November 18

Chap would love to swim, I thought, but the lake looks awfully cold. I felt the fuzzy tennis ball in my pocket. Chap is passionate about water retrieves. The lake shimmered, barely rippling in the light breeze. I zipped my vest higher. Chap ran through the dry leaves behind me. We were in northern New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest on a cool, overcast day. If I threw his tennis ball into the lake Chap would shiver as soon as he got out. Then I would have to dry him off, heat up the camper, let him inside, hang up his towel and wait until he warmed up. No, I thought, we’d better just play fetch on land.

As I turned away from the lake I heard a splash. Prudence is not in Chap’s limited vocabulary. As Steinbeck wrote of his dog, Charley, Chap “never thinks of the future.”

Since he was already wet I threw the ball in for Chap. He brought it back. I lathered him in dog shampoo then threw the ball back in. He retrieved it. We played fetch until Chap was shivering so violently that I worried about hypothermia. I took him back to the truck and dried him. At least he was clean.

Chap and I left Boston this morning where we’d stayed with Chrissy, a friend of mine from the Semester in East Africa I did in 2002. We had a helluva time. Chap got to sleep inside since Chrissy’s roommates were gone and I got to smoke a cigar a great cigar bar, a basement hideout replete with pipes in the ceiling and all the Johnny Walker a man could drink. It was in the Italian section of town near Chrissy’s apartment. The lights were dim and the smoke was thick. The candle on our table flickered. I faced the bar’s only entrance and explained somewhat melodramatically to Chrissy that James Butler Hickok had died because he failed to take similar precautions. The place felt like a Speakeasy for Capone’s best gangsters.

Chrissy puffed on her cigar as we talked. She works with brain injured adults in Boston and has risen in only a year from a simple caregiver – a “wiper of asses,” in her words – to managing two separate wards. Now she wears a suit to work. But she has dreams as wide as the world and wants to do lots of things before she settles down. Social work in South America, or maybe Africa. I sipped my scotch and nodded. In this bar we knew life would last forever. Maybe Chrissy could find work in an orphanage. Anything. Social work is her passion, but not her identity. Many people, she says, perceive the injustices of the world and take them personally. They start seeing themselves as victims and become indignant. Then they become self-styled activists. Their advocacy can be outlandish, self-promoting. Sometimes it is downright silly. She sipped her wine. “I am not going to chain myself to a fence for gun control,” Chrissy says. “I do what I can, but you’ve got to leave it at the office at five.”

Chap is snoring in the corner of the camper now. He is warm, dry and smells like shampoo. No vestige of the dripping, shivering Chap I saw forty-five minutes ago remains. He lived his passions but left them at the lake.

* * *

Spent the afternoon driving through the countryside of New Hampshire and Vermont. Beautiful. Now I understand why everyone who sees it uses the word “quaint.” But “quaint” only describes the way the country would look if you took a photograph and stuck it in a magazine. “Quaint” is too simple because it implies simplicity. Beneath the whitewashed wooden churches and clean-swept fields pulses a vitality as robust as anywhere else – it just gets hidden by an exterior visitors find so pleasing that they never get past it.

I did not find the reticence for which Yankees are so famed and about which Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley. Several times strangers initiated conversation with me. I found the urge to befriend passers-by – an urge I have come to believe is nearly ubiquitous – stronger here than in most places. The impulse is always strongest in rural areas, but today was exceptional. The old man at the gas station came out to chat as I pumped; the mechanic at the auto parts store gave me excellent directions to another store where I could find the parts he didn’t stock. I like it here. I’ve stopped Squatter for the night beside the Housitania River in Connecticut, and the policeman who came by to investigate didn’t even run me off. Talk about a pleasant place.

November 16

Calling athletes “Neanderthals” may no longer be insulting enough to comfort embittered nerds. Recent paleontology indicates that Neanderthal Man did not walk slumped over with his head hanging and hands drooping near the earth as was once supposed. Arthritic degradation of an early specimen had deceived scientists, according to exhibits at Washington DC’s Natural History Museum. Now it appears that Neanderthal Man walked upright. His cranial capacity of over 1400 cm3 tells us that his brain was bigger than ours. And archeology has revealed that he probably cared for the sick and held ceremonies for the dead. We now consider Neanderthal Man closer to that unique specimen we call “modern man” – Homo sapiens sapiens, to the scientific community – and so scientists have reclassified him to Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. His taxonomical name differs from yours and mine only at the subspecies level. Neanderthal Man is now officially closer to modern man than upright man, Homo erectus, or tool-using man, Homo habilis.

