Visions of the Past

Our bikes came to a halt in awe of a field of small yellow flowers laying drenched in the suspended sunlight. We were riding roads unmarked on our map of Ohio. The road system was a grid, so there was no worry of becoming lost. We went west, parallel to the highway – away from all of the traffic and anxiety – riding instead amongst a silence broken only by the subtle wavering hum of wind against the eardrums.

A flurry of red winged blackbirds, nestling quietly in the long grass was roused in a flurry, unintentionally startled by us as we passed. The hills were effectively gone now, the lingering few being inconsequential in the scope of the flat farmland stretching out in all directions. This was the first of the Midwest. A humble farmhouse and its rickety barn, its silos and trucks or tractor adorned the roadside marking each transition from one plot of land to the next, and a dark line of trees stood mediating the boundary between crops. The sky was bright blue overhead.

Ahead of us I saw our road was coming to an end with the next intersection, and we would have to decide between taking the left or the right to find the next street leading west. In our pause Justin pulled out a water bottle to take a swig. I looked down the road to the right and saw two dirty blond heads bobbing up and down, a couple kids on bicycles coming toward us.

The one in front was the smaller, maybe five years old. His face was smudged with dirt and he was draped in a pair of dirty, tattered overalls. He carried a large white jug in his left hand with the few fingers he could spare while gripping onto the handlebars.

His brother followed. He was a bit taller, overalls faded and worn to the same pale blue as his brother's, probably having been handed down from a yet older dirty blond head. The white cloth handlebar tape was mostly stripped from his old orange road bike. His seat was too high and the bicycle was too big so he rode standing erect on its aluminum pedals with his little dusty bare feet.

They rode by slowly, perpendicular to us. Forgetting their bicycles, their destination, forgetting time and place, and forgetting their expressions their identical faces stared back at us as we stood over our bicycles and bags. Mouths open and eyes empty, they struggled alike to register what it was they saw before them. I was equivalently overwhelmed at the sight of their pure, unconscious possession of countryside childhood and waved to them as they passed in front of us. They were pulled suddenly away from their confusion, became suddenly conscious of the clicking from their freewheels and remembered where they were. They both returned to pedaling, and, shyly, they waved back.

When they were a bit down the road Justin looked at me, exasperated, and proclaimed, “I want to be them!"

We followed after, a short way behind. The boys had pulled off and dropped their bikes on the left side of the road. The little one was running, almost dancing, through the wheat field, waving the big white jug side to side in his hand held high toward his father who was stepping down from the lofty seat of a tractor. Once closer, I saw his father prop the little boy up on his shoulders and walk through the field while talking to another man, his son's arms hugging tight the straw hat on his head. The older brother was up in the tractor seat with his hands around the steering wheel. He put out his right hand to us and waved once again, proud of his position and grinning brightly from the honored seat.

Across the horizon in the distance the figure of a horse drew a buggy northward. It turned and began down the road we were on, coming toward us in the left half of its lane. I could distinguish a small brown horse with a loose vertical white stripe along the length of its face leading an uncovered old wooden carriage. In the seat sat three young girls. Holding the horse's leather reins was the oldest, wearing a dress of deep magenta. A thinly striped bonnet covered her dark hair, with its rippled brim shading her brown eyes from the noon sun. Sitting beside her was a slightly younger girl who had two tight, long, brown braids running down the front of her dress from behind each ear. A third littler girl sat at their feet. All three struggled between looking at us and looking anywhere else.

Present day had fallen out from beneath me and I was gone into a time so long passed we couldn't comprehend each other. It was here before me laid out not as a reenactment, but as their approach to reality, the functional past voluntarily lived out in the current. Time seemed to progressively slow in the lessening distance between us. In the moment we passed, they politely waved, their expressions still suspended in indecision, still unsure what to think or how to look. This got the attention of a little sandy blond girl sitting on the back who poked her head up from behind them. This littlest, seeing us as we went by, turned around to face us, then plopped down, her pale blue dress and little feet dangling over the back edge of the carriage. The dreamlike sense of fantasy escaped me in a smile I could no longer contain. She didn't wave, but her unabashed eyes, so full of gravity and insatiable wonder, followed us precisely, and curiously, seeking the timeless comprehension we all were seeking, following our figures at least as long as I could watch them in the distance from the corner of my own wondering eye. The clop-clop of the horses hooves began to slowly fade behind, and a fresh breeze rolled over the fields, bending the strands of wheat. Silence curled up around us once again as the eternal sun slowly drifted through the sky.

