September 29

What a beautiful damn place to wake up. I don’t usually write in the mornings, but this is too pleasant. Hills that rise and fall like the surface of a potato chip, to steal an analogy from McPhee. The country is arid, and the ground covered with sage and tawny grass. The air is fifty degrees and smells wonderful. Blue sky with a few clouds stretched across it from west to east like pulled taffy. In the distance Colorado 13 shoots vehicles north and south like an asphalt conveyer belt. Across it, through binoculars, I can see two herds of pronghorn antelope. Beyond one of the herds two swells about ¼ mile apart run parallel to the west. At their crests stand ridges of solid rock, rising six feet out of the soil atop the swells. The rock ridges look like old lava flows, but I bet I’m looking at a giant sedimentary rock that got flipped on its side millions of years ago and then weathered unevenly, some layers, like the two I can see now, resisting erosion more successfully than others. There are so many ways to look at the world around us.

September 28

I was sitting in my underwear when Sue came by today. She had her dog and her father along with her. I had a bowl of cereal in my lap and was watching the morning news when I looked out the window and saw her. Sue was the instructor of the WFR class I completed a couple days ago – I had been the “valedictorian” of our class of sixteen. Maybe that’s what earned me the visit.

Anyway, I was glad to see her. If Sue were twenty years younger and unmarried I would ask her for a date, although I probably wouldn’t get it with no pants and milk dribbling down my chin. Sue worked as a geologist for many years before retiring to teach WFR classes and join the search and rescue team. Now she teaches and rescues with her black lab, Tasha. Tasha, at ten years old, is a professional search dog. When I finished giving the tour of my family’s condo, I ran up two flights of stairs and hid in a bathroom. At Sue’s instruction, Tasha found me without trouble. Tasha attended every WFR class we held. She lay on the floor and absorbed the attentions of her obsequious admirers. I sang “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine” to Tasha more than once. Sue looked on skeptically but I have a feeling she sings to dogs, too.

I clothed and shaved myself, then walked with Sue, dog, and dad up to the clinic where Sue works during ski season setting bones and giving IVs. I told her I was surprised I hadn’t found my way into the clinic before, given my crash-prone past. “You never know; you might come in next season,” she said. I told her I thought my reckless days were mostly gone. Sue didn’t comment. We walked around the clinic and she showed me the X-ray machine, the X-ray developing station and the door through which injured skiers entered the clinic. On the wall by the door hung photos of people skiing off ramps, playing soccer, climbing cliffs. Sue told me those were former patients. I said that was encouraging.

“Let me know if you want to work in the clinic next season,” Sue told me. I smiled. I hope she meant it, because there’s a damn good chance I’ll do just that.

For now, though, I find myself in northern Colorado, a few miles from the Wyoming border. Tomorrow, fortified with the geological knowledge gleaned from John McPhee’s Rising from the Plains and the introduction to Roadside Geology of Wyoming, I’ll venture into Wyoming to look at rocks. But tonight I’ve an experiment to perform. On the way up here I collected several samples of what I believe to be coal, the result of sandstone thrust faults sealing off Mesozoic (dinosaur-age) swamps that subsequently got dunked into the mantle, heated and put under great pressure – at least according to my theory. Now I’m going to shove my samples next to the burner of my propane stove, turn on the heat and see if my rocks ignite.

* * *

They didn’t burn. I could get the edges to turn bright orange, like the coals of a campfire, but the rocks I’d collected wouldn’t burn on their own. They did smell strongly of tar when I put them in the propane flames, however, forcing me to open the door and windows to ventilate. Then it got cold, and I decided to switch from geology.

Carl Jung’s descriptions of the psyche kick ass, even when you don’t agree with them. Jung writes that the conscious self – called the “ego,” not unlike in Freudian thought – relates to external reality through the “persona,” a creation of the individual designed to serve some purpose. For instance, the persona of a gangster in Compton might eschew any fear, because such a persona would prevent other gangsters from hassling him. The ego relates to upwellings of subconscious feeling through the “anima,” a kind of internal attitude. Those who view their dreams as premonitions, for instance, have an anima that lends much credence to the stirrings of the subconscious.

In the male, writes Jung (writing in the first half of the twentieth century), the persona is often masculinized in order to meet social expectations. The male persona may be rational, unemotional, unyielding. If this is the case, the anima will express the other half of what it means to be human – when he relates to his dreams and his inarticulate fears, the male may be a pushover, prey to the whims of his subconscious. Whereas the persona is logical, the anima will be sentimental. This is why, according to Jung, men are more likely to abandon hope altogether and commit suicide than females – their animae can more easily be swept away. In females, the persona may emphasize feeling over thought, in keeping with cultural norms, but the internal attitude – in females, called “animus” – will be just the opposite. The female will often recognize her internal whims for what they are and deal with them summarily, though she may be less inclined to speak out in the classroom because her persona is more subdued. Whereas the female persona may be soft and sentimental, her animus is calculating and crafty.

Then Jung’s theories get even cooler. When a person is unaware of the “multitudes” within (as Walt Whitman called them), the ego may identify wholly with the persona. Then the ego has no conscious relation to the anima/animus, since it does not acknowledge its existence. The person becomes RULED by the anima it will not acknowledge (literary example: Woodrow Call; Lonesome Dove). What then? Then the person “projects” the anima onto something or someone external, meaning that the individual perceives some other thing or person as displaying the traits of the anima he refuses to acknowledge.

Pretty interesting stuff. On Friday night I watched “Steel Magnolias” with my mother. Not too manly. What does that say about me? Maybe I have an anima of iron. And maybe I shouldn’t be a Compton gangsta.

September 24

I stopped in at John’s place – Kiwi John’s, not Smiley John’s – to use the internet. He gets the same LinkSys wireless that Scott gets because he stays one floor below. “Yeah,” he said when I knocked, “come on in.” John is a New Zealander by birth, but has been living in the states since ’78. It’s easier to do science in the US. He’s gotten grants from the National Science Foundation to study the way ice breaks in Antarctica, and is getting medical training for his trip in our WFR course. In his fifties, John is our second-oldest student. His hair is thinning, like mine, but he is thicker around the middle and a bit more easygoing. Not that he doesn’t work hard – he works for several hours after class everyday, preparing for his research – but he doesn’t seek argument like I sometimes do. I think age has evened out his fractious side like erosion bevels a mountain range.

John is a very smart man who likes to laugh. He told me when I stopped by that I ought to pursue a general education at my young age instead of specializing. Lots of kids specialize too early and then lose out when the job they might’ve taken gets shipped overseas. Then he chuckled because he’s paying to send his 23-year old daughter, with an undergraduate degree in performance trumpet, through law school. “She’s very talented,” he says. “She’ll be the best trumpet-playing lawyer out there.”

The emails I answered from John’s kitchen table reminded me that a big world existed outside of Crested Butte, so when I left John’s place I told him I was going to buy a copy of the NY Times and that I’d bring him a copy, too. “Thanks,” he said. I was on the way back to John’s place from the grocery when I turned off the blacktop and headed into the National Forest to make some lunch.

I was bumping along the dirt road, swerving around potholes and listening to the squeak of Squatter’s shiny new spring-loaded camper couplings. John’s need for a newspaper didn’t seem urgent. The aspens are beautiful this time of year. Even in the crisp air of late autumn a few are still green. Some are bright orange, others already bare with their spiny branches reaching toward the sky. Some are red. Many of the aspens glow yellow, so bright and pure that they seem painted. They grow alongside firs, tall and stately in their deep green. Heifers graze among the trees because the Forest Service leases this land to ranchers, and the white faces and chestnut bodies of the cows move among the trunks. They graze out of the trees and into the open grass of the valley, concentrating their efforts at the bottom where an unassuming creek has leveled the terrain.

I passed a cow that had died recently. In the last day or so. Its feet stuck up into the air and its stomach was bloated with the gases of internal decomposition. It was on the side of a hill, not quite down to the creek. The coyotes and buzzards had not yet found the body, so the cow looked like a cheerily hefty heifer that was rolling to scratch its back. Birds had not yet pecked out the eyes. The cow wasn’t moving. I wondered if the rancher knew it had died. I stopped the truck to get out and take a look, but as I reached for the keys I saw two guys farther down the valley in the floodplain. They were practicing their golf swings, using the cow as a target. As I watched one of them swung and the golf ball sailed high, floated in the air, a white dot against the sky, and then fell a few yards short of the heifer with a thud. I had to laugh. The cow didn’t mind.