Of course, the taxonomical structure and complex theories that surround each existing ancestral skeleton must continually adapt themselves to what scientists dig up. When oddities in the formation of Neanderthal Man’s bones were found to be arthritic rather than genetic, anthropologists’ theories about his lifestyle changed to accommodate a generally upright posture. The bones, scientists say, represent the facts. The theories are only interpretations. As Biblical literalists might tell you, the truth about man’s origins comes from the dust.

It was not so long ago that Biblical literalists controlled the descriptions western people propound to explain the world around them. Man arose spontaneously from dirt. Species differed because God had assembled them differently. The world was created on October 26, 4004 BC at 9am.

The anchoring points for these theories came from various passages in the Bible. From solid points of scripture, touted as indisputable truth, thinkers connected dots to form theories. By counting generations, for instance, an 18th century bishop uncovered the date of the world’s beginning. Today, the anchoring points for scientific thought are objective observations, like the discovery of prehistoric hominid footprints at Olduvi Gorge. These observations are considered factual and interpretation of them constitutes theory. Scientists interpret certain archaeological findings, for instance, to indicate that between 5 and 2 million years ago a certain line of apes began to walk upright.

In every age man has believed he knew the means of discovering the truth. Once man’s means was theological. Today it is empirical. But man only creates models for the world around him, only crafts mental frameworks to describe his world. Perhaps man has never encountered truth – he has only created more or less facile models to represent it. Even the purportedly fixed anchoring points for his models are subject to reevaluation as archaeological finds get discredited or scriptural declarations get declared metaphorical. Just as some Christians have claimed a mortal man could never look directly into the face of the Living God, a scientist must admit that we may never glimpse pure truth. We must make do with models, because they’re all we have.

November 14

Looks like Squatter’s Log will be more sporadic than usual for this leg of the trip. I usually only write when I’m alone and I’m stopping to stay with folks most of these nights. I spent the evening of the 12th with Kimi, a friend of mine from Vanderbilt who transferred to UVA, and didn’t write that night. Last night I slept in Washington DC in the house Lily (another friend from Vandy) shares with nine roommates and did not have time to write. I will sleep here again tonight. I’m starting to worry that Squatter will feel neglected.

_________________________________

Chap and I stood on the low embankment of an unfinished railroad line from the mid-nineteenth century. I tossed his tennis ball into the underbrush and he went to find it. We were at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, the gentle green farmland that fed Virginia. We looked east where the Yankees had come from. During the Battle of the Second Manassas, Ulysses S. Grant’s troops charged across the field against the left flank of the Confederate line. Wave after wave of blue-coated Yankees attacked the ill-provisioned Confederates until the Rebels ran out of ammunition. Standing on this embankment, General Thomas’s Georgians threw rocks. Stones clattered against Yankee armament. The Union troops reached the railroad. The fighting was hand-to-hand. Thomas’s Georgians, my ancestors among them, repulsed the attack and then Longsteet’s Confederates, charging from the right, swept the Yankees from the field.

The Confederates won the Battle of the Second Manassas but in the end Grant got the Shenandoah Valley, its rolling grainfields and quiet cows. When he finished, the alcoholic Grant proclaimed, “a crow will have to pack his lunch when he flies over the Shenandoah Valley.” It was so. Grant destroyed the valley, burned its barns, slaughtered its cows. The outnumbered, outprovisioned Rebels could do nothing. They were fighting for their homes but losing. The war was all but over. They fought on. As Rhett Butler observed, “Southerners can never resist a losing cause.”