Searching for Balance

I was led to the dining room table and Grandma Nancy set a bowl of chili in front of me with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, silverware, a soda pop, and then two slices of pie. I was worn but clean now, and glad to be getting fed full at what was both the end of a long day and the start of my first hiatus.

It can truthfully be said that I have never eaten so well or so much in an equivalent length of time as I did in the following week. The days passed by increments measured in the time between feasts. Mornings began with breakfast toast and cereal tiding us over until the lunch that was planned. In the case that there were no large lunch on a given day we could expect a big supper that night. Not a single day came in which my stomach's limits went untested.

A general listing of the meals and their contents should convey an accurate picture. Excluding snacks, I attempted to keep track, but please forgive me if some stray dishes have escaped the company of their companions here (there were so many!): chili, a buffet in Amish country (bread pudding and plethora other dishes), cheese sampling at a cheese factory, cheese and crackers, hot sausage sandwich and beer at Geisen Haus, Memorial Day fried chicken and jojos, tuna noodle casserole, sausage and sauerkraut, a Sunday morning breakfast buffet (custom omelet, muffins, etc.), family cookout burgers, dogs, deviled eggs and macaroni salad, a dinner buffet, a spice cake, pizza, chips, and pop, and finally the pies! Very berry, peanut butter cream, chocolate cream, lemon meringue, another very berry, and a cherry.

This should speak for itself.

After I'd finished dinner everyone came together in the living room and played cards. Mindy wandered about our feet under the card table while we played, hoping for leftover food scraps and the local weather report and tornado warnings buzzed behind us on the television. The past three nights had brought in cloud cover and sudden, heavy thunderstorms, but tonight I'd sleep in a bed beneath a solid roof safe from the rain and wind.

The next day I helped Justin in the garage to get his bike out of its shipping box and reassembled.

“We'll get you some dignity again, Bullseye,” he said to it soothingly.

The neighbor's dog came charging in. He curiously sniffed about us, looked up, barked once, and returned to sniffing. He appeared to be a mix of beagle and something else, his hunting nature searching for some invisible foe.

The neighbor appeared in the driveway, saw what we were doing and seemed to become excited, “Hey! So you guys must be the ones taking the big trip! That's quite an adventure I'd say. Hey, Calvin, get over here!” he yelled to his dog. He talked to us a minute longer and then returned to the other side of the bushes separating the properties. Calvin followed along at his heels, trying to chew his shoes as he tried to walk.

“Calvin, yep, that's my feet! He doesn't do that to anybody else, you know, just me,” he called back to us from out of sight.

Most of the week was filled with eating or sleeping or in waiting for the one or the other. My poison ivy rash had initially grown worse, primarily on my left foot in which a layer of fluid swelled up beneath the skin (chills run down my neck now just thinking about it). I'll say no more about it other than it went slowly away and scabbed over. Just writing that much about it makes me physically uncomfortable.

Memorial Day afternoon Grandpa pulled the car out of the garage and we all got in to go to Aunt Sandy's cookout. On the drive through town Justin pointed out the restaurants, stores, and other landmarks he recognized as we passed them, paging through fuzzy childhood memories. He confirmed their accuracy against the memory of his grandparents, casting his fragmented stories like lines to fish more full or entirely fresh ones from the depths of his grandparents' combined pond of recollection.

“I remember Lake Mohawk. I used to love it there,” he said. “Of all the places I remember from coming up here as a kid that's the one that stands out most. So many good memories there. Isn't that where we...,” he retreated into the foothills of a story and, as if from a distance, looked up with expectation to his grandparents seated in the front of the car.

We pulled up to the house and the cousins were playing basketball in the driveway. We went in passed the three dogs, and came out on the back porch. It was a warm day with a deep blue sky overhead spread with a few thin, stippling clouds. Grandpa took shelter in the shade of a large tree which hung partly over the porch and the rest of us sat around the glass table. Aunt Sandy and Uncle Gene came out and they all began to talk with each other about the changing times in the way families do, having been known each other through a changing past. Justin's cousin Michelle came out and then people began to swim in the above-ground pool. The water's temperature had just recently begun to reach comfortable levels. Me and Justin were soon in the basement finding out how bad we were at billiards.