September 22

As for the salmon, Scott says the rebel coho are actually called “jacks” and are about 95% male, so their population isn’t swelling in the traditional manner. And he knows of no data indicating that anadromous steelheads typically breed with other steelheads instead of with rainbow trout. So my conclusions were, predictably, a little shaky. Species can become separated, though, Scott says, because of behavioral differences – the separation needn’t be spatial. Two particular species of moths, for instance, are physically capable of interbreeding but are evolving as separate species because one breeds during the day and the other at night, although they inhabit the same area.

My classmates are interesting people. Tonight Kirra and Smiley John are sleeping at my place, where they’ll probably sleep for the remainder of the course. Kirra was born Australian, and had dreamed her whole life of living in Steamboat Springs, CO. She got her green card a few years ago and is studying for her citizenship exam now. John knew Kirra from leading tours with the same travel company two years ago. The two reunited this summer when Kirra delivered a motorhome to Alaska, where John was working – she currently works delivering vehicles across the United States – and the two drove into Crested Butte together. They were camping in the back of Kirra’s refrigerator truck until the police told them they couldn’t camp in town. Then Kirra asked me if she and John could camp in my driveway. Sure, I told her, but you’re also welcome to sleep in our extra beds.

Kirra, John, Scott and I spent all afternoon outside with our WFR class going through potential medical scenarios as the snow swirled around us and the mercury bobbed in the thirties. I mimicked a climber with a broken wrist and a nasty case of Acute Stress Reaction, Kirra devised a backboard for an unconscious patient while Scott stabilized a spine and John helped to splint a compound fibula fracture. The four of us find ourselves here, in this mountain town, learning the same things and working on the same projects, thousands of miles and millions of ideas from the places we began. It is one of fate’s everyday statistical impossibilities.

September 21

The genetics and behavior of fish conventionally described as salmon and trout are straining the taxonomic bounds we have placed on them, Scott told me. I was over at his place using the internet to check email. Scott is a 41-year old student in my WFR class who was trained as an engineer but left the discipline to become a field biologist. Some coho salmon, he says, behave very much like trout. Certain members of the species will swim to the salt water a year or so after their birth, as any normal coho should, but then they make a remarkable decision. Defying the nature of their species, they turn back. Saltwater life is not for them, these rebels seem to decide, and they return upstream to spend their lives in fresh water. Recent research indicates that these fish, which never grow as large as their far more numerous oceangoing brethren, wait until more conventional coho fight their way upstream to breed and then, after the female lays her eggs, the male rebel darts into the mating melee and fertilizes a few of the eggs. A cunning sneak attack without parallel in the human life cycle.

I wonder, wouldn’t the progeny of the rebel fish have a greater propensity to remain in fresh water than the offspring of two conventional coho? And if enough of the eggs fertilized via sneak attack produce healthy offspring, wouldn’t the rebel population grow? And, assuming that the lifestyle of the rebel coho is sustainable, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that, at some point, rebel females will start laying their own eggs to be fertilized by male rebel coho, who at this point will seem far less rebellious? Here we would have divergent evolution, a split in the evolutionary line. Maybe the path of the rebel coho is the phylogenetic path of all freshwater fish – after all, they came from the sea somehow.

Steelheads, Scott continues, are anadromous fish (meaning that they live in the ocean but breed in freshwater streams and lakes) but are almost genetically identical to rainbow trout, which are non-anadromous. Rainbows spend their whole lives in fresh water, but there is often more genetic variation between coho that breed in different river systems than between steelheads and rainbows. And I think here, surely, we have an instance of divergent evolution. Assuming that steelheads mostly breed with other steelheads and rainbows mostly breed with other rainbows, evolution is bound to produce ontological differences between these two fishes since their different lifestyles make different traits more advantageous. Maybe, Scott says. You can’t be sure. And Jeb, what do you mean by “these two fishes?” They’re the same. “Oh,” I say.

But back home, I am still wondering. If steelheads and rainbows are almost identical genetically, they must have the same phylogeny (evolutionary history). And if their genetic past is the same, and now their behaviors differ, what explanation can we proffer but divergent evolution in action? Maybe today’s steelheads and rainbows are like yesterday’s traditional coho and rebel coho. I will ask Scott tomorrow in class. Maybe we can have an argument.

Who knows the answer? Certainly not me. But I do know this is a fascinating, fascinating world we inhabit.

September 18

These days in Crested Butte will be busy. WFR class ran from 8:30 to nearly 6:00 today. Then I came back home, socialized with Mom, who has flown out to stay with me for awhile, ate dinner and began my reading for class. Now that I have finished reading it is 10:30, and if I am to get 8 hours of sleep my day is nearing its close. But before bed, a couple notes on the seemingly concussed contents of my cranium. Introspection always makes a scary bedtime story.

I have been on the lookout for my Current Principal Character Flaw (CPCF) for some time now. My personality being as it is, I always have some lurking vice awaiting discovery, much like rednecks always have lawn ornaments lurking in their yards – they could have flamingos, ceramic deer or rusting automobiles, but you know there’s something hiding under the grass. Like a redneck whose weeds have grown too high, I have had trouble pinpointing my CPCF of late. And because I had not yet isolated the vice, I subconsciously doubted its existence and I’m afraid my sense of self-worth became recently inflated. I’m afraid I became self-righteous. Self-righteousness is a dangerous thing. To quote Carl Jung, “[W]e find, as the pious Henry Drummond once observed, that it is highly moral people, unaware of their other side, who develop particularly hellish moods which make them insupportable to their relatives.”

This afternoon, as I was driving back from WFR class to my family’s condo, I listened to my thoughts ricochet around the cab of the truck, as is my usual practice. Today some of my thoughts were downright ugly. Now I will tolerate a personal reflection of questionable beauty (an open-mindedness born of necessity), but I abhor a shabby mindset. An unkempt mind is a reparable problem. My CPCF, I discovered, is selfishness.

That seems obvious. In retrospect, diagnosing me with selfishness should have been no more difficult than diagnosing the Marlboro Man with emphysema. But in this respect I don’t think I’m too far behind the rest of the world. It is always difficult to see our real faults – misdiagnoses of personal vices are as common as stolen Alabamian flamingos. As Hermann Hesse has written, “Nothing is more painful for a man than to take the path which leads to himself.”

Now I have only to fix the problem, but that may not be easy. Isolating the CPCF helps, but just because I’ve found the Chevy hiding under the weeds doesn’t mean I have the means to move it.

September 17

In Grand Junction, CO I picked up Tony to give him a ride into Crested Butte, where we will both be taking a Wilderness First Responder (WFR) course from Sept. 18-26. Like Lynn, Tony is a native of England. Apparently the English are overrunning the western states.

As we crossed western Colorado, climbing from the canyons of the Colorado Plateau to the towering heights of the Rockies, Squatter’s engine pulsed hard in the thinning air and Tony remarked that the United States is a terrifically large country. If a Wyoming woman tires of rural life she can move to San Francisco. If a Phoenix man grows weary of the heat, he can move to Minnesota. If a New Yorker becomes disenchanted with insularity he can move to Missouri; if a Las Vegas woman gets fed up with profligacy and prostitution she can move to Alabama. An American can make these changes with minimal adjustments in language, culture, diet and habits.

But where is an Englishman to go if he tires of the rain?

September 16

Taxicabs, concrete, duffel bags, wait. Pleading voices, trained voices, long lines, go. Pricey beer, bad food, newspapers, wait. Intercom, heavy bags, shoulders sore, stand. Small seat, flight attendant, turbine scream, takeoff.

All the flights were delayed, all the seats were in the middle but it was good to be traveling again. I didn’t want to talk to the folks back home. To study, to watch, to move without casting lines back to the places from which I had come. Let spiders knit the world together. I want to see the world’s disjuncts. Do they exist?

