December 11, 2001

New York, New York

            As I approached Ground Zero, a guard at the entrance to the site pointed to my bike loaded down with gear and asked, "are you running away from home?"  I laughed and answered yes; yes, I was indeed running away from home.

            I walked up to the chain link fence surrounding the site of the destroyed Twin Towers.  It had just stopped drizzling and it was starting to get dark.  There weren't many people here, so I didn't have to wait too long for a chance to peer through a hole that had been cut in the plastic covering the fence to allow visitors visual access to this scene of calamity.

            If not for the twisted, melted remains of the building's frame, I would have thought I was looking at any other site in the city where an old, decrepit structure had been razed to make way for new construction.  Yet here was the spot where wholesale tragedy had taken place just two months earlier.  Many unaccounted for victims still lay entombed under the debris.

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Sideswiped in North Carolina

      I left Prospect Hill, North Carolina on the morning of December 21, 2001--the winter solstice and also my 42^nd birthday.  The day was starting out crisp and frosty as I made my way into what I consider the Deep South.  The southern sun soon was shining down from a clear blue sky; there wasn’t much wind, and all this made for a great day of riding.  The road I was on only added to the pleasure.  North Carolina’s Highway 49 is a divided 4 lane road with nice wide shoulders that rolls through fragrant (even in winter) pine woods.  It is designated as a bike-friendly road and indeed it was, until the afternoon rush-hour commute began at around 4:00 p.m.

      I had stopped for a short break at 3 o’clock.  I sat on the guardrail by the side of the road to drink some water and eat some raisins and fig bars.  I tried calling my cousin Kevin back home in Massachusetts to let him know that I’d actually taken off on the big adventure I’d told him I was planning a few months earlier.  I knew he’d be excited, since he had been a semi-pro road racer and was still an avid cyclist.  But no one was home so I saddled up and hit the road again.  I then noticed that at this point on Route 49 the nice wide paved shoulders had disappeared and just a few inches of bumpy pavement lay between the white line on the road’s edge and the grass off to the side.  I also noticed that traffic was starting to get rather heavy now and what’s more, I was riding into the setting sun.  It was colder now, too, and I had to stop to add another layer of clothing.  Soon it would be dark.  I figured it was time I started scouting out a good spot to bed down for the night.  I was certainly tired enough--I’d been pushing myself pretty hard the last few days since my hiatus in Maryland.  I had tallied up about 80 miles a day for the last four days.  But I had wanted to give myself a nice birthday present by completing a hundred-mile day, something I hadn’t done since day one of this trip.  That meant I still had another 20 miles to go.  It’d be dark by the time I got that much further.  Maybe I could just go another five or ten miles and that would satisfy my greed for mileage.

      All the while I was ruminating over such matters the increasingly denser traffic whizzed by at 50 miles per hour.  I’d gotten used to being in such close contact with these glass and metal monsters; they were just one more element to endure, like the wind and the rain, and I embraced the challenge.  The heavy traffic didn’t unnerve me at all anymore.

      Then, out of nowhere I felt a sudden whoosh of wind on my left.  I turned to look, but all I saw was a wall of white.  I felt myself going down to the grass on the right.  Everything happened so fast—it was over before it even fully registered in my mind what had happened.  A quick thought went through my head as I went down: “I can’t die on my birthday—that ain’t right.”  And as I lay on the grass looking at my bent handlebars, I thought, “Oh no, the bike’s ruined!  The trip’s over already!  Shit!!”

      I’d been sideswiped by a feed grain truck.  I was very lucky.  The truck had made contact with only the top outer edge of my left pannier.  It had sliced it open and some of its contents had spilled out onto the roadway.  A flurry of cars sped by and honked their displeasure at me.  The rear wheel of my bike was halfway in the right hand lane of the road and several cars swerved to avoid it.  More honks of disapproval.  No one slowed down except the truck which had sideswiped me and I watched as he pulled over up ahead onto the grass shoulder.  I quickly pulled my bike out of further harm’s way and when there was a break in the busy traffic I stepped into the road to retrieve the few  articles from my pannier which were strewn about in a small radius on the road.  Miraculously, nothing had been damaged, despite the dozen or so cars which had driven by in the right hand lane.  My CD player and aluminum mess kit were intact.  There were a few items of clothing and a couple of books fluttering in the light breeze.  I gathered everything up and tossed it all onto the grass

     The next onslaught of traffic was rapidly approaching and I hobbled onto the grass and to safety.  I had pulled a hamstring muscle; that and a blood blister on my thumb were my only injuries.  The bike was fine, except for the handlebars, which I could bend back into shape, and the torn pannier, which could easily be mended with duct tape.  Cars sped by and honked for me to get the hell out of the way.  Nice people.  I guess I was impeding their mad rush from their workplace cubicles to their cozy homes and nightly regimen of television.  So sorry about that folks, I didn’t mean to interfere with your rat race.  I’m fine, though, don’t you worry your silly little heads about me.

      Meanwhile, the driver who’d sideswiped me had parked his truck on the shoulder and was now approaching me.  I waved to him to let him know that I was alive and in one piece.  Then I saw him stumble and fall to his knees.  He clutched his chest.  He was a short, heavyset man.  Good Lord, I thought, he’s having a heart attack.  But then he got up and continued in my direction.

      When he was within earshot he exclaimed, “I thought I’d killed ya!  Are you okay?!  Man, I’m really sorry, I never even seen ya!  Y’okay?!”  He was quite shaken—his southern accent was half drawl, half panic-stricken tremolo.

      I told him that I was alright, just a couple of scratches, no harm done.  I lifted my bike up and started to put the spilled contents back in the pannier.  He came closer and I could see his hands still shaking.  Again he asked if I was okay.  I assured him I was but I wasn’t too sure he was okay.  I was afraid he’d collapse right there on the grass and die on me.  I held the bike by the handlebars—in addition to being bent they were no longer pointing straight ahead; I’d have to loosen the headset and realign them if I wanted to be able to ride the bike any further.

      The truck driver said he’d give me a ride into Richfield, which was another ten miles down the road.  He explained that he wasn’t supposed to pick up passengers, but since he felt responsible for what happened, it was the least he could do.  I took him up on the offer.  We walked toward the truck.  Again he expressed his sorry at nearly killing me.  “Man oh man, I never even seen ya—the sun was in my eyes…I thought you was dead, man.”

      “I should have gone by my instincts,” I told him.  “I knew the traffic was getting a little too heavy for my comfort.”  I figured it would help him if I shouldered some of the blame.

      As we went down the road toward Richfield, he explained the reason he was unable to see me.  He worked for a hauling company, driving these open-topped feed trucks.  He was done for the day, or so he thought, when his boss told him he had to bring this empty truck to a depot in Charlotte.  The previous driver hadn’t cleaned the windshield, as was his duty, and he was tired and just wanted to get the last run over with so he could go home.  He should have cleaned the windshield anyway, even though it wasn’t technically his responsibility.  Driving into the sun with a dusty windshield caused blinding glare, but as long as he kept his eyes on the vehicle in front of him, he figured he’d be fine.

      “Then I heard a noise, looked in my mirror, and saw you lying in the grass…man, I was sure I’d killt ya.”  As he said this his trembling right hand fumbled with a pack of cigarettes.  He offered me one.  I declined.  I told him I used to smoke and if ever there was a time I should restart the habit, now would be the time, but I thought I would pass on that.

      He dropped me off at a gas station/convenience store in Richfield.  Before he took off for Charlotte, I gave him the address for the website I’d set up for my ride.  I had told him that I planned to ride clear across the country and like most people I encountered, he was amazed; he had never heard of anyone doing such a thing and he said I was either Superman or crazy.  I told him I was neither—lots of people have done this before me.  In fact, I told him that the first person to do a cross-country ride on a bicycle did it in 1900, the golden age of the bicycle, between the days of stagecoaches and the first horseless buggies, when there weren’t even roads going all the way across, just big muddy ruts.  I didn’t know if this were true, I’d read it in a book, but it sure sounded interesting.

      We said our goodbyes and once again I assured him I was fine.  He handed me a ten dollar bill.  “Here, it ain’t much, but I figure I should give you something for any damage I caused.”  I told him he didn’t have to do that, but he insisted.  Then he took off, but not before stopping by the pumps and cleaning his windshield.

      To be honest, I was never so excited in my life.  I’d come within inches of being killed and it made me feel so alive—I was taking part in this world for once, taking risks that could actually end it all for me and it felt beautiful.  I had to tell someone about this; I had to share this new joy for living, this palpable zest for life which I had acquired in one terrifying heartbeat.

      I called my youngest sister back in Massachusetts to give her the good news about my newfound appreciation for life and my growing sense of meaning and purpose.  But she wasn’t home, so I chatted with her husband for a few minutes.  I told him about my brush with death and how pumped it had me feel.  I assured him, though, that I would be more careful from then on and would purchase a rear-view mirror at the first opportunity.

      I found a good spot where I could hide myself under some trees on the edge of a state park in Richfield, set up my tent, ate some grub, and then crawled into my sleeping bag.  I was still too excited to sleep and because I hadn’t ridden enough miles to exhaust myself to the point where I would plummet into a deep sleep as soon as I closed my eyes, I just lay there for a few minutes, reliving in my mind that whoosh of air, the flash of white, the individual blades of grass in stark green relief as my face crashed toward them.  I felt a sense of reception of the Universe like I had never felt before.  I got out of the tent and stood up.  I looked up into the black sky.  A billion points of light streamed down towards me and I imagined that one of those points was my true home, a place where my internal being could find total compatibility with external reality.

      Then I felt a sense of loneliness that was so profound I wanted to cry.  This day, my birthday, had been the happiest, yet scariest day of my life.  I’d received the greatest gift ever, a sense that my existence had some meaning, if only a potential meaning at the moment—at least there seemed to be a direction I could point myself in—and I had to talk to someone who could understand.  So I called my friend Jason back in Haydenville.  He was perhaps the number one fan of the ‘Big Bob’s Bike-O-Rama’ fan club and he might understand what I was going through.

      It wasn’t too late and Jason was still up.  I told him about my incident and he agreed that I was lucky and told me to be careful—I had to make it back to Massachusetts in one piece, because he had plenty of work for me and there were lots of people who wanted to see me again.  “Don’t dilly-dally,” he would tell me often throughout my trip, “don’t stop somewhere and disappear on us,” he would plead.  He burst my bubble and brought me back down to planet Earth where I had to admit to myself that, yes, though I may be riding along on a euphoric high-speed locomotive now, eventually the ride would be over and I would disembark back at the ramshackle station with the creaking sign swinging out front that read “Hometown, U.S.A.”, and I would rejoin my fellows and be just another slob doing what he had to do to get through another day, satisfying my hunger and slaking my thirst.  I was flesh and blood--mortal, frail, and wrought with foibles--not, as I wished to be, a compact and dense bundle of pure spiritual energy, unconstrained by time and space.  Yet, I knew, even if no one else did, that a spirit seed had found purchase in me today, had quickly germinated, and was growing, even as I spoke of mundane matters with my friend.

      So I didn’t lay a spiritual rebirth trip on my friend, not wanting to give him undue cause for concern about my sanity.  Instead I told him how some of the hunters and other rugged outdoorsmen and working-class heroes I had met in the South had told me they admired what I was doing.  They told me that they didn’t think they would have the courage, strength, or endurance to do what I was doing even if they could find the time.  And there I’d been nervous about how people in the South would receive me, a goofy Northerner on a bicycle.  I knew what this was all about.  I was out to prove, not just to myself, but to some of the men in my life, Jason included, for he was a lumberjack among other trades, that I was a real man, too, not just some Casper Milquetoast or Walter Mitty,  full of dreams and fancy words and hot air.  I could be as rough and tough as any of them.  I could take on tasks that were dangerous and difficult, without complaint and without shedding tears, just sweat and blood.  I had just fought a truck and I had won.  I was so proud of myself.  It was obvious I had a big complex that I was trying to untangle.

[	Current Location	|	hundreds of feet above muddy water	]
[	Current Mood	|	scared	]
[	Current Music	|	10,000 Maniacs	]

January 8, 2002

Greenville, Mississippi

            I learned a concrete fact about the North American continent when I first set out to cross it on my bicycle.  North America is not as some might believe, one contiguous landmass.  It is more like a group of islands connected here and there by bridges.  And most of those bridges were built after the invention of the internal combustion engine and the motorized vehicles powered by such engines.  These bridges were primarily designed to carry cars, buses, and trucks from one side of a river to the other and not people on foot, bicycles, or mule train.  Of course, in cities bisected by a river, you will often find sidewalks on some of the bridges, allowing pedestrians and cyclists to get across the river and to remain as dry as their more fortunate motorized brethren.  But invariably the motorist, who is generally a bigger spender, is catered to first and the interstate and its enormous restricted access bridges get top priority in our fast-paced motorized society.  So if you're on a bicycle, you can either take along an inflatable raft to get yourself and your bike across the major rivers...or you can plan your route accordingly, ahead of time, so that when you arrive at the river you will be able to cross it on a bridge built to accommodate both motor traffic and human-powered traffic.

            I did neither of those things.  When I started planning my trip a few months before I left, I plotted a line on the map from western Massachusetts to southern California which ran through New York, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada.  I began the laborious and tedious task of choosing roads on which to travel using official state highway maps and the Internet.  When I saw that this process was going to take longer than the actual trip, I decided to wing it.  I would just head out and plan my route as I went.

            Then I decided to do my little ride in the winter instead of the spring and I had to alter my general route accordingly.  I would make a beeline from Haydenville, Massachusetts to Athens, Georgia and then proceed westward from there.  I had to get as far south as quickly as I could before winter kicked in.  I would hug the southern edge of the U.S. to stay somewhat warm.  (Little did I know that I would encounter more wintery conditions in Alabama and Texas than my family and friends back in New England would during that non-Winter of 2001/2002.)

            I knew that I'd have to cross the Mississippi, "The Great River Road", eventually, and that bridges across it were few and far between, but my attitude was: "I'll cross that bridge when I get to it."  There is only one way to make a land crossing of this continent without going over the Mississippi River and that is to go by way of northern Minnesota, north of Lake Itasca, the source of the Mississippi River.  I wasn't going to go that route--I was on a bicycle, not a dog sled.
            I finally met up with "The Great River Road" in Greenville, Mississippi.  I had been following US82 all across Mississippi and I really enjoyed that road--it was well maintained; it had wide shoulders; the terrain was pleasant and the scenery was easy on the eye.  That road became a good friend of mine and I put all my trust and confidence in it and knew that it would take good care of me.  And now this was where that friend had led a willing fool such as myself to: the Benjamin G. Humphreys Bridge.  I took one look at that evil monster of a bridge and I knew that US82, my fair-weather friend, had betrayed me.  My heart sank into disappointment and dread.          
           I deeply regretted not researching this small detail of major river crossings in more depth back in the comfort and convenience of home, where the magic of the Internet would have yielded to me the necessary information to make a wiser choice on where precisely to cross this river.  The bridge I had chosen, almost arbitrarily, was clearly not one I'd be able to ride on and live to tell the tale.  I stared up at it and my jaw dropped.  I'm dead meat, I thought, what an utter fool I am.  It was a high narrow bridge, built in 1940, with two lanes for 70 mph traffic--half of it tractor-trailers.  There was no sidewalk--just an 18-inch wide metal beam on each side about two or three feet above the curb.  There was absolutely no way I'd be able to navigate this enormous piece of steel and concrete treachery.  There were no signs prohibiting pedestrian or bicycle traffic on the bridge, but none were needed--any fool who attempted to mount this bridge probably wasn't cut out for life on this planet to begin with.

            
             I couldn't even see the bridge in its entirety.  A good half mile or more of it was an elevated approach way that gradually rose and disappeared around the bend.  It was a couple hundred feet above the ground and still rising and I couldn't even see the river yet.  Traffic was heavy, noisy, and non-stop in both directions.
            Now what the fudge am I going to do?  I sat down by the bridge abutment and ate an apple while I considered my options.  It was at least 50 miles north or south to the other closest bridges.  Even if I had the common sense or patience to alter my course now, what guarantee would I have that I'd not encounter a similar or worse (were that possible) situation at another point of crossing?  I could stick out my thumb and hope someone in a pickup truck would come along and give me a lift.  For some reason I quickly dismissed this idea.  Pride?  Fear?  Shyness?  No--just plain stupidity and recklessness.
            I tossed the apple core into the bushes and said, "Screw it!  I'm going for it!  Carpe diem!  Ee-ay pro ay-oh and all that crap!"  I often whistled in the dark and now I was whistling into the wind of the passing metal hordes.  The wind carried away my plaintive tones...none heard them.  I stood up, grabbed my bike by the handlebars and thought, "You only live once, they say, and now I'm gonna find out if it's true." 

(To be continued...Will our dauntless hero tread where angels don't even know about?!  Was it environmentally unsound of him to toss his garbage like that into the bushes or was he just making some sort of profound gesture?  Does that terrifying bridge actually go all the way across into Arkansas, or was construction halted halfway because of the war effort?  For the answers to these and many other important questions about life that you didn't even know you had, check back here as often as possible...heck, quit your job, abandon your family, and lose yourself in the splendid tales I spin...you won't regret it, I absolutely, positively, whole-heartedly guaran-freakin-tee it!)

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The Bridge of Terror – Part Two

I walked my bike around to the other side of the guardrail and onto the shoulder of my turncoat highway, US82, up to where the shoulder ended at the bridge abutment.  I bid farewell to the road, “So long, old buddy, it’s been nice knowin’ ya, even if you did let me down when I needed you most.”  I waited for a small break in the almost constant deluge of speeding vehicles, then mounted the narrow metal beam that ran along the foot of the bridge’s railing.  I felt like a convicted sailor walking the plank, a very, very long plank, to my grisly, watery death.  Instead of shark’s teeth tearing me to shreds, the grille of a Mac truck would have that honor.  I was on the left side of the bridge—I wanted to face my executioner head on and not be hit from behind like some victim of an anonymous Mafia hit man—this wasn’t business, it was personal.

I wanted to savor every last moment of my life, a life in which, prior to this trip, I had wasted so much precious time complaining about how tedious and dull and drawn-out it had become; how it had turned so painful and tiring and sour.  But now I could see how really short it had been and that I had no one to blame but myself for not appreciating the sweetness that abounded all around me.  And this, my final day of existence was such an exquisite one—the sky was deep blue and cloudless, the very symbol of infinite hope for all those other lucky people who would still be alive after I was gone and forgotten…and the air was so mild and…yes—sweet!  Oh, the sweetness!  I gulped down gallons of that fragrant air, it was as flavorful and satisfying as a condemned man’s last meal could be.
           Riding across Mississippi had been such a fulfilling and enriching experience.  I’d been through unspoiled nature preserves, small towns with big-hearted people, abysmally poor villages where the people had treated me with such kindness and respect despite their lifelong hardships.  Any stereotypes a Yankee like me had owned about Southerners had been smashed.  I had nothing but love in my heart for these hard-working people who’d made such a contribution to the nation’s wealth and then been left behind in the wake of a shifting economic paradigm.

       

                 Outside Kosciusko, a father and son came running down their long gravel driveway toward me, yelling, “Hey!  Hey there!  Wait!  Wait a minute!  C’mere!”  They were grinning from ear to ear, their faces and coveralls covered with grease.  They’d been in their garage working on an engine.
           “Are you riding the Trace?” the father inquired.  His son remained silent throughout the whole encounter, he just grinned, his large white teeth illuminating his besmirched, boyish face.
          “The what?” I asked.
          “The Natchez Trace,” he replied.  “Me and my boy here rode it all the way from here to Nashville on our motorcycles just this past summer.  And we saw lots of other folks just like you ridin’ the Trace on their bicycles.  My boy was lookin’ out the window and he said to me, ‘Hey, there’s another one o’ them guys on his bike…he must’a got lost!’  That’s why we come runnin’ out to see ya.  Man, riding the Trace was the most fun we ever had.  But I gotta say, I don’t know if we’d think it was so much fun if we had to do it on bicycles.  It’s a long way!  We ride around on our mountain bikes, too, but I can’t imagine ridin’ all that way on a bike like you are.”

            I told him that this was the first I had heard of the Natchez Trace.  Then when I told them that I had ridden down from Massachusetts and was headed for California, they looked at me in disbelief.

            “Are you shittin’ me?” the father asked.  “That’s incredible!”

            Then I spent another five minutes or so answering all their questions.  They were the same questions that other people curious about my little ride had peppered me with along the way and I gave the same practiced replies.

            “Scared of wild animals in the woods?”

            “No.”

            “Scared of psycho serial killers on the road?”

            “Ain’t seen none yet.”

            “What do you do for food?  Where do you sleep?  Aren’t you exhausted?”

            “Stop at grocery stores, just like anyone else.  Sometimes in briar patches, sometimes in pine groves.  No, I feel great…haven’t had time to be tired.”

            The father said that if his old lady were home he’d have her fix me a big meal right then and there and if I wanted I could sleep indoors for a change, seeing as how it was fixin’ to rain.  I expressed my appreciation for the offer, but declined.  I was still a rather shy person and though I enjoyed getting the attention I was for what I was doing, I didn’t feel comfortable drawing any closer to people except to have small conversations like this en route.

            I walked along the beam on the bridge’s edge, slowly placing one foot in front of the other, my left hand tightly gripping the railing and my right hand pulling along the heavy, unwieldy bike to my right rear.  There was no margin for error.  I imagined myself on a balance beam.  I thought of Olga Korbut and wished I had her grace, agility, and self-confidence.  I thought of the father and son in Kosciusko and wished I had taken them up on their offer…I thought of all the other people I’d met along the way who’d been curious about me and I wished I had shown them me instead of a wall.  I thought of Suzi and the happy dinner we’d had two nights before I left, when she gave me a little stuffed kitty to take along—it was pinned to my handlebar bag and I glanced down at it, then I thought of the warm good-by hug, the smooth, soft skin of her sweet face against mine in the chilly December night air. 