At some point during the few hours we played, the fried chicken and jojos (elsewhere known as potato wedges or steak fries) arrived. Being wise to our appetites, everyone had gathered their first plate of food before telling us it was time to eat. Later in the week this happened again, twice, before we learned to not be so easily fooled.

Nine o'clock on Wednesday Grandpa had us help him with the weekly yard work. He putted around the front and back lawns seated on his red riding mower in the morning heat, wearing blue shorts and suspenders, fishers cap propped on top his head, and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Justin took the push mower around the smaller spaces and I brushed at the detailed edges with a weed whacker. Afterward he had me climb up onto the roof and pull out clumps of helicopter seeds accumulating in the corners of the gutters. The last task he had for us was to fell a small, bent tree that was starving its neighboring trees for light. The only payment Justin's grandparents asked for the vast amount of food, a week of nights in the warmth of a bed, and our participation in all their kindred kindness and love was a bucket of damp tree seeds, some cut grass, a tree stump, and for us to otherwise rest and be.

Sunday morning they took us out to eat at a breakfast buffet. We all came in and took a seat at one of the tables. Walking by the section next to our table I noticed a very cute girl wearing a bow on the front of her long brown hair serving a table. I got up and filled my plate with eggs and other things, finished and got up for my second and third plate. The guy who had got our order at the entrance when we'd come in approached me directly as I looked over the desserts.

“Hey, man,” he said to me, grasping my attention, “I've got a question for you. You see that girl over there?” He motioned toward the girl with the bow. My wide eyes followed the motion and, seeing her stifling either laughter or embarrassment under a tightly sealed smile, I quickly looked down at the floor and nodded my head. She knew she was being talked about and kept from looking our way. My heartbeat quickened out of uncertainty. He continued, “Well, she's really shy, but she said that you look like you're her type. So I wanted to ask you for her, does she seem like she's your type at all?”

My eyes bounced from the floor, to the food, to him, to the plate I held in front of me.

I was completely overwhelmed, but I managed to tell him, “Well, uh, I'm actually pretty shy, too, but, well, I'm kind in the middle of a trip to Alaska.”

“Oh,” he said a little surprised, “Well, would you be willing to take her number at least?”

I didn't really know what to say given the combination of my complete lack of practice with this kind of thing and the complexity of the circumstances I'd found myself in, but I told him yes.

At the table I sat down, still a little overwhelmed, and tried to describe what had happened. Grandma Nancy began poking fun. Waving her finger at me she said, “You're tanned so your face doesn't show it, but I can tell that you're blushing.”

I did call her. I didn't want to insult her by not calling. In fact we ended up going out for ice cream the day before Justin and I left town. I was ecstatic to meet her, but this is where my writing becomes most difficult. I'm forced now to distinguish what, if anything, should be made public, and what should remain private. Will what I write in any way betray the trust of who I write about? When I meet someone and tell them about this journal, if they find their way into my writing new problems arise. Now I'm writing to you and about you, subject and audience becoming one in the same. This makes things difficult, and how much more so in a girl-guy situation. This search for the precarious balance between trust and honesty pervades every paragraph in my subjective non-fiction.

So we went out and had ice cream. We talked about art and the world and where and how we currently found ourselves. More than anything else, I think, we were each glad to meet someone we'd been intrigued by. The whole event had thrown me off, though. It's amazing how much sway a woman can have, even unintentionally.

She parked her car in front of the house when we'd got back. We walked down the street under the darkening sky just to keep talking a little longer. I could no longer see her face in the absence of sun or street lights, but I could feel her expressions through her emphatic voice, and I thought, “Please, don't stop talking.”

Riding through a small town I stop beside a lonely gas station in the noon heat, crouch down in the shadow at a spigot on the wall and refill my water bottle. A man walking by from his truck slows down next to me. I look up and he points to my bicycle and asks where I'm from and where I'm headed.

“I saw the bike and I thought, 'This guy's gotta be on some kind of trip!'” I answer him and then as he goes he leaves me with his parting words, “Yep, do it while you're young,” and the sentence echoes through me.