Tonight I find myself south of Polaris, west of Orion, north of a shooting star and east of Price, Utah. The yellow lights of a small Utah town shimmer below me and the night is silent, humbly silent except for the automobiles passing on US Route 6. It is easy to resent them, but I remember that only an hour ago Squatter and I were on the same road.

I met Lynn on the plane from Chicago and we flew through the night sky together. She said that back home in England there were children who had never seen the Milky Way, who did not know that it could be glimpsed in the night sky if only one would substitute the bulging yellow halo around London for the glimmering lantern lights of a small Utah town. I said that is a shame. The Milky Way is beautiful. But then there are many beautiful things in the universe that I have never glimpsed, of whose existence I am unaware, and I shame no one for them.

Novel places, foreign news, talking people, go.

September 7

September 7

When it comes to naming animals, my family is unoriginal. The red horse we called Red, the paint horse we called Paint. In the pasture now we’ve got Smoke, the dapple gray; Black, the black and Midnight, the other black. The most inventive names that walk around the pasture cropping grass are William and Dawson, but those two horses came with their names. Dad and I would never impose appellations like those. When Dad added another unnamed red horse to the pasture, we dubbed him Green.

At sunset today I loaded Duke, the black lab – Duke the Second, to give his full name – into the truck and drove down into the pasture to visit the herd. I let Duke ride in the cab as his predecessor liked to do. Duke the First would sit on the wide console of a Dodge pickup and watch through the windshield, tongue hanging happily out of his mouth like a stoned Driver’s Ed teacher. For hours he would sit like that. He did not look for anything in particular – blondes, brunettes, redheads, nothing fazed him – but he always seemed content, and he liked to have his head scratched. Duke the Second hasn’t developed the same love of travel. I don’t think he likes trucks – he gets embarrassed.

Duke the Second has the same jet black coat that Duke the First had. He has the same finely shaped head and snout, the same robust body, the same graceful tail. He can bark just as loudly and he jumps into lakes with the same aplomb. He is just as amiable, and every bit as smart – Duke the Second’s English vocabulary includes the commands here, kennel, back, sit, heel, fetch and stay. But Duke the Second only has about half the legs. Whereas Duke the First cast an impressive, well proportioned silhouette – the David of the canine world – Duke the Second looks like Michelangelo started at the head and gave up when he got to the knees. He is the butt of innumerable jokes. At the Stewart County dove shoot yesterday, he followed Dad into the living room where we were serving barbecue. “Hey Jim, is that your lab?” someone said. “Looks like he’s got a little basset hound in him.” Duke plays dumb, but he hears the jokes. Behind his back, we call him Lowrider. But he will never ride in a lowrider because all of our trucks are four wheel drives, which is unfortunate for Duke. His altitudinal challenges are never more apparent than when he tries to jump into a high-riding pickup truck.

Duke sat in the passenger’s seat and hung his head for the first few hundred yards, and his nose bobbed at the bumps we passed over. But dogs are sensible creatures and will not remain despondent for long. They are superior to cats in that way. Cat lovers, most of whom are Yankees, will tell you cats are more sentient than dogs, but that’s untrue. Cats are just more self-absorbed and finicky. Duke is too wise for such Yankeeism. By the time we reached the horses, he had decided he didn’t give a damn if he was related to a basset hound. He leaped out of the truck and bounded around to the other side to greet the remuda, the tall grass waving above his head.

The remuda stood and looked at us for a moment. Those unacquainted with equine cognition would have taken this for taciturnity, but Duke and I knew better. We waited, and eventually the horses realized who we were and came to meet us. Horses are generally benign but universally stupid. Curiosity is about all one can hope for in a horse when it comes to intellection. A horse that manages to learn its name is noteworthy. As Duke can tell you, no horse is ever going to learn to watch a stick sail from a thrower’s hand, mark where it lands, then retrieve it, much less be sagacious enough to draw from the process the immense joy Duke derives.

But there is no doubt that a horse is one of the most beautiful creatures on Earth. Its elegance is unmatched, its quivering power noble beyond the capacity of lesser creatures. This beauty is not to be taken lightly. As Oscar Wilde has written, “Beauty is a form of Genius – is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned.” For years, southern men, who have traditionally underestimated the intelligence of southern women, have analogized their counterparts to horses. The analogy is not without merit, though it is not without flaws. Duke and I appreciate the special grace of a southern woman. From Texas to the Carolinas, from Florida up to Maryland, the southern woman dwells and exercises her gifted charm with a coquettish smile or an unanswered phone call. But she does it knowingly. The horses before Duke and I were not so wise. Knees lifting high out of the grass, manes billowing behind, shoulders tensing and releasing with each semiconscious step, they trotted and sidestepped and reared, reacting to one another as they converged. We watched their ignorant beauty, a gangly man and a stumpy dog standing reverently in the grass with the sun setting behind.

William and Smoke approached the truck. The other horses lost interest before they made it. William butted his head against me and I rubbed his forehead. He rubbed back, then thrust his head over my shoulder so that his jaw and mine were side by side. Hoping he wouldn’t toss his head, I massaged the coarse hair of his mane. I ran my hand along the aligned hairs of his neck, my hand sliding from black patch to white to black again. William blew through his nostrils, producing that sound that mimics almost exactly the rise of a covey of quail.

Smoke poked his head through the driver’s window, which was open. His whole head was inside the truck. His neck bobbed as though he were chewing the cloth of my seat. I opened the rear door and peered at him. He met my eyes with surprise – what are you doing in here? – and withdrew his head. He ambled toward the front of the truck, his shoulder brushing the wheelwell. He stopped before the front bumper and nuzzled the grille, moving his head up and down against it in an arc. Then he raised his eyes, as if to look into the windshield, turning both ears toward the truck. He drew his chin across the hood.

William, for his part, had discovered that the driver’s windowsill made an excellent scratching post, and was vigorously rubbing the end of his nose against the point at which the plastic that sheathed the glass met the sheet metal of the door. The whole truck shook. Duke and I watched with interest. I had always believed the tip of a horse’s nose to be sensitive, but William seemed disinclined toward my viewpoint. He rubbed for several seconds, then, without acknowledging the disquietude of man and dog, began cropping grass.

I heard a thump from the other side of the truck, and stepped around the tailgate to find Smoke caressing the side-view mirror. He had pressed the mirror back against the truck, but it had sprung back to its former position when he released it. Smoke was not perturbed by the sudden movement. As I watched he rubbed his cheek against the radio antenna, which sprang back into place with a metallic whang. Then, leaving the front of the truck, he stepped gingerly toward me, moving along the side panels, and lowered his head to the bedliner.

Back on the driver’s side, William was still cropping grass and Duke had taken a scholar’s interest. He was trying to do the same, turning his head to the side and attempting, with his elongated canine teeth, to grip the grass and tear it from its roots. But most of the grass slipped through his mouth, and the grass that Duke could crop he could not chew. Gamely he tried, though, working his tongue against the roof of his mouth like a man with a hair in his mouth who lacked the hands to retrieve it.

In the gathering dusk the crickets had started to call. “Kennel!” I said to Duke, and he abandoned the grass to load up into the truck. I turned the key and turned on the cargo light, which shone in Smoke’s eye and drove him out of the truck bed. I let out the clutch. Under the emerging stars Duke and I bumped back up to the barn to play a few rounds of fetch in the floodlights. Behind us the horses grazed, unfazed by our visit, though we thought of them as we drove up the hill.

Septmber 5, 6

I’m not traveling, am back in GA until late on the 15th. Entries for this period, if they come at all, will be sporadic.

September 4

(On the plane from Salt Lake City to Atlanta).

In the last sixty days of what could be a close presidential race, with media coverage of a candidate’s campaign crucial to garnering undecided votes or motivating constituencies to visit the voting booths, I am surprised America’s presidential hopefuls don’t pander to media sources like dogs pleading to kids holding hamburgers. But either the Bush and Kerry campaigns haven’t begun to cater to news networks yet or they’re doing it without my knowing.

In the jumble of issues that lie on the table for this November’s election – war in Iraq, a languid economy, gay rights, employment, arms buildup in North Korea – where is the First Amendment? Neither candidate has mentioned it. Have we already forgotten the radical role of journalists in the march on Baghdad – journalists embedded in military units as though they were medical personnel? Have we – and have the candidates – already forgotten the awesome power of the news media and the messages they disseminate?