Tears welled up in my eyes as I looked back up just in time—WHOOOOOOOOOSH!  The first tractor trailer sped by inches from my face.  The serene image of my face pressed against Suzi’s was supplanted by the violent image of a truck’s side-view mirror ripping off my face.  The noise of the traffic abruptly returned as I woke from my reverie.  I was ready when the next truck went by and I breathed in, made myself as thin as possible and hugged the railing.  My heart pounded.  I really didn’t want to die.  Not if I couldn’t be there when they read the eulogy and so find out that I hadn’t been such a bad guy after all, just a hopeless fool.  WHOOOOOSH!  RRRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNHHHHH!  I was totally alert now.  My universe consisted entirely of the beam on which I trod and the trucks which were trying to kill me.  I could do this, I tried to convince myself…slow and steady wins the race.  Just stay focused.  Concentrate.  But after ten minutes and a couple dozen trucks, this torture was staring to do me in.  I’d been so tense that my leg and arm muscles were starting to cramp up.  My left hand had become numb and I was worried—no, worried is not the word—I was scared shitless that my grip on the rail would loosen and I’d fall into the roadway and it’d all be over posthaste.  What’s more, I’d probably cause a pileup on the bridge and be responsible for other casualties.

I took a break for a couple of minutes until feeling returned to my hand and my muscles weren’t cramped.  The traffic lightened somewhat and I looked around.  I was a hundred feet above the ground.  It looked like marshland down below.  Where was the Mississippi River?  Ahead the bridge still rose and bent to the right and disappeared into nothingness.  Again my mind began to wander.  Now I thought of Sandra.  She had been showing much interest and enthusiasm for my ride.  Through her e-mails and now, in the last week, phone calls, she had seemed to me to become not just a passive observer in my adventure, but an active participant.  She had shared some of herself with me.  Her dream was to get a sled and a team of dogs and race in the Iditarod.  She was a career woman in the big city, but she loved being outdoors, summer, spring, winter, and fall.  She swam laps in the pool daily at the college where she worked and she read voraciously.  She was unlike most women I knew—she had a mind and a body.  We hadn’t spoken of spiritual matters, but her zest was proof that she had a spirit, perhaps a great one.  Still, I couldn’t picture her face now, a month after we had met at Ground Zero.  I’d been so bashful and mostly stared at the ground while we spoke.  All I remembered was that she was about 5”9” and wore a plaid woolen coat.  I really wished I had studied that face.  I’d have something to go with that chirpy Noo Yahk-accented  voice and I could hold that in my mind as I prepared to die.  I’d begun to entertain the thought that my first order of business when I returned East after this trip would be to visit her and give a first-hand, detailed account of everything I’d experienced.  Maybe that could be the basis on which something further could develop.  I looked down at the handlebar bag with the furry kitten pinned to it.  Inside was the cell-phone.  Maybe I could call her now, if I had coverage out in this rural area, and she could talk me out of this mess, like a cop talking down a jumper or a shrink talking someone down someone from a bad acid trip.  She was a mathematics professor, a very rational person and she’d probably suggest what I’d been considering just then—“Why don’t you just turn around and get down off that bridge before you get any further?”  No, too tricky.  The bike was too cumbersome, it’d probably fall into the roadway.  I’d also thought of just heaving it over the railing and let it fall a hundred feet.  Then I could descend the beam to safety.  The bike would be ruined beyond repair, no doubt, but I’d be able to retrieve my belongings from it, and I’d still be alive.

I started to get a pounding headache.  I wanted to cry.  How could I be such an idiot?  I hated myself…I deserved this horrible death I’d signed up for.  Oh well.  I started forward again.  One foot carefully planted in front of the other.  I thought of the Three Stooges: “Inch by inch, step by step…”  I started laughing like a lunatic.  I let out howls at the trucks as they careered toward me.  “Come and get me losers!  I’m all yours if you can catch me!  Wa-hoooooooooooooo!”

So, does our hero finally reached Arkansas, or is his final destination a locked psych ward or a cold, unmarked hole in the ground?  Stay tuned, and ye shall surely find out.

The Bridge of Terror – Part Four

          After having made my way painstakingly, one foot in front of another like a tightrope walker, along this narrow beam, along this bridge, my Waterloo over the muddy river, along what seemed like ten miles of endless suspended agony, I finally cleared the bend in the bridge...only to find that the bridge proper was just beginning. Aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgh! Vile curses rose from my lungs as my heart sank. Bile boiled in the pit of my gut. I saw in front of me the bridge rise another fifty feet to where it met with an enormous box truss.  This bridge was of the cantilever design. This design is an improvement on the earliest bridge known to man, the beam bridge. A primitive example of a beam bridge is a log thrown across a stream. The banks on each side of the stream provide support. As a person walks over the log, the force of his or her weight is transferred horizontally through the log to one or both banks which counters this force and keeps the person dry. If the person is too heavy or the log too weak, the force equations don't compute and the hapless crosser gets wet--or worse, gets eaten by crocodiles or piranhas. 
           Since there are no mile-long logs to throw out over very wide waterways and not always enough money in the state's coffers to build nice suspension bridges, the cantilever bridge design provides a suitable compromise. Cement pilings and steel towers are erected in the middle of the river, upon which is fastened a box truss with a roadway set in its bottom. This box serves as an artificial riverbank against which beam bridges from either of the real banks can lean.  Bridge designers liken the beams which rest against the box truss of a cantilever bridge to diving boards. Perhaps when you have been in car, or especially a heavy truck, you could feel a bit of a bounce when you crossed from the approach way onto the truss section. What you felt was the switchover from your load's weight being transferred to the riverbank to being transferred straight down into the river bed by way of the towers and pilings under the box truss. You have just 'dived' halfway across the river.

           I'd been feeling optimistic until now, thinking my ordeal was nearly over. I'd even begun to chide myself for being so melodramatic about my plight and felt a small measure of guilt and shame for indulging in puerile fantasies about the eulogies soon to be read over me--oh, the broken hearts grieving for my short, tragic, abysmal life...Ha! What a punk, what a schmutz I'd been.

                                    

            My bubble had burst and grim reality had me by the short hairs again. I simply was never going to make it down from this bridge! I wished I really were at the end of a long diving board. I'd bounce a few times, then spring off, arms spread wide in a graceful, arching swan dive into the black void that ran under the cocoa waters below.  New worries crowded my mind: Would the metal beam which I'd walked along so far still be there on the box truss?  Would there still be a railing to cling to, or would I have to hang onto the I-beams which made up the truss sections?

As I gained altitude and neared the box truss I began to breathe easier. I could see the other side of the river now and I could see that the elevated roadway leading down to the highway in Arkansas was not as long as the roadway leading from the Mississippi side. I was more than halfway home! Woo-hoo! Furthermore, I could see that the railing continued along through the box truss and that there was actually something akin to a narrow sidewalk instead of a crazy balance beam on which to tread.  I could even sit down for a break and have a snack if my stomach could handle it.

The traffic was light now--I hadn't had to flinch away from a semi for several minutes. Then, in the eastbound lane, a young man in a pickup truck slowed to a stop and yelled over to me, "Throw your bike in the back and I'll give you a lift!" At first, I thought, "Cool...groovy." But I could see an eastbound convoy of 18-wheelers ascending the bridge and I had no idea what was coming up behind my would-be rescuer at 70 miles per hour--probably a tour bus. I knew I'd never be able to get down off the beam with my bike, cross the eastbound lane, and lug my heavy bulk of a bike and gear onto the back of his truck before traffic smashed into us from two directions.

"No, keep going, man! It's too dangerous! You'll get rear-ended!" I warned him.
            "You sure?" the good Samaritan asked.

            "Yes! Go! Go!!" I waved him off and reluctantly he sped away. I got myself in this mess and I'll get myself out of it.  I didn't want to drag innocent bystanders into my private world of self-inflicted terror.

In a few more minutes, I was in the box truss and I leaned my bike against the railing, squatted down on my haunches and squeezed my eyes shut. I wanted to lie down and take a nap. I felt dizzy and light-headed, so I took out a bologna sandwich and another apple and ate. That did the trick. My heart rate was back to normal, my anxiety was gone...I even felt happy. My future was so bright! I had engaged the enemy successfully so far, just little old me against a whole wide world of metal, meat-eating monsters. I felt stronger, more capable and self-confident than ever. Heights had always been my biggest phobia and I'd always been nervous going over bridges, even in a car. I had grabbed the bull by the horns and hadn't yet been bucked. If I could do this, the rest of my little ride would be a cakewalk, I self-prophesied.

I stood up, slapped my hands onto bike and railing and continued on my merry way.  The occasional big rig roared by trying unsuccessfully to menace me.  I felt new energy coursing through my limbs, so I picked up the pace a little.  Let’s get this B.S. over with, I said to myself.

I allowed my mind to wander some more.  Now that I was in Arkansas, I did some final reminiscing about Mississippi.

I’d seen a lot of road kill on this trip, especially once I got down South.  Dogs and cats.  Rabbits and squirrels.  Pigs, horses, cows…some of the poor critters I didn’t even know what they’d been, all that was left was a pile of bones and tufts of dirty fur.  And birds—birds that flew low when they should’ve been flying high.  But the strangest road kill I saw was in the Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge near Starkville.  On a peaceful dirt and gravel road that ran through the refuge I came upon about a dozen birds, brown birds about the size of blue jays and of a species with which I wasn’t familiar, all dead and lying in a four foot radius in the road.  I saw no evidence of foul play, no bird shot, all of their feathers intact; they didn’t look happy or sad, just dead.  Did they fly through a cloud of poisonous gas?  I wondered still what could have befallen those guys.  Maybe someone was hiding in the woods playing tricks on me…

My restless mind revisited Kosciusko.  I certainly should have let those kind folks I met put me up for the night.  Not only could I have exercised my trust and openness muscles, which were at the point of atrophy, but I could have staved off the loneliness that was taking over my soul.  And I could have stayed dry and warm that night and not nearly succumbed to teeth-chattering chills.

For it did indeed rain that night, as the father had warned it would.  It had already been drizzling for an hour when I rode through the center of town in the late afternoon.  And like an idiot I went down an embankment off the side of the highway and into the woods seeking out a campsite for the night.  I went down, I repeat, into a floodplain, while it was raining, to spend the night.  The rain intensified as I struggled through the dark, dense patch of woods, looking for a clearing.

The density of the woods kept me fairly dry.  The pine trees and the vines woven among them were like a huge tent that amplified the sound of the fat falling drops of rain and inspired in my exhausted and barely functioning brain what seemed like a very clever idea.

I found a spot between several pine trees.  I went in with my camp saw and slashed and hacked and uprooted all the vines in an area between the trees large enough to pitch my tent.  I also cut off some of the lower protruding branches of the pines.  Then, like a basket weaver (which is what I probably should have been doing in an insane asylum somewhere) I grabbed the ends of vines and weaved them around the pine branches which protruded from the trees at a height of about five feet.  I worked assiduously for an hour until I had a nice solid pine ‘n’ vine roof under which I then pitched the tent.  What a genius I was!  Barely a drop of rain penetrated the all-natural tarp I had constructed.  I got inside the tent, crawled into my nice warm sleeping bag and slept the sleep of the partially just and only slightly damned.

I awoke at about 2 in the morning and immediately perceived, by way of the two inch deep puddle in which my body’s midsection lay, the fallacy of my reasoning a few hours earlier.  Sure, there wasn’t much water hitting me from above, but there was plenty of water collecting underneath the tent and permeating the non-waterproof floor.  You see, water always flows downhill—that’s what it does, it’s looking for the sea and gravity helps it along by pulling it in whatever direction sea level lies—and I was downhill from just about every terrain feature in the area.  I’d have spent my time more wisely using all those branches and vines to construct a platform to keep me a few inches off the ground and out of puddles.  But we geniuses aren’t always so wise.

Well, I shivered myself back to sleep for three more hours.  It was cold—above freezing, but not by much.  Even when it’s in the forties, it feels a lot colder when you’re in a wet sleeping bag wearing wet clothes.  If misery and discomfort are gauges by which to measure adventure, then I was having the adventure of a lifetime, oh boy!

The next morning I staggered out of my tent, numb and shaking uncontrollably from the cold.  I dug out the driest clothes I could find and even those I had to wring out before changing into them.  Then I hobbled down the road, walking like Frankenstein on my frozen feet, looking for the closest greasy spoon diner where I could warm myself and, of utmost importance at five in the morning, guzzle some really strong coffee.

Later, after packing up all my gear (which now weighed twice as much because of the extra water weight) I sought out a laundromat to dry everything.  As I sat out in front eating doughnuts while my things took a spin in the dryer I got into a conversation with a young man.  He found it hard to believe that I was actually intending to go all the way across the country on my bicycle. 

“I’m almost halfway there,” I told him.

But what really blew his mind was that I was doing it unarmed.

“You shittin’ me?  You ain’t packin’ nothin’?  Not even a little .38 snub nose?” he asked me, eyes wide with wonder.  “Boy, you really is crazy!”

Good thing I didn’t have a gun, given my state of mind while I crossed this bridge.

Now I was out of the box truss and halfway down the approach to terra firma.  If the beam I walked on were wide enough I would have danced a little jig.

Almost there…come on now…this is the happiest day of my life…I’m gonna be a better person from now on, and this time I really mean it!  The last three tractor trailers sped by and I stuck my tongue out at them.  Then I lowered the bike from the beam, hopped down into the roadway and crossed the two lanes and hauled my bike up over the guardrail beyond the abutment.  I leaned the bike against the guardrail, then I lay down on the ground for a few minutes staring up at the sky and breathing in the fresh winter air of Arkansas, the Natural State.

                                    

When I stood up, I looked down at the left leg of my gray sweatpants.  Friction from rubbing against the railing had worn a hole two inches in diameter through the pants.  I’m going to cut that part of the pants out and save it as a souvenir, I told myself.

 I looked at my watch.  It was almost two o’clock.  It took me over an hour and a half to get across that bridge.  It took everyone else about two minutes.  But will they appreciate life the way I do now, having stared directly into the face of sheer, unmitigated terror?  I’m sure they’ll manage somehow.

An hour an a half.  In that same span of time, some person somewhere out there might have taken a nap and just woken up and found himself to be exactly as he was when he lay down; nothing happened—he may as well have just blinked his eyes.  But in that same time, my whole existence had tumbled around and around and certainly had not returned to its safe origin.  I was out West now, my life was at a frontier.  You call it the Mississippi River, I call it the Rubicon.  An hour and a half.  An hour and a half out of 42 years.  It should only take a few seconds to die, not an hour and a half.  Somewhere else out there, some young child will live twenty years in a few seconds as he scrambles to dodge a bullet or a bomb.  A few seconds, an hour and a half, 20 years, 42 years, 10,000 years…time is nothing.  I’m just one ant moving westward while over there I see another 300 million ants moving in some other direction.  The West is so wonderfully wide and I feel so small, so delightfully small.

Wyoming, Iowa

July 11, 2004

During my journey through the Midwest, the background music was by and large of the country variety.  As I rode down the pleasant farm roads, I would often pass a farmhouse or barn undergoing some phase of construction or renovation.  Behind the buzzing and chirping of the power tools, the radio could usually be heard pumping out a steady stream of modern country music. I guess the music fit in with this sudden appearance of loud human activity in the midst of the quieter and more laid back rural and natural setting. On this serene Sunday morning nothing at all seemed to be going on at any of the farms or occasional tract home...that is until I came through the town of Wyoming.  Here the crunchy, distorted, overdriven sound of heavy metal came gushing out from behind a farmhouse.  At first I assumed it was from a radio, but as I neared the small farm, it became apparent that this was live music. I decided to investigate further, so I rode up the gravel driveway to an open two bay garage, where three men of my age were just wrapping up a song in the back.  They welcomed me to sit down and listen.  They were excited to hear about my trip and I had to answer their questions for about fifteen minutes before I got to hear some more music up close.  The name of their group was "Downside".  After I heard a couple of tunes I told them the name should be "Upside", but since their genre was all metal--dark, furious, and ominous-- "Downside" was indeed more appropriate.  They allowed me to record them with my little monaural tape recorder.  (Back at home, I put the songs on my computer and, after a little tweaking, was surprised at the quality of sound I managed to get while I was out "roughin' it".)

My next stop was in Dyersville, which holds bragging rights to both the location of the cornfield/baseball diamond from the movie "Field Of Dreams" and the National Farm Toy Museum and Gift Shop.  I didn't visit the former but on the spur of the moment swung by the farm toy mecca.  Before I could go inside, though, I was accosted by a group of about five people leaving the museum who wanted to hear all the tedious details about my trip.  The ringleader, a lad of about twenty, peppered me with questions, while the crowd surrounding us grew to a dozen as more tourists walked out of the farm toy and implement emporium.  Then, after about ten or fifteen minutes, he finally let me go, but not before pressing a ten dollar bill into my hand. I tried to refuse the cash, but he insisted, "You'll need to buy more food, won't you?"  Indeed the price of admission to the museum was four bucks, so the bill was immediately broken to gain entrance.  It was quite an impressive array of metal and plastic tractors, backhoes, and bulldozers; cultivators, conveyor belts and grain silos; exhibits with the actual die-cast machines used to make the toys--from the early days in the thirties right up to the present.  There were miniature farm scenes; some also incorporated HO scale railroads.  For that is what the Midwest is: one vast network of grain farms, centrally located co-op grain elevators, huge milling plants, livestock feed lots, and railroad lines connecting it all together.

I bought some over-priced and apparently home-made postcards in the museum's gift shop, then I was on my way.  I called home to the folks before looking for a place to camp.  I was in the middle of open farmland--not too many woods to provide camouflage out here.  But I did find a muddy patch of trees with thick pricker bushes and vines and ferns underfoot.  It was a couple of acres between farm fields and far enough from any farmhouse to arouse undue suspicion.  I had to scout around a bit to find a spot that wasn't too wet and overrun with tree and bush roots.  I also had to douse myself with insecticide to ward off the hordes of skeeters.  Before the sun set, I ate some grub, did a little reading, then crawled into my tent and was asleep thirty seconds after my head hit the pillow (balled-up jacket, that is.)

July 12, 2004

I woke up at about 5:30 in the morning.  I listened to the news on public radio while I broke down camp and had breakfast.  Then, one of my heroes, Garrison Keillor from "A Prairie's Home Companion", came on with one of his weekly features: "The Poet's Corner".  Today was the 187th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, another of my heroes.  This got me kind of excited, so I sat down so I could listen to this segment with full attention.  I'd picked up a copy of "Walden" back in New York and I felt like I was carrying Thoreau's spirit with me.  I imagined he would approve of my own peculiar experiment in simple living.  Instead of a cabin in the woods, though, I lived on my bike on the open road, unfettered by all the unnecessary and cumbersome accouterments of modern life.  I was amused by the anecdotes Garrison Keillor related about Thoreau's life.  For instance, after Thoreau graduated from Harvard he was a teacher at a boy's school.  The headmaster had taken him to task for not employing corporal punishment on the boys.  Exasperated, Thoreau called one of the boys at random to the front of the classroom and gave him a good thrashing.  Then he tossed the hickory switch to the floor and quit teaching.  Well, what do you expect?  He was, after all, a philosopher and not a Catholic nun!

When I finally emerged from the muddy copse I found myself enveloped in thick fog.  I'd become used to the early morning fog in the summer plains.  But this stuff was really impenetrable--I couldn't see the road until I was actually on it.  What's more I couldn't remember which direction I'd been heading when I entered the woods.  Using my compass I found my way to the main county road.  But traffic was a bit heavy (where did all these cars come from???  There isn't a town around here with a population over four thousand!) so I decided to ride on the dirt farm roads that parallelled the county road.  At least I wouldn't have to worry about commuters not seeing me until after they'd already run over me. Unfortunately, the dashed lines on my map didn't quite mesh with reality.  That, and the persistent fog, caused me to get a little lost.  Not really lost, though.  I knew well enough where I was, because every twenty minutes I found myself at the same fork in the dirt road--I was going in circles like some poor fool in "The Twilight Zone"!  It was mid-morning now; soon the fog would lift and I'd be able to see landmarks which could guide me.  But this day the fog didn't clear until around noon.

I was now heading toward The Great River Road, i.e., The Mississippi River.  Most people (myself included) think of Iowa as one big flat cornfield.  But up here in the northeastern corner of the state it is far from flat.  Over countless millennia the Mississippi has carved its way from northern Minnesota to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico.  The result of all this carving is the magnificent bluffs that tower over the river's valley.  As I wound my way down the county road that ran along the hills above the Yellow River (one of the Mississippi's tributaries), I was captivated by the beauty and serenity of the valley below.  It was five o'clock now and time to look for a spot in which to camp.  And down below were plenty of woods on either side of the river.  So once again I consulted the dashed lines on my map and found what looked like a route which would take me over the river and not make it necessary for me to double back the next day to the county road.  I headed downhill (a welcome relief after a day of a lot of uphill riding) on dirt and gravel and eventually found the Yellow River.  (It wasn't yellow, though; it was light chocolate from all the mud it carried off from the steep river banks.)  I had to sneak across some farmland to an area of tall rushes on the edge of the river.  The ground was very wet below the rushes so I found a drier spot nearby between a row of trees and a huge mound of earth which apparently had been formed by the detritus of some excavation project.  I, the intruder, was well protected from the view of other intruders.  After I set up the tent, I headed down to the riverbank to bathe.  (I know it's time to take a bath when even the mosquitoes avoid contact with my body.)  Now I had a small problem: the aforementioned banks of mud.  This section of river was a cut bank; the turbulent river came roaring around a bend and the water's angular momentum cut into the river bank, causing a small cliff to form.  I couldn't just walk into the river.  I could've jumped in, but the strong current would've carried me off just as it carried off the mud (and the occasional tree and bush.)  So holding onto a clutch of rushes with one hand and a bar of soap with the other I gingerly lowered myself into the river.  How utterly refreshing it was.  I found a root protruding from the cut bank and after washing my body I clung to the root and sat submerged up to my head for a few minutes enjoying immensely the feel of the water and the view of hills rising up from the other side of the river.  The sky was turning pink and purple and the air was becoming cool.  I didn't hear any of the noises which populated most of my riding day--trucks, trains, cars, and power tools.  All I heard was the chirping of birds and the rustling of leaves and the tall grass.  Before I got too comfortable in the river I climbed back up the bank to go make my supper.  As I was climbing over the edge of the mud-cliff (and ending up dirtier than before my bath) I heard something moving about in the rushes.  Fear struck in my heart for a split second then suddenly the creature appeared--it was a beautiful heron taking off.  He flew right over my head and zoomed along twenty feet above the river's surface.  As he flew around the bend, more graceful and elegant than any acrobatic fighter plane at an air show, I shouted after him, "Nice to meet you, friend!"  I headed back to my campsite, had some chow, and went to sleep, once again before the sun had completely set.  This evening's sunset had morphed from pinks to purple to fuchsia to a vivid red the color of blood.