Above, a few stars began to show in the night sky. She got back into her car, and said goodbye to me and wished me safety. I quietly said goodnight, turned away, and walked through the darkness down the driveway to the house. Then climbing its steps, I listened as the engine of her car turned over and drove away. I stepped in the door, trading one opportunity for another.

Childhood

Over the green rippling surface of Ohio I rode my bicycle. On my left came a barn, in front of it a plain black carriage sitting with reins resting slack and its attendant horse trotting about with its sisters and brothers in the field behind. At a spigot nearby was a woman in a plain black dress and bonnet, arched over, pumping water into a bucket, ignorant of me as I looked on. I'd entered the Amish country.

Next on the road, in the yard of a white house there sat two small girls beneath a tall old tree, both wearing the same dress and bonnets and little black shoes. They looked up suddenly to me from the grass and were first struck confused, but a broad smile spread across each bright face and they began vigorously waving with wide eyes fixed to me.

From behind the hill in front of me now their father came. He wore a black suit, a flat black hat, was bearded and projected a pleasant sensation, sitting in his carriage with the reins resting in his palms, a slim brown horse pulling him along. His face, too, showed a smile, and he chuckled when he saw me. The wonder his children had experienced in seeing me seemed in him to have been replaced predominantly with amusement, resulting from his benefit of experience.

Their wonder caused me to wonder, to attempt to see through their young eyes. They looked out from the boundary of their lawn onto a road traversed all day by vehicles they don't understand. Having never felt the vibrations of an engine from a passenger seat, having never seen images of the wide world flickering on a television screen or any of the other familiar and ubiquitous experiences the rest of America takes for granted. What must they think of it all?

As a child, I remember, my mother buckled me tightly into a safety seat in the rear of the car. I'd sat, bored and restless, while the mundane land passed by, occupying myself with my little fingers and hands until we pulled into the grocery store parking lot. She let my sister out, then placed her hands beneath my shoulders and lifted me out from the car, standing me on the asphalt. My sister tagged along beside her and I peered around from the shopping cart seat, keeping my fingers grasped around the thin metal bars. We wandered around the store, Mom picked out what we needed and placing it into the cart's basket. Inevitably my sister and I began losing our patience so Mom promised us each a 25 cent fruit roll up if we'd keep ourselves quiet. Back in the car I sat buckled again, now scratching at the edge of the gummy fruit circle and peeling it away from the plastic, poking out the animal shapes in its surface and chewing them one by one.

That memory flashed through my mind. Seemingly trivial, it was something these children couldn't know. They saw world as if separated from it by a pane of glass, but I could see in their eyes there was no loss of childhood. They held the same curiosity and pure amazement now as I'd had years ago. As children looking onto something new a waterfall of intrigue and bewilderment filled them up without them knowing what the difference was between intrigue and bewilderment, nor knowing the other words to comprehend their feelings. I looked now back at them through the eyes of my past to see inside them. There was understanding in the instant our gazes met. I was filled from the same waterfall of feelings and, though I tried, I couldn't help but be overwhelmed, and an simple smile burst onto my own face.

This road I'd taken led me through a line of Amish towns. Mennonites were intermixed, dressing similarly but with distinctly more colorful clothing. Outside every house were hung long lines of clothes drying in the day breeze, dresses and shirts running from little to big, one end to the other. Varieties of bicycles laid on the lawns or rested against a house or barn, and two or three stood outside each workplace and shop. The children were mostly out, the bigger ones working in the yards, littler ones playing.

As I slowly pedaled up one steep hill, a small boy in overalls sitting on a white swaying porch bench peered out at me with wide eyes and gaping mouth from underneath the brim of a straw hat. He sat intensely paralyzed, his stare glued like a magnet to my bicycle.

Every adult waved to me as I passed by, almost all with the same expression of amusement. But eventually I had passed the bounds of their humble land and was put back in modernity and to, what was to me, the repetition of the familiar.

Being so near to my next checkpoint, Justin's grandparents' house, I decided to push through the day and get to Canal Fulton. You may recall, on the night Justin had hurt his leg, we'd both spent the following day and night beside a stream in the forest just off the road. At the time neither of us had considered to look for, or had even known the looks of, poison ivy. Much too late, we both figured out we'd come in contact with it, and in my ignorance until that point I had been scratching wherever I itched. I'd had it for maybe a week now and it continued to spread. I passed the long hours of each night tormented by the intense itch, laying there in my sleeping bag with arms crossed in restraint, mustering all the force of will I could to keep myself from scratching.