News networks can be interest groups, just like oil companies or environmental societies. They just desire different things. The United States presses have never had absolute freedom, despite their best efforts and despite the wording of the Constitution. Those who would take expression and set it in print have fought for centuries to expand that freedom. They have battled the Alien and Sedition Acts, suits for libel, complaints about the invasion of privacy, restrictions set on their methods of investigation, bureaucrats who sought to silence them in the interest of national security. Advocates of the free press have not always been justified in their claims – at least according to the Supreme Court, which has sometimes ruled with them and sometimes against them – but we can recognize that, right or wrong, the American press has consistently sought to escape restrictions on its freedom.

Why don’t today’s candidates take advantage of that effort? Why isn’t Bush promising CNN even better seats on America’s next invasion? Why isn’t Kerry lambasting the Bush administration for not granting more press passes to American POW camps? Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not saying that candidates wooing the press with assurances of greater future freedoms would be desirable – but I am surprised it hasn’t happened yet.

Or maybe we just don’t know about it.



I also think Senator Kerry should:
1) Figure out exactly what President Bush has done to aid hurricane relief in Florida, and then “call for” more.
2) Spend some of his advertising money buying plywood and shipping it to West Palm Beach – if he can get away with it under campaign finance laws.
3) Go down there and pitch sandbags for a day.

September 3

I parted with Squatter today. Left him at Pard’s RV Repair in Salt Lake City so that the mechanics could fasten the camper more securely to the pickup. I’ll fly out of SLC to ATL tomorrow, and won’t return until late on the 15th after I’ve spent time with the family and my southeastern friends. When I get back to Utah, though, the camper will be bolted to the frame in the front and to the bumper in the back. Forest Service roads, beware! Squatter and I will be ready. But today I started missing Squatter as I rode Salt Lake City’s municipal train – the “Trax” – back into downtown, bags in hand, to find a hotel. I was alone.

From the Howard Johnson Express where I left my belongings and took a shower, I jumped on the Trax again and rode out to find a bookstore and a restaurant. As I sat in Murphy’s Pub reading “Roadside Geology of Utah,” eating a cheeseburger and sipping on a local brew, I listened to the unintelligible but heartfelt blather of an overserved gentleman who claimed variously to be from Afghanistan and Greece. Thankfully he didn’t bother me. “I am from Greek,” he was saying to the unnerved patrons he cornered. I left half my beer on the table, as is my new custom, thanked the waitress and walked back to the Trax.

I disembarked the train and turned to walk to the Howard Johnson. I had taken about one step when an attractive young woman in a baby blue outfit said, “You got a phone?”

I lent her my cell phone, and she called a cab. “Where are you going?” she asked me. I told her. “Can you pick me up at the Howard Johnson by the Trax?” she said into the phone.

Opportunity! exclaimed part of my mind.

Beware! screamed the rest of it.

I decided to listen to the second portion, as is my new custom. She spoke with the exaggerated intonations, the ambiguous slang (“and I was like, ‘this is whack’ . . .”), the egocentrism and the nervous energy that often indicate heavy drug use and a life spent in the world’s seedier sectors. We walked to the HoJo, toward the main entrance door. “I’ll wait with you outside for the cab, if you don’t mind,” I said. We stopped. The abridged life story she told me was not coherent. It jittered across space and time like bouncing ball hurled into a warehouse.

Heather[1] was 24. She had just finished dinner with her ex-boyfriend, who had custody of their child. “It’s because he has a wife and a job – he’s stable. Besides, with the child support and everything, it just works out better that way.” Heather had been born in West Virginia, but had spent most of her life in Great Falls, Montana. Father in the army. Her grandmother, who was like her mother, had killed herself. That was in Salt Lake City. Heather lived with her best friend, who was a guy. Tyler had the hookup. When he finished his two years for drugs, he got lodging with two other guys for $240 a month and got to go to school for cheap. He was studying geology, like that book I was holding. He worked at the same time and did well. But she and Tyler would never work out together. He had communication problems. Heather used to have a job but she quit showing up and got fired. Telemarketing. She couldn’t sell things to people by calling them, they had to call her. Sales by telephone weren’t her thing. She didn’t have the hookup like Tyler. She wasn’t in jail long enough. She went in for possession. It was a 3rd degree felony. That meant she couldn’t hunt anymore – no guns. She was like, can’t you downgrade that to a Class A Misdemeanor, but they gave her this Spanish lawyer who barely spoke English and she got a felony instead. That meant she couldn’t hunt. She didn’t know what she would do now. For awhile she had stayed with a Mormon bishop – well, he was going to be a bishop, he wasn’t yet. You have to do a lot of stuff to be a bishop, like have a wife. He had five kids. He had wanted Heather to marry him, but she was like, no. She didn’t know what she would do now. Maybe nursing. Yes, the schooling to be a nurse was hard but it was cheap. She didn’t know. Maybe she would just go home to her mother in Montana. Tell her things just didn’t work out. She knew she would end up just going home.

By the time the cab came Heather had grown uneasy around me. She was dancing side to side as she spoke, swinging her arms. She had borrowed my phone again to make sure the cab was on its way. I stood there leaning against a column, asking her questions, trying to make her feel comfortable. Sometimes people who have struggled socioeconomically, who have swerved on the wrong side of the law, who haven’t had an education like mine react that way to me. It is as though they perceive me as a part of an establishment that has marginalized them and that continues to persecute them. I think Heather saw me, subconsciously, as a link in the track of a bulldozer bound inexorably for a distant destination with no room aboard for her. She was cordial when she climbed into the cab– “bye, it was good to meet you” – but she was glad to leave me behind.

After she left, I walked inside to my room. I yawned. I would type a few lines, read awhile, and go to sleep around midnight, as is my new custom.



[1] I changed her name here.

September 2

The temperature reached 116 degrees Farenheit. Gusting winds over 50 mph whisked so much dust across the playa in Black Rock Desert that we had to wear goggles when it blew. The alkali dust was so acidic and dry that some Burners treated their cracked feet with vinegar. My hands dried out and bled, but I didn’t notice until I saw them on the steering wheel as I left.

I am writing, of course, about Burning Man, the festival that brings 25,000 revelers each year. I met Burners from Israel, Canada, Uruguay. Sometimes they come from farther.

I will not try to describe Burning Man. That would be impossible. There is no apt description. Any account will be biased, and perhaps absurdly so. For my recapitulation, you can read below. For the administrators’ presentation of the event, you can see www.burningman.com . But no account will be, or can be, wholly accurate.

Burners rolled into Black Rock City, as the congregation of tents and cars was called, and parked on the playa. Some parked cars, others RVs, others converted school buses. Many set up “theme camps” from which they provided some service to passers-by for free – monetary commerce between Burners was taboo. The Canadians and I disseminated snowcones, hawking them with a megaphone to those who rode or walked by. People walked by, in Black Rock City, in outfits that would be illegal, or nearly illegal, anywhere else. Two out of ten women wore no tops. Others wore only corsets or skimpy tops with thongs. The men’s costumes were equally outrageous. Many of them wore dresses – not because they were gay, or transsexual, or habitual cross dressers, but because those were the fashions of Black Rock City. A few of the older men wear nothing at all, save shoes and a sun hat. One of the Canadians, Robin, wore a black mask and a Canadian flag as a cape. I never saw him out of costume. He called himself “Captain Canuck.”

Other camps peddled different wares. One washed hair for free, and it became popular by the second day because there is no running water, but much dust, in Black Rock City. Another advertised itself as a “Punani Shave Parlor,” and in it women could have their nether regions shaved in various designs and dyed in various colors, as advertised and illustrated on photographic cards handed out in the reception tent outside the shaving trailer. The constant buzz of the razor could be heard from the trailer between 11 AM and 5 PM daily. And at the Orgasmatron women were invited to sit before a crowd of 20 to 100 people on a bicycle seat on which a knob was strategically situated. The knob was situated to stimulate their clitorises, and it vibrated. The women moaned and howled with real or imitated delight. During my time at Burning Man, I heard only praise about the Orgasmatron. “Well,” said one male voice in the crowd, “I’m going out in the playa to masturbate now.”