New Albin, Iowa

July 13, 2004

            In the small town of New Albin, Iowa, population 527, I stopped for a late lunch break.  It was a simply gorgeous day.  Though the temperature was in the upper eighties, I didn’t mind it much—humidity was low and the clear blue sky, the bright green trees, and the richly textured turquoise and white Mississippi River shone through to me with such vividness and clarity that I was sure I  had never felt so stimulated and alive.  To the proportion that the lush green earth—with all of its healthy trees and towering bluffs, its swollen creeks and rivers—was bursting with new growth, in like manner I felt reborn as I labored along the Great River Road.

It had been a particularly wet spring and summer had come early to this region.  The day before, in the Turkey River Valley town of Elkport, I had seen the result of flooding from the heavy rains and snowmelt.  A couple of large farmhouses had been washed from their foundations and some large barns lay in tattered wrecks on the edges of fields, ruined by the overflowing river.  The river though now contained within its normal margins, still gushed with much turbulence and was the color of hot chocolate and melted marshmallow as it carried off the precious topsoil it had stolen from the farmers.  I saw the white pickup trucks of the federal flood control people and heard the crackle of their radios as they reported their assessments back to the main office.  I saw beautiful herons swooping down to the river for lunch, oblivious to the sufferings of their human neighbors.

I went into the town’s grocery store and bought the fixings for ham and cheese sandwiches, some soda pop and apple juice, and some corn chips.  I went a few hundred feet down the road to a small park built on the dike which protected this sleepy town from the creek which raged by on its way to join up with the mighty Mississippi.  I sat down at a picnic table under a pavilion and laid out my midday feast.  My appetite was gargantuan and I easily consumed four fat sandwiches, a five-ounce bag of chips, some grapes, and a couple of bananas and a quart of Nehi.  The creek kept me company and it babbled loudly and constantly—I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.  As I chowed down, people walked by on the dike with their dogs.  They smiled and waved, but I thought I detected slight suspicion in their faces as they glanced at my bike loaded down with gear.

After I ate, I jotted down some corny stuff on postcards to mail off to friends and family.  Stuffing my face and sitting in the shade made me a little sleepy, so I decided I’d better get a move, lest I lose my momentum.  I’d only covered half of the miles I had planned on for the day, and the bulk of the day was already discarded.  It was about four o’clock.

I pedaled back up the side road along the dike, crossed the railroad tracks and rejoined the highway.  As I approached the town’s other small grocery store, I observed standing by the door two young men, attired in cycling gear, drinking from water jugs; their recumbent bicycles leaned against the side of the store.  I hadn’t met any fellow cyclists in a few days, so, even though I was itching to get some more miles logged, I pulled over to greet them.

They were Sam and Greg from San Diego.  They were riding the Northern Tier route as far as Whitefish, Montana; from there they were going to continue southwest toward the Pacific Coast and on down to San Diego.  They had started out from Ticonderoga, New York, on the west bank of Lake Champlain, on June 15^th.  I remarked to them that it was unusual to see people travelling east to west on this route.  Most folks go from west to east because they’re under the illusion that the prevailing westerly winds will give them a helping hand.  The reason they started from Ticonderoga, they explained, was that Greg had just graduated from college in that area and had just wrapped up an internship with an NBA marketing firm.  Sam had flown out from San Diego to meet up with Greg and after outfitting themselves with new bikes and gear in New York they set out on their epic trip to raise money and awareness for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

These guys were half my age, fine physical specimens, riding low-slung, streamlined recumbent bikes, and yet, though they’d set out from Ticonderoga, New York on the same day I was leaving Portland, Maine, some 300 miles and two mountain ranges to the east, I had now somehow caught up with them—me, a crusty old-timer on his heavy, lumbering mountain bike with fat tires, the very antithesis of aerodynamic agility.  A bit of typical male egotistical pride swelled up in my breast as I explained this to them. 

But their youth itself offered up the reason as to how I was able to close the gap between us: they had many friends in various cities across the country, and on a weekly basis they would stop to visit one of them, spend a day or two cooling their heels, kick them up even, and indulge in a little partying.  After these rest stops it would be a day or two before they were back up to speed.  For my part, I hadn’t tarried at all in such fashion—I had yet to take one complete day off to rest, in fact.  I had had a few days when I rode only about twenty or thirty miles…these were my days off.

Here was the difference between us: in the passion of their youth, they covered their miles in sudden fits of stopping and starting.  They didn’t crawl out of their sleeping bags until the sun was already in the sky, then hurried through breakfast (or, I suspected, as is the case with some youngsters, skipped it altogether), threw their stuff together, hopped on their machines, then raced off into the day, pedaling sometimes into the setting sun to make up for lost time.  The philosophy and practice I had adopted for myself, a middle-aged fogey, one that better suited my bulky machine was: ‘slow and steady wins the race’.  And though I was certainly not engaged in any kind of competition, except perhaps against myself and against the elements, what cyclist doesn’t occasionally compare his or her progress to that of other cyclists?

            They told me that this was their first ride ever, big or small.  They had never ridden bicycles much at all in their entire lives.  They had expected it to be a difficult challenge and they were not disappointed in that respect.  Still, they were enjoying themselves immensely and holding up quite well.  Since I was a veteran rider and had already completed one cross-country expedition and had ridden down the almost entire length of the Atlantic Coast, I felt obligated to give them some pointers, because that’s what old fogeys do best.

            “Yes, the physical aspect of such ventures is not really a big deal.  I think most people can do a ride like this.  You’re out in the fresh air every day; your complete body is getting good daily exercise.  Every day you’re getting stronger and as long as you keep yourself well-nourished, your energy level will keep increasing.  Contrary to what some folks back home seem to think, those who’ve never tried this, you don’t gradually accumulate an excess of fatigue to the point where one day you’re riding down the road and you simply keel over.  Not at all.  As you’ve probably found out yourself, with a regular feeding and resting schedule, you begin to feel like you can just ride forever.

            “No, the body is not the problem, it’s quite resilient…the real bugbear is one’s mind.  This isn’t so much a physical journey as a psychological one.  The mind tires out much quicker than the body.  Especially in this modern world of ours, where our brains are constantly bombarded with artificial stimuli, where we find it hard after awhile to keep on, day after day after day, involved in one activity: pedaling our butts down endless roads.  Ironically, it’s when the going is the toughest, over mountains and through wind and rain, when the ride is psychologically easier.  Then we have something with which to keep ourselves occupied—we need then to be alert to the increased dangers each situation presents us with.  But as you get midway through a trans-continental ride, when you hit the vast, rolling Central Plains, that’s when the mind begins to rebel.  After a while, everything starts to look the same.  Reference points disappear, the horizon disappears into infinity.  One day seems indistinguishable from the next.  And when you look at a map of the U.S., you realize that they don’t call the Great Plains ‘great’ for nothing.  Holy shit, they make up most of the country, it seems.  How the hell am I ever going to make it across such vastness?  Without going stark, raving, bloody bonkers?!  That’s when a little voice in your head says, “I wish this were over with.”  It’s like little kids in the backseat of a car screaming to their parents, “Are we there yet?!  Are we there yet?!”  Then you start getting a bad attitude, you no longer live in the moment and enjoy the natural beauty you’re immersed in.  The monotony of the landscape begins to piss you off.  Where are all the blasted trees?!  I’m sick of looking at corn fields!  Since the mind and body dwell so closely together, are in fact one, I think, negativity bleeds from the mind into the body and you begin to notice that you are becoming more tired from day to day—just like they said you would.  You become engulfed in a whirlpool of self-defeat.  You become careless and might have close encounters with motorists, for whom negativity is the norm (on the clogged, mercenary roads.)  So now fear, along with fatigue, is a regular item on your daily bill of fare.  You neglect your bike and because your mind is no longer finely tuned into the sights and sounds around you, preoccupied as it is with self-castigation (“Why am I doing this, anyways?”), you miss the warning signs of disrepair coming from your machine, your former boon companion, and you perhaps break down in the middle of nowhere, shaking your fist at the invisible gods in the gray sky, “Why are you doing this to me??  Arrrgh!!”

            “This is the point at which some cyclists call it quits.  “Why bother”, they say, “it’s just not worth it.  I’m pooped.”  They think it’s because the physical challenge was too great, so they pack it in and go home.  They might feel great disappointment and they might vow to try it again later, or they might vow never to attempt such foolishness again—but either way, they will attribute what they consider failure (though it certainly is not) to physical limitations.  This is a fallacy.  When they get home, they find themselves to be in great physical shape—the best ever.  But their nerves are frayed.  Their bodies were up to the task but their minds were not.  When they first set out on their big ride they probably never even considered that this would be a battle primarily between their psyches and the endless and uncaring road.  They had  trained their bodies to compete against and defeat the physical elements out there, but had they prepared their minds to take on an even greater task—dealing with long stretches of empty time and space, learning to forget about the distant goal and concentrating on the only thing that really existed, the present moment and what it contained: the few bits of physical matter that surrounded them, the small bubble of space around them, the unfolding pavement beneath the wheels, the pieces of gravel and broken glass to be avoided, the tiny and abundant wildflowers on the side of the road to be appreciated, the ancient barns collapsing into dry, dusty fields to remind them of impermanence—then they might have sustained a positive mental attitude and would have completed their bicycle journey and felt such a sense of self-enrichment that is hard to come by in any of the conventional ways that I know of.”

            This is what I would have told Sam & Doug, were there enough time.  But I could only give them a summary of the above and hope they would heed some of it.  I was scared for them, taking on such a big project without the previous experience like I had.  I thought to myself, if they make it, it will be because of dumb luck or because angels look out for adventurous, yet sometimes careless fools like us.

            They did complete their tour, though, and Sam sent me this e-mail, which I excerpt here:

Bob,

            This is Sam Reed.  Doug and I met you on the road, on your last cross country bike trip.  We were the two guys on recumbents.

            …

            So, how is everything going?  How was the rest of your trip?

            Doug and I finished our ride on Sept 12, 2004 and covered ~5700 miles.  It was an amazing experience for us.  I think that I will eventually do another bike tour; however, I doubt I will want to go as far.

            …

            If you are ever in San Diego or close by, give me a call so we can meet up.

            You had some inspiring philosophies to share, and I would enjoy another conversation.

            …

            I hope this e-mail finds you happy, alive and kicking, and with the wind at your back.

Your fellow touring buddy,

Sam

North Dakota

July 28, 2004

      I encountered the windiest weather I've ever experienced in the stretch of badlands between New Town and Williston.  It took thirteen excruciating hours to cover the 65 miles between those two towns.  The route for this stretch of the ride departed US Route 2 and followed Louis and Clark's footsteps along Lake Sakakawea and the Missouri River (ND Route 1804).  Whereas Route 2 to the north continued on its rolling, relatively hill-less course, Route 1804 clung to the tortuous contours of the badlands surrounding Lake Sakakawea.  In addition to having to fight continuously the 25 to 35 mph side winds, now I also had to climb and descend a seemingly unending series of hills.  It was cloudy and cool so I donned a sweatshirt and windbreaker over my jersey.  But after a half-hour of exertion I'd be sweating like a pig, so I'd take them off; half an hour later I'd be numb from cold--back on they'd go.  This continued all day long.

I stopped for some mid-morning refueling on the side of the highway.  There wasn't much traffic out here...a pleasant respite after a couple days on busy 2.  Despite the wind and the chill, or perhaps because of it, I felt tremendous peace sitting on the dusty ground nibbling nuts and fruit and scanning the horizon.  I had come from the corn and soy bean fields of eastern North Dakota to the wheat fields (and in some areas, nothingness) of the western end of the state.  I'd grown a bit weary of looking at corn and soy beans weeks ago when I was first in the Midwest.  Now I had the pleasure of witnessing the crazy and beautiful architecture which Nature had carved along the Missouri.

It is hard for a native New Englander like me to describe these badlands to one who hasn't been in them, but an illustration occurred to me:  When winter finally gives way to spring here in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts the snow melts in the meadows and small streams carry the melt-off to the Connecticut River.  Where the streams run down twenty foot high cut banks on the river, one can observe how some of the meadow's soil is deposited in intricate, curlicue patterns on the steep banks, much like a child at the beach will drip watery sand on his sand castle to make turrets. The badlands along the Missouri River have that same effect, just on a much, much grander geological scale.

I listened to the radio as I ate.  Out here I couldn't get much except AM radio from Saskatchewan.  But this morning I tuned into some talk radio from Williston.  A guy was being interviewed about the cross-country bike ride he and his son were making from California to New York City where the father was hoping to find work as an actor.  Interesting.  He was staying at a campground in Williston and at 7:00 that evening he was organizing a little photo shoot.  He was hoping to gather together as many people on bicycles as he could and reenact a scene from the movie "Forrest Gump".  In the movie, Forrest starts running across the country for no apparent reason and along the way people start following him, thinking him to be some sort of messiah with a message.  Only now instead of running, people would gradually join this cyclist as he ambled down the road.  That sounds kind of cool, I thought.  Maybe if I make it to Williston in time, I too could take part.

A little further down the road I came upon two men in their fifties standing on the side of the road, their bicycles leaning against the back of a car which was driven by a woman, the wife of one of the men.  They were riding the Northern Tier just like me, except that they were travelling west to east and were doing the trip in segments. Every year when their two-week vacation rolled around, they would throw their bikes on top of the car and the one man's wife would drive them out to where they'd left off the previous year.  They didn't have to lug all their camping gear like I did, so they were making better time than me.  Still, doing it this way would take four or five years.  (And I guess the further east they progressed, the more of their precious vacation time had to be wasted driving to that year's starting point.)  I was grateful that I didn't have a "normal" life and I could take all the time I wanted in riding from coast to coast in one shot.  But they were happy to be doing it at all and I was happy to see fellow cyclists on this cool, windy day; it made the ride a little easier when there were others with whom to share the stories, the joy, and much needed encouragement.

After spending hours on the road doing battle with the endless procession of impatient motorists, I always took pleasure in stopping and chatting with like-minded people. Most motorized people cannot understand why we cyclists seem to derive so much enjoyment from what appears to be such a punishing activity.  Well the reason we do it is a secret and I am bound by The Cyclist's Sacred Oath to not reveal it. If a car driver wants to know what we're up to then he or she will just have to put the horseless buggy in the barn and come on out for a spin with us.  Of course, I'm not too worried about that happening any time soon, so for now I am content to pedal along in the spacious breakdown lanes of our nation's highways and byways, while the uninitiated hordes speed by in their hermetically sealed glass and metal cages and coffins in frenzied pursuit of creature comforts, with the messages from their car radios exhorting them to acquire more, waste more, pollute more...remember, whoever makes it to the finish line dragging behind the most cumbersome pile of crap wins the Great Rat Race!

I told these fellow cyclists about the interview I'd heard on the radio.  They knew all about the guy and said that the interview had been taped the day before and the guy and his son had already left Williston that morning.  Well then, I'd probably see them on the road at some point; and in fact I only saw one other cyclist the whole rest of the day.  I was about 25 miles from Williston descending a long, winding hill, while climbing up the other side of the road was a guy pulling a B.O.B. trailer.  We waved to each other as we passed.  That probably isn't him, I thought.  Besides, where's his son?  They probably did the smart thing and stuck to Route 2.

With ten miles left to go to Williston I was debating whether I should just pull off into a gully and call it a day.  The wind, that great capricious spirit of the West had sapped my own puny mortal spirit.  Just as in Texas two and a half years earlier, I thought that if I waited a little while the wind would stop and I could continue on unhindered.  What foolishness!  There are simply places out West where the wind never rests, it seems.  One old folk song from Australia kept going through my mind: "And they call the wind Mariah..."  Mariah is from the Arabic, "ma'a reeh", or "with the wind".  "Reeh" also means spirit in Arabic.  I was riding the Spirit Wind, the same one that accompanied Captain Lewis and Captain Clark and their entourage exactly two hundred years before. And my spirit, like theirs, I hoped, was indomitable.

Screw it...Williston was my goal for the day and I couldn't rest until I got there.  It was seven o'clock.  I'd at least get there before dark.  As I crested the last hill, I saw the town down below a couple of miles off.  I own this town, I thought, I paid for it with my aching muscles.  I rode through the industrial outskirts into downtown and stopped at the first convenience store I saw for some juice and a snack.

While I was drinking my juice in front of the store, a young man, eighteen or nineteen, rode up on his bike.  When I told him I was heading into Montana the next day, he told me how he had camped and fished all over Montana.  He was somewhat of an expert on the Lewis and Clark saga and debunked some of the myths that had grown up around that story.  How refreshing to meet a young person who was interested more in the outdoors and local history than video games and popular junk culture.  It must be the expansiveness of the West that stimulates his young mind, warding off the pernicious tunnel vision that besets many in our society. God bless him.

Another young lad, eleven or twelve, had been listening to some of our conversation, and then went in the store.  He came out with a bag, from which he produced a couple of Little Debbie cakes.  He handed them to me and said he hoped I would like Montana.  Again, my heart was gladdened to see a young person act so polite and respectful to an elderly dude like myself.  Back home I'd become accustomed to receiving mostly distrust and derision from the newest generation, a generation which I'd convinced myself was even lazier, more self-indulgent and materialistic than mine had been.  But that is one of the side-effects of cross-country travel: faulty stereotypes are smashed and one is forced to take his fellow humans as they come.  Each person has a unique story to share...some are happy, some are sad, but each and every story begs to be heard.

The young man in front of the store had told me there was a park in the center of town where people were allowed to camp.  I found it not far from a sub shop where I bought my supper.  But I'd had enough human interaction for the day and I wanted to camp out on the outskirts of town where I could be alone.  I followed the railroad tracks to a patch of trees and prickers behind some factory buildings.  I always enjoyed sleeping near railroad tracks.  I didn't mind waking up every hour or so as a freight train rumbled by.  The lonely whistle followed by thunder and clatter never failed to evoke romantic stirrings deep within me.  I remember lying in bed as a child, unable to sleep because I was really excited about something or really upset, as the case may have been.  Then I'd hear a train's whistle off in the distance and it seemed to say to me: "This is your future calling...I'm coming by to carry you off to strange and wild places and exciting times."  How many young boys (and girls too) have heard that whistle and had the first spark of Wanderlust ignite in their souls?

Many people have asked me if I didn't feel some measure of trepidation sleeping in strange surroundings where wild animals and psychopaths might lurk.  On nights such as this one was, the question was moot.  All I felt was exhaustion and in the thirty seconds or so before sleep overtook me, I only felt gratitude to be alive on this planet, surely the finest one in a several hundred million light-year radius.  When I awoke at five the next morning, all was quiet and calm.  There was no wind and dew covered the grass.  I felt mounting excitement as I realized that I was about to enter Montana with its Big Sky overhead.  Soon, the Rocky Mountains would present themselves...then Idaho, then the final state, Washington and a whole new heap of mountains...and then: the end of the road.  Sadness and elation comingled in my breast.

Before I headed out of town to rejoin Route 2, I stopped at another convenience store for more juice and some cold cuts.  A delivery man, in his thirties, saw me pull up and wanted to know what in the hell I was up to?!  After I told him he got a little agitated, in a jolly, amiable way, and asked, "Why can't you guys take up a less strenuous hobby, like fishing?"  This was an attitude I'd encountered before.  People would say they got tired just looking at people like me chugging down the road on their heavily laden bicycles.  Yeah, but I never feel relaxed by watching sedentary people lounge around...

I sat on the wide median strip between the opposing lanes of Route 2 and ate my breakfast, which this morning consisted of orange juice and bologna sandwiches.  The grass here reminded me of the mesquite grass of Texas 1500 miles to the south.  Back then I actually got a flat when I made the mistake of walking my bike through the grass on the side of the road.  A guy I met back then had told how he got a flat tire on his truck in Oklahoma driving through an alley where mesquite grass was growing.  Now I had triple-belted tires (one of the belts being Kevlar, the same stuff in flak jackets) and thick, thorn-resistant inner tubes.  I wasn't too worried about getting a flat here.  (The tires were starting to get a little too bald, though.)  I finished my grub and got back on the road.  At eight o'clock in the morning just about every single car and truck in North Dakota and Montana was on this stretch of 2 and they were all gunning for me. Oh well, eventually I'd get a break and be able to detour off the highway through quieter Indian reservation roads.

Montana

July 29, 2004

      I crossed the border from North Dakota into Montana on Route 2 outside of Bainville.  Right on the border stood a large wooden structure with few windows and billing itself as a casino and dance hall.  I pulled over to rest the bike against a wooden fence connected to the building.  At eleven in the morning the place was closed.  I was eating my lunch of bologna sandwiches and Fig Newtons in peace when a car pulled up.  The driver was a young and quite attractive Native American woman and her passenger was a slightly deranged elderly white woman. The older woman was rambling on about how a guy on a bicycle, my age or older, had been begging for money the day before, but when he was given a bunch of cash, he went and got drunk instead. They suspected that the man had stolen the bike and the gear that was with it. He didn't seem like the bike-camping kind of guy.  I couldn't figure out if she was trying to find this guy, so people could get their money or property back or take vengeance, or maybe get the guy scooped up by the authorities before he harmed himself, or was she trying to warn me about this predator possibly lurking and stalking in one of the ravines and leaping out like a hungry cougar; whatever she was trying to say it took about twelve minutes for her to convey the message.