Ulysses S. Grant, his army and his bottle swept past Virginia. Grant sent General Sherman through Georgia where Sherman razed all he encountered. He turned widows out of homes, requisitioned their houses and appropriated their foodstuffs. He left them hungry. Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground. Grant continued to drink. As Doc Holliday, who hailed from Macon, Georgia said of gunslinger Johnny Ringo in the movie Tombstone, “a man like Ringo has a hole right down to the middle of him, and he can never kill enough or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.” Grant could never fill his hole. Even after he had heard the South’s dying gasp at Appomattox, even after he was acclaimed as a hero, even after the exaltation of the North catapulted him to the presidency, Grant continued to drink. He died a penniless, broken man.

Holes are not filled with blood or conquest but by an unassuming faith in the worthiness of one’s own goals. It is better to lose a fight you believe in than to wrest victory fighting for the sake of something you doubt. Chap was still looking for his ball, and I walked down the embankment to join him.

November 11

On Novemberr 4th I picked up my old friend Vivian in Little Rock. We cruised into Nashville for Vanderbilt’s Homecoming Weekend and to see my father’s trial against DiamlerChrysler. Both were good. It was wonderful to see the old college crowd again, and we got rowdy just like we used to. Beer, bars, cops and pepper spray. We had fun. Dad was ripping DiamlerChrysler’s yankee lawyer to shreds. The yankee was hemorrhaging dignity as DiamlerChrysler will soon hemorrhage cash. I had fun on both counts. But during the latter part of my stay the fun came from external events. It was not the innate joy that wells up from a psyche in harmony. I left Nashville this morning.

A sequestered mind turns on itself. This is especially true of mine, but traditionally I have had no difficulty being alone. Today was an exception. As I drove east out of Nashville I found myself grim, mulling over things gone wrong and the missteps of mine that I associated with them. In truth many problems are inevitable, but a gloomy man faults himself. Then you have an autocatalytic cycle. A mind weighted with guilt cannot make reliable moral decisions and, even when it can, the psyche, lethargic with depression, cannot execute them. The body then commits crimes it would have avoided in a sounder state, the mind blames itself and the cycle begins anew.

I have long been prone to these melancholy periods. They usually come in winter. I didn’t get one last year so I thought I had grown out of them. Guess not. I call these periods Sad Spells. I understand the stages well enough to diagnose them, so I can avoid extended and deep Sad Spells, but I can’t dodge them altogether. I suspect no one can. I’ve got a couple remedies to try, so hopefully I’ll be back above the clouds soon. I just feel bad for Chap. For reasons neither of us can explain his traveling buddy self-destructed all of a sudden. But I am not Humpty Dumpty, and soon I’ll be back together again.

November 2

9:00 PM
Despite rainy skies citizens are marching on the polls as they have not since 1968. Tomorrow their voice will resound across the world. It is a flag-waving day for the United States. No matter who wins this is a bright day for our democracy.

But I predict that tomorrow morning Senator John Kerry will add “president-elect” to his calling card. Polls have been tight and in many cases favorable to President Bush, but voter turnout is smashing records all over the United States. The voting proportion of the public will exceed the proportion pollsters deemed “likely voters” and newly energized voters will catapult a democrat into office.

11:30 PM
I guess neither Chap nor I are any good at predictions. I couldn’t predict the presidential election and he couldn’t predict that if he rolled in the spoiled meat in the parking lot he would get a bath. Neither of us is satisfied with the results of our miscalculations but I’m betting a midnight swim in the Gulf will lift our spirits.

November 1

These men in Wrangler jeans and black-and-white striped shirts were not cowboys. They were gritty, grinning inmates with nothing to lose and a long chance to win.

Before the first event at Angola Prison Rodeo the crowd was restive. It was a hot and muggy Halloween in the stifling humidity of the Louisiana bayou country. The sun’s rays pounded the rodeo grounds. The show horses with their ornate saddles stirred up the dust and manure of the arena while we in the crowd shifted in our seats and waited for the real rodeo. We had come to see sweat and blood, not starch and glitter. A fly buzzed loudly in my ear and I brushed him away. The man beside me dropped peanut hulls between his boots.

