but true. Bare gray and tan rock sides slid up from the far stretched slopes on a meadow's edge, passing to me the sweetest hints of the great northern wilds I'd be missing with my destination being west. I bent my wheels south to get back on track and into Wyoming again, issuing my apologies to that beautiful volume of land and greetings to the thrusting expanses ahead.

Loose folds in the land gave rise to peaked buttes. Smooth slopes fell away from the buttes' pinnacles as if some subterranean giant held them suspended over his pointed fingers, with the earth being nothing but a loose blanket spread over his poking fingertips.

Midday I dropped my bike beside the road and climbed over a fence and into a field. One of these perfect peaks stood clean and high away from the road. I ran first through the brush and grass growing in high thickets, then at the base of the butte I scrambled up its side. I'd misjudged the size and ruggedness of the thing by magnitudes. Whole boulders I had to scrape over, which grew ever more massive the nearer I came to the top. Hopping and heaving, I gripped with my fingers in the cracks of a final rock and pulled myself over the sheer stone, up onto the peak and was able at once to survey every near and distant part of the land. The fields rippled up all about the pinnacle in wavering green hills dissipating off into a clear fluctuating horizon, everything laden with webs of billowing yellow-petaled flowers and afar away thick dark forests blanketed the Black Hills' last northern dregs.

The roads were vacant and quiet now as I went on, rising and falling with the wild soft graces of an ocean vessel. Jagged horizons wound round on every side. A dignified pronghorn stood lone amid the grass of a hill, watching me, piqued with clairvoyant attention. Its hallowed face followed me, kingly black bifurcated horns rearing from its skull, hooves lightly, tentatively holding to the soil, ever ready to spring to flight. I came near, noticing it standing tranquil on the hillside, and in a moment it had leapt away and was a shrinking dot on distant slopes.

Clouds crawled in on the beating wind, which now blew broad against my side. With the sky dimming to a pale pink behind the west I set down my tent in a fallow field by some sage bushes as they waved against the old wooden rail of a fence. A lack of forethought left me eating the last of my food stocks for supper that evening and I checked the map to find barely a trace of any towns ahead.

Come morning the sky remained dim and a sprinkling of rain had doused the ground. With an empty belly I started my ride, the bike dragging with the void of energy in my legs. A missed meal on a long ride acts like a wrench in a moving gear, and the uncertainty of whether I'd find food that day compounded the emptiness in my stomach.

Rumbling along, I pulled into an open valley in the heart of which sat the few solitary buildings of a town called Biddle, one more dismal part of the gray afternoon. Along the road ahead shrouded in some trees, I was elated by sight of a gas station, garage behind it spitting out a buzzing, clanking ruckus of mechanics and machines.

I went into the station and picked out some candy and a box of cereal with a gallon of milk while the counter lady watched me slant-eyed behind the register. She didn't say a word while I paid, and kept her expressionless face bowed to the counter, dropping my change into my palm. The bell clanked against the glass in the door behind me and I sat down at a picnic table beneath what on a sunny day would've been an ample shade tree and set to eating cup-fulls of cereal.

The sounds from the garage went silent and two men came out toting lunch pales in hand. One was older with brown hands, wearing overalls and a grease-stained cap with the bill flipped up. Behind him followed his son, whose face was tired and had his blue sleeves rolled-up. He shook his fingers through his hair as he walked, ruffling it up. They plopped down at the other wooden table and did the same as I was. From somewhere the man's daughter, a girl aged sixteen or so with a long ponytail falling between her shoulders, walked up to their table and sat down beside.

They talked to each other a while (saying some things about tomorrow) before the father addressed me, waving his brown hand toward my bike which rested against the side of the station, “That yours?”

I looked up from my cup, “Yes, sir.”

“You're packing a bit on there. All self-sustained, are ya?”

“Yeah, but somehow that didn't keep me from running out of food, though.”

The son said with a thoughtful frown, “Least you got something there now. I wish I could just up and leave. I'd be all over the country.”

“I keep telling you, go on if you want,” his father said.

The son looked a little dejected, “It's not that easy. It does get dreary here, with the hills all around and on days like this no less. There's no seeing past them. It's just too small a place to keep a guy.”

“Talks like I used to,” said the father, nodding to me.