      After the two women sped off in their car, I packed up the debris from my quick lunch and I likewise hit the road, eyes wide open for any sketchy looking folks. I noticed, about a mile down the road that the highway mile marker read "665 miles".  That meant that Route 2 ran approximately 666 miles across the Big Sky State.  And I would end up traveling on most of that length of wide open Route 2, and even enjoying most of it.

      My first stop in Montana was Culbertson, fifteen miles west of the border.  Before the center of town there was a combination tourist info center and museum of local Wild West history. The place was air-conditioned and there were a number of interesting old artifacts in one of the rooms which I would have liked to have inspected, but the place was overseen by two matronly women who hovered over me at every turn and wanted to know what I wanted to see.  I didn't think they'd understand, "I want to see what I see," so I left, but not before grabbing my free roadmap of Montana.

      I rode another fourteen miles to Brockton where I would spend the night.  When I was heading out from Williston, North Dakota that morning I was warned that I should avoid Poplar after dark and even during daylight I should use caution passing through that rough town on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. I heard of how a young canoeist hooked up with some locals and at the end of a wild party with the men, the guy was badly beaten with his own paddle. I found a rare patch of tree cover at the bottom of a narrow gully and after dismounting all my gear from the bike I crawled down into the cool and comfortable little space beneath the scraggly branches.  I knew that if it rained, I'd be in trouble.  Then I would have to move the tent and everything up the hillside and out into the open where I'd be exposed to all who passed further up above on the road.  But for now I was fine, once I escaped from the multitude of hungry mosquitoes into my tent.

July 30, 2004

      I slept very peacefully and awoke the next day to a cool, clear morning; I was very much refreshed. I made it to Poplar by mid-morning and rode through a small maze of streets in one of the residential areas of town--a sun-washed slum.  I found a grocery store and went in to get some supplies.  When I came out of the store, feeling increasingly nervous about leaving my bike unlocked out front, a car was just pulling up.  A woman got out and went into the store, while the male driver eyed me putting away my purchases.  I acknowledged him and he waved me over.  He asked all the usual questions about my ride and its supposed purpose.  Then his companion came back to the car with a case of beer.  "What do you do for fun?" he asked me as he cracked a can of beer and took a big swallow.  I knew what he meant, but I merely pointed at the bike and said, "This is it.  This is what I do most of the time lately."  "Well, you gotta do something...sometime..." he rejoined, and I thought, "Yeah, what I gotta do now is get out of this place, before more people try to commandeer me for their parties."  And sure enough, as I turned the corner and began pedaling toward the main road through the reservation, I noticed a dozen or so men sitting on an abandoned loading dock overlooking a trash-strewn lot behind the grocery store.  Some of the guys drank out of paper bags and one of them jumped up and came my way.  When he was within earshot, he told me to come on over and visit.  I said thanks anyway and sped off at eleven mph.

      Riding through this part of Montana is a challenge due mainly to the tedious rolling terrain and of course, wind.  Many cross-country cyclists choose to ride from west to east because they've heard that that is the direction of the prevailing winds.  Perhaps; but I found that wind direction varied quite a bit from day to day and I think that anyone cycling through the Northern Plains is going to spend a fair amount of time working against the wind regardless of their direction.  And whether someone is going east or west, wind gusts from the north or south are more difficult to deal with than headwind.  Because now the cyclist must do extra work maintaining lateral balance.

      The total lack of shade out on the open plains also presents a challenge to those foolish enough to venture through it at a snail's pace.  I always travelled with about a half gallon of water, and that was enough to get me from town to town without becoming dehydrated. But lacking insulated water jugs, I usually drank warm or even hot water.  Luckily there always seemed to be a bar or roadhouse out in the middle of nowhere; small oases between centers of civilization.  I would go in with my plastic bottles and ask the bartender to fill them with ice water.  Enticed by the air conditioning, I would usually linger at the bar for twenty minutes or so and drink a couple of ice-cold cokes.  With my body temperature back below the boiling point, I'd head out again under the merciless sun.

      On the plus side, out here visibility is virtually unlimited.  Except where the road rises and goes through a narrow cut in the rock, there are no surprises from traffic.  Still I had always to be on my guard.  As I was coming into Culbertson, the tarp on a large truck ahead of me was ripped open by the wind and a huge cloud of shiny particles went flying up from the truck and slowly rained down onto the highway.  I had no idea what these glittering objects were, some sort of construction material perhaps; I was glad I was far enough behind that none of it showered down on me.  The objects were in fact crushed aluminum cans most likely headed for a recycling center.

      I rode 65 miles that day from Brockton to Nashua.  After replenishing my water supply I set about looking for a spot to camp out.  It didn't look good.  Since Culbertson I'd been riding in the plain of the winding Missouri River.  I could see the spectacularly tall river bluffs a few miles south and I thought of how nice it would be to camp out by the river.  Just east of Nashua the Milk River joins the Missouri and Route 2 then runs along that river.  (The Milk River actually courses through the original bed of the Missouri, which was diverted by a glacier in the Pleistocene era.)  The bluffs of the Milk River also looked tempting, but I doubted there was any way I could get to the river here without trespassing on someone's farmland.  Besides, it was another two or three miles to the river and I didn't feel I could pedal another inch.

      So I rode through the center of town and about a quarter of a mile down a farm road I ended up trespassing in some cornfields after all.  The work day was over and I didn't think I'd be discovered by anyone driving a tractor through the fields, so I quickly walked my bike through the rows of corn. I came upon what I thought to be a dike.  I lugged the bike up the steep wall of the supposed dike and discovered that it was actually a dry irrigation ditch.  I found a section where vegetation had filled in the ditch and I was able to ensconce myself within some brush and was further hidden by trees on either side of the ditch.  Good, I thought, now even if some farmer happens to come along through this cornfield he wouldn't even know I was here.

      After striking camp and eating some grub, I lay down on my sleeping bag and listened to the radio.  It was seven o'clock and the weather was quite pleasant.  Occasionally clouds would drift by and block the sun which still had a couple of hours left to shine down.  At 7:30 a storm warning came over the radio.  The announcer said that a 35 mile wide band of thunderstorms was working its way southeast across the county at a rate of fifteen mph.  I consulted my map and determined that if the storms didn't die out, they would reach Nashua within about an hour.  I knew it wouldn't be safe to be beneath these trees in a thunderstorm, but I decided to wait and see what evolved before undertaking the cumbersome task of relocating my campsite.  I fell asleep and woke up about an hour later.  The sky was dark and I figured it must be after sunset.  Storms must've gone somewhere else, I thought.  It was real windy though, and when I looked at my watch and realized it was still 45 minutes before sunset, I knew I was in trouble.  I got out of the tent, stood on top of the dike and looked toward northwest.  There they were, that band of rolling thunderstorms the weatherman had promised--estimated time of arrival: mere minutes.  There wasn't any time to take down the tent and move it; everything would get wet in the process.  So I covered the tent with the rain fly, put on my rain suit, walked a couple hundred feet into the cornfield, and sat on the ground to wait out the storm.  I wasn't concerned with getting zapped by a lightning bolt here.  I just didn't want to be under the trees in that wind.  It didn't rain too much...but a lot of lightning bolts touched down around me.  The wind got to whipping about rather furiously.  After a half an hour the storm departed and I returned to my tent and to my slumbers.

July 31, 2004

      It was still a bit damp when I decamped at about six a.m.  I stopped at a picnic table on what I couldn't figure out was town property or private property.  Must be the "City Park"--as these things were generally called out West, even in places with a population of 112--I don't think anyone would build a small war memorial statue in their own backyard, but who knows.  As I sat there having my breakfast of instant coffee, Raisin Bran, and bagels with peanut butter, townspeople drove by and stared but no one stopped and said anything, which was fine by me.  After I was done I got back out on Route 2 and followed it as it rose up from the badlands of the Milk River.  This day's ride was uneventful.  Wind was moderate and the temperature had dropped down into the seventies.  Although the road followed along the course of the river, the hills weren't too steep.  I did notice that I was gradually gaining altitude as I ventured west.  Indeed, the easternmost end of Montana is about 2000 feet in altitude and by the time the rolling high plains meet the Rocky Mountain Front the altitude is about 4000 feet which means someone going up into the Rockies is already over halfway up by the time they reach the Front.  But the Rockies were still 300 miles away and for now the livin' was easy.  This day's ride also brought me through another Indian reservation, Fort Belknap.  I didn't travel through any towns on this reservation; in fact Route 2 runs a mile or two north of the rez's northern border.  Hats off to the fine folks down in Missoula at Adventure Cycling for providing some relief to cyclists from mean ole nasty Number 2.  (The only major problem with pedaling in the shoulders of U.S. 2 is the sheer tedium...sometimes the volume of traffic gets a little too heavy, lots of big rigs.)

      At Fort Belknap, the Adventure Cycling route detoured off of 2 and through reservation roads.  The roads were macadam surfaces, long and straight and unmarked; thousands of gallons of gooey sealant covered miles of cracks--and as the day grew hotter, the ribbons of sealant started to melt and run like shimmering black snakes: fifty foot long Anacondas! Occasionally I would cross over an exceptionally wide swath of the sticky tar and find that, despite the stickiness, I could slide suddenly and unexpectedly sideways if I hit a thick enough patch of the stuff. (Fortunately, I had long ago learned to use caution crossing diagonally over white lines along road shoulders, especially ones recently painted with reflective paint--sometimes they're slippery whether wet or not.)

      I rode through farm fields which didn't look all too productive this year, perhaps casualties of ceaseless drought.  At distances of perhaps half a mile to a mile from one another were the small houses and trailers in which lived the Native Americans who worked these farms. It was a beautiful place, especially when you looked out at the surrounding badlands. You couldn't see the actual Milk River from any vantage point on this huge area of level land, but you could make out, a couple miles off, through the haze of the heat, the magnificently sculptured bluffs which the river had carved as it sought its way, somehow, someway, to the Missouri, to the Mississippi, to the Gulf of Mexico, and finally to its goal: the Atlantic Ocean. (It's seems funny to speak of that eastern locality out here in the Wild West!)

      As the day's riding was coming to a close in the late afternoon I noticed a sign indicating that one could fish, swim, or camp, if they so desired, at Nelson Reservoir a few miles down the road from Saco...just follow Beaver Creek till ya' see a whole mess o' water.  Hmm, looks well worth my time investigating, since there are no woods--just a lot of barbed wire--out here in which to camp.

      This was welcome news—a legitimate campsite.  It was a daily challenge finding a suitably discreet location to spend the night.  There was only a thin strip of land on either side of Route 2 hemmed in by barbed wire—no trees, no cover.  Furthermore, unlike the equally barren West Texas plains three and a half years earlier, there were no dry creek beds under the highway where I could safely hide from the prying and suspicious eyes of civilization.  So I happily turned off of Route 2 and followed Beaver Creek a couple of miles to a nice spot on the reservoir maintained by the Bureau of Land Management.

Nashua, Montana

July 31, 2004

      I retired to my tent at around 8:00 that evening.  I listened to the radio for a bit, hoping to catch a local weather report.  All I could get was a faint AM signal out of Alberta, so I turned off the radio and rolled onto my side facing the reservoir.  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the air was rather still.  As I watched the sun descend lower and enlarge over the smooth, sparsely vegetated hills on the other side of the man-made lake, I thought, Well, I think tonight will be a little more peaceful than last night.  As always, I had the rain fly rolled up and attached to the front of the tent, ready to be unfurled in any contingency.  Right before I closed my heavy eyelids for the night I gazed out at the scene over Nelson Reservoir—squadrons of small birds were circling about and then dive-bombing the water…going after fish or insects, or just playing, I wasn’t sure.  I thought, this is like a living postcard, and then my mind’s shutter finally closed with a soft click.

      A bright flash and a loud boom stirred me from my slumber a couple of hours later.  The gentle scene of the lake by which I had fallen asleep earlier had been replaced by one of majestic violence.  Lightning flashes illuminated tall billowing clouds over the low hills on the opposite shore.  On this side of the lake the wind was picking up and the small scrubby trees were beginning to quiver.  Occasionally a dry leaf, or twig, or piece of paper would skitter by on the ground and scrape the side of my tent.  The storm clouds, still a few miles off, were absolutely magnificent—there was a long line of them; in the dark sky, I couldn’t see how far they extended to either side, but when bolts of electric fire issued from them, I could see the middle bulk of the clouds in vivid detail.  They shared a common flat floor, but a hundred different mushroom roofs.  And the mushrooms were still growing, puffing out and spilling over the front and sides of these heavily breathing, living masses of moist air.  Sometimes huge indentations would appear in the cloud fronts and lightning bolts would pass horizontally through the gaps in these constantly shifting partitions.  The colors—only apparent for split seconds when the bolts flashed—were those of fireballs: orange, red, brown, charcoal gray.  The bulbous tops of the clouds rolled forward and tumbled down to be sucked into the cloud mass and be recycled; new bulbs of vapor shot up in their place, extending the overall height of the victorious cloud.  I half expected the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to come galloping out of the cloud front on their rip-snorting steed.

      I must have sat up in my tent watching, enthralled by this spectacle, for a good twenty minutes before I started to consider the practical implications which such pageantry had in store for me.  The storm was now in line with the far shore, about a mile off.  The wind on this side had picked up considerably and the skins of my tent oscillated.

      I tried to convince myself that the storm was moving off at an angle and that I would be spared the brunt of the wind and rain.  This was wishful thinking; the storm had such a wide front and it was obvious that it was going to include all of the reservoir and everyone camping out in its wrath.  I had wasted time—already fat drops were falling as I covered the tent with the rain fly and hastily secured the guy lines.  I knew I didn’t do an adequate enough job tying down the ropes in my rush to take cover from the imminent deluge.  As I worked, I could see my neighbors, a middle-aged couple down at the lake’s shore with flashlights, dragging their motorboat out of the water and tying it to a couple of trees.  On the other side of me, a large family was likewise making preparations for the storm that was due to arrive within minutes.  They took their boat out of the water and secured it; they rolled up the awning on the side of their camper and took down the mosquito net canopy they had erected over a picnic table.  I could hear car doors opening and slamming as they gathered up gear and threw it into their vehicles.  Then one of the cars was started and driven off.  Were they fleeing the scene because they’d had experience with these Great Northern Plains storms and knew better than to hang around?  Maybe they were just hungry and drove off somewhere to get snacks.

      I sat in my tent and counted the seconds between lightning flash and thunder clap.  One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, kee-RASHHH!!!  It was getting close.  My tent was vibrating wildly in the wind now, and the rain pelted it in waves from front to back, left to right.  I waited for a pause in the rain, and then stuck my head out through the front flap of the rain fly for a little look-see.  I looked but saw very little.  The clouds were almost directly overhead now and blocked out all moonlight.  Then a magnificent bolt of lightning touched down on the shore just a few hundred feet away and for a split second I glimpsed the angry, roiling clouds above and beyond and all around.  They seemed so low that I could have touched them.  Now it started raining in earnest, and by earnest I mean torrentially.  The wind had really intensified—it blew in from the southeast and pushed the storm clouds sideways as they advanced from the west over the reservoir.  It was the mighty clash of air masses and we humans below could do little butch watch helplessly.

      I started to get a little scared.  I’d been in a couple of good and scary electrical storms in the Southeast the previous summer and during them I had just laid low in my tent and patiently waited them out, gritting my teeth and feeling the hair on the back of my neck bristle every time lightning struck nearby.  But the violence of this storm was new to me.  I imagined the wind yanking my tent from the ground and hurling it like a football, with me inside, across the prairie.  And I imagined that while I sailed thusly through the air, a lethal bolt from Thor would shoot me down and burn me to a crisp, leaving me a smoking pile of ashes blowing in the Wild Western Wind.

      So I decided to abandon camp and seek shelter in the only amenity which the BLM offered here: a nice, solid brick and steel chemical toilet outhouse.  It was only a couple of dozen steps from my tent, but in the few seconds it took to get there, I was completely drenched.  The wind was blowing so hard that each time I lifted a foot I was pivoted a little off course so that I looked like a very drunken chap staggering down the road.  Once inside the outhouse, I wished that I had thought to bring my wallet with me, because now I pictured my tent being blown away without me in it, never to be seen again, probably torn to shreds on numerous barbed wire fences.  Oh, at least I’d still be alive.  The rain rapped down incessantly and loudly on the corrugated steel roof of the outhouse and I felt like I was trapped inside Buddy Rich’s snare drum.

      Every few minutes I would open the door just enough to peer out and examine whether my tent was still there.  I saw nothing but black inkiness, save for when lightning struck—sometimes frightfully close—and then I would be afforded a brief snapshot of the area.  Each time I was glad to see that my tent was still there.  This went on for an hour.  Then the rain and wind started to die down somewhat.  I could still hear thunder but it was now a mile off.  Maybe I would return to my tent now.  I was scolding myself for being such a chicken…what kind of adventurer was I, running for safety inside an outhouse, my tail between my legs?  Had I been sucking my thumb as well, I wondered?

      I went back in my tent and took stock of the situation.  Some moisture had penetrated the floor seams of the tent and a couple of clothing items had gotten a little soggy, but nothing serious, no flooding.  Some rain had managed to splash in under the rain fly at the foot of the tent and had gotten in and made the bottom few inches of my sleeping bag a bit wet, but again, no big deal.

      I sat there on my sleeping bag, eating some cheese and thinking, Whew, I’m glad that’s over with.  But it wasn’t.  A few minutes later the rain started up heavy again and the wind started blowing even harder than before.  It came in strong gusts like the blows of a fist of some giant, hairy Nordic god—a big, brutish blacksmith god, ferociously evil.  The wind blew so hard this time, I was certain the tent would be uprooted.  So once more I fled to the safety of the brick outhouse.  And once more I forgot to bring along my wallet.  Oh so what, I thought, we’re all going to die anyway…this must surely be the end of the world.

      This insanity lasted another half hour.  Toward the end of it, I cracked open the door and waited for some lightning to illuminate what I dreaded to see: the absence of my tent, and maybe even my bike, which was forty pounds of metal and chained to a tree.  I rather expected to see nothing around me, just a void, the entire landscape stripped to smooth bedrock by the relentless and all-powerful wind.  But my tent was still there, and the bike, of course, and everything else.  However, in the split second of viewing time which the lightning flash provided, I thought there was something odd about my tent.  The next flash of light made clear exactly what it was: the wind had blown the rain fly half off.  Oh great, everything in the tent would be soaked but good.

      As soon as things calmed down enough, I went back to the tent.  Not only was the rain fly half off, but the whole tent was twisted askew.  Had some of the stakes come out of the ground?  No, they were all fine.  What had happened was that the wind had blown so strongly and consistently from one direction against the tent that it had deformed one of the aluminum poles that held it up.  The smaller pole at the rear of the tent was alright, but the front one, which fits together in sections like a blind person’s walking stick and holds up the front of the tent in the shape of an upside down “U”, was now in the form of an italicized upside down “U”—very italicized.  I tried pushing the tent back into its proper position, but it kept leaning back to the side.  Finally, I tied it back with rope just so I could get in the tent and remove everything for a good wringing out.

August 15, 2004

I arrived in Omak at nine o'clock Saturday morning after spending the previous night alongside the road in Riverside on a stone and sand ledge at the base of a bluff which rose a couple hundred feet above me. Omak is a gritty Native American town in the northwestern corner of the Colville Indian Reservation. It's a cowboy town, and on this dry and dusty eighty-degree morning it pulsated with potential (and a fair amount of actual) violence. Every August a large rodeo, The Omak Stampede, is held here, and it attracts hundreds of rough hombres, hard-ropin', hard-drinkin' cowboys of every stripe--Native Americans, white dudes, black dudes, Mexicans and many others. The finale of the rodeo is a bareback horserace known as The Suicide Race. The racers run en masse across a couple thousand feet of a broad plain before they plunge down what can only honestly be described as a cliff. Every year a few of the horses can't negotiate the steep terrain successfully and have to be put down if they don't die directly. And of course there are some injuries among the racers and the occasional death. The race was to be held later in the afternoon, after the big parade down the main street of Omak. I'd at least stay and check out the parade (maybe it would be better than the one I'd seen in Minneapolis) but I doubted I would hang around to watch The Suicide Race. I had my own suicide mission to undertake.

I wandered around town for a little while and I could see people setting up folding chairs and staking out good viewing spots along the curb. I found out that the parade would not start for another hour at 11:00. I went to one end of Main Street and I encountered three individuals gathered around the entrance to a motel. One of the men, a hefty thirty-something Indian from a reservation in Montana, was attired, as many young men in the crowded "rez" ghettos are, in stylish urban hip-hop fashions. One of the two white men was a young guy in his early twenties who said he had hitchhiked in from the coast and was looking for a job and a place to live in Omak. The remaining member of the trio was a local cowboy, a short, slim, craggy-faced guy in his thirties with a tangled set of broken, rotting teeth and a huge wad of chewing tobacco in his craw and the resulting odd manner of speaking. He was discoursing on the colors which the different gangs on the rez wore. He said that just a couple days earlier a guy was shot because he was wearing purple. "Don' be wearing' nawthin' porhhpul 'roun' Omak urrhyuh get yurrh ass capped!" "Like this?", and I showed him a purple bandana I kept in my handlebar bag for wiping off sweat. "Urrhupph", he said and made his hand into a pistol and capped my ass.

