"I find we all need a place to land"

The longest day of the year was marked by an accordian. We lounged in the sun and marveled in all the babies born since the last solstice, then snuck off cackling to the pond to revel in our non-parental status. We watched the bonfire ignite submerged in a steaming woodfire hot tub. We cooked eggs and made coffee in the morning. Cameron and Banjo played guitar while baby Angus pulled himself up.

We drove back through the country roads to the city of Portland where my stuff is in the basement and I am sleeping on the couch and the housing market swims before my eyes on craig's list.

For months this date was the marker to end the madness, the signal that the wheels could grind to a halt, and that I could rest, dig in, stick around a little while. Yet as I arrive at this great exhale, I realize I've got to take another deep breath and face creating a life that doesn't fit into my back pack.

god's country

I awoke to Becca yelling. Peaking out my tent into the drizzly morning, I saw a huge bull elk, antlers full of velvet nuzzling her tent affectionately. When she yelled, he backed away startled, then returned to lick on her backpack and investigate. She finally asked him politely to leave, informing that she neeeded her space, and he did.

The rain broke long enough to allow us a sunny breakfast of eggs and potatos, coffee sprayed out in laughter, and then the sky turned black. We began packing in a furry, hoping to miss the storm, but were still scurrying about when hail the size of almonds began to painfully pelt us. Just as a I finished shoving everything away, a huge lightening bolt struck about 50 feet from our camp leaving a tree smoking. All of my wilderness leader training fled my head and i jumped up and down crying "what do we do??" Luckily Cameron remembered to climb on his pack. Ah yes, we must insulate ourselves from ground current. By this time i was wet to the bone. The truck only a mile from our campsite, and we were truly in the midst of wildness. We began walking throught the slanting rain, passing boiling thermal features and buffalo crouched low to the gound. Thunder rumbled, and we ran trying to pass through an open meadow before the lightening struck again. A fisherman hid under the bridge before the parking lot, and the ground looked white from the hail balls not yet melted.

The afternoon found us in a bar on the Montana side drinking hot buttered rum served by a retired bull rider.

When the sun rose the following morning, i crawled out of our hotel in Jackpot, Nevada to extricate the stove from all of the wet camping gear and get some coffee going. Sitting on the tailgate, waiting for the water to boil, an old cowboy asked me where we were going camping. "Actually we're just coming back from Yellowstone up in Wyoming."
"God's country," he replied.

and the beat goes on

San Antonio, Austin, Fredericksburg, Texas.
The train carried us through no man's land between the border of the US and the border of mexico, desert in all directions. On one side wood shacks and laundry lines, the other lawn and stucco.
Northridge, The Smog Cutter, Korea Town, North Hollywood, Los Angeles(Tod Snyder claims it should be its own state, and sometimes it is).
Santa Cruz, Oakland,The Strawberry Music Festival, Benton Hot Springs,CA.
A swarm of locusts appeared on the highway splattering against the windshield and carpeting the road, flying in all directions. There were enough squished on the grill to give off a smell of dead fish, Nevada.
The sun was so hot I might fall over. We emerged from Coyote gulch after a magical four days of waterfalls, red arches, golden eagles, and lizard that marked the trail with their rapid flight. We accidentally passed the night on private land relishing the cool of a higher elevation, Utah.
Today I write from Lander, Wyoming.
Traveling the backroads of the West is every bit as much of an adventure as Ecuador ever was.