“It's true, though. Too many ties here, and all of 'em seem so comfortable. Like shiny lures. Things are peaceful, and I don't mind that, Dad, but it's easy to forget yourself in the quiet. And the years are short besides.”

His sister rolled her eyes and said with a smile, “He's always talking like this.”

“Yep. Something's gotta give. You can only ride the fence for so long,” the father sighed, his eyes on the bicycle.

I felt as if I'd intruded somehow, heralded some emergence or transformation. I could've been the drop of rain that broke the dam. It was just a bike laid up against that wall, but it was also an instrument, a vehicle – one with infinite potential. Just a bicycle, but commander of the whole revolving world. Not far past these western hills laid the rocky mountain spine of the continent, a bridge bent from pole to equator stretching right out from their doorstep. All it takes is a simple journey. Walking on the bare faced earth with neither shelter nor reserve, twinkling constellations, a roof; the trees and burly mountains, the walls; soil in deserts or meadows, a floor. Nature lends no supplement or support to a weak spirit. Contentment is internalized by necessity and gives birth to a raging durability. Oneself becomes a structure, a solid pillar against the furious kaleidoscope of elements.

Voyaging into the foreign spaces forces one to a realization of reality, the actual scope of oneself in the midst of a stretching universe. And the universe continually stretches, me shrinking in comparison all the time. I put out my arms as far as they reach and what is that distance! while even the fires of stars quiver and pale in the sky. A waning speck on the face of a planet, but I can function, I can move by my will. A thinking speck with some small and increasing understanding. And when by will I move with a wave of my hand, or a finger even, and the air waves from it in reaction, reverberating away to the edge of the atmosphere and outward beyond, to some small extent eventually I've touched the retreat of the stars.

A thinking speck with some little understanding. I threw my bleak self into the country to discover this and whatever else, to be here and wonder about this kid's unimaginable future. Later what would he see and what would he know? Something unknown would spark in him and it, through him, would affect me and some particle in every being beyond the bounds of country or continent, beyond all time, and on into the end if there is such a thing anyway.

They got up from their table. The man and his son disappeared into the shade of the garage. The daughter went off behind the station toward wherever home was and I sat a while, looking at my bike and wondering, and from this went off to say hello to the roads of Wyoming again and whatever it might teach in our time together.

Photograph albums: 1, 2,  3, and #4.

Deliberate Intentions

May 19

On northward approach I went. The highway Gene had suggested kept me flowing on up/down elevations and the repetition of eroded mountains passed the day. A thin blanket of cloud remained in the sky, but it withheld its rain and kept the temperature a bit higher than it had been in days. By nighttime the land had become less extreme in its angles and would go by more smoothly.

May 20

By schedule I figured I'd be leaving Kentucky by tomorrow, but had no intention to rush. As evening began to close the day I stopped at some highway exit restaurants to search out a meal. I leaned my bicycle against a restaurant's stucco wall and sat down to roll a cigarette. A lady in fast food uniform came out and sat on the curb, lit her own cigarette, then cautiously meandered toward me. She asked if I was traveling and I introduced her to the trip. When she'd lived in Florida, she told me, she'd worked at a vegan/vegetarian place and had some friends who'd done something similar. She introduced herself to me as Cheryl.

“I love to meet people like this,” she said with a quiet smile, motioning to my bicycle. “I'm not very talkative, but if I see someone traveling or something I always talk to them and say everything right away, but then...well, what to say now?”

It was a meeting between two shy people who sensed familiarity, but both of us were unaware how to share the dialogue in our minds. Fortunately the most valuable things don't need words to be expressed and I perceived her kind sensitivity intimately in the silence between sentences.

“Hey, are you hungry? I get off in ten minutes and could bring you some food. Are you vegetarian or would anything be okay?” Excitement had entered her soft voice.

Every act of charity I encounter and the qualities of those who choose to provide it overwhelms me more each day. In some things appreciation may diminish with added quantity, but I find the opposite true of freely offered charity. These people themselves are loving kindness manifest, the voluntary instrument of absolute good will. Every altruistic act I've received is carved into me as a testament to the holiness of humanity and by each act this holiness approaches its whole.

God's perfect face shined onto me through her patient inquisitive eyes: seeking, giving, becoming good will. Love, exceeding and bountifully blessing, reflected on me from within the window of her eyes, a pristine symmetry of universal truth was mirrored for an instant in the imperfect person.