I ambled on down to the other end of Main Street where there was a convenience store with a bank of payphones outside. I made my weekly call to my parents, then parked my butt (which hadn't been permanently capped) on the sidewalk and watched the Annual Omak Stampede Parade. What a contrast to the Minneapolis Aquatennial Parade. The Omak parade was a loud, colorful display of horses and riders from reservations all across the Northwest. Also on parade were the police and fire units from towns all across north central Washington, as well as guard and reserve units with their spit-polished military vehicles and paraphanelia. The firemen rode on the back of old pumpers and sprayed the grateful crowds (it was now getting into the nineties as noon approached.) Their nozzles were set on stun...they'd pretend they were going to water down one side of the street, then suddenly turn and spray the other side. Sometimes a group of twenty horses would go by all in step...even the poop scoopers following behind seemed to proceed with exquisite choreography. In between each group of riders was a high school marching band. There weren't any Melha Shriners in little go-carts. Instead a local group of Tim Allen-inspired gearheads rode by, circling around each other and poppin' wheelies on their modified lawnmowers. Apparently they had their own event in town--a race on these souped-up landscape-mobiles in which speeds were in excess of 30 mph. It was the type of parade which kept the spectator's rapt attention.

(The parade I watched in Minneapolis, the Aquatennial Parade which kicks off that city's annual water festival, was also a colorful display, especially with troupes of Thai and Cambodian traditional dancers doing synchronized cartwheels and graceful backflips with long brightly-hued silk scarves trailing. But it was an unevenly-paced happening, with annoying large gaps between the units which made some observers think that the parade was over. And of course since it took place in the middle of a large, noisy city, it was often hard to really hear and pay attention to what was going on. At one major intersection along the parade route, marchers and traffic took turns going their respective ways. And most of the parade consisted of floats of local dignitaries and the occasional beauty queen, who did nothing but smile, wave and throw candy to the crowd. This being the Midwest, though, it was a nice treat to gaze at the occasional beauty queen.)

Back here in Omak it was time for me to continue on. I walked my bike along the sidewalk to the end of Main Street where it rounded a bend and yet more units were streaming out of a side street to join the parade. A group of men and women on four-wheelers went by and one of them pointed at me and shouted "He should be in the parade!" I smiled and waved to him and acknowledged the thirty or so pairs of eyes now fixed on me and my ridiculous bike with all the luggage on it. I didn't join the parade, instead I rejoined Route 20 and headed for Okanogan and after that the climb to Loup Loup Pass. This part of the Okanogan Valley is narrow, with less than a mile width of plain on either side of the river and after that the walls of sandstone and other sediments which the river has deposited and then cut through over the millenia. After Okanogan this wall starts rounding off and the highway gradually makes it way up to the crest and then follows along the bottom of a new wall. Now I was a few hundred feet above the river and could better see more of the beautiful valley it had carved; I could also better see more of the absolutely magnificent and huge mountains which I was about to spend the next few hours travelling through on this rather hot afternoon.

The climb to Loup Loup Pass through the Okanogan Range was not as difficult as the climb I made two days earlier through Sherman Pass on the highest paved road in Washington (Route 20). There's a vertical gain of about three thousand feet from the Okanogan River to Loup Loup Pass, elevation 4020 feet. This gain is spread out over seventeen miles with gently paced intervals of hill and dale and on this particular day there were plenty of shaded areas (depending on which way the road twisted) to offer some relief from the heat, now in the upper nineties, but dropping a few degrees with every thousand feet of altitude. I still had some water left and plenty of food by the time I reached the top and I felt pretty good. I looked forward to the free ride I'd paid for with a few gallons of sweat and barely paused before I began to coast down into the Methow Valley for twelve miles till I hit Twisp. But my free ride only lasted for about four or five miles and then I was hurtled face-first back into the same blast oven I had encountered after Sherman Pass and again after Wauconda Pass. During the summer in north central Washington the river valleys are like convection ovens and while it is only in the upper eighties on the mountaintops down in the valley the temperature hovers around 102. So there was a nice hot wind I had to pedal against for seven miles to get to Twisp. Now my water was gone...I think half of it evaporated before I even had a chance to drink it. My nice Oakley shades couldn't protect my poor retinas from being scorched by furious Helios. At least when I came down from Sherman Pass I had water to pour in my eyes and on the top of my overheated skull. (I can still hear the hisses and cracks as my head contracted and hardened, like a red hot chunk of steel being plunged into a bath.) The landscape in this last desert valley before the rain forests on the other side of the Cascades was certainly beautiful in an austere, rocky way, but it was hard to appreciate when flames are shooting from your eyesockets and all you can see is bright white light bouncing off every surface.

I was planning on continuing as far as Winthrop another ten miles up the road or maybe even as far as Mazama, the last town in the Methow Valley before the Cascades, but now I thought it would be a good idea to tag along with this interesting fellow into Twisp and let him show me a good spot to camp at the edge of the city park where the Twisp River joins the Methow River. This spot had been a meeting spot for thousands of years between the local Indian tribes until 1903 when the white settlers unceremoniously told the natives to scram. Most were interred in the Colville Indian Reservation, a huge swath of desert which was largely unusable to the white usurpers. Needless to say this created a great deal of ill will between the natives and the new settlers which went unaddressed until August of 2003 when the first Two Rivers Pow Wow was held as an act of reconciliation between the parties. The second annual pow wow was coming up in a week and I was tempted to linger in this pleasant little town to take part in it, since I'd wanted to check out such an event if possible during my trip across the West. But alas, I knew I couldn't stop now for more than a day or two with Anacortes and the end of coast-to-coast trip number two just three days or so away. At least I could enjoy Ed's company tonight and in the morning and listen to him expound on his knowledge of all things Native American. Ed is a white man himself but I heard him constantly disparage the entire race because of their greed, wastefullness, separation from nature, and generally shabby treatment of the people who'd been here for countless generations, who were indeed an integral part of the land, its life and its harmonious existence, and from whom the white fools could learn a great deal if they would but turn off their noisy tools of destruction and just listen. "I'm terribly ashamed to be a white boy..." he lamented more than once.

We stopped at the supermarket in town and got some supplies, then headed to the Twisp City Park and waited for the sun to go down. Then we took a walk through some pine trees on the edge of the park and walked a little ways down one of the many dry streambeds left behind by the fickle river. I set up my tent but had to use stones to hold down the corners...tent stakes were useless in the rocky soil. My companion had no tent or sleeping bag, but instead strung up some mosquito netting over his ground cloth and foam sleeping pad. I felt a bit of envy for this free-wheelin' light traveller. Everything he needed was right there in his backpack. (He did have other possessions which he kept in a storage unit, so it wouldn't be fair to say that he was a true wandering ascetic...but he was the closest to it that I had met.) He didn't have to maintain a bicycle while he traveled around and he could easily go off into the wilderness far from the beaten path, while I had to stick to the road. He told me that his Native American friends, who treated him as one of their own, had revealed to him the knowledge of seven plants which could sustain a human being in the North Cascades year-round. "When the day comes, and it ain't far off, when all the shit goes down and white boy's evil technological civilization collapses all around him...well I know how to survive and the white boys'll be comin' down from the hills freakin' out cuz they've run out of toilet paper and bullets!" (Ed had thought once 24 years earlier that he was indeed witnessing such a collapse of civilization. He'd just gotten out of the Army, where he served in Vietnam in the final days and was camping in southwestern Washington. It got very dark and started raining. But it wasn't normal rain, the drops were dark and muddy "They've finally done it, the fools!"--he thought nuclear war had just broken out between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. He went into town where everyone was running around in a panic. "It finally happened! It finally happened!" one of the residents shouted at him. "What?! What finally happened?!" Ed shouted back. "Mt. St. Helens just blew up!" Oh.)

Throughout most of my trip I had been getting up before sunrise and was on the road by six, but now, near the end, I was in no rush and I wanted to savor every moment. I treated Ed and myself to coffee and muffins at the Cinnamon Twisp, a cool little bakery on the main drag. For a couple of hours we had some great conversations between ourselves and passersby who couldn't decide who was the weirder of the two: this wild-eyed hippy in a kilt or this crazy masochist on his...what is that anyway? A bicycle or a mobile luggage rack?! By the time I headed out it was after eleven. My plan for that day was to make it to Washington Pass, near the crest of the Cascades, and to camp out a mile up in the sky. Then I would just coast down for a couple of days toward Anacortes, riding alongside the "Magic Skagit", as the Skagit River is known by some. I took leave of this charming, rustic town with the vow that I would return one day, perhaps to settle here for a little while. Ed told me about Sunny Pines, an organic farm several miles up Twisp River Road, owned by a couple of, you guessed it, aging hippies who would let young (and old) wanderers camp out on their land while they helped work the rich river plain soil. I'd worked on a couple of non-organic farms in the past and though the work was hard and low-paying I'd found it to be quite fulfilling. Maybe these guys at Sunny Pines would take me in. But that was something to deal with after I'd hit the coast.

It was a little cooler today, clouds were starting to roll in, and the temperature was only in the upper eighties. In a short time I covered the ten miles to Winthrop. Sure enough Main Street looked as phony as a three-dollar bill. I didn't linger here but pushed on. After another eight miles I came to Goat Creek Road where I would detour off Route 20. There was a nice little swimming hole on the Methow River here and though I was determined to make the mountaintop by day's end, that clear sparkling water sure looked inviting. So I parked my luggage rack under the bridge, stripped to my shorts and dove in. Ahhhhh. There were about a dozen other people refreshing themselves in the river and I struck up conversation with four of them, a husband and wife and their two children. They were on summer vacation and had been headed to a campground in North Cascades National Park. But this was an unusually active wildfire season and Mother Nature cancelled their reservations. Now they were just driving their camper around and enjoying their visit to this Paradise on Earth best they could. They thought that what I was doing was really cool and indeed were mountain cyclists themselves; I could see their bikes mounted on the back of their camper. I wished them well and continued on towards the Cascades, worried now that the wildfires might block my progress as well. But I'd been monitoring news reports and knew that the fires that raged on the other side of the mountain were well south of my route and if I didn't dilly-dally too much I could pass through safely. After another five miles I was in Mazama, the last town in the valley, and the last chance to stock up on supplies before I began my ascent to Heaven. On the way into town I passed a large open field which was being converted into a staging area for the firefighters. There were several large canvas tents being erected and a forest service helicopter was just taking off. About twenty men and women in full fire gear were milling about. I was tempted to stop and ask them about their progress in fighting the spreading fires, but they looked pretty grim-faced and I didn't think they had much time for idle chitchat. I stopped at the general store and went in to load up on Gatorade and all the foods which I'd found through experience to provide nice energy boosts during a long climb in the hills. I bought a couple pounds of raisins, because I really think those delicious little fruits saved my ass on Sherman Pass three days earlier. As I sat at a picnic table in front of the store a guy pulled up on a Harley and parked next to a hitching post. He took his helmet off and came towards me. Well whaddya know?! It was the young white guy I'd met the day before in front of the motel in Omak. His name was Jeremy. "Hey dude, where'd you get the nice bike?" He told me he was considering buying it from a guy in Omak and the owner was letting him test drive it. I noticed it had an Oregon plate and was a little skeptical about his story. He was acting very strange and for a minute I thought he was on drugs--maybe coke or meth--but in our conversation he openly admitted that he was manic-depressive and hadn't taken his medication in a week. He loved the manic phase of his illness, and as soon as it peaked he would resume his meds before he slid back into Hell.  He didn't like being alone when he was manic and would it be alright if he tagged along with me through the mountains? Well he was a likable enough guy, and he didn't seem violent, but I didn't see how someone on a mountain bike and someone on a Harley were going to manage to travel together. He had no camping equipment and I told him he was welcome to share my campsite up on Washington Pass that night, but that my tent was only big enough for one guy.  He said no sweat, he was going to be up all night anyway and didn't need a tent. I said alright and told him where I'd be at nightfall. But now it was about four in the afternoon, drops of rain were staring to fall and I began to think that I wasn't going to make the eighteen steep miles to Washington Pass that day. (Good, I thought, I wouldn't be where I told this guy I would be and I could enjoy the night in peace.)

Now I was entering the Cascades for real and in every direction I looked were the beautiful rugged peaks in stark relief that the previous day were only hazy shadows. I could die right here with absolutely no regrets, I thought. I only rode for about an hour and hadn't hit the steep stuff yet, when it became apparent that the skies were going to open up but good. So I pulled into the Early Winters Campground in the Okanogan National Forest and claimed a site. I was the sole occupant of the campground. Nice. I set up my tent, put everything in it in preparation for the imminent deluge and then went to explore Early Winters Creek. Each individual stream that drains the North Cascades is a marvel within itself. Huge trees, spruce, firs, hemlocks and cedar are uprooted by the water's unrelenting downward force and end up entangled in the creek. These logjams are vital ecosystems, providing spawning grounds for salmon, helping to oxygenate the water, and for us humans simply providing us with natural beauty to gaze at and nice perches to sit or stand on while we fished. I hiked a quarter of a mile or so up the creek jumping from tree trunk to tree trunk and wishing I was one of the wild creatures who called this place home. If I knew what was safe to eat out in this wilderness I wouldn't be cooking up yet another batch of Ramen noodles for my supper. Just as I sat down at my picnic table to chow down on noodles, fruit and crackers I heard the distinctive roar of a Harley and here came Jeremy rumbling up to my campsite. I offered him some of my meal but he wasn't hungry. He let me sit on the Harley, and I must admit it felt pretty comfy, but I thought, here I am sitting on a bike that was probably stolen.  Now I'm an accomplice. It was starting to rain legitimately now, and Jeremy agreed with me that it would probably be a good idea for him to go back down the valley and find some shelter. "Why don't you go to Twisp, park the bike near the city park and hang out in the gazebo. At least you'll stay dry...nobody'll bother you there." He smiled and said "I love Twisp, but Twisp don't love me."  I gave him a few dollars and he roared off into the rain.

It was six o'clock now, and though I'd only put in about thirty mile this day I was beat and I crawled into my tent to escape the rain and get rested up for the final big climb the next day. As I drifted off I could here thunder off in the distance from the other side of the mountain. It wasn't raining terribly hard but the tent amplifies every raindrop so it always seems to be raining harder than it actually is. I slept straight through to about midnight and when I awoke it really was raining hard and the wind was whipping my tent. I listened to my radio for a bit to see if I could get some weather info but all I could pick up were some AM stations in British Columbia and I didn't know how relevant their forecasts would be to my situation. I went back to sleep and when I woke up again at five in the morning all was calm and tranquil. I got out and walked in the dark to the creek which was anything but tranquil. All the rain from Silver Star Mountain six thousand above was now coursing down Early Winters Creek and I thought, this is what they call a creek?! Back home in New England this violent onslaught of water, wood, and mud would be reason enough to evacuate to higher ground. Out here it was just Mother Nature doing a little housecleaning and rearranging the furniture. All through the Cascades are signs indicating where such and such a stream had its original bed until some obstruction (fallen sixty foot tall trees and boulders the size of houses) blocked its path. These reroutings happen in real time, not geological time like back East. Each year the geological service updates it maps and charts to reflect these changes. The western mountain ranges are rowdy adolescents, still developing, still undergoing growth spurts, crashing into one another...ferocious sibling rivalries. Out East the Appalachians are, well, older than the hills. Balding, stooped over, and senile those eastern hills have long forgotten their glory days, they were once higher than The Rockies but are now just shrunken shells. Whereever I go in my travels I eventually start pining for the peaceful hills of my native Western Massachusetts, but not at this moment...there is so much out here to assail all the bodily senses, that the puny Berkshire foothills were the farthest thing from my mind.

Wednesday, August 18, 2004, Twisp, Washington

The next morning I decided that if I were going to stay in Twisp for the rest of the week I would still have to do some riding everyday so I could stay in shape and keep up at least some of the momentum I had built up over the last two months.  I didn't want to be like a couple of cyclists I'd heard of who'd almost crossed the country and quit just a couple hundred miles from their goal because they just couldn't go another foot, they'd just had enough.  Even though I'd already crossed the continent once before and didn't feel like I was out to prove anything, I just had to finish this ride so I could feel that wonderful sense of satisfaction I'd experienced the first time.  (The previous summer I'd ridden to Florida and had hoped to make it all the way to Key West, but I only made it halfway down the Atlantic coast of Florida when I lost my wallet and that ride came to an abrupt end.  Sure I'd been disappointed and embarrased...and a little relieved as well.  It broke my heart to see how we Americans treat our coastline, a very fragile ecosystem, like it's just a playpen and a sewer.  But did I hang around to help fix the problem, like Ed would advise?  No, I just did some more running amok.)  So after some more coffee and muffins at The Cinnamon Twisp, Ed and I headed up Twisp River Road, Ed on foot, me on my contraption.  I thought I would go as far up that river valley as I could and look at a wildfire up close.  I parted company with the kilted hippy once again and pedalled off.  I forgot to fill my water bottles,

so I stopped a couple miles up the road where Sunny Pines Farm had a barn which served as the shipping point for their produce.  The fields where they grew the vegetables and fruit were still another six miles up the road.  There were a couple of young folks working there and they let me fill up my jugs.  While I was doing that a gentleman with thin gray hair on his pate pulled up and came into the barn.  I gathered that he was one of the owners and I was about to ask him about his policy of letting farmhands camp on his land, but I decided to wait on that for now.  I'll do that after I hit the coast, I thought, I don't want any distractions now.  

A few more miles up the road I passed by the farm fields of Sunny Pines.  It looked like it would indeed be a very pleasant place to live and work.  I would certainly be back someday, sooner rather than later, I hoped.  After a couple more miles I came to a fork in the road. Running parallel to this new road was a stream which fed the Twisp River.  I decided to follow this road up into the hills rather than continue on down Twisp River Road to see the wildfires.  It was starting to get hot as the afternoon progressed and I thought nothing could be finer now than to go skinny-dipping in the sparkling cool water which splashed lazily down the hillside over the boulders and fallen trees.  After a half mile or so I found a nice spot where the stream was a couple hundred feet from the road and hidden by the dense woods.  I'm

not a very modest person and I hadn't seen a car pass by in over an hour, so I stripped down and jumped about ten feet from the top of a boulder into an inviting pool dammed up by trees and rocks.  I washed the grime from my body and sat by the edge of the pool submerged to my neck.  Puffy white clouds floated by overhead, birds chirpped in the trees, and occassionally I heard critters stumbling in the brush further up the hilldside.  It suddenly occurred to me that for once, out here in the wilderness, I heard no sounds of civilizations--no squealing tires, no chainsaws, no loud car stereos, no ATV's or jet skis, just my own thoughts and even they were starting to dim down a notch or two.  Could it be?  Was I finally able to relax and shut out all the noise, internal as well as external?  I was truly in heaven and I wanted to stay there.  But alas, finally a loud dump truck rumbled by and roused me from my reveries.  My old impatience returned and I was unable to sit still any longer.  I put my shorts back on and took a short hike up the stream.  First I jumped from boulder to boulder until I came to a spot where

the stream levelled out and was deeper with fewer large boulders and more fallen trees snagged on one another.  Now I decided to test my balance by seeing how far I could get by walking along the criss-crossing tree trunks.  I would be Super Mario being chased by Donkey Kong.  I didn't score very high --I lost my footing on one particularly slippery log and fell into a pool below.  I landed kind of hard, this pool wasn't as deep as the one further downstream, and for a few seconds I was worried I'd sprained my ankle.  But I dragged myself out, crawled through the thick brush and limped along the bank back to where the rest of my clothes were.  My foot would be fine.  I got dressed, pushed my bike back out to the road and began what would turn out to be a twelve mile ride to the top of the hill and, eventually, three miles after that to a hidden Methow gem--Black Pine Lake.   

Back in Twisp I'd been thinking it would be nice if I could find a safe place to stash my gear so I could enjoy some nice day-trips on an unloaded bike.  Now I was glad I hadn't done that.  I was definitely going to camp out here for the night.  However, since I'd planned on returning to Twisp before day's end I hadn't brought along much food, just some fruit and crackers.  Oh well, I'd survive...maybe I could forage for some nuts and berries.  I pulled into a campground which was not crowded at all, a few people fishing and only one other group of campers: mother, father, and a couple of boys.  I waved to them then sat at a picnic table.  I had a voracious appetite so I tore into my Graham Crackers.  As I sat there munching my crackers I thought I felt something on my leg.  I looked down and there was nothing.  Hmmm.  Then it happened again and I looked down once more.  Still nothing.  Must just be my leg muscles twitching, though that hadn't happened in over three thousand miles.  Now I was spooked.  Was a poisonous snake trying to do me in?  The third time I was quicker and I caught a glimpse of the culprit, a small chipmunk, perhaps of the Townsend variety, though I couldn't be sure; my knowledge of woodland critters (as well as plants, trees and much else) was still in its infancy.  This little guy just wanted me to share my food with him.  I'd've been glad to but I didn't have much.  I thought for a moment I could give him all my crackers, fatten him up a bit, then I might have some grilled chipmunk for dinner.  But I couldn't do that to the poor fellow.  So I got up on top of the table to enjoy my meager meal in peace.  I closed my eyes and enjoyed the sensations of this serene setting.  It was cooler up here by the lake under the pines.  I opened my eyes and looked around; off in the

distance a couple of mountain peaks loomed.  One of them was Horseshoe Butte, with the odd shape that gave it its name. (One thing I especially liked about the mountains out West were the irregular profiles they presented.  In the pictures I had seen, of the Rockies, for instance, it seemed as if the peaks and sides of these great hills had been more symmetrical, as if the photographs had been airbrushed to satisfy the aesthetics of Easterners used to their more rounded and evened-off hills; but in reality it looked as if all these immense masses of rock had been chucked down from the sky and left to lie where they fell, like a toddler playing with blocks.)  When I reached down for another cracker they were gone.  I swung around and there was Chipolonious Monk with a cracker clutched in his paws happily munching away.  "Well alright," I told him, "here ya go" and I grabbed the stack of crackers and threw a few onto the ground.  He dove for them and was joined by a couple of

comrades.  "If I die of hunger out here in the wilderness, it'll be on your furry little heads!" I remonstrated.  They didn't seem to care--little ingrates.