What I wanted now more than anything else was a shower and I would ride a hundred miles to have one if that's what it took. So that's exactly what I did. It required nearly the full day, but once the sun had just barely dropped below the treeline I was stopped on a sidewalk corner by the green sign displaying “Canal Fulton Corporation Limit”.

Finding the way between towns is simple if given a map, but the mazes of neighborhoods and townships are a matter completely their own. I called Justin to get more detailed directions to the house. After a little more riding and a few more calls I had found their street. From a distance I saw Justin's silhouette, arms extended, waving me down. I waved back at him and coasted to a stop in the driveway of his grandparents' white house.

Once Justin's parents had picked him up on that cold and bitter day in Crossville, TN, he'd ridden back to home with them in Greenville, SC. In the days that followed he visited the doctor and was subjected to some exams, with the resulting report that his knee should recuperate on its own given adequate rest. With a knee brace on his leg he was sent on his relieved way.

Given this news he had devised a way to reconvene with me and continue the trip. While I was riding through Kentucky he was packing and shipping his bicycle, bags, and belongings to his grandparents and then he paid a bus fare to get himself there as well. He would need a bit more time to recuperate, but I greatly anticipated a break and an opportunity to rid myself of the ivy rash.

I pulled my bicycle into their garage. A group of people, most of them Justin's mother-side extended family, sat in chairs on the back porch talking, the nearest few giving me a wave and friendly comment.

Inside the house I met Justin's grandmother.

“We thought you'd look like some kind of monster, the way Justin made it sound with the poison ivy and all. It's not so bad is it?" She laughed. Their white dog waddled up and began to sniff my ankles, "And that's Mindy. She won't bite or anything. She's a nice dog."

Immediately Justin took me down the basement stairs, pulled a towel out of a cabinet in the bathroom and pointed out the knobs, nozzles, soaps and shampoos of the shower. Finally I set to cleaning off. If that shower had continued for the rest of my life I'd have died happy. But, of course, not wanting to be rude I kept the shower short and went upstairs to formally meet everyone. On the porch I was introduced to the slew of family members who I'd become further acquainted with over the next eight days.

More pictures uploaded to Facebook.

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.

Ballad of the Lost Man

May 15

I felt better by morning, but Justin's leg persisted in pain. We rode toward the next town, there being no use in resigning ourselves to tents for another full day. Justin's leg gave a few times on the hills and he had to walk it twice, but soon we'd made it fifteen miles and entered Crossville.

Around the town we searched for an outlet for charging my computer a while, but in the end we weren't able. Justin called his parents while we sat outside a grocery store, telling them we made it to town and that's when they informed him that they'd already left. They were in their car with bike rack ready, on their way to pick us up. Voluntarily and out of assumed parental obligation they'd set out first thing in the morning, thinking that I'd spent yesterday throwing up and that Justin was completely incapacitated. If the situation hadn't already been poked so full of insecurities they may have been met with a bit of opposition, but, being as unsure as we both were about what to do, this came as something of a welcome resolution even if it was accompanied by a tinge of surrender.

Within a few hours they'd arrive so in the afternoon to escape the cold Justin and I buffeted, passing time in some semblance of a farewell feast. We ate three hours in a Peking restaurant, resting boothed in the warmth until a plethora of had plates passed. Then ice cream bowls were stacked tall, stretching both stomachs and seams. Perhaps the yellow-lit signs which had proudly offered “all you can eat” had not been intended for tired venturing cyclists at the end of a thirty-six hour fast, but we obeyed them all the same and then bid bye to the friendly heat, bundling up in search of a library.

Justin and I found it with a man huddled outside on a bench in a zipped-up sweater, computer in lap. That was exactly the sign I'd hoped for, telling of open internet access. Soon another hour had passed and Justin's parents drove up, parking alongside the curb.

They greeted us with eyes of unanswered questions and curiosity. All Justin's things were packed up and Justin sat down in the back left seat, hurt leg stretching lonesome across the rest of the back seat. His parents offered me some granola bars and a sports drink (to rehydrate, again they thought I'd been sicker than I'd been) and Justin's dad offered me money for a hotel which I could never have accepted and asked if there was anything else I could use. Once everyone had been appeased with hugs they went off on their hours of a drive to Greenville. At my final look into Justin's face his expression told of a combination of frustration and indignant resignation. At once upon sitting down, he'd later say, he'd been filled to the brim with longing and the need to be back on his bicycle. But alas all things don't cater to our individual plans.