After interminable time the pomp ended and the combat began. Angola Prison Rodeo began as eight chutes loosed eight 2000-lb. bulls with eight inmates on top of them into the hot, still arena. The arena exploded. The bulls whirled, the inmates whooped, the crowd roared. The bulls heaved and snorted. They slammed inmates into the dust, kicked them and trampled them. They ran into each other and rammed each other’s riders. The last inmate on a bull’s back would win. When every prisoner but one had fallen a buzzer sounded but the winner wouldn’t bail. He stayed on his bovine tornado until a final twist dumped him into the dirt. He leapt to his feet pumped his arms into the air. The crowd cheered. Nearby another inmate wasn’t moving. Five men in gray hustled him out in a stretcher, the winner strode out of the arena and the next event began.

The prisoners rode broncos in the next event. After that three-man teams given a wild horse with a halter and a lead rope had to vault a man onto the horse’s back. In another event inmates caught 500-lb. steers barreling out of a chute and wrestled them to the ground. In another an inmate riding bareback had to “rescue” a partner standing atop a 50-gallon drum. The inmates rode more bulls. Three man teams pursued wild cows and tried to draw milk from their udders. In the final event hundreds of inmates spread out across the arena as a wide-horned and pissed-off bull trotted into the dirt oval with a poker chip on his forehead. The inmate who retrieved the chip won.

But the most outrageous event was rodeo poker. Four inmates sat in metal chairs around a flimsy poker table. According to the rules the last inmate sitting won $500. The wardens let out an angry bull.

Not an inmate moved. The monstrous, red-eyed bull approached the table and sniffed the closest inmate. With a sideways swipe of his head he knocked the inmate to the ground. The inmate’s chair lay bent and contorted beside him as the cloud of dust that had risen dissipated. The inmate crawled away. The other three sat motionless. The bull moved to his left and sniffed the next inmate. The man didn’t move. The crowd was silent. The bull breathed on the man. He didn’t move. With a violent toss of his head the bull hooked his horns under the chair and hurled man and metal into the air. The crowd gasped. For a palpable moment the inmate hung fifteen feet above the ground. He fell with a thud and the bull was on him. Horns rooting after the prisoner, hooves pounding the earth around his body. Dust obscured the scene as the prisoner writhed but could not escape.

Eventually the prisoner was borne out of the arena on a stretcher and the splinters of the table were carried away. The wardens brought out another table. Four more prisoners sat down. As a bull prowled the table, not a prisoner flinched. One by one, the bull removed three of them.

* * *

That night I went out in New Orleans’s French Quarter. But what to do for a Halloween costume? Chap and I went as “bird hunters.” With everything but the shotgun – hat, bird vest, whistle, shells – we went barhopping. Chap loved it. People gave him beads and tried to give him beer. I could scarcely move twenty yards on Bourbon St. without having to stop to let somebody pet my dog. Women especially loved him. Quite a few of them were damn good looking. He just looked right up their skirts then went and peed on a lightpost. Some species have all the luck.

October 31

As I got out of Squatter the woman collapsed on the sidewalk. Her son and daughter caught her. We were at an I-20 rest stop just east of Longview, TX and the elderly woman had been crossing the pavement to the restroom. The son and daughter, both of middle age, carried her back to their car and propped her up in the back seat. They looked alarmed and flustered. An oxygen tube ran to the old woman’s nose. Her skin was pale and her chin drooped near her chest. I ran to the car.

“What’s wrong?” I asked the daughter.

“She has emphysema,” she said. “She just passed out.”

I called 911 on my cell phone and told the dispatcher where we were. I said we needed an ambulance as soon as possible, and to make sure the ambulance carried oxygen. I turned back to the son and daughter.

“I’ve got some medical training,” I told them. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

The woman was 80 years old and needed constant supplementary oxygen. She was traveling with a portable tank and had turned the rate of oxygen feed down because the tank was low. The son had turned it back up and she was recovering. She could talk now. But the tank was very low. The son was considering driving on to his sister’s house in Louisiana where they had another tank. The ambulance is on its way, I told him, and it will have oxygen.

I went through the mental checklists Sue had taught me in Colorado. Circulatory system – no major bleeding, had pulse. Nervous system – awake and aware, no mechanism for spinal injury. Respiratory system – the woman had an airway and was breathing. That she could talk told me she was in mild respiratory distress at worst. Not bad as long as the oxygen held out.