I took a walk down to the water and chatted with one of the guys fishing. That's what I should be doing, I thought, I should get myself some fishing gear next time I'm out on an adventure and learn how to be a little more self-sufficient.  ("What do we need Safeways for when we live in such a bountiful land?" Ed had asked me as we sat in the supermarket in Twisp eating fruit bussed in from the Imperial Valley of California.  Yeah, but where can you find Slim Jims and Honey Buns out in the wilderness?)  Still hungry I took a tour of the campsites to find the best spot to set up my tent.  I wanted to wake up, crawl out of the tent, and the first thing I would see would be Horseshoe Butte.  So I made my way up the hill to an area that the rocks and tree roots had formed into a terrace.  On the way I passed by the family I'd waved to earlier.  Of course my bike and all its attached stuff provoked inquiries and I gave them my well-rehearsed thirty-second soundbite.  They wanted to hear more and invited me to join them for the supper they were just laying out on their picninc table.  "It's not much," they warned, but it was. It was a gargantuan feast as far as I was concerned--stir-fry veggies, fruit salad, Caesar salad, fresh bread, potato salad, deviled eggs, potato chips, corn chips, and bug juice. For the sake of politeness I tried to pretend that I'd eaten enough, but when they were all finished eating and some of the dishes had leftovers, they told me to have some more since a guy like me probably needed twice as many calories as they did.  I couldn't argue with that logic.

Thursday, August 19, 2004, Twisp, Washington

I rose early, ate what was left of my rations--some grapes, crackers, and raisins--then broke camp to descend from this mountain paradise back down to my adopted hometown of Twisp.  Instead of being safe and following the same route I'd taken to Black Pine Lake, I decided to risk getting lost and follow another path back to the Twisp River.  As is usually the case for the risk-taker I was rewarded with some perilous riding and breath-taking scenery.  I hung a left at the campground's entrance and the gravel road soon became all dirt; first it was tightly packed dirt, then after a couple of switchbacks the road became looser and steeper, much steeper.  I had to ride the brakes for awhile and then, fearing I'd topple over the edge into Nothingness, I dismounted and hiked down for a mile or so, still gripping the brake levers, lest Ol' Betty run away from me, loaded down with all my crap.  Every once in a while I'd stop to catch my breath and then lose it as I gazed at the wonders surrounding me.  I was in the Alps, I swore to myself.  Layer upon layer of mountains folded in, about, above, and below me.  I was struck with awe.  Miles away and a thousand or two feet up were snow-capped peaks--not much snow, since it was, after all, August, but magnificent nonetheless.  I knew that there was permanent ice on some of

those peaks...these were the glaciers which were still retreating all

these many years after the last ice age.  Eight o'clock in the morning and I was already sweating like a pig...yet I was staring at the distant

remnants of a much colder time.

Closer to where I stood (rather: leaned, flexing my muscles against gravity) I shot nervous glances down the hundreds of feet of steep terrain where glorious stands of pine and other evergreens marched unending down, down, down to...where?  Where the hell was the bottom of all this?  If I slipped and fell, I'd surely find out.  I wasn't curious, though.  Probably just a lot of rotting logs and skeletal remains...maybe the answer to all of the Universe's mysteries lay down below...who knew, but the bears and gophers and gargantuan dragonflies?

It was turning into a very pleasant morning--not yet hot; slight breezes

wafted from various directions.  As I rounded a bend in the dirt road, I

could see smoke rising up from the far side of a mountain range.  It must be from the wildfire complex above the Twisp River Valley, I thought.  (When I first heard these fires referred to as "complexes", I thought, "How odd?"  But I soon learned that these fires were indeed complicated systems, not the mere forest fires that sometimes broke out back East in dry weather, usually in early Autumn.  They were like living organisms, striving to reproduce and dominate the landscape just as animal lifeforms would.  And they required equally complicated strategies and a whole lot of coordination and cooperation between hundreds of people to contain, control, and eventually conquer them.)  I wasn't even sure if that were the Twisp River Valley on the other side of the mountain.  I had a compass, I could see the sun, but I wasn't really sure what direction I was going in.  I'd twisted and turned on this road so much in the past hour, and I'd been so bedazzled by the crazy, uneven, and unending peaks that towered over me, that dwarfed me and leaned over me and closed in on my puny self, that I'd become, in addition to beguiled and seduced, quite bewildered and intimidated.  To tell the truth, I didn't care which way I was going.  According to the map, this road would eventually straighten out and deliver me to Twisp River Road and to the mundane world of human affairs--but for now I was gladly trapped in Valhalla and roaming alongside the gods.  

By and by I came down into a more level area between the mountain flanks.  Small farm fields appeared and off the sides of the road were small rustic houses along with old rusted vehicles and farming implements.  This part of Washington is semi-arid.  In some areas the predominant hue was brown; in others it was green.  It depended, I supposed, on the availability of irrigation and the local level of precipitation.  Here there was more greenery--lots of apple orchards and vegetable gardens.  I saw corn fields, though they certainly weren't as omnipresent as the million or so square miles of cattle corn back in the Midwest.  A little further east of here in the Okanogan Valley the landscape was tinted brown; sparse patches of evergreen and sage dotted the dusty hillsides; there I saw small ranches where skinny horses and mules nibbled sun-dried hay.

Finally I reached Twisp River Road, just a mile or two from where it joined Route 20.  I saw a small pickup truck parked by the side of the road with someone leaning on the hood, propped on elbows and waving at me; as I got closer I could see that it was Brad and once again I marvelled at the fact that, thousands of miles from home, I kept running into friends at every turn.  Brad was coming from some construction job he was overseeing when he spied someone coming down the dirt road on a bike.  "I wagered 10 to 1 to myself that it was Bob, and whaddya know, I was right!" he exclaimed. "Does that mean that I owe you ten bucks?" I asked him.  "Ha, ha, ha..."

Brad had been discussing with Ed the possibility of Ed renting a room in

Brad's house and now he confided in me his uncertainties about Ed's

suitability as a tenant.  I'd already heard Ed's side of the whole story

and I could see that the deal probably wasn't going to go down.  I thought to myself that I wouldn't mind settling in Twisp for a spell and maybe I could work out a deal where Brad would put me up (perhaps just let me camp out in his yard) in exchange for me doing some work for him.  But Brad was interested in generating some rental income, which is why Ed, who was on Social Security, was more the type of person he'd be interested in.

We talked about the Pow-Wow which was set to start the next day in the

afternoon.  Myself, Brad, and Ed had already talked to the one of the

women in charge of preparations for the event and indicated that we would be available throughout the duration of the weekend to help out in any way we could.  There would be plenty to do, we were assured, especially in the way of setting up tables, tents, and a very large grill.  We'd agreed to meet this woman later today on Glover St. to help fill her car with food and supplies and unload them at the City Park.  Also, no one seemed to want the unglamorous job of directing people where to park, so Ed and I, the dynamic duo, volunteered our managerial skills to the task.  "We both done jobs that were a whole lot less glamorous," said Ed.  "Oh thank you both," she gushed, "I'd run out of people to ask."

I was really looking forward to the Pow-Wow.  I had hoped, as I journeyed westward, to observe such a gathering, but up until now I'd never been in the right place at the right time.  When I first arrived in Twisp and saw the posters announcing the Pow-Wow for a week hence, I thought, "Darnit! By that time I'll be at the end of my trip in Anacortes."  But fate stranded me here for a few days and now I thought, "How cosmic."  And not only would I be just another white spectator checking things out, but I'd be an active participant, helping out out and meeting and learning about the Native Americans who'd been such caring and thoughtful guardians of this piece of our common Mother Earth and who'd been so unkindly and unjustly shoved aside when the white settlers bulldozed their way into this at once wild and tranquil valley a hundred and one years earlier.

Indeed, with each passing hour of this day, that ofttimes troublesome, and yet sustaining fanciful side of my nature tingled with anticipation.  Maybe this will be it!  Maybe the secrets and solutions to my existence will somehow appear to me, out of the blue, and with a glorious thunderclap, during the Pow-Wow.  Oh the small mind of the egotist, always setting itself up for bitter disappointment in its fruitless search for...not even for something as shallowly noble as personal meaning...just a circular search for a miracle cure, some magic snake oil that would heal me...me...me.

The Broom Dance

Twisp, Washington

August 22, 2004

            I took a break from my duties as parking lot attendant (which were far from overwhelming, since attendance at the Pow Wow was lower than had been hoped for and expected) and walked back to the park for my dinner.  I had a ravenous appetite.  I suppose my Native American name would've been "Eats-With-Ravens".

            At one end of the fire pit, upon a steel grate sat a 40-quart pot of soup.  A middle-aged woman stood by it, stirring the contents with a wooden paddle.  "It's almost ready," she said, "just a few more minutes."  Then, surreptitiously, she threw in something concealed in her fist, perhaps some magical herbs and spices.

            She was a Native American, and she was quite outspoken, in contrast to most of the other indigenous women, who struck me as demure.  Earlier in the day, I had listened as she made clear to Uncle her opinion on the current state of Native American manhood:

            "All the chiefs and bucks have become soft; they've lost their old ways; they are no longer warriors.  They would rather hang out with each other and party.  They can't fight anymore, they can't defend themselves or their tribe.  They don't impress me.  I don't know how their women stand it.  I prefer a man who's lean and strong."

            As she said this, I found myself trying to straighten my posture as much as possible, trying to get six feet two inches out of a five eleven and seven eighths' frame.  I sucked in my gut, normally taut and flat after all these miles of riding, but lately gaining a perceptibly thin layer of fat with all the gorging I'd been doing at the Pow Wow.  I puffed out my chest--my pecs, nonexistent for most of my life, now were musclular, though they were hardly anything that Michelangelo would have wasted any time memorializing in marble.  If the men if this woman's life failed to impress her, maybe I would give it a shot.  Oh, what a pig I was...am.

            "There you go, hungry guy," she said with a smile as she ladled steaming hot bean and vegetable soup into my bowl.  I immediately sampled the hearty broth and exclaimed, "It's fantastic."  I didn't say this just to win points with her, though if that happened, it was alright with me.  It truly was delicious soup, and though it contained no meat, I'm sure she made the base from the juices of wild game and that infused it with a flavor that would make even a city dweller, who knew nothing of the woods, the mountains, or the plains, feel as if they were sitting on the ground beneath the bright moon and stars and listening to the wolves howl.  A line had formed behind me; perhaps the soup's aroma had drawn these twenty of so people, or maybe it was this woman's reputation as a first-rate chef.

            I was heading to the end of the line for seconds when I heard a man at the stage summoning people to gather around.  He had a special treat for everyone.  His hoarse voice enjoined us to, "C'mon up, all you people, get out of your chairs and come on up here.  We need all of you.  C'mon."  I had no idea what was going on, so I decided to go investigate.

            This Pow Wow was unlike any organized event I had attended in the white man's world.  There was no program printed up listing times and places for all the different dances and ceremonies and drum circles that took place.  Things just happened when and where they were destined to  take shape.  A person who was used to the orderly, controlled, and I must opine, anal way of Western (i.e., European) life, might find himself or herself uncomfortable in such a situation, but some might soon see the beauty in the way things unfolded.

            The descendants of Europe also loved to gather in informal groups, small and large, to party, to loosen up--usually with the aid of alcohol and other substances--and to talk and dance and sing that they might forget the difficulties of their lives.  There were no written or unwritten marching orders at such festivities, things just happened, sometimes for the good and sometimes for the bad.  Native Americans had adopted this formless sort of partying and they, too, often gathered around and used alcohol and other drugs to sink into oblivion and forget about the harsh destitution that had befallen them.  Sadly, on some reservations this was the predominant activity, day and night, and the effects were obvious and quite negative.

            But this Pow Wow was no frivoulous party, though there was indeed laughter and singing and chatter.  This event had a serious purpose and undertone.  It was a reconciliation Pow Wow.  It was a chance for the descendants of the white settlers of the Methow Valley and the descendants of the indigenous tribes who had been displaced by them a century earlier to come together in a spirit of peace and forgiveness; to become acquainted with one another so that they might work together to solve the problems they had in common. 

            True, the Indians had it much worse than the whites--their land had been stolen from them, although they might say, "How can you steal something from us that we never owned.  We belong to the Earth and now you are stealing yourselves from the Earth.  Fools."  And true, their culture was, at best, reduced to token remembrances as they were dispersed to farflung reservations, dusty plots of land where nothing can grow but hopelessness and bitterness, or at worst, annihilated.  But now these white folks found common cause as the land they loved became threatened by a new group of invaders--the money-grubbing nouveau riche professionals fleeing the densely populated and increasingly crime-stricken areas on Washington's coast.

            The newcomers weren't much different from the settlers of a hundred and one years ago.  They barged into the valley, protected by their heathen gods of profit motive and English Common Law, and began shamelessly sculpting and hammering it into ugly and nonsensical shapes. 

            How can you consider yourself civilized if you don't have a nice big shopping mall with acres of asphalt parking lots?  Let's build a huge modern supermarket and do away with those inefficient rinky-dink farm stands.  Let's consolidate those apple orchards and turn farming into the behemoth it yearns to be: the mega-agri-industrial complex.  Then we can load up all the fruit and produce into trucks and export them...someone's gonna make a killing, by gum.  Now that we've got this nice big supermarket with thousands of square feet of refrigerated warehouse space, spewing noise and pollutants into the atmosphere, lets truck in some fruit and produce from Florida, from Arizona, from Southern Goddamned California.

            You see, now we're making new wealth so everybody can be happy.  We're gonna have to widen the highway now, so those eighteen-wheelers can truck shit in and truck shit out, day and night.  Listen to the roar and rumble of economic progress.  Look at the demand for oil and energy skyrocket.  Oh boy, somebody's gonna get filthy rich and I hope it's me.  Come on people, move out to the Methow and discover the beauty of the natural West while it lasts!  Come on out, we'll build some nice cookie cutter McMansions for you...over here we got some starting in the 400's, over there some good deals in the 600's...hey buddy, you got a cool million?  I got just what you're looking for over here, and don't worry-- we've used only the finest vinyl and imported rain-forest hardwood products available. 

            Don't fret, we know there's still a few hippies holding out in some of the hills, but we can assure you that this palace we've built for you doesn't incorporate any sissy-lovin' liberal mushy greenpeace energy saving features like passive solar heating.  You don't need to hike up into the hills and risk encounters  with grubby pot-smokin' freaks just to take a cool dip in a mountain stream, because we've installed a nice heated Olympic-size swimming pool in your spacious back yard, after thoughtfully cutting the few remaining trees which thought they were doing you a favor by holding your hillside soil together and perpetuating the hydrological cycle.  Bah!  Soil erosion and drought, like harmful factory emissions and global warming, is just another lie being foisted on you by the liberal media, who, as we well know, are financed by Greenpeace, the A.C.L.U, NAMBLA, and al-Qaeda! 

            Hey you retirees, we haven't forgotten you.  Why don't you come on out and spend your golden years and your pensions right here in this beautiful valley.  It's just what we need: a nice fat idle class of folks to patronize the new service economy we've created here.  Yeah, that's right; for a while we had a bit of an unemployment problem--some folks had the ax fall on them, what with all the growth and change happening so fast.  But now, all the young people in these parts have been spared the bother of learning something useful on the farm or on the ranch or in the workshop and they will now gladly pump your gas, wait on your table, and ring up your purchase.  Ah, what can be nicer than to hear the sound of a new sale on a spriong morning?  Ka-ching.  Ka-ching.

            We used to hear the birds singing in the morning, too-wheet, too-wheet, but we put an end to that.  Who needs the sounds of babbling brooks and rustling leaves when you've got the rich sound of diesel engines tearing up and down the road, the soft thud of fender-benders in the parking lot, the jubilant cursing and the middle fingers flashing.  Who needs green plants and blue skies when you've got greenbacks and silver dollars and a mountain of cheap plastic crap that reaches to the heavens and blots out everything?

            I approached, bowl of soup in hand, the area in front of the stage where the dances were held.  Some of the community dining tables had been moved to expand the dancing area.  Up on the stage, one of the tribal leaders was exhorting people to come assemble for "a really big treat."

            "We gonna have a broom dance now," he said in a low gentle voice.  "Do you know what a broom dance is?"  Some of the people smiled and nodded in the affirmative. "I know some of you do...the ones that don't, you gonna find out.  Come on now, we need more people, come on everybody."

            He then directed the people who responded to his request to separate by sex and form two straight lines on either side of the earthen dance floor and to stand there facing each other.    The line of women was clearly longer than the men's line, by about a third.

            "Come on, guys...we need more men over here in this line.  Come on now, get up and get over here.  I know you all just had a great feast and maybe you wanna take a litlle nap...you can do that later.  First you gotta get up here and help us do this broom dance.  Come on now, I ain't gonna shut up until more of you braves come up here and get in this line here...that's it now, come on up.  I know you wanna start the dance and you wanna hear me stop talking.  More men, we need more men!"  He was raising his voice now, though it was still gentle and playful.

            One by one, men in the crowd, in mock displays of begrudging, joined the line, after being prodded by giggling women to do so.  Some of them grabbed other guys on the way up and after awhile the male's line was nearly as long as the female's.  But still the leader on the stage was not satisfied.

            "Come on now!  Just a couple more guys and we gonna get started!  You there, in the blue shirt, come on up!"

            Uh-oh, I'd been spotted.  I wasn't feeling all that adventurous.  I had no idea what this dance involved and I'd been content just to be another onlooker.  I pointed to my bowl of soup, thinking I'd be excused so I could finish eating.  Surely protocol dictated that a guest not be interrupted in the middle of his meal, I reasoned.

            "Put the bowl down and come up here," I was ordered.  "You can finish that later, it ain't goin' nowhere."

            Mish, standing behind me, laughed and said, "Go on, Bob.  It looks like fun."  I thought this morose young man was being sarcastic.  The other people standing and sitting in the vicinity pushed me forward with their eyes and their smiles.  I considered grabbing Misha by the wrist and dragging him with me, but I knew he'd have nothing to do with it.

            Apparently I was the last guy they needed to balance the lines.  The men and the women stood in their respective lines awaiting further instructions.  I wondered if others were as bewildered as me.  Was this going to be some kind of line dance?  Had Christian missionaries from Great Britain taught their folk dances to the Native Americans? I wondered.  Across the way, a couple of young Indian women were laughing, their hands and wrists were interlocked and they swung each other around as if they were at a sock hop.  One of the young ladies was dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers; the other in a traditional blouse and vest, woven skirt and cowhide moccasins.  Her skirt flew up as she disengaged from her partner and spun around several times.  The beads and feathers and fringe made a colorful display.

            "Okay, now we're ready to start somethin' here.  Listen now...okay, settle down now," he addressed the two young women in particular and in general the rest of the sixty or so people lined up to his right and left.  "Okay, are you ready?  I want all you guys to look across at the ladies standing over here...now isn't there some special woman you have seen this weekend at this gathering?  Is there someone you have seen who maybe you want to meet but maybe you're too afraid to say something?  Well, now's your chance.  And you ladies..."  He turned his attention to the other side of the field.  "Is that special guy standing over there, waiting for you to approach?  Okay now, when the music starts playing, I want all you guys and girls to run over and take a partner and we're gonna start the broom dance."

            There wasn't much time for the dance participants to scope out prospective partners.  A few seconds passed, the traditional rhythmic music began pouring from the loudspeakers and the two lines of opposite sexes hurtled toward each other.  Some people immediately paired off while the diminishing pool of singletons hurried up and down the ragged line looking for mates.  I had my eye on one very enticing young Native American, but she was quickly selected by (or she herself quickly selected) someone else.  Eventually I found myself standing there holding the hands of a woman my own age...a woman I would not have chosen solely on the basis of physical appearance, but as they say, 'Beauty is only skin deep', and besides, this was a harmless dance, not a marriage proposal.

            After a minute or two, all the men and women were paired off.  All, that is, with the exception of one woman.  I thought to myself, where was she?  I would have picked her.  She was given a broom and some fairly simple instructions.  As the music played, and as the couples promenaded in a big circle on the grassy dance floor, this lonely, spurned broomlady was to dance in the opposite direction, inside the circle, holding the broom aloft.  Then, when the music stopped, she was to approach the couple she wished to break up and tap the female half of that couple on the shoulder with the broom.  Then that woman would have to take the broom and relinquish her partner.  This procedure would repeat itself throughout the duration of the dance, a variation on musical chairs.

            This is good, I thought.  It meant that I might have a crack at meeting someone else; not that there was anything wrong with the person whom fate had thrown alongside me--we were getting along swimmingly, making small talk and such, and I was letting her lead, since dancing was not an activity I took to in a natural manner--but I do believe that variety is the spice of life, you only live once, you know, and what, I wondered, were the mathematical odds of me eventually being paired with that charming Native American I had my eye on?  Would this dance last for hours, as some of the ceremonial dances seemed to?

            Around and around we went.  Occasionally, some of the men twirled their partners and I felt obliged to do the same, if just for the sake of form.  I began to feel less self-conscious--indeed, there was an air of playfulnees all about, as if we were a group of children, innocuous and innocent, cavorting in the carefree summer evening while our parents were off somewhere else.

            Then the music stopped.  Ooh, ooh, pick me, pick me!  But no, the woman with the broom swatted some other couple and the music resumed.  I was running out of small talk and I didn't wish to spring any big talk on my partner

            After about twenty minutes and a dozen or so transfers of the broom, the music stopped for good.  I still held the hands of the same woman; my palms felt awfully sweaty and this made me a little embarrased--maybe it was her hands sweating, but I doubted it.  The last woman to be left holding the broom had been promised a prize and now she was to receive it.  She was called to the front of the stage.

            "Okay now, we had a lot of fun.  Now come on up here...bring your broom."

            She was a white woman in her thirties, all smiles and long brown hair.  She held the broom up like a trophy.

            "Now we're gonna play a little more music and you're gonna do your own special broom dance."  The woman looked puzzled.  "You know--we all have a special little broom dance we do when we're all alone and now you're gonna do it here for all your friends to see."

            The woman nodded her approval and the music started.  She held the broom in front of her with both hands and began prancing like a deer.  She twirled around and even jumped in the air a couple of times.  Then she swooped in low to the ground and for a second I thought she was going to execute a cartwheel; but her exuberance did have its limits.  She was do-seh-do'ing the broom when the music stopped and at that point she tossed the broom high in the air like a baton.  Her former fellow dancers and the audience laughed and clapped their hands and then dispersed.  I shook hands with my partner and we went our separate ways.