While I was getting my things together to ride the man on the bench inquired about the travels. His name was Tom and he said he'd been in the navy. Having visited forty countries while sailing, he now had settled momentarily in Crossville. When he told me forty countries I asked him in awe which ones and he must've listed about twenty just from the top of his head, spanning nearly every continent. I wasn't sure exactly where I would be going that night and, becoming the implement of the traveler's blessing, Tom extended an invitation to the town's mission.

He warned me first, “It's a Christian place. I have my own beliefs and nobody's going to force theirs on me, but when we get there you might have to sit through evening mass.” He was stern and serious when he talked. I told him I didn't mind and walked with him a few blocks down the road.

We approached an unassuming white building on the left and walked around the rear to a sheltered porch, inside a line of chairs against each wall and coffee buckets at the foot of each for cigarette butts. There were a few guys sitting inside smoking and talking. Tom asked one, an old guy, shortish and thin, wearing a cap, if I'd be able to stay as an over-nighter. The man said I'd have to check in after supper.

Everyone soon began to shuffle up the building's front stairs into the upper floor. It was a room with pews on both sides, pulpit in front, and tie-dye stained glass windows lining the walls – a typical one-room church house.

“Have a seat wherever,” Tom told me.

A four person band stood at front, guitar, bass, electric percussion, keyboard, and mics for each. The next hour consisted of them playing songs, mostly lyrical hymns that had been patched over the tunes of rock songs. The twenty-odd onlookers all sat in the back pews and watched, a couple singing along with memorized words and an occasional interjection of “Thank Jesus!” Praise of the Almighty variously interpreted through a crowd of eyes.

Afterward everyone staying the night returned to the back porch and then the dinner bell rang. Volunteer high school kids said a prayer for all then stood behind a counter and served everybody down the line what burgers, dogs, chips, and your choice of cake or cookies you could eat. The people here ate well and were well and happy for it. Above each window sill and doorway, and every space between the walls proclaimed “Jesus is the bread of life.”

I gathered what I'd need with me from my bike after I'd eaten and went to sign in with the man from before. He was a caretaker of sorts, calm, soft-spoken, and inviting. He showed me around while he recited the rules, taking me upstairs to the church room and showing me my cot, the blankets, sheets and pillow provided. It was rules to take a shower each night, so I did and then afterward returned to the porch to smoke and talk with the rest.

They had their own business to speak about mostly – the tasks of finding work, what developments had unfolded in the lives of each. Speech on the porch was to be kept wholesome (rules were posted on the door) and so it was. Portraying these sorts of situations is always difficult with there being infinite complexity and flowing dynamics noticed only when one scrutinizes in detail the characters about as they interact with one another against the progressively revealed background of past interactions. Some of the men here had been here for months and the kind of play you might see among family members made an occasional appeared. They cared for one another and each others' situations and the individual pursuit of resolution.

There was Tom with his 40 countries, originally from “Joy-zee” - that's William Nathaniel Bailey II, goes by Nathan, poking fun at Tom. He wore khaki pants and a white button-up shirt untucked, brown hair a medium-length and tidy mess.

“That's the way they say it in Jersey, right? With the accent, you know, isn't that right, Tom?” He was just a kid. A tidy kid, warm and kindly-hearted to everybody.

“It's Jer-zee. Hear that? Jer-zee. Don't tell me they say 'joy,'” Tom rebutted with a tinge of feigned frustration entering his voice.

One man strayed in past dark, too late to be signed in, after a day-job all frustrated and surly. He had scraggly hair spreading out in all directions from underneath a trucker's cap, and began to passively make a ruckus.

“Well I guess if I can't get checked in then I'm trespassin' ain't I? Now I ain't tryin' to argue. I'm just saying that what you want from me is to have a real job (as you rightly said).” He directed his speech at the caretaker-man and his southern accent began picking up hostility and volume, “Now I just come back from a day's hard work with that repo-man. You all know him and you know he's an honest fella, and now you're telling me that's not a good day's work and so I need to be signed in on a daily basis. So what you're telling me is nothing I do is good enough!” Now the group surrounding, each sitting in their chairs collectively raised their hands against him.