From the son and daughter I took the woman’s sample history because I knew the EMTs would want the information when the ambulance arrived. Symptoms, Allergies, Medications, Past history, Last food and fluids, Events leading up to incident. I wrote it all in my notebook. A couple noteworthy findings – this was among the worst emphysema incidents the son and daughter had seen. Their mother was on several medications, some for her lung condition and some for blood pressure. And she had drunk no fluids since “coffee or tea” at nine in the morning. It was now two in the afternoon. Potential for volume shock, I thought. I took her radial pulse and wrote “pulse: 98” in my notebook. That’s I bit high, I thought, consistent with inadequate oxygenation of tissue. But maybe she’s just anxious about all the commotion. “Potential ASR,” I wrote – Acute Stress Reaction.

When the ambulance arrived I tore the sheet out of my notebook and gave it to an EMT. She smiled. “Look,” she called to her colleague, “this gentleman has taken a sample history and written it down for us.” She beamed. “Thank you,” she said. “I just feel good that we’ve got people out on the road who know what they’re doing,” she said. “Are you an EMT back in Georgia?” They put the elderly woman on a stretcher and gave her oxygen. “No, I’m a WFR,” I said. The son and daughter thanked me profusely. I had not showered in a couple days and was unshaven so I felt a little uncomfortable with all the attention, but the pair didn’t seem concerned. “I think we’ll just take him back to Texas with us,” the daughter said. I felt glowy inside as I drove on to Louisiana.

I think the sample history was helpful, but I think what comforted the son and daughter most was just having someone on scene with a practical agenda, someone who could ask questions and draw conclusions. Someone who draws calmness from a bank of pertinent knowledge. I am proud to have been that person. The desire to help other people is nearly ubiquitous, but often people have no formula by which to assist. The presence of someone with a clear agenda, I think, assures everyone. I’m lucky I could take a course. I’m sure everyone on the road would like to have access to such knowledge. The world is certainly not fair – the opportunities I’ve had for learning are nearly unmatched.

In an hour or so Chap and I will leave this Baton Rouge motel and drive north on US 61. We’ll take a left onto Louisiana 66 and follow it through cypress swamps and oaks draped with Spanish moss until the road deadends at the gates of the Louisiana State Penetentiary – Angola Prison.

Today is Halloween, and at my buddy Ben’s recommendation (see August photos from Alaska) I will go to Angola Prison Rodeo. In this rodeo wardens put criminals, most of whom are sentenced to life, on untamed animals and invite sellout crowds to witness the spectacle. According to Ben’s report many of the prisoners can’t even ride. According to Ben there are as many as six prisoners on bucking horses at one time. According to Ben these prisoners just don’t give a damn. To me this sounds reminiscent of Roman gladiatorial exhibitions. Who cares if the government of Louisiana is filthily corrupt? As long as they strap prisoners to 3,000-pound bulls for fun I don’t care.

I am very excited.

October 29

I stopped Squatter tonight beside a dirt farming road northwest of Celeste, Texas. It’s a beautiful name for a town; you have to give the Texans that much. It even flows well with the name of the state. The smooth, unaffected assonance of the “e” calms the pronouncer. I imagine a privately contented populace, a town composed of people who go about their daily lives in seemingly unremarkable fashion. They farm, sweep, drink, relax, fight and make love like people anywhere but on closer inspection you find a wisps of smiles lurking at the corners of their mouths, for in Celeste lives a different breed of Texans, a breed that does not need the compulsive boasting by which the rest of the state is stereotyped. A quiet people who view showmanship with genial amusement. I have never known a woman named Celeste, but if I did she would have light blue eyes that sparkled with a merriment I scarcely understood. She would laugh without demeaning her object and her feet would barely touch the ground. She would smile at my confusion as I stumbled for words upon meeting her. Maybe tomorrow when I drive into Celeste, Texas tomorrow I will find a jubilant parade led down Main Street by this happy young woman, her head garlanded by a wreath of oak leaves as she reaches into a Folgers can and throws rose petals to laughing little girls.