            I returned to my bowl of soup, now cold.  I finished it anyway, then had some grapes and a large slab of apple pie.  Ed was nearby and he walked up to me.

            "I saw you up there taking part in the dance.  You looked like you were having fun," he said.

            "Well, it wasn't my idea.  Misha made me do it...he should've been up there too.  He abandoned me," I replied in mock sorrow.  Misha smiled weakly.

            "You should've brought her back here with you.  She looked like she was really enjoying your company," Ed said.

            "You think so?"

            "Sure.  A lot of good things come out of these dances.  Some people get real lucky, sometimes they find a soul mate," Ed explained.

            "Pfah!" Misha blurted.  "Nothing ever happens.  After it's over, everybody goes home alone, just like they were before."

            What a study in contrasts these two guys were, Ed and Misha.  Ed, nearing fifty years of age, was the eternal child, always optimistic, always exploring the possibilities in a world he saw as battered, much like himself, yet beautiful with its power of renewal.  He believed that white society would one day have an epiphanal understanding of its self-destructiveness and beseech Native America for help in digging itself out of the dark grave it had dug for itself.  He saw the descendants of the oppressors and the descendants of the oppressed learning from the long years of their mistakes and joining in common cause.  He thought that there would one day come a huge backlash from modern man's overreliance on technology and that humans worldwide would fight back, would rebel against their self-inflicted dehumanization and would, after much suffering and discomfort, find once again their rightful place in nature.  Universal harmony would be restored and all of the Great Creator's children would know genuine love and peace...the faded dreams of fading hippies.

            Misha's world outlook was much less generous, if not downright gloomy.  Earlier in the day he remarked to Ed and myself that he detected a real tide change in the Pow Wow's atmosphere.  Sure, things were festive at the outset, with all the singing and dancing, the storytelling and the sharing of food...good times being had by all.  But now he saw that the line that separated the white townspeople from the displaced Indians was as distinct and permanent as ever.  He derided the liberal types who made phony overtures toward the Indians, to help them both reclaim their vanishing culture and integrate into modern America; to both raise their standard of living and to allow them to share their heritage with the descendants of Europe who had strayed so dangerously far from nature.

            "The natives here laugh at the Americans.  White Americans think they're gonna save the poor Indians, when what they really wanna do is recruit the natives to help in their pursuit of global domination.  The Indians don't need any help from us.  They're just biding time 'til the whites wipe themselves out--'til they die out from disease and infection, pollution, murder, all that shit," Misha had explained earlier in the day, when dark clouds had rolled in over the surrounding bluffs and heralded his feelings of portent.

            Ed thought that the natives would come to the aid of the usurpers, if aid were sought.  But Misha didn't think that was likely to happen:

            "A race that thinks it's superior would never acknowledge that it needed help from those it considers inferior.  Even if they were sinking in quicksand they wouldn't put out their hands.  That is what pride is--'Pride goes before the fall.'"

            One thing they both agreed on was the belief that before the emergence of homo sapiens, a race of very intelligent humans inhabited the earth.  And these intelligent beings were not of the earth, but rather came here from another galaxy.

The Drum Circle

Twisp, Washington

August 21, 2004

            Making my way across North Dakota and Montana, I sometimes left Route 2 and rode along the quiet roads that went through Indian reservations.  Sometimes I would tire of riding and would dismount so I could travel at an even slower pace and fully appreciate the serenity of my surroundings.  But after awhile my brain hungered for auditory stimulation.  So I'd take out my radio and tune to a local station.  Outside of the reservations there was usually nothing I could pull in, except maybe a weak AM signal from Saskatchewan or Alberta.  But on the reservations I could usually find native programming which was provided under the auspices of National Public Radio.  I found these radio stations to be quite interesting.  Sometimes there would be a local Native American band performing.  Their tunes would blend indigenous music with rock, country, and other genres.  Sometimes the songs were of a romantic nature, like any of the silly love songs one heard on mainstream American pop radio; sometimes they were of a political nature, with edgy themes--they lamented the loss of a rich, beautiful culture and the hopelessness of poverty, discrimination, alcoholism, drug addiction, and broken homes.  Occasionally they sang of the hope of resurgence and the possibility of retribution against the oppressors.  Mixed in with these native "pop" tunes were the traditional drumming and chants from native rituals.  I would listen to the traditional music for a few minutes, thinking it was important for me, as a white man, to understand these sounds and derive some sort of appreciation for their spiritual power.  But, to be honest, I only experienced tedium and would turn off the radio and listen once again to the soft whirring of the wind, the clip-clop of my cycling shoes and the mechanical sound of my bicycle's wheels.

            But now, here at the Pow Wow, I was held in rapt fascination by the sights and sounds of the drummers as they plied their trade on the simple stage set up before the crowd of Pow Wow visitors and participants.  A succession of drum circles performed and some were purported to have established fame and following on the reservations throughout the Pacific Northwest.  It almost seemed like a competition, though there were no judges or prizes.  I wondered to myself, in a humorous vein, whether or not these drummers took to boasts of superiority in their genre, as do American rappers.  No, I didn't think so--the purpose of this music was neither entertainment nor self-glorification.  This was sacred music, and though its practitioners carried themselves with pride and dignity, they were not profane.

            After watching and listening to a couple of the circles drum and chant, I began to discern recurring patterns and forms.  This music was certainly not dull, as I had judged it, listening on the radio.  It was full of color and drama and intense emotion.

            Each of the songs began in the same simple manner: the four drummers, seated at right angles to one another around a common drum, with heads bowed down, began slowly beating the drum in 4/4 time--the time measure never deviated from 4/4--with a stick that resembled the mallet used to strike a bass drum in a rock or jazz drum kit.  After a short period, this "intro" ended and the beating began to intensify.  The volume gradually increased and the tempo likewise slowly quickened.  Then the "leader" of the quartet raised his head up towards the night sky and began chanting.  This initial chant was a long drawn-out wail, piercing one's heart with a sound of agony.  Then he dropped his head earthward for a few seconds as the wail died down...again he jerked his head up and spilled out rapid beads of syllables.  At this point, the other drummers would stay their mallets and the leader would drum solo and let out another long wail--as if he were petitioning some force in the Spirit World.  The reply would come as the other drummers resumed their rhythmic pounding on the animal hide.

            Their voices, which on the radio I'd deemed shrill and cacophonous, were beautiful in their interplay.  They harmonized, though it was not the sort of harmony I was accustomed to--a harmony based in the cold mathematics of fundamental tones and integral overtones.  It was a hot-blooded harmony based in the microtones of yearning and fear, supplication and conquest, hope and despair.  The rhythm that accompanied this organic harmony was also rooted in Life--that 4/4 beat: a march, marking off the steps which every Being in this world makes, from the initial stumbling, tentative steps, fresh from the papoose, to the last tired and shaky steps toward the grave...to repeat the cycle...

            And though the time measure of the drumming never varied, the intensity of the pounding did indeed.  It was a rather dramatic effect.  As the chanting grew in complexity, evolving into ever more tightly interwoven syllabic schemes, pleading with ever more passion to an unseen diety, the drummers, in perfect synchronicity, pounded the drum with commensurately increasing force, fervor, and fury.  Each individual strike of the mallet upon the taut leather drumhead was a carefully crafted statement, and each subsequent strike possessed just a few ounces more of strength than the one preceding it.  This crescendo was cataclysmic, culminating in a tremendous thunderclap that threatend to rend the drum's skin.

            And then--for a moment both infinite and infinitesimal--silence.  The circle's participants and their followers had been led in a holy procession to this musical precipice and the muses of the open sky had held them suspended with gossamer threads of air while they gazed into the chasm below...and watched as an eternity of generations of their forebears, clad in tribal finery, lowered lodgepoles and bundled belongings to the ground, tethered horses and dogs to trees--trees which towered so high, yet whose tops remained so far below the eyes of the invokers--watched as these ghosts from the past and from the future raised up their heads and craned their necks...and when their distant eyes, pinpoints of fire and soul, connected with the eyes of their brethren in the World of Now, they shot forth a beam of Light so silvery translucent, so potent and constant, that it pushed the onlookers back away from Time's craggy edge and planted them firmly in their rightful place.  This moment, so brief as it was, had transferred such an abundance of energy to the drummers that it could not be contained in mortal vessels--it spilled out into the crowd, into the trees and the birds, the elk, ravens, and mice, into the dandelions, the icy mountain lakes and into grains of sand on the dry braided streambeds...it formed pools on the ground and seeped away, leeching into Time Unending and returning after its ten thousand year journey to its source far, far below in the core of Life's body, the living Earth.

            The pause after the final climactic strike of the mallet was so short, a mere sixteenth of a beat rest, that it could not do much to alleviate the onward push of the chant.  The singing resumed, and to the physical organ of the ear, it was unchanged: still the web of pleading syllables unraveled.  But to the Inner Ear, the ear that wraps around the entire surface of the soul, everything was different.  The singing was so full of gratitude for the fleeting instant of reconnection with the Spirits-Who-Followed-Before, that the night sky filled with light, the clouds parted and the moon shone down with brilliance--up there was the source of this music--it didn't come from human mouths and vocal tracts, it came from a ghostly choir in the celestial empire.

            The drumming had stopped, the voices were mute, and I sat there below the stage, staring at the drummers, hearing everything in the silence.

Level 25

 Chapter One – Rendezvous at Ricks

         An I.V. drip provided the neuron-stimulating solution to Norma’s brain by way of a stainless-steel spike inserted into a raised blue vein in her pearly-white arm.  The solution was one of the vital ingredients of SR—Supra Reality—the hottest info technology of the 21^st century, which evolved from the much more sedate Virtual Reality of the 1990s.  The other ingredients of SR included the traditional goggles and data gloves; the Internet, which provided SR participants with a common meeting ground; and the carbon-based biochip cerebral implants which enabled those participants to “pick” one another’s brains.
           Within seconds of the catalyst entering Norma’s system, her brain lit up like some megalopolis city hall switchboard, sending out thousands of queries and directives, and receiving the same every second.  She was plugged into SR-land and she was on the prowl.  Her target was Nick and his highly protected “Level 25” program.  Nothing could stop her—nothing short of total network logjam paralysis or perhaps a major brainpan gasket fissure.  But these events, once common in the early days of SR, were almost nonexistent probabilities in 2018.
          Norma was a 38 year-old Serbian freelance ‘Net agent who’d led a rather tumultuous life.  Both her parents had been eminent computer scientists at the University of Belgrade and Norma had enjoyed all the warmth, comfort, and intellectual stimulation that a childhood in upper-middle class academia could offer.  But her parents were martyred in the conflagration of ethnic strife which consumed Yugoslavia in the 1990s and she became an orphan.  She spent her adolescence shuttling from one refugee camp to another in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, acquiring hard-bitten, back alley skills for survival and adopting a sullen, forlorn demeanor which did not leave her until she met Dmitri in Srebrenica in the autumn of 1996.
          Dmitri, a Bulgarian computer programmer twenty years older than Norma, was the founder and president of SUNF, the Serpska United National Front, a ragtag collection of extremist, allegedly political-minded cyberpunks, ostensibly committed to the restoration of an ethnically diverse and politically tolerant Yugoslavia through the enlightened use of high info technology.  But in reality, Dmitri had assembled around him a passel of pimply-faced geeks, eager to play with high-tech gadgets and maybe meet some girls.
          In the 1980s, Dmitri had been the hero among the young hackers of Bulgaria, he being one of the first to use the Arpanet—the American Defense Department’s precursor to the Internet—to infiltrate highly secure and highly sensitive data bases of the U.S.’s National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and National Aeronautic and Space Administration, among others.  His tour de force was the sale to the Soviet Union of some NASA codes which enabled the U.S.S.R. in 1986 to sabotage the American Space Shuttle program, in effect setting it back five years.  Possessing a rather charismatic personality, he was constantly surrounded by a coterie of programmers and dilettantes, whom he entertained lavishly at all the night raves in Sofia’s underground techno dance clubs.  These blowouts were fueled by copious quantities of drugs, most notably Ecstasy and DMT, which Dmitri purchased with the profits from his espionage activities.
          When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early ‘90s, the winds of fortune sent Dmitri scurrying to Bosnia, where civil unrest had created numerous pockets of power vacuum just waiting to be filled.  He landed in 1993 in Srebrenica where, masquerading as a Bosnian Serb, he founded SUNF with his old Sofia gang and began scouting for new local talent.  Three years later, he found his most promising prospect—the scrappy 16 year-old Norma.  Norma and Dmitri hit it off grandly.  She became his student, disciple, confidante, and, eventually, lover.  They collaborated on many of the most important breakthroughs in Supra Reality, which, by the late 1990s, was gathering a very full head of steam.  They sold patents from these discoveries and used the money to build up SUNF’s power base.
          But the many years of heavy drug use began to wear on Dmitri and he developed one hell of a psychosis.  By 1999, he had become convinced that the much touted “Y2K” bug that would plague most computer systems beginning at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, would, in fact, herald in much graver problems for mankind than jammed elevators and faulty ATM transactions.  He and his fellow SUNF devotees believed that AI-driven machines, robots of every stripe—industrial, domestic, and military—would take advantage of the widespread computer crashes in 2000 to overrun, dominate, and enslave mankind.  Such was their despondency, that in the last week of December 1999, they committed suicide en masse by drinking cranberry juice spiked heavily with digitalis, covering themselves with black lace shrouds and lying on the floor of their compound to die.
          Everyone in SUNF was dead—everyone, that is, except for Norma.  She was never the naïve, idealistic type, and although she’d been utterly devoted to Dmitri for almost four years, she was even more devoted to herself.  So after watching the last member of the cult/techno-political party expire, she took the treasury’s funds and after a short search around battle-ravaged Srebrenica, found and purchased a tractor trailer, loaded it with millions of dollars worth of SR gear and headed northeast to Minsk, Belarus, where she set up shop as an infotech consultant, this time as a solo act.  Now she was a hacker for hire to the highest bidder—she no longer cared about helping to solve the world’s problems, only about fattening her own purse.  Call her a cyberpunk or a data whore—she didn’t care, just as long as her fee was paid, preferably in U.S. greenbacks and not in worthless rubles or zlotys.
          For the next eight years her main client was the Commonwealth of Independent States which consisted of Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine.  In 2000 the C.I.S. was swallowed up, in the west by Poland and Lithuania and in the east by China and Mongolia.  It was time for Norma to move on and find a new employer.  She relocated her operation to the dingy Adriatic seaport city of Tirane, Albania and began working for the C.S.S.I.P.S., the Confederated Sino-Slavic Islamic People’s States, or as it was more succinctly known: “The New Red Order” or N.R.O.
          The N.R.O. was an archipelago of authoritarian, fundamentalist regimes stretching from Beijing, China through the former Soviet Central Asian republics all the way to Albania.  Beijing was the dominant power among these states and was now, in 2018, concentrating most of her energy in her westernmost satellite outpost of Albania.  For the last ten years she had been employing crack ‘Net agents to prowl the Web and steal S.R. technology crucial to her designs for world domination.  And she was relying on her top agent, Norma, to bring home the most critical piece of S.R. software, Level 25.
          As the mist cleared, Norma could start to make out the images in the digital landscape before her more clearly.  She reached up into the upper left corner of her field of vision and pressed an S.R. button.  A dialogue box popped open in front of her and with the tip of her right index finger she scrawled in it an alphanumeric series—this was the identifying code for an Individual S.R. Personality Construct, the so-called ISPAC code, which is like a fingerprint or DNA for an S.R. participant.  She was using a Construct Identifier and Locator, a piece of software strictly prohibited by the Global Software Authority in its Special Cybernetic Addendum to the Privacy Act of 1964.  But Norma was not one to concern herself with legal niceties.
          Within seconds a beep sounded and another alphanumeric series presented itself in the dialogue box.  This was the S.R. memory address of the construct which Norma was trying to find.  She pressed the “go to” button and was immediately whisked away to where her quarry, Nick, lay.  Once again she had to wait a couple of seconds for the cybermist to clear and then she was able to take in and evaluate her surroundings.
          She was in a 1940s Moroccan seaside bar—Rick’s Place.  Actually, it had more of the feel of a Hollywood soundstage.  Sam, the piano player, leisurely picked out a plaintive tune on the ivories.  At the bar sat Nick, disguised as Humphrey Bogart.  In the twinkling of an eye, or perhaps more aptly in the click of the CPU’s quartz crystal clock, Norma transformed herself into Lauren Bacall.  She wore a tan mohair suit, complete with padded shoulders, knee-length skirt and floppy hat with a garish peacock feather.  Her light brunette hair was fashioned into long wavy curls, her eyelashes were thick and lustrous and her lips appeared larger than life with bright crimson lipstick.  She was drop-dead gorgeous, as the standards of 75 years ago went.
          She sauntered up to the stool next to Nick and sat down.  She pulled a pack of Chesterfields from her purse and demurely placed a cigarette between her lips.  Nick swung around on his stool to face her, flipped open his Zippo and offered her a light.  The ceiling fan overhead creaked as it spun around languorously in the stifling desert air.
          “What’s a dame like you doing in a joint like this?” Nick asked.
          “Well, a person’s gotta be in one place if they’re not in another,” Norma replied.
          “How true,” said Nick and he let out a soft chuckle.
          “What’s a gal gotta do to get a drink in this place?” whined Norma playfully.
          Nick snapped his fingers and in a trice Rick materialized behind the bar.  He set down a drink on the bar in front of Norma, a fruity concoction with a little paper umbrella sticking out.
          “Hubert Burns at your service,” Nick said as extended his hand for Norma to shake, “intrepid reporter for the Herald Tribune.  I’ve been dispatched to North Africa to cover England’s and America’s repulsion of Rommel’s Afrika Korps.  Taking in a little R & R here in sunny Casablanca.”
          Norma shook the proffered hand and rattled off her own extemporaneous cover story:  “Lorraine Bridges, spoiled debutante and heiress to the Bridges-Colfax Diamond Mine fortune in South Africa.  Stranded in this city of intrigue while I wait for a steamer to carry me home to Durban.”
          As Nick released Norma’s right hand he noticed the gleaming band of platinum on the ring finger of her other hand.  His gaze returned upward, into Norma’s eyes, two icy-blue steel ball-bearings which told Nick nothing about their owner.  He exhaled leisurely and a small cloud of blue cigarette smoke wafted up into the ceiling fan.  His eyes spoke volumes, though; they were smiling eyes; they sparkled; they were the chief contribution to Nick’s charm.  They were his women-hunting eyes and he had them set on stun.  He was curious to find out if Norma wouldn’t be able to deflect them.
          They sipped their drinks and chatted equably for a quarter of an hour while in the background Sam played his monotonous dirge over and over.  They talked about the most mundane matter—topics such as the Saharan climate and how Norma’s outfit was most ill-suited to it.  Nick tried to steer the conversation toward Norma’s background, but these attempts Norma fended off coyly.  He brought up the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific, but she was plainly uninterested.
          Finally, Nick flung a few francs at Sam and told him a little heatedly and sarcastically, “Whyncha lay off it, Sam.  Go learn a new tune!”  Sam stood up and hurried off, knocking the piano stool over in the process.  The bar was suddenly silent, save for the creaking of the fan.
          Nick pointed at Norma’s ring and said, accusingly and sneeringly, “Alright, doll, let’s have the straight dope now!  Who’re you running from?  And don’t give me any more of that spring chicken tripe!”
          “Oh, no!” she protested, “you’ve got it all wrong.  It’s not like that at all, Mr. Burns.  Why this—this is merely a traveling accessory.  It’s my personal organizer.”  And with that Norma pulled the ring up over a knuckle and twisted it back and forth.  In the air above the bar between the two of them a two by three foot diaphanous computer screen opened up.  In it scrolled by in rapid succession: a spreadsheet with figures apparently related to Norma’s monthly budget; the fields and records of Norma’s telephone and address database; and, before it closed with a zip, blocks of obtuse assembly language code.
          Norma slid the ring back in place, thinking ruefully to herself, “How could I have done such a stupid thing!?  I should’ve made at least a cursory inspection of my appearance before I walked into a singles bar decorated like that!  I’ve been at this game eighteen years, why am I staring to slip up now?”
          The ring had been a gift from Dmitri some twenty years ago.  And though it once bore a great deal of emotional significance for Norma, she now wore it solely for its utilitarian aspect.  Indeed, the platinum exterior housed kilometers of submicroelectronic circuitry, which, combined with the bioimplant in Norma’s brain, gave her some extraordinarily nefarious powers which few others on this planet enjoyed.  She made a mental note to start wearing the ring on a different finger.
          “An accessory!  Of course!  Now I’ve heard everything!”  Nick roared with laughter.  “I didn’t doubt you for a second, babe.”  Nick let out a low whistle and fanned himself with his fedora.
          “But you gotta believe me, sweetie, I’m pure as the driven snow,” said Norma as she leaned over and gripped Nick’s hairy forearm with her smooth and pale, yet firm hand.  She wasn’t quite sure what was happening here, but she decided to put on an air of mildly raucous levity and to go along with it—whatever it was.
          And what, in heaven’s name was real here?  In reality there was no Rick’s Place, no Sam the piano player, no creaking ceiling fan, nor flirting 1940s characters swiveling about on barstools.  That was all in cyberspace—fleeting phantasmagoria—spurious digital signals coursing through fiber optic cables, bouncing off satellite dishes high above the stratosphere and eventually making their home in the interstitial neural spaces of some cyberpunk’s brain.  It was said that information was power—refined information at least.  But raw data abounded everywhere: it was like seawater; it came in unstoppable waves and like the briny liquid it was quite unpalatable.  And it seemed to Norma, to Nick, and to everybody involved with info technology in the second decade of the second millennium (and that was probably 75% of the 25 billion human souls alive) that the polar icecaps were melting and mankind would soon drown in the oceans of useless data.
          Five thousand miles of empty space separated Norma and Nick.  Nick lay back, all wired up and connected to his neurostimulant I.V. drip, in a suspensor chair in his high tech studio bachelor pad in stylish exurban Houston.  He was plugged into one end of a circuit which ran across the world to a soundproofed, camouflaged tractor trailer parked in an alley in Tirane’s gritty smelly industrial section, between a fish-processing plant on one side and a fertilizer factory on the other.  This was Norma’s base of operations in Albania, and the malevolent, methodical machinations underway here gave off its own peculiar scent of unreality.
          While Nick lay twitching in his chair and Norma lay similarly in hers, the digits of her right hand gesticulating frantically, a HomeCray personal supercomputer, which took up 15 feet of the trailer’s tight space, worked calmly and diligently to dissect Nick’s brain, or at least that portion of it which surrounded his bioimplant.  The “brain-dissecting” program had kicked in the moment Norma grasped Nick’s arm.
          Examining the contents of conventional silicon-based memory chips is a fairly simple matter.  The cells of data in such chips are arranged much like the array of boxes in a post office.  Each box has a specific address and when a chip is presented with the appropriate digital signals it surrenders the contents associated with that address.
          Extracting data from a carbon-based bioimplant with neural network architecture like the one found in Nick’s brain is an entirely different prospect, some several orders of difficulty higher.  One need now deal with various strategies taken from different areas of discrete mathematics, topology, non-Euclidean geometry, and non-linear analysis.  One need know a thing or two about bijections and surjections, Abelian groups and ring theory, and local energy minima and maxima.  But even all of this didn’t guarantee a bloody thing.  Data, in a neural network, just didn’t exist at a given address as in a serial silicon chip.  It was at once everywhere and nowhere.  It was stored by means of associations and just as with the human brain, could only be recalled by the same agent which stored it.  Suffice it to say that information stored in a neural network was afforded a high level of security.
          That is, until Norma’s ingenious Neural NetCracker software is brought to bear on the problem.  Using a host of sophisticated extraction, decryption, and enhancement tools, Norma could take the two-dimensional, or Cartesian, world of neural interconnections, the excited or inhibited synapses at a given instant in time, and follow their development through time, thus giving a three-dimensional picture, the so-called “global” representation of that area in the brain which constituted the interface between cerebrum and implant.
          If one had enough of a notion as to what they were looking for in the global view—a seed, or a clue, that is—then using Norma’s program one could virtually see into another’s brain, or at least that part which interface with the bioimplant, and, by extension, with the Internet.
          The only person who possessed this unique program was Norma.  She also had in her keeping a small block of code known as the “header tab” for the Level 25 program, the program she sought to extract from Nick’s implant, and this header tab was sufficient to serve as the seed in a run of the NutCracker program.  All that was needed now to ensure a good rendition of Nick’s global bioimplant representation was a sufficiently prolonged stimulation of Nick’s nervous system—enough stimulation to bring about the direct memory transfer between Nick’s brain and Norma’s program.  It was such stimulation Norma hoped to effect when she clutched Nick’s wrist.
          “Sorry ‘bout that,” he said, “I’m being paged and I guess I’ll have to take my leave now—it appears to be urgent.”  He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a sheet of bright light about the size of a business card.  On it a string of neon-blue alphanumeric characters glowed.  “My Web address…look me up sometime.”
          Norma took the calling card and slid it into her purse.  “I will,” she responded, then watched as Nick donned his hat, tipped it once toward her and shuffled out of the bar into the stifling desert air.  She closed her eyes briefly and when she reopened them she was back in her trailer in Tirane.
          She immediately swiveled in her suspensor chair toward the HomeCray’s large display screen.  What she saw there was rather disappointing.  Because of the interruption caused by Nick’s pager, she hadn’t been able to induce an adequate direct memory transfer between Nick’s implant and the transducers of her HomeCray computer and its NetCracker program.  The global representation of Nick’s implant interface on the screen gave no hint whatsoever of the secrets of Level 25 which lay within.  All that appeared were nebulous clouds of yellow, blue, and green dots, embryonic in nature and aborted before they could be of any use.
          “Damn,” muttered Norma distastefully as she removed her S.R. gear and rose from the chair.  She rubbed her eyes and stared at her reflection in a mirror on the trailer’s wall.  She observed the wrinkles around the corners of her mouth, the crow’s feet which had recently made their appearance in the corners of her eyes.  She sighed.  She thought to herself that she would have to meet Nick again in cyberspace and do whatever was necessary to ensure that he spilled the contents of his implant; he must yield up Level 25.  And strangely enough, she remarked to herself, she was looking forward to it.