“Don't get loud on this porch. You take that outside. This is a place of peace,” says Nathan, looking him in the eye.

Serenely, having been through it all before the caretaker-man said, “I didn't say anything like that. That's what you're saying. There's Frank, now. You go talk to him.” Frank was the owner and had just parked his truck outside, here to do last-minute business.

Things died down after that.

“I hate to see the bad apples like that, but sometimes you get them,” the caretaker-man said later.

A man in a tie-dye shirt and leather jacket warned, “And as they say 'they spoil the bunch.'”

I went up to my cot. Maybe an hour after I had fallen asleep someone else was brought in and laid down in the cot beside me. He commenced to saw the loudest logs I ever heard and now even trying to sleep in warmth became tiresome.

May 16

Inevitably, morning arrived at six and I woke to do some chores as per the rules. Mostly the regulars were already taking care of everything. Me and the snoring man shuffled around uselessly, eventually finding ourselves with everyone else on the back porch.

Weather had remained cold for the morning and rainy with a forecast of more rain and high fifty degrees. I found myself a cup of coffee then returned to talking. A few people already began leaving for a day-job at around six-thirty. On the porch a man named Daniel sat across from me and spoke with Fred, the snorer, about football. Daniel was a tall man, well built and middle-aged. He humbly brushed off comments with a smile about how he could've made it like one of the players he knew so much about.

“Oh, I used to be skinny when I played, nothing like those guys.”

The conversation meandered, leading from the places people'd been to where they hoped to go and everything in between.

Clanging from the breakfast bell shot through the air and everybody immediately got themselves up and into the dining room. After the prayer I shifted through the line with everyone else, picked out a donut, poured myself some cereal and took a seat. The room kept mostly silent. I got some seconds and then I started supposing it was about time to collect my things and get. Everybody was sifting out for the day and I said goodbye to the few still around. I held my bicycle by the handlebars and set to walking down the street. All the buildings and lights were sapped of color by a sunless sky.

Forward to the main drag and I was northbound. It felt to me like a strange while since I'd ridden anywhere as I went on down the road away from the town. Buildings turned to faded gray hills, windows were replaced by animals speckling the distant grass, bowing their heads to the plain and the trees. Rolling along by farmhouse, truck, silo, the soft touch of the dangling cloud struck cool on my face. I reflected on the past day in my roadside solitude and the meditation put on me by pedaling's repetition. I understood as I thought: these men with their troubles and magnanimous faces hold a more accurate understanding of their own context and circumstance than most care to realize or recognize. I and you put away our preconceptions and stigmas; trading in all pity for sympathy or empathy. They know more than you and I of themselves and strive.

Along came the song of a lone bird wading through the afternoon haze, reaching through my thoughts as an echo and seeming to be the ballad of the lost man – overwhelmed and under-emphasized. The song remained clear and beautiful through the softly weeping sky.

More pictures.

O difficulty, difficulty!

May 12

This date passed quickly, beautiful and uneventful. It began in early waking and preluding coffee upon the rooster's call and quick bustle to pack pre-departure. Jabez led us through the stretch of hills to town telling us each landmark which may have passed our gaze. Night still sat between the hills, but an orange glow began to show behind the eastern treetops.

I peeled the aluminum foil cap from my coffee mug as we went on, tilting my cup to heed the force of turn and slope. My eyes were peeled to the sky as color streamed into all things. I had the benefit of the windows; unfortunate Justin sat in a chair in the back of the van beside the bicycles and bags.

Jabez gave us a choice of where to be dropped off, telling us which roads would lead us where and we decided on the gas station at the intersection of two highways where we would begin to climb north. Once stopped we laid out our things in a wide pile in the parking lot. Jabez departed and we thanked him for everything, with thoughts for Susan following behind.

Quickly I packed my bike together and went on ahead of Justin to try and find some photographs of the Southern countryside in the early morning light. A few minutes down the road I found the field and watched as the sun peaked over the misty slopes and soon Justin caught up, just having filled his water bottles. The day continued slowly at first with frequent stops as the light crept up. Within a few hours Justin and I had agreed to commence our mornings at six daily. The opportunities afforded were too numerous and broad and the dawn-side temperatures too comfortable to pass.