Under the changing sky Cheryl soon returned with a feast in a bag. She passed it on to me and, astounded by its weight, I thanked her, looking over it with gaping eyes. Each of us still with so much to say but no way to say it attempted to talk a minute more until her ride had arrived. The sun fell now below the horizon and the glow of evening began to fade. Then, having gotten into the car, waving goodbye they drove away and she was gone.

May 21

Riding through morning I stayed along a highway which looked to stretch flat and long to Kentucky's north border. It was a bright day. I rode on in the little shoulder singing to myself beneath the still blue sky. Surrounding fields dashed with lines of crops and little streams hinted at the Midwestern heartland.

Time passed in a haze of subconscious thought and flowing lands. As the sun crept west I found myself in traffic's evening rush. I listened to each vehicle pass. The pitch of the engine's whine rose steadily behind me, then, passing by, it would descend to become a flat hum in the distance ahead like every driver drawing breath and sighing at the completed day's work. In its wake a fold of unmowed grass bent into the vehicle's vacuum and followed away.

Suddenly I found myself becoming caught up in the rush of traffic. It immediately struck me as strange and unsettling, that I on my bicycle in the midst of a self-proclaimed pilgrimage should fall unconsciously into a repetition of this daily sprint. So I stopped pedaling and sat on the roadside to consider. This strange feeling required that I earnestly pause and deliberate why I was where I was, riding my bicycle.

I set to it:

Desire describes the surface, but what is contained within the desire? Somehow through my experiences I've accumulated this longing, but what are its details and contents?

When I'd completed my first journey it resulted in more than what I could have expected. I had conceived it in a naive desire to travel, but when I'd returned, the way in which I viewed everything had changed. I immediately began planning the next trip. Why had I wanted to travel and why now was I urged to continue? I still hadn't understood what was behind my desire, but I had gained an appreciation for the depth of the question. It is simple to give a lot of superficial answers as to why: a desire for simplicity, perhaps, or a need to slow down, to see the world or even just the country. But these barely capture a shade of it. It runs infinitely deeper into my blood and my build.

Travel itself has always come first with intentions following, attributed later as they seem to fit. I know a definitive reason must exist and from what examinations have proceeded I've managed to sufficiently distinguish what I currently see as my main purpose.

These trips are always hatched upon a feeling of dissonance between me and my surroundings. Erupting from stagnation, I'm repelled by the sterile fragility of apartment buildings and the fabric office partitions. There is something that demanded Thoreau to carve a home from the wood and live among it. That same thing endlessly tugged on Tolstoy, begging him to leave both comfort and family and set foot to path for a life of wandering. It is what whispered like an angel's breath in the ear of John Muir from every rustling leaf and crumbling pebble, his pulse quickening at its beckoning. It haunted Kerouac's steps all the years of his life. It is found equally in our blood and those stretches of land where the absolute satisfaction of every sense lies, that satisfaction most deeply engrained in humanity's heritage. It lies in the natural landscape and in the search for community and parity with it. This place was our home at our dawn and will be our bed in the dusk. It is our mother and sister and daughter, father and brother and son. The intimate love of it is fastened to our deepest body, bone and mind. From the foundations of humankind drifts a stream of profound appreciation for its natural ruggedness in which we matured. It has been hindered by modernity's vain distractions and so now I submerge myself wholly to be baptized in its primitive banks and to look out with renewed perspective from beneath its surface.

In the ignition of time came the unfurling of space and life developed and was gifted unto the primordial wild father, Adam. He was born and he learned for a time and then came his cursed fall in the instant when he became aware, realized, and understood and could comprehend himself. Then he commenced his migrations. His consciousness and migratory pattern is my birthright and inheritance, and I've been gifted and cursed by it and refuse to let it waste.

Through flawed eyes I look out on the sanctified landscape and see: the choir of birds who sing praises on high; the trees, austere monks, perpetually meditating on the cyclical wisdom found in days and seasons; and I look up to our priest, the sun, at his pulpit, the sky, his mere presence exposing to me in daily revelation the vision of God!

Travel is my vehicle for this experience. What could be more desirable to the one who seeks awakening into the rudimentary ends of experience? I find it readily along this black line of asphalt crawling beyond vision and conception, piercing and shattering the horizon's edge. It is no means to an end, but an end in itself. This is why I travel.

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.