People were kind on the playa, almost by law. When I pulled into Black Rock City, there was no space around the Canadians’ camp. Robin found a spot for me and ushered me in. Late that afternoon, I was sitting by Squatter clipping my fingernails when Aleena saw me. “Why are you sitting by yourself?” she asked. “Come join us on the other side of the bus.” This was her first Burn, too, so we tattooed “virgin” on each other’s arms with my Sharpie (except that she accidentally wrote “v-i-r-i-n,” being somewhat drunk at the time. “Virin” was my nickname from that point forward. It became slurred until, in its final form, my nickname rhymed with “fern.”) When Robin discovered I had no bike, he gave me a spare to use for as long as I wanted it. A woman with whom I stopped to talk on the playa spent thirty minutes explaining to me how her sun dial worked and why the apparent path of the sun in the sky resembles a figure eight. Dozens of people carried “misters” with them as they traversed Black Rock City – spray bottles with battery-operated fans attached – and, in the baking playa afternoons, misted anyone who assented to the treatment. Other Burners gave out water bottles when the sun got too aggressive.

The laws of Black Rock City were mostly unspoken. Be kind to others. Don’t bitch too much. Take whatever drugs you want, but never pressure others into them. Share supplies – rebar to anchor structures to the playa, nylon cord to hold tents against the wind, duct tape to hold automobiles together. Have fun. But an orthodoxy emerged, one nearly as rigid as that of the societies it sought to repudiate. Commodification and traditional cultural norms were unnecessary and unfounded. The earth was sacred, we had to preserve it. Humans were out of touch with their animal sides. When I walked through camp wearing only my bass fishing shoes and felt hat, I elicited hoots of approval. When I went out at night with a collared shirt tucked into khaki pants, I drew looks askance.

On the morning of my third and final day at Burning Man, I lay in bed awhile and contemplated a cup of coffee. Did I want to percolate one, or was it too much trouble? How soon would it get hot outside? I was still considering when I heard the first pumping notes of the 80’s power ballad “The Final Countdown” – a bubbly, ebullient song not unlike “Eye of the Tiger.” It was the Canadians’ favorite, and it played seven or eight times a day. When I stepped outside Robin was in the dusty street in front of the bus dancing like a cork on ocean waves and jamming on an air guitar. His cape billowed behind him. Across his shirt was a strip of duct tape on which he’d written “sell me shrooms.” Yesterday’s had read “sell me weed.” I stretch and then go out on the street to dance alongside of him.

“Hey, Vern!” he yells. “How’d you sleep?”

* * *

Tonight I am camped in eastern Nevada on a dirt road leading north through one of innumerable parallel valleys. Identifying this area tectonically as basin and range is as straightforward as placing the playa in the hydrologic expanse of the Great Basin. In fact, both Black Rock Desert and this area are basin and range regions that happen to fall within the Great Basin, but as temperatures here prepare to dip near the thirties those similarities seem difficult to recall. Pleasantly difficult.

August 30, September 1

NO ENTRIES

August 29

Spent most of the day in Reno, working the internet, heating up the cell phone and provisioning for Burning Man festival, which lasts for a week. It takes place in a playa (the bed of a seasonal lake) in the Black Rock Desert, and no water or food is sold on site. The festival culminates on September 6th when the hippies get together and burn “the man,” which seems to be some sort of effigy symbolizing human impermanence or corporate evil or something similarly profound. I won’t be able to stay that long; I’m due for a dove shoot in Georgia around that date. But I look forward to the days I will be able to linger.

I just bought a case of Natural Light for $8.98 at the Sak-n-Save. The omens, I must say, are good.

August 28

With heavy eyelids I plodded up to the urinal to make water. Suddenly the steel urinal hissed like a pouncing raptor and growled like a geyser spewing sulfur. I leaped backward, eyes wide. I was almost back against the far wall when I realized the automatic-flush urinal had just flushed a little early. I finished my business quickly and scurried back to Squatter, where appliances don’t make inappropriate noises.

Squatter and I just halted for the night in a rest area along Interstate 80. It was my fourth attempt to stop. About an hour ago, I started to turn off US 95 toward the silhouette of a hill that looked like a pleasant camp. I returned to the highway when I saw the sign “Winnemucca Community Landfill.” Next I tried to make camp by a small stream, but a rusty gate and a “Private Property” sign thwarted me. I got on I-80. I put my blinker on to take the first exit northward toward the Humboldt River, where I could fall asleep to the murmuring of a running water, but turned Squatter back to the expressway at the sign “Prison Area – Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers.”

Today has been a strange one. This evening I find that the camper is secured to the truck by duct tape, I am in Nevada, and there is blood spattered all over the front bumper. I expected none of these things. But then, I guess that’s why one travels.

The Wallowa-Whitman Forest Service roads I went through this morning were rough on the camper. The part that overhangs the cab kept slamming down onto the roof as I splashed through mud puddles and crept over rocks. Twice I had to get out to “repair” the couplings. All I had of use was a set of wrenches, three rolls of duct tape and many, many trees. Pine sticks thrust between the bed post holes and couplings serve to tighten three of the corners, and once corner uses duct tape to hold the sticks in place. I finally made it out of the National Forest, however, by asking directions from a man riding a dirt bike with a mule deer draped over the back, blood seeping through the cloth bag he kept it in. “You have to go back out to the main road; that’s the quickest way.” The main road was a gravel track that led me to the exact point at which I’d entered the forest. So much for efficient travel.

Not that I value efficient travel. That would have been evident in western Idaho later that day where I stopped atop a hill and pulled out my hammer to take rock samples from a roadcut. I was traveling toward Steen’s Mountain in southeast Oregon, but there were red rocks, black rocks, yellow strata, white pockets in this roadcut. I had no idea what any of the colors indicated, but I merrily took samples of everything and was walking across US 95 to Squatter when a bus pulled up behind me.

It was not just any bus. It was an old Chevy schoolbus handpainted by an acquaintance of its occupants. The side sported a green figure, some sort of festive ghoul. The entire bus was graffitied in reds, blues, purples, oranges. No vestige of the original paint remained. The double-paneled door opened and its occupants spilled out. The first was a long-haired fellow, shirtless, sporting a full beard and carrying a much-drunk fifth of Jack Daniels. Immediately he began to relieve himself. The next passenger looked similar. Then came a young woman in a dress who wore no underwear. I know she wore no underwear because I happened to be looking when she hiked up her dress and squatted to pee. The driver cut the engine off, and immediately steam poured from the grille and water spilled down onto the dust. “Turn it back on, turn it back on!” one of the urinators shouted. With a massive clearing of its throat the bus shook back to life and stopped belching steam. “That was lucky,” another young man informed me. A moment later, “Hey, can we buy any weed from you?”

They were fifteen in all, and had come from Calgary, Alberta – “all the way from Canada, man.” They were going to the Burning Man festival north of Reno. It was an art and music festival. A young woman disembarked the bus and lay down on her back beside the road. Was she okay? I asked. “She just drank a fifth of Jaeger.” What was I doing with that hammer? I explained that I was into geology and had been taking rock samples, though I did not know what the rocks meant. Dane, who I had just met, pointed to another long haired Canadian shuffling across the Idaho dirt in Tevas. “He’s a geologist. Maybe he could knows more about it.”

Andrew, a graduate student to be, confirmed that he was studying geology. He, Dane and I crossed the road for a geology lesson. The white pockets were probably ash, either from a volcano somewhere upwind or from exposed coal that had caught fire (later research confirmed that it was 15 million year ash from a volcano 30 miles away). Some of the yellow strata were conglomerate, varied rocks that had been eroded from their sources in a streambed or volcanic landslide and then lithified together. And the black rocks were “volcanic bombs” – grapefruit-sized pieces of rock that either been hurled by the exploding volcano or had been airborne globs of lava that solidified on the surface. They were probably rhyolite. Andrew pointed out that the strata on the sides of the road tilted in opposite directions. “I don’t know what that means,” he said. But we concluded that this was basin and range country, and the faulting was probably concomitant to the crustal spreading of the region 12 to 25 million years ago, which, I would discover, coincided nicely with the time of regional volcanism.