Level 25

Chapter 2 – Beltway Bound

             Nick was rudely awakened from his diversionary pleasures in Rick’s Place in Casablanca and brought back to the real-time pressures of his NASA career in Houston by the persistent beeping of his pager.  He slid out of his suspensor chair and strolled over to the large, flat computer screen on the living room wall which served as the interface for all of his phone, fax, e-mail, and v-mail communications.  He pressed a button below the screen: the beeping ceased and the screen filled with apparently meaningless gibberish, a mish-mash of letters, digits, and punctuation marks, along with an assortment of strange symbols which comprised the other 140-odd slots in the extended ASCII code.  This pager message was encrypted, not surprising in these days of widespread eavesdropping—usually undertaken in the service of police surveillance or for blackmail purposes.  Even the most routine, mundane messages, business or personal, were encrypted.  One military intelligence-gathering outfit had a motto which summed up quite aptly the mood of the present day: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”
            Nick pressed another button and entered in a password.  The onscreen gibberish took on a more meaningful hue.  The message read: “Nick, get your ass in here PDQ!  We’re now in Contingency Mode Red—Stanford.”  Nick grumbled.  It was 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning.  His weekend was on the verge of ruin.  And probably because of some trivial problem that those idiots in the Supra Software R & D department could just as well handle themselves, he thought.  They, especially his boss, Stanford Desjardins, were easily thrown into a panic over problems, which, when calmly analyzed by Nick, were shown to be entirely routine and completely tractable.  How the department had managed to keep itself together before he showed up ten years earlier as a junior software engineer was beyond him.  Well, he would have to report in, but he wasn’t going to break his neck doing it.  He was still in his pajamas, unshaved and unshowered.
            An hour later he was leaving his cul-de-sac, one of the hundreds of identical dead-end lanes which sprouted off the four-lane artery running through Zone 5 in the southwestern corner of Houston’s residential district.  The only thing to distinguish his street from all the others surrounding it was its grid-number: D-23.  From high in the air, this part of the city—with its broad parallel avenues, and an infinitude of smaller streets spiraling off the avenues, and a further plenitude of cul-de-sacs branching off of those streets like the minute veins in a maple leaf or the alveoli in a lung—this fractal city had the appearance of a gargantuan integrated circuit.
             Within minutes of boarding his MagLev car, Nick was approaching the infodustrial district.  Traffic was rather light this crisp, bright October morning.  It was usually rather light every morning.  In the twenty-first century, though the world was beset by extreme overpopulation, at least pollution, hunger, disease, and traffic jams had been largely eliminated.  And, Nick ruminated as he left behind him the last vestiges of the residential district, the superpowers, that is, the Corporate States of America and the New Red Order (China, really), had finally stuck a seemingly peaceful balance of power.  The future hadn’t looked this bright for as long as he could remember—which made the announcement of Contingency Mode Red seem all the more Chicken Littleish.
             Entry into the infodustrial district was through a huge, black plastic tube-tunnel, out of which radiated, at various angles, eight smaller tubes like the hairless legs of some giant spider.  Each of these “legs” led to a different zone of infodustrial Houston, whose immensity boggled the mind.  In fact, it marched on in drab sterility to the west for over 200 kilometers to what had once been Austin, the capital of Texas before the C.S.A. became fully centralized, did away with state governments, and established corporate headquarters in the administrative district of Houston, similarly immense, drab, and sterile, and stretching farther than the eye could see to the north to what had once been Dallas-Fort Worth.
             For some reason a red light flashed on and off over the entrance to the tunnel.  The sensors in Nick’s car saw it before he did and the car stopped thirty feet before the entrance.  Any cars arriving after his would automatically stop, leaving five foot gaps between themselves.  After 90 seconds, the red light still flashed, a most rare occurrence, indeed.  Perhaps, Nick pondered, workers were inside the tunnel installing anti-sabotage devices.  He’d heard rumors that such work was taking place all over the infodustrial district.  But on a Sunday?!
            He rolled down the windows of the cab to take in some of the cool autumn air.  He noticed that on both sides of the MagRail small sections of the fence had been toppled, evidently to allow pedestrians to cross (at their own peril) the MagLev highway.  It seemed to Nick logical that a crossing, albeit an impromptu one, should be placed here.  Vehicles had to slow down, and sometimes, as now, even stop before entering the infodustrial district tunnel.  A person had less of a chance of becoming road kill here than on other parts of the magnetic roadway, where cars regularly exceeded speeds of 200 kph.
            This got Nick to thinking about just what kind of person lived out in these parts and would use this crossing.  Just as in the divided Germany of an earlier generation, where a whole subculture of social misfits, bohemians, and renegades lived in makeshift camps in the western shadow of the infamous Berlin Wall, so too now did all the detritus of the infotechnological age congregate here in the no-man’s land on the border between Houston’s residential and infodustrial districts.  They made their squalid camps in the culverts beneath and around the massive MagLev tubes that shot off toward the various pockets of prosperity in the Infodustrial Complex.  These peoples were the marginalized losers in the modern infotechnological equation: they came from among the 25% of the population engaged in non-infotech vocations.  Many had been skilled laborers, factory hands, shop rats, and artisans in the previous economy.  They had been a proud and stubborn breed, but were now redundant.  America’s collective skill base had “evolved” to the sophisticated level of information processing.  “Crude” hardware demands could be satisfied cheaply and efficiently by “jobbing out” such contracts overseas where the labor base had not similarly evolved.  Those foolish Americans who had once worked with their hands and had refused to retool and work with their heads had lost out.  Instead of the American Dream, they partook in the American Nightmare.
            These holdouts were a small minority, Nick realized, however much the liberal-leaning online social commentators trumpeted their plight.  And, Nick suspected, most of the denizens of the hobo camps along this border were probably drug addicts, sexual deviants, or perhaps artistes manqué.  There was little hope for the first two classes of dropout, but there was no reason that the failed painters, writers, sculptors, and musicians of the old days could not wear implants in the left side of their brains and become content providers on the ‘Net.  Then they could happily participate in today’s economy.  But they were contrary folk, and they probably deserved the misery in which they dwelt.
            Just then his noontime reveries were interrupted when out of the corner of his eye he sped a nattily dressed, middle-aged man, with gray dreadlocks, abundant facial piercings, and tribal tattoos on both arms coming through the opening in the fence to his left. He appeared headed for Nick’s car.  Oh great, he thought, just what I need!  The man was probably going to try to sell Nick some scavenged, obsolescent electronic parts of maybe some much adulterated neurostimulant.  That was how these bums eked out a living, Nick had heard.  It was too late to roll up the window without appearing afraid or rude.  But the man was empty-handed.  He walked up to the driver’s side window, fixed his placid stare on Nick and said calmly: “The apocalypse shall claim the highest level.”
            “What?!” asked Nick, dumbfounded.
            “The highest level shall fail!” the scruffy man stated, somewhat more forcefully.
            “What are you—,” Nick started to say, but at that moment the windows began to slowly roll up as a warning buzzer sounded, and the car started to glide forward into the tunnel.  Well, that’s no surprise really, Nick thought, just another one of Houston’s burnt-out junkies.  But he mentioned the highest level…
            Nick’s car glided to a halt on the landing deck on the 52^nd floor of Building 19-B, home of NASA’s Supra Reality Software Research and Development Division.  It hummed softly as Nick stepped out.  He reached in through the open window and pressed a button on the dashboard labeled “Auto-Park”.  With cautious acceleration, the car departed without Nick, and with the aid of an on-board navigation system it made its way to the employees’ parking deck on the 125^th floor, found an empty slot and powered itself down.  It would reawaken when Nick pressed another button on his key fob.
            He entered the building and immediately headed down the main hallway toward the elevator which would plunge him 65 floors down, into the bowels of paved-over Earth, where his department occupied a suite of high-security labs and offices.  On his way to the elevator he passed the employees’ cafeteria.  Inside, a skeleton crew of programmers and analysts ate their Sunday dinners.  Most ate meals which they’d brought in from home and heated in the microwave ovens.  Arrayed around the walls were vending machines from which the workers could purchase food if they wished, but few opted to, because it was heavily processed synthetic food shipped in from NASA’s food processing research and development facility in the Space Shuttle Support Services Division.  A sign near one of the machines invited personnel to fill out a comment card and to “let us know how we can improve the quality of our products”.  One such card was taped to the bottom of the sign.  It read, in large block letters: “TAKE THESE MAGGOT-GAGGINGS AND BLAST THEM OFF INTO A BLACK HOLE!!!”
            Nick got in the elevator and descended to sub-basement level 13.  After going through the annoying, but necessary, security procedures, including voice check, retinal scan, and implant query, he entered Stanford Desjardin’s office.  He expected to find his boss alone, since he and the occasional trainee or two were the only staff members to come in on Sundays.  But to his surprise, he found not only Stanford, who was seated in his luxuriantly padded leather chair behind a large mahogany desk, but also five other rather grim-faced men in black jumpsuits sitting in a semi-circle in front of the desk.  Nick recognized them as members of the Security Contingent, which shared S.B.L. 13 with the contrastingly happy-go-lucky R & D team.  They all regarded Nick with a look of gravity as he bounced into the room, grabbed an empty chair, swung it around and sat on it backwards, resting his arms on the back of the chair.
            “What’s cookin’, Chief?” Nick asked, puzzled and slightly nervous.
            “Afternoon, Nick.  Sorry to have to drag you in here on your day off, but it’s kind of serious—like I told you already: Contingency Mode Red’s been declared.”
            “But why?  And what’s that got to do with me?”
            “I’ll let Major Inqvist fill you in.  You know our local SecCon chief, I’m sure.”  Stanford swept his hand, palm up, toward the beefiest and apparently eldest (judging from the wrinkled face and the gray, close-cropped hair atop the square, knobby head) of the five paramilitary men seated in front of him.
            Nick nodded affirmation.  He knew the Major in passing, had exchanged pleasantries with him and his wife at NASA picnics and Christmas parties.  But they certainly didn’t run in the same social circles.  Nick’s crowd was full of yuppies—brash, flighty types—some were programmers and others were artsy, dilettantish poseurs, but all were laid-back party animals.  Major Inqvist’s world, in sharp contrast, was peopled by rigid right-wingers, uptight authoritarians who saw conspiracy and intrigue lurking around every corner.
            Major Inqvist sat up squarely in his chair, consulted his clipboard briefly, then looked at Nick.  “you’re familiar with Level 25, then?” he asked Nick.
            “Well I should hope so,” Nick answered with a look of incredulity and a chuckle, “I wrote most of it!”
            “But of course,” the security chief drawled in a tone that seemed to say: Shut up, punk!  It’s my job to ascertain the facts, however obvious they may seem to you.  “Well, we’ve recently received intelligence indicating that the N.R.O. wants that program bad and have put up a sizable bounty to get it.”
            It didn’t surprise Nick that the N.R.O. would covet Level 25.  After all, it was the final module in a state-of-the-art system which would make extra-terrestrial mining economically feasible.  The actual space-borne mining machines had been available for years now—even the Chinese had them—but the guidance and control software needed to operate these machines had been much more difficult to develop—not only technical problems beset the program, but financial and political as well.  Nick had been on the project for eight years now, it had become his sole focus.  And now the project’s culmination loomed on the horizon—maybe it would be complete in as soon as six months.
            No, it didn’t surprise him that the only other superpower in the world wanted this potent software—it was going to make a lot of people very rich—but why would they try to steal it, endangering hard-won global peace and security, when, five years after the release date of the software, they would simply be given Level 25, in accordance with the Space Exploration and Exploitation Treaty, the so-called Baku Accord which the C.S.S.I.P.S. and the C.S.A. had both signed in 2009.  The main provision of this agreement provided for the fruits of all economic exploitation of outer space to be shared in by all the nations of Earth, regardless of terrestrial military alliances; it was an inspired document, with much flowery rhetoric about “the shifting sands of earthly affairs” and “the infinite ethereal bounty of the universal cornucopia” and how mankind should set aside petty squabbles and come together in a “modern Brotherhood of the Cosmos”.  To all observers at the time, it had been ratified in good faith by both parties.
             “I knew that Level 25 was a hot ticket, but I wasn’t aware that it had a price on its head,” Nick retorted.  His tone conveyed skepticism as well as disdain for the security chief’s alarmist attitude.
            “The price is on your head,” Major Inqvist said, with a bit of a self-satisfied sneer.  “When’s the last time you downloaded Level 25?” he asked.
             “Why, yesterday morning, in the full privacy and security of my office across the hall.  It was only a partial download.  I put the Gravitron Calibration Hash Tables into S-RAM and calculated new resultant vectors—more accurate vectors, I hope.”
            “And when you were done…?”
            “Standard measures: upload through a Triplex link, then I did a full data swipe on the S-RAM—you can check it right now, if you want.”
            “That won’t be necessary.  And this is the same cautious, painstaking routine you take every time you work on Level 25?”
            “Of course, I always—“
            “Even when you’re in a rush to get out the door on a Friday night to jam with your buddies in that punk band of yours?  Or maybe you got a hot date with Trixie or Babs or some ‘Net chatroom bimbo?”
            “Now wait just a minute!  My record of thoroughness, reliability, security, uh, integrity…everything, why it just speaks for itself!  There’s no way—!”
            Stanford Desjardins held up a hand and motioned for silence.  “Gentlemen, gentlemen!  No need to get all hot under the collar.  No one’s making any accusations here.  If there’s been any leakage…why, then all we can do now is take preventive measures.  And we’re here now to implement some damage control, post haste!”
            Another member of the security team spoke now, a younger man who was Nick’s age.  Nick recognized him from the technopunk dance clubs he frequented.  Probably not a bad chap, Nick thought, can’t possibly be as anal as his boss…not yet anyway.
            “We’ve booked passage for you on a shuttle leaving NASAir Interplanetary Spaceport in Corpus Christi at 1900 hours.”
            “What are you talking about?!” Nick demanded.
            “You’re going to the asteroid belt, Nick…for safe-keeping, of course, and as long as you’ve gotta be there you can oversee Beta-testing of Level 25.  Get to know the hardware boys, they’re not such a bad lot, really, you’ll get on just fine,” Stanford told Nick in a somewhat offhand manner.
             Nick’s face transformed gradually from quivering disbelief into a hideous mask of despair.  Small drops of sweat rolled down over his creased forehead.  “Now hold on one minute!” he wailed, “I’m not going anywhere, least of all to the asteroids!  Level 25 won’t be ready for Beta-testing for at least another six months, and anyway we already have an experienced Beta-tester, John Alford—he spent three years on Tantalus-5X testing Levels 17 to 22, and he loved the belt—he can’t wait to go back!”
            His loud protest fell on deaf ears.  “That’s not the point!  You’re a liability here.  We need you—correction—we need your bioimplant as far away as possible while we quash Beijing’s little spy ring down here.  Your personal wishes in this matter are entirely immaterial,” Major Inqvist let Nick know.
            Nick rose.  His brain reeled.  He thought of his pleasant, ordered life on Earth.  He thought of the alluring woman he’d met that morning at Rick’s Place.  It was an S.R. encounter, granted, but it was an encounter he truly wanted to follow up.  But now…he turned and started for the door.  “Well, I better go home and get packed if I’m gonna make a flight at 1900 hours.”  He frantically tried to form an escape plan in his head.
            “That won’t be necessary—we’ve already detailed two men to your apartment to pack up everything you’ll need for your trip,” said the young security officer.  Well on his way to being anal already, Nick thought.
            “But I have to—“ was all Nick could get out before another security officer stood up, walked quickly the three paces to where Nick stood facing the door, and calmly placed an inoculation gun to the side of Nick’s neck and pulled the trigger.
            Sfffft! went the gun and Nick’s eyes seemed to spin around several times before fixing themselves in a placid stare.  His body went limp, but he remained standing.  Insipid Muzak rang softly in his ears.  He felt serene, warm—a grin akin to Mona Lisa’s began slowly to spread from ear to ear.
            “That’s more like it,” said Major Inqvist as he rose and took hold of Nick’s arm.  He turned his head toward Stanford and said, “I told you the smug little prick wouldn’t listen to reason.”  And to Nick: “Come along now, let’s go for a spin.”
            The major and his goon squad spirited Nick back up to the 52^nd floor, loaded his agreeable body into a special NASA transport car and trundled him in an express MagLev tube directly to NASA’s launch facility in Corpus Christi, some 400 kilometers to the south.  This MagLev tube ran through a wide expanse of devastated territory—some eighty square kilometers in all—in Houston’s administrative district.  This area had been home to thousands upon thousands of warehouses—hardcopy repositories—places where the paper copies of government documents came to wait out the mandatory 100 years before they could be finally consigned to the flames.  But the flames had come prematurely to these warehouses three years earlier.  In rapid sequence, the warehouses’ climate control systems, sensors, and fire control systems, all autonomous and computerized, had failed.  (“Sabotage” was whispered in some circles, but dismissed as “reactionary thinking”.)
            Under the hot Texas sun, the trillions of cubic meters of cheap pulp reached kindling temperature and an epic blaze broke out, an out-of-control wildfire, which took over eight months to tame.  Even now, wisps of smoke could be seen here and there, and the smell of waterlogged burnt paper was omnipresent, an everlasting testament to the myth of the “paperless office”.
            With hours to spare, the NASA express car pulled into coastal Corpus Christi and Nick was deposited in a comfortable lounge at the Spaceport to await boarding of the Space Shuttle “Compromise”, destination: the belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter; in particular, Tantalus-5X, the base of NASA’s space mining experiment.  For good measure, Nick was given another injection of Trianeze in his neck.  He complacently nodded his approval.