At any rate, I am enjoying Texas so far. It’s easy to find country music on the radio. The skies are big and there are few parking meters. The nights are enchantingly temperate after the chill of the Bighorns. I write now with the door open and wind blowing through the camper. The farmland in this northeastern part of the state is a bit more crowded than I would like, but then, one can’t stay in Kansas forever. At least I have found no bentonite in Texas, the “Hell Shale” that made navigation of muddy roads in Wyoming, Nebraska and Kansas too dicey for Squatter’s street-tire supported bulk.

I am making lots of friends on the Texas roadways with my slow but aggressive driving and my Kerry-Edwards sticker. Maybe tomorrow I’ll find Crawford on the map and head that way. I also want to purchase a sticker demeaning the University of Texas Longhorns, preferably one that refers to the team as “The Masticators,” a name The Old Man invented. Then I can be sure someone will key my truck.

Citizens of Texas have long boasted of having joined the US by contract, unlike any other state, and for this reason John Steinbeck once formed an organization entitled “Friends for Texan Secession.” Although the club did little but socialize, and although all of the members of which I am aware – meaning Steinbeck – are dead, I have declared myself an honorary member. But my membership is mostly symbolic. I confess here that I think I’m coming around to this state.

Texas, I’m sure, is relieved to know it has my support.

* * *

I just had to discipline Chap for disobeying the “stay” command, a command he has executed to perfection for several weeks now. He damn sure knows what it means, but he kept jumping out of the camper after orders to the contrary. Each time he disobeyed I picked him up and threw him back inside with a harsh verbal reprimand – “what the f___ do you think you’re doing?!?” – which would be light punishment for most dogs. Then I’d walk away to test him, and four times he stepped back out. I don’t know what happened to the dog. He and I have been in sinc recently. Maybe it was the full moon or the impending thunderstorm, but I feel like hell for punishing him. I know I was right, but somehow it’s a poor consolation.

The storm is here now and is raising hell. Chap is cowering under the table, whether from the storm or my perceived wrath I’m not sure. Tonight Mother Nature is flexing her biceps. The rain lashes the camper like a thousand angry teamsters with a sound so furious that Chap would have to shout for me to hear him. The bass of thunderclaps carries through the machine-gun like pelting. The wind rocks the truck on its chassis, side to side, front to back with such ease that I worry we might be in for a tornado. There wouldn’t be much I could do about it. In the last tornado story I heard a funnel cloud carried Dorothy and Todo from Kansas to a strange land. Maybe this tornado is the return ticket she never used – maybe it will take Chap and back to Kansas. Who knows? But I’m being melodramatic. There is no tornado. This is a pretty impressive thunderstorm, though. It is turning out to be, as Willie Nelson says in his appearance in Larry McMurtry’s Texasville, “a real turd floater.” As long as it’s not a camper floater I guess we’ll be alright.

October 26

I had forgotten how much I loved Kansas.

It’s as though the people feel obligated to compensate for the state’s lack of tourist attractions. Kansas is flat. It has no mountains, no coastlines, no exotic wildlife, no large lakes, no cities of international import and no real history save that of Conestoga wagons trying to get someplace else. Even Wyatt Earp, after whom Dodge City’s “Wyatt Earp Boulevard” is named, earned his real fame from the OK Corral gunfight in Tombstone, Arizona. When one considers the United States, nothing catapults Kansas to prominence. Kansas produces some oil, but not as much as Texas. Kansas produces lots of corn, but not as much as Nebraska. Kansas has power-generating windmills, but not as many as North Dakota. Kansas’s only claim to national prominence was The Wizard of Oz, and, frankly, nobody likes Dorothy anymore.

But I love Kansas. I enjoy being here. The state produces character like the ocean’s surface produces waves.

It was in Kansas that I met Melford Rinkin, the retired pipeworker who came out in soiled overalls to meet me when I stopped to pitch a beer can into his pile of aluminum cans. He told me about the prices scrap aluminum was fetching in Amarillo since China was buying the metal “because the ‘Lympics are going to be there in four years.” He gave me kind but incomprehensible directions to where I might find prairie chickens, and he complimented me on Chap, saying “I didn’t know Brittanies had them squared-off noses. ‘Merican Brittany, you say?”