“Hey, man, you should come with us,” one of them said to me. Burning Man attracted tens of thousands of people every year. “Yesterday there was Woodstock; today there is Burning Man.” “You can find us – you know what our bus looks like. It’s a great time.”

And that’s how I came to be in Nevada.

But before heading to Reno, I decided I’d swing by Steen’s Mountain. Sundown found me humming along a gravel road on its eastern side. The area was not lush, but it was downright fecund when compared to the surrounding area, which was desert. It must have attracted lots of animals – the road was hopping with animas when I passed through. Squatter almost flattened three mule deer who decided to test the braking capabilities of a heavily loaded Dodge Ram on gravel. I stopped the truck – eventually – and watched them bound away. A mule deer’s bound is a strange method of locomotion, a stiff-legged gait strongly reminiscent of Looney Toones characters or the way horses run in Disney’s Mary Poppins. Straight up, straight down, straight up, straight down, all while keeping a good forward pace. Amazing. I love to watch it, but at this point I’d just eaten my last chicken breast for dinner and was longing for a rifle. The ‘fridge was empty of meat. I drove on, and someone must have let loose the rabbits, because I must have seen forty cottontails darting across the road in front of me. Thirty-seven of them made it.

Hitting rabbits in Squatter is about like shooting quail with a .44 Magnum. You miss most of the time, but when you do connect, it’s all over. One of the rabbits was crushed pretty badly, ears to tail. The Michelins must have taken him longitudinally, because there was no edible meat left. But what do you think became of the other two?

August 27

Moonlight pours from the full moon and across the bridge like paint from a can. Indian Creek rustles in its gulch, and the evergreens of Wallowa-Whitman National Forest stand poised, ready to trap the moon in the net of their branches when it passes behind them in its lateral trek across the sky. All of that is outside, where I can see my breath. Inside, it is warm. I feel like the king of a very small castle.

August 26

If I were a hunter-gatherer, I would make a good wife. I have gotten pretty good at gathering. Up north of Anchorage, I gathered some blueberries from the tundra and mixed them in with my oatmeal. They were a bit tart, but good. East of Bellingham, I found some blackberries growing wild and I plucked them from their protective briars, mixing them with my morning couscous. Later, when I stopped to change my oil, I jammed the remaining berries between two slices of bread with peanut butter, and they were the best blackberries I have ever eaten. This afternoon I yanked some mint from an Oregonian farmer’s field, and tonight I boiled the leaves into my hot chocolate. Excellent.

But I have to work on my hunting. I was considering buying a BB gun with which I could kill small game for the pot. Birds, squirrels, rabbits, etc. I passed a pheasant today that I think I could’ve killed, although I would’ve had to aim for its head. I need a quiet gun because I don’t want to have to buy small game licenses in every state, and anything too loud might summon Fish & Game. But it seems wasteful to buy an air rifle just for the next few months – maybe I can provision myself whenever I next return to Georgia. Until then, I’ll rely on Squatter, who knocks the occasional bird out of the sky.

At present it would be more useful to be a mechanic than a hunter. The camper is sloshing about in my truck bed pretty badly. I had to cover about a mile of steep gravel road and ford one small creek to reach blacktop from last night’s campsite, and tonight I bumped over a couple miles of muddy Forest Service road to reach my current locale. The big bolts that hold the camper to the truck bed are faring poorly off the pavement. One is bent at such an angle that adjusting the nut is impossible; on another the threads are stripped and the nut is jammed so tightly that WD-40 can’t help. When the time comes, I will have to remove those with a hacksaw. The threads on still another bolt don’t go high enough to cinch the camper down. All I have to replace these steel bolts, if they shear, are some aluminum fasteners I bought in Haines before I picked Ben up. Someday I will have to visit an RV shop and get the camper fastened down properly – these bedpost couplings aren’t sturdy enough for long-term use. Until then, I guess I can improvise. I’ve an idea involving some wood chips that might work on the left side bolts. And, hell, the right side isn’t looking that bad . . .

In truth I am neither a mechanic, a hunter nor a gatherer. But the beauty of being alone is that I’m my only option.

August 25

Okanogan National Forest, northern Washington, the windward side of the Cascade Range. A high latitude rain forest at low elevation. Mosses and ferns covering the forest floor. Rotting logs suspended a few feet off the ground by the remnants of their trunks, absorbing the rainwater dripping from the conifers above until they collapse to the forest floor under their own weight. Streams flowed throughout the forest, flowing over rocks of all types – Eocene granite, Cretaceous sandstone, gneiss from ancient seafloors and basalt from archipelagos that smashed into western North America 40 to 100 million years ago. Up higher, elevation thinned the trees and eliminated the ferns. The alpine and Douglas firs shrank and clumped together as they neared the timberline, then stopped altogether. Shrubs and grasses didn’t climb much further. Above the greenline foot-wide streams, white in their fervor, pounded down from hanging glaciers and a pulver of snow lay over the austere rock between glaciers like powdered sugar over French toast. White clouds blew through the mountaintops, enveloping them and then leaving again.

Fifty miles east, in the rain shadow of the Cascades, grasses and sagebrush have replaced the mosses and ferns. Pines have replaced Douglas Firs, coulees have supplanted creeks and farmers irrigate their fields. The clouds have rifted for the first time since I arrived in Washington, and the stars out tonight that can compete with the moon glitter all the more brightly for their sabbatical. In the moonlight Squatter and I cast shadows.

Below us runs Douglas Creek, a rare perennial creek in this country. From where I sit Douglas Creek has incised its way through about 500 feet of rock to reach its current level. Now it runs through a soft rock – a sandstone, I think – and has sculpted a watercourse more imaginative than that of most commercial water parks. It plunges down parallel slides into deep pools, where it rests and breathes, lurking above a luge course of its own creation. Small trees grow on its banks, reeds bob in its current. Bubbles make circles on the surface. Then it dives. Douglas Creek twists and pivots, pounding and spraying, gouging cavities as large as grizzly bears in the stone that strains to contain it before splashing again into another pool where it swirls, pauses, pontificates. Then it rushes again, this time a straighter course, straight into what ought to be its bank and the creek carves out a room, a cave, this one big enough for two families of grizzlies. Inside the cave water laps against the shore, peaceful but persistent, calm. Above it bats fly in jerky circles, pursuing the latest insect hatch. And then the creek is gone, darting out of the cave on its way to the Columbia River along the path it has been carving for thousands of years.

Curious to know what it has carved through, I take my hammer from its loop and pound the rock that forms the creekbed. The rock is light brown and gritty. I have read that siltstone tastes creamy and sandstone is chewy, so I put some of the rock in my mouth and chew. Gritty to me. But I can’t imagine a rock I’d find “creamy.” Maybe that’s a method useful only for geologists, whose teeth are more accustomed to grinding stones. I pound out some more rock, pocket my sample and climb up the bank to a layer of dark gray-brown rock. The layer extends from the lowest point I can see, where the loose gravel meets the 500 foot cliff wall, and then up about eight feet. Erosion has sliced vertical scallops out of the rock, and the rock shows a tendency to fracture along those scallops. It fractures in six to eight foot lengths in such a way that if you were to view the severed piece from overhead it would appear as a lozenge with the corners rounded off. I whack it with my hammer. It sounds almost like a normal rock, and at first I don’t notice the difference. I do notice that this rock is tough. I have to whack it several more times before a piece the size of my head falls off. Fortunately the cliff does not tumble on top of me. I carry the piece I’ve secured – which is unexpectedly heavy – to a horizontal rock I can use as a workbench, then I hit it again. In its reduced size, the rock reverberates. It sounds like metal striking metal. I hit it once more. It sounds like a swordfight in the movies. With glee I hoist the hammer and hit the rock harder. More swordfighting. Sounds of a pirate battle resound in Douglas Creek’s canyon. Clang, clang, clang! Clang clang! At length I overcome my preoccupation with making sword noises and secure a sample small enough to fit in my pocket.