All the day on was simplicity and clear skies, so we went – passed the Tennessee threshold before noon and going easily on to Cleveland. Immediately upon entering the town we came across the wastes left by the tornadoes, those same tornadoes who'd gifted Jabez and Susan with their rooster friend. The gifts here were less pleasant: buildings torn apart from within, each strung together with caution tape borders and a pink X adorning each side. Weeks have passed and nothing'd been done – lasting monuments for a memory slow to fade, but our way went on.

Searched out, found, and stopped in a two-story campus-side library for afternoon siesta, shoes off, writing, reading, or napping in chairs away from the outside peaking sun and asphalt heat.

Afterward time and distance went on without bother. Night came suddenly with the search for a campsite continuing late. In surrender and weariness we came upon a cemetery rising to a hilltop, a long steep drive winding around its left margin. We stopped and pressed our bicycles up the gravel tracks and in conscientiousness, with a bit of hesitation, and full due respect made shelter behind the graves, a morbid bed perhaps, but welcome (so long as we remained undisturbed!) at the close of the day.

May 13

Waking came with dawn and we gathered our things as planned upon the turn of six. We rose with the clouds and went on our way. The sky remained veiled through the rest of the day and color was lost from the dawn. When days are gray it's easy to expect less pleasant things. We went on without much event through the daytime, climbing to the top of a plateau in the mountains as rain began to fall.

Near the end of the day with the sky still a dim gray I rode up a hill and stopped during a small gap in the rain, awaiting Justin behind me. I saw his white helmet appear and noticed he was walking, hauling bicycle alongside. He slowly approached and then he told me he'd almost fallen but had caught himself, planting his right leg into the ground with the result of a jammed-up knee. He could walk with the pain, but pedaling wasn't as simple. The joint shot him with pain if moved it to either side so we sat and rested a while, wondering and weary and unsure of what may follow.

Light began fading away and the sky's shade of gray deepened. There was nothing to do but make camp, so we set off, and with one footstep to my pedal my chain popped a strained link, dragging fallen along the asphalt. The fix was quick, but the insult too obvious to miss. The day pressed me hard, but I didn't know whether to cry out to it, “O difficulty, difficulty!” in laughter or tears.

Two hills later we readied to make quick camp in the woods. A parked car sat in a shoulder-side pull-off from which descended a rugged path down to lower ground running parallel to the road. A short way along the path we found an empty space on even ground next to a shallow trickling stream. Here was where we laid our tents and sat in repose. We filled our lungs with nature air, exhaling temporal worries into a flowing and flowering wilderness night.

May 14

Turning in discomfort through night, my eyes were closed though seeing only occasional brief and fleeting dreamless sleep. The earth's rotation went on slowly and unevenly. I awoke in cycles every time initiated by pitter-patter on the tent top, single raindrops growing and collecting to a reverberant shush until sleep caught me again. The stream behind the tents swelled, its pulse and pace quickening as it fed.

I became sick to my stomach as night faded into day and the uneasiness continued. My alarm sounded at six, but I did not feel like doing anything, now having gained what felt like fever. Justin remained also in his tent, got up a couple times, but we both slept on past afternoon without much change. I had told my parents I would call them the night before, but had had no signal to do so. Justin went searching for one on the road, but acquired nothing. Returning he told me that the car at the base of the path's driver-side window was shattered out and asked me if I'd heard anything in the night. Neither of us remembered it being that way before.

Not until later did we discuss what we might do about the day. My body ached and was heavy and cumbersome having remained in my tent such a period and the air outside was yet colder and uninviting. The rain had been dropping in, on and off throughout the morning, but by late afternoon had been absent a while so with difficulty I got up and walked about. Justin's leg had not improved and I still felt queasy, shivering on my surface while hot inside and retaining a fogginess of mind. Days like this test how much you want what you think you want and make you sick for home and a bed; days like this test fortitude and teach will.

We walked down the road to where my chain had broke and were able to make our calls to the comfortable houses in heat and dry so far away. The sun was setting beyond the trees. Vehicles sped occasionally by as we walked back on the side of the road, and I watched as the waxing gibbous moon grew brighter against a sky shrinking away. We turned back into the forest to find our tents still draped with a cold moisture in the dark.

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.