It was in Kansas that two girls, aged seventeen and eight, rode out on horses to greet me as I cooked my breakfast couscous (see photo). I had spent the night beside the dirt lane that passed their house. For an hour and a half they sat on their horses and told me all about their lives as I stood with a skillet in my hand, charmed, and asked them questions. Christy, the seventeen year old, was supposed to look after Chelsea while they were out riding. Chelsea had been riding since she could remember and seemed to regard her horse as a generally reliable tool that required occasional discipline. The horse was twice as tall as she was, but she rode bareback. “Mom told us to be back by nine thirty,” Christy said. “But we might be able to stay a little longer.” Chelsea slapped a horsefly on her horse’s neck and the insect tumbled to the dirt.

It was in Kansas that the waitress of El Leon Mexican Restaurant – “Best Mexican food in town and some American” – stopped and helped me translate my order for three enchiladas into Spanish. It was in Kansas that I found the downtown streets of Dodge City, Sublette and Ness City paved with brick. It was in Kansas that I watched two pickup trucks going in opposite directions on a dirt road stop, back up so that the drivers could chat, part so that a third pickup could pass, then come together again with such practiced precision that they might have been synchronized swimmers. It was in Kansas that, at five p.m. on a Monday, an AM radio deejay announced gleefully, “I hope you had a nice weekend. If you didn’t, it’s time to start drinking!” It was in Kansas that I found the yellow painted centerline replaced with rubber tabs glued to the asphalt that, when run over, sounded like cards being shuffled or a goat breaking wind, depending on your mindset.

Today Chap and I stopped at Cedar Bluff Reservoir for a bath (see photo). We drove up to the lake’s sandy shore, then I stripped down until the only article of clothing he and I had between us was his collar. We sprinted into the lake. Chap chased ducks while I bathed. After a game of aquatic fetch we raced up and down the beach to dry off. When we got back in the truck I drove barefoot so the sand could fall off my feet before I put shoes on again. The rubber of the pedals felt good under my toes. To the west the sun was setting. It produced that wide swath of western orange that you can see when the land is flat enough to make it visible.

October 25

Chap was a real pain in the ass tonight. I parked the truck by a sorghum field in southwestern Kansas and, though it was dark, let him out to run around. He promptly ran off. I called for him, but he did not return. No big deal, I thought. This has happened before. He always comes back in twenty minutes or so.

I was about to light my pipe and do a little reading on this surprisingly mild high plains evening when I heard the familiar jingle of Chap’s collar. He was limping and I ran to him. Just sandspurs in his paws, I discovered. As I removed them I noticed that Chap reeked. My hands stunk from handling him. He had found a carcass in the sorghum and had perfumed himself, in the manner that dogs will, with the enthusiasm of a legendary French whore. He had rolled in the mess.

I considered making Chap sleep outside. But the temperature could drop, and the forecast called for rain. Maybe he could spend the night in the cab. But the passenger’s seat would stink for weeks. There was no lake or stream nearby in which to bathe him, and anyway I didn’t want him to soak the inside of the camper. Reluctantly I opened the door and loaded Chap into the rear of Squatter.

He stank. I mean it was unbearable. I filled a pitcher with water and grabbed my dog shampoo, then carried Stinky Chap to the dirt road to bathe him.

Chap loves water. He will gladly retrieve anything you toss into a lake. Chap loves to be petted. Every morning he whines until I scratch his head. He loves new smells. He often rides with his nose out the window. But when you combine the three, Chap rebels. He detests baths. He shrank from the water I poured over him and tried to creep away as I sought to replace the perfume he had taken such pains to acquire with the scent I preferred. Chap was offended. In his view, he’s the one with the sensitive nose. I was an olfactory buffoon. I affected an air of stern indifference. “Chap,” I told him, “I outrank you on the food chain and don’t give a damn if you’re pissed off. So you might as well just stand there and quit complaining.” He glared at me and stood still.

After the bath I toweled him off and loaded him into the camper again. He gave himself an extra shake then turned around to face me. His was wagging his tail. I had forgotten that only humans bore grudges.