I don’t have to beat the hell out of the next layer to identify it. It is basalt, dark and porous, having pooched out in bulging lobes that look like pillows but feel different if you lay your head on them. I have taken a sample of this same rock earlier and looked it up in my rocks and minerals book. Basalt. That makes sense. Basalt is typically a marine rock, the primary constituent of seafloors. Much of this area – central Washington – was once seafloor, and was sutured on to the continent 40 to 100 million years ago like I mentioned in the last entry. Why it rode up onto the continent instead of subducting I don’t know, and I’m not sure geologists know either. But without these chunks Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase would have been a comparatively piddling acquisition. The North American coast once ended in Wyoming. Not all of the land that lies west of Wyoming today was added in this haphazard gluing manner – some was part of a shallow sea in the early Mesozoic, around 200 million years ago – but chunks of sutured-on land did make it as far east as central Wyoming. And such chunks do compose most of Washington. They pounded on North America with enough force, in fact, to create the Cascades.

Back at the top of the cliff and hot from the climb, I lay out my newest rock collection and open Rocks and Minerals. A southern breeze coming off the sage ruffles the pages. I open to the sedimentary section, hoping for something that resembles what I found in the streambed. I flip through, eyeing the pictures. The breeze smells good and feels better. But I can’t find anything in the book. “Sandstone” isn’t even in the index. Rocks and Minerals must only list fancier rocks. Traditional geologic rock names have become outmoded in some ways because discoveries made by peering through electromagniscopes have revealed distinctions too fine to be described by coarse words like “granite” or “sandstone.” Proper rock identification will require more education.

So I flip to the “Introduction to Rocks” and start reading. Darkness falls, and I switch on my lantern. I am pleased to learn that rocks rich in iron – like the one I was swordfighting with – are often of marine origin. This fits with what I already know. I keep reading. I read until 8:53 when the first coyote howls.

His howl is half throat and half violin, at once meticulously musical and crudely primal. It carries across the sage alone until it is echoed by another coyote on the other side of Douglas Creek, and then another far to the south. I have seen no game at all on this side of the Cascades, but the coyotes will find it. They will find game and chase it, chase it in a pack if necessary until the prey slows with fatigue and can run no more. Then the coyotes will immobilize it, its wide fearful eyes pinned against the dirt, and then the intestines will steam in the moonlight as the coyotes tear them from the paunch, maybe before the animal is dead. That is their way. Blood on their snouts, they will snap and growl at one another. They know not mercy and they know not malice. Like dashing streams and eastbound seafloors, they are part of a world in which actions and reactions are steady and inexorable, in which the transient concerns of ephemeral Homo sapiens sapiens hold no more sway than did those of trilobites.

August 24

It has been raining, really, since I woke up this morning aboard the Malaspina. It rained in the waters off southern British Columbia, it rained in Bellingham and it is raining now, just east of Northern Cascades National Park. But I can’t say that I’ve minded; it just comes with the territory. Here galoshes aren’t a fashion statement.

There are a few things that can make rain downright pleasant. One is a good rifle and the freedom to stalk through the whitetail woods on leaves that will not crunch. Another is a warm woman who will dance through puddles to slow Willie Nelson songs. Another still is a good cowboy hat on which the raindrops drum and trickle off the brim. Today I’ve had one of three, and that ain’t bad.

I won’t take the hat off, even now as I’m sitting under a tarp. I made camp here a few hours ago along the Skagit River, which is to say that I raised Squatter’s roof and tied one side of my tarp to the camper and the other to a Forest Service sign. It’s a pleasant camp, if damp. The Skagit is boisterous with adolescent vigor, as are most northern rivers at this time of year. One might more properly say that it is turgid with glacial runoff. It eagerly whisked away the macaroni I washed out of my dinner bowl. Its greenish water bounds over the weary boulders in its streambed, leaps over the gravel where the river runs shallow and shoves leaves and sticks along its surface in its haste to reach Diablo Lake, where it will come almost instantly to a near halt, bruising its shoulder on its seat belt, to swirl in gentle eddies with other glacial waters like a cowboy who has rushed to a dance to twirl softly with his sweetheart.

August 23

If the fog gets thick, the Malaspina’s fog horn blares a two second blast every one hundred and twenty seconds. Even if the fog comes at seven in the morning. I guess waking up to a fog horn beats awakening to the crunch of plowing into another ferry, but it’s a close call.

By the time I unzipped my sleeping bag at eight it was warm enough to sit comfortably without a shirt under the covered solarium. I sat for a few minutes at the foot of my lawn chair feeling the rhythm of the day. The cool wind outside of the solarium blew just hard enough to ruffle the tents a few feet away. The tentless deck rats, a population which included me, had slept under the open-sided solarium’s roof because of the slate-gray clouds that lithified in yesterday afternoon’s skies. But the sky this morning grew cumulus clouds, decorative clouds, joyful clouds that traversed the sky in self-contained merriment. I pulled on a tee shirt and padded out among the tents in bare feet, feeling the vibrations of the Malaspina’s diesels. I leaned over the rail and peered toward the bow. The wind breaking over my nose smelled of the sea. I stretched and walked back into the solarium.

Today has been a reading day, a day for napping, a day for bullshitting. Roger and Jed and I sat in the cafeteria over breakfast and discussed vestigial structures and taxonomy, real estate and financing. What distinguishes monkeys and apes? How are bears and pigs related? How reliable are the appraisals of foreclosed houses? Did you know you can flip a house without ever buying it? Roger, how did you end up teaching economics? We discussed etymology and nautical terms. Is a galley only a kitchen, or can it be any area associated with eating? What is a scullery? How do you spell voilá? Shouldn’t there be a nautical term for “cafeteria?” We discussed drugs and highs. Do all shrooms come from cow patties, or just the most desirable ones? Did I tell you about the brick of hash brought back from Amsterdam? Roger, how again did you become a schoolteacher? Ladies and gentlemen, the cafeteria is now closed. Please exit the cafeteria if you have finished your meal. Our plates were long gone and our coffee cups had been cold for an hour, so we left.

Outside, the tents were ruffling and the clouds were sailing across the sky. If they turned toward Bellingham and raced the Malaspina, who would win? I would have been content to lose. I climbed the stairs to the aft observation deck and lay down for a mid-morning nap.

August 22

“It’s Hawaii with glaciers,” Jed says to everyone he speaks to. He and I and most of the other male deck rats cruised yesterday with our shirts off, lounging on the aft deck as Alaska Ferries’ “Malaspina” motored south out of Haines, weaving through the islands of southeast Alaska like a needle through fabric. At sixteen knots we left the glacial fjord of Haines and Skagway behind and cruised through taiga and glaciers to Juneau, taiga as thick as caribou fur and glaciers that crept toward the sea like ice cream dripping down inverted cones. That night, after passengers with cabins retired below decks and we deck rats fell asleep in our lawn chairs under the soft glow of Aurora Borealis, the Malaspina stopped at St. Petersburg and Wrangell and navigated “The Narrows,” a stretch of the route where land is reputed to come within a stone’s throw of both sides of the boat. I wouldn’t know, though, because Jed and I had drunk several beers and I was fast asleep.

Time aboard the Malaspina is delightfully idle. People read or sleep or sit together, sometimes talking, sometimes not. Some lift binoculars, some do not; some click their cameras, others don’t. We all watch the scenery. The inactivity frets Jed. “I feel like I should have to work for this,” he says from behind his sunglasses. This morning he did pull-ups. “I’m used to biking or hiking every day.” I adjust to stationary life more easily, watching the white, bubbly trail of the ferry fade to blue beyond the brown toes of my propped-up bass fishing shoes. The shoes were new when I started this trip, but now the scars and blemishes of travel are turning them into proper footwear. My Carhartt pants, too, are showing signs of use. There is gray silt stuck around the cuffs, and I sit up to brush at it.

The silt came from the lateral moraine of Worthington Glacier. I was driving south into Valdez when I passed it, and since I’d never been close to a glacier before, I decided to visit. When I climbed out of Squatter and headed for the ice, I looked – exactly – like a Georgia boy out to see his first glacier. I wore a flannel shirt, Carhartt pants and bass fishing shoes manufactured by Georgia Boot Co. In lieu of an ice pick, a carpenter’s hammer swung gaily from my hammer loop as I skipped over streams of meltwater gushing from beneath Worthington.

Different parts of a glacier move at different speeds. When the glacier flows over a dropoff, it accelerates and the downhill ice temporarily outpaces the ice behind it, causing tension within the glacier. Crevasses form perpendicular to the direction of movement. As the glacier flows, those crevasses bend so that they resemble giant smiles, curving up at each end because the thinner edges of the glacier move more slowly than the thick ice in the middle, which deforms more readily as a result of its great weight and generates more meltwater because of the pressure it exerts on the ice below.

At the edge of the glacier I swung my hammer at the ice, expecting it to give way like so much hard-packed snow. The ice chipped. I swung again. It chipped. Impressed, I decided to climb up. I reversed the hammer and drove the claw as deep into the ice as I could, then, pulling on the handle, clamored onto the glacier. Rocks and debris from the cliffs above littered the surface. Water rushed audibly below. I swung the hammer again and climbed higher. Then I thought about the crevasses, and slid sideways to examine the nearest one.

I peered into it. Even at the edge of the glacier the crevasse was eight feet deep and two feet wide. At the bottom, the ice was blue, indicating ice crystals compacted so tightly that only low-frequency blue light could penetrate – light waves with shorter wavelengths, toward the red end of the visible light spectrum, never made it. Though I stand over six feet tall, I was by no means confident that I could climb out of the crevasse if I slipped into it. Certainly there was no one around to pull me out. Beloved though they may have been, my carpenter’s hammer and bass fishing shoes could scarcely function as an ice axe and cramp-ons. And that blue ice looked cold.

I slid back down onto the churned rocks at the glacier’s base. A ridge of lateral moraine ran along Worthington Glacier’s southern side, an easy 50 or 60 feet above the glacier’s surface. Probably a vestige of the last Pleistocene glaciation. Atop it, according to my brochure, was Moraine Trail, a one mile hike alongside the glacier. I climbed toward the trail. The moraine slope lay near the angle of repose, and I climbed on all fours to the sound of loosed rocks clattering below me.

The trail was a ribbon of hard-packed till that traced the crest of the lateral moraine. Breathing hard, I sat down on it. The gray dirt that now covered my hands and pants fell away steeply on both sides, in places so steeply that I doubted I could have scaled them. I looked out over Worthington Glacier. Its source was high in the Alaskan Range, a snowy basin as white as angels’ gowns. As the snow accumulated, the ice crystals compacted into ice and when the ice reached a critical mass it spilled out of the high basin. Now in motion, the glacier interacted with the mountain, reshaping it and being shaped by it. No longer pure, the ice grew dirtier with the crumbs of the cliffs it had carved as the glacier descended from the angel-white basin. It ground the stone underneath into “rock flour” that would cloud alpine streams with silt. It plucked whole boulders out of the mountains and incorporated them into its sliding bulk as the ice at the base melted and froze, melted and froze. It sent glacial streams downhill from its terminus like fingers, streams gurgling siltily into the lake that formed uphill of the terminal moraine Worthington Glacier had deposited during Pleistocene time, 12,000 to 1.8 million years ago. Trees shaded the western shore of the lake. Bare and sterile rock touched the snow of the angel-white alpine source.

I put a hand down on the firm dirt of the trail and pushed myself up. The wind I had scarcely felt down on the glacier blew hard from the south across Moraine Trail. I walked slowly, almost slow enough to double-step, because the grade was steep and would get steeper as it passed the point where Worthington fractured into crevasses. I climbed. I began to sweat. I pushed my sleeves up and unbuttoned my shirt front so that the wind could cool me, and the first raindrops I felt fell on my hot forearms. They were small raindrops, typical of southeast Alaska. The kind of rain that could fall all day.

As I hiked upward, the loose morainal ridge that had marked the glacier’s southernmost edge during Pleistocene time gave way to hard rock and cliff edges. The rain kept falling. In places, the trail strayed obnoxiously – and I thought perilously – close to the ledge. I held on to the bushes that grew on the opposite side of the trail with both hands and sidled past the cliffs. When my bravado refused to submit to prudence any longer, I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled toward the edge. I poked my head over the empty space. “Sheer” is an understatement. The rock, gray and brown and unforgiving, dropped straight down, offering only thin ridges that looked like blades to break the fall of a tumbling hiker. I wondered how much it would have cost the Forest Service to install safety nets. Rain fell on the back of my neck and ran under my shirt. It was turning the trail, I thought with dismay, to mud. I backed away from the cliff and continued up.

The stones beside the trail had been dull with the dust aroused by nearby foot traffic, but now spots appeared in their dusty coats like specks of varnish flicked from a paintbrush. My southern arm and pant leg were getting wet. I moved my camera into my right pocket and kept walking. Only my exertions kept me warm. The vegetation grew scrubbier as I climbed. The trees were below me, and I could see up ahead that tough-souled grasses would supplant the bushes I walked through now. The rain intensified, the drops growing larger. Above the grasses rocks, ornamented only by lichens or unassuming mosses, fought the battle against wind and rain alone. I knew they were losing. The rocks beside the trail where I was were pretty well varnished now.

I began to look for temporary shelter. Ahead, to the south of the trail, I saw an angular boulder leaning slightly to the north. “House Rock,” I decided to call it. When I reached House Rock I found the dust on its north side dry, so I sat down and nestled against the stone. It was smooth and cool, soothing against the hot skin of my face and neck. I stretched my legs in front of me against the rock and found that most of the time even my northernmost leg stayed dry. I pulled the brochure from my back pocket and read. Worthington Glacier was a temperate glacier, more responsive to climatic fluctuations than glaciers in colder regions because its ice did not glue it to the mountainside. Because it was temperate, Worthington had more meltwater underneath. Temperate glaciers were early indicators of climatic change. Temperate glaciers were now receding in overwhelming proportions. I rolled down my sleeves as my perspiration evaporated. The warmer climate concomitant with global warming had also brought more precipitation, however, so many temperate glaciers in southeast Alaska were accumulating ice at their alpine sources although this accumulation had not yet manifested itself in glacial advance. That would take several years. For now, glacial tongues were receding in the balmy temperatures, even as glacial mass increased. I rebuttoned my shirtfront. The brochure advertised Worthington as “Alaska’s most accessible glacier.” The wind slackened for a moment and rain fell against my leg, popping against the stiff cotton of my pants. I shivered and slid the brochure back into my pocket. I left House Rock with a pat and headed uphill.

The trail petered out in a field of broken stone near the source. Ahead, above and to the left, a field of ice and snow sat poised to send its contents downhill. Ice flowed from it, a tributary, crossing the direction of the trail and sweeping down to the right to join Worthington Glacier. Far ahead and on the other side of the glacier lay the massive, pelagic sheet of pristine white that fed Worthington Glacier. The sheet had fed Worthington Glacier throughout the Pleistocene, and fed it still. Clouds blowing across the mountains veiled its furthest limits so that the snow of the glacier’s source blended imperceptibly into the white obscurity of the clouds.

I turned and crouched by a pool of glacial snowmelt. I drank from my cupped hands. The cold of the water hurt my fingers. The pool was clear. If not for the dimples of raindrops I could have discerned individual granules on its bottom.

I thrust my hands into my pockets for warmth as I hiked back to Squatter. I wiped my hand dry on the inside of my shirt and shielded my camera from the dampness of my pants. Water ran down my forehead and dripped off my nose. Now the rain dampened my right sleeve. Lower down, the wet bushes beside the trail drenched my pants and I carried my camera in my hand. The bass fishers were soaked, and my cotton socks damp. Water dripped off the handle of my hammer. My pants were sodden, the dust around the cuffs turned to mud. I grinned and stretched, then skipped for about thirty yards. The warmth in my quadriceps spread across my body. I was too wet to think about being dry. I opened my arms to the rain and let it run down my cheeks.

The moraine is caked to my pants and will not brush off. It doesn’t much matter; the Malaspina’s deck rats aren’t particular. I lean back in my lawn chair and feel the sun on my face. Jed is wishing a storm would come up so the Malaspina would at least rock a little. The stillness is fine with me. The white bubbles of our passing are turning gradually to blue, but it’s not the aquamarine blue of the Caribbean or the cobalt blue of the Mediterranean. The water is more greenish-gray because of the silt.

Squatter plunges through an arm of the Saganirvtok River in northern Alaska.
Jeb Butler