Meeting the Road

Hot tea at sunrise

Half way through our second day of driving, we've pulled off by the side of a Colorado mountain road, giving the bus some time to rest so as to prevent overheating. It's already happened once. In a desolate West Texas dust bowl, 30 miles outside of Big Spring, we pulled off to the side of the road to release a good five minutes of spewing vapoprized coolant erupting from the engine's cooling system.Coolant boils at 260 degrees F. To be fair, our mercury thermometer inside the bus was reading just above 115, so after 10 straight hours of turning those gears, we probably could have seen it coming.

We let it cool, filled the coolant resovoire with water, and prayed to make it as we pitter-pattered down the flat and sandy highway west to the end of Texas.

We fell asleep on the side of a dirt road in New Mexico to the inhuman vocal outbursts of the cows on either side of us, and woke up naturally before the sunrise to boil some hot chai tea on a cool prarie morning. We've crosse

d desert and planes - places so flat and expansive that you get a sense of the giant spherical form of our planet at the horizons dip down out of sight.





Off to the side of a New Mexican highway we took note of some particularly attractive cliffs and rock outcroppings, so Christian and I crossed the barbed wire fence and wandered off to climb the rocks while Mark stayed behind to draw what he saw. That's always how people stayed healthy and fit before - just getting places. The simple energy required to get from bottom to top or east to west or one side to the other was all the stimulation that the body took to do what it does. We don't do that anymore. We just drive places. We don't just go places, we get there, making a way between one point and another.

We stick to the back roads, navigating by map through tiny towns, made of tin roofed wood and brick houses, the occasional historic bank or town hall, and not a McDonalds or Walmart in sight. People out here take care of themselves.

In the suburbs where I've grown up, the all-american ideals of liberty and freedom have become distorted and mistaken for what is actually just security, born out of their ability to rely on other far away people for everything. Americans flock to the vast expansive suburbs to have their water, their power, their law, their infrstructure, supplied to them, always minimizing their actual involvement in their own livelihood. Inspite of the mundane, monotonous, maybe even boring as hell life that we see as we roll through these 200 person towns, it may have merit far beyond the one we've constructed back home.

We watch the sunset from the roof.

Dedicating yourself to a career means monotonizing your life. You become an accountant, get a good salary, and that's all you have to do. Instead of growing food, you do your work. Instead of finding water, you do your work. Instead of working your land, building your house, and making your home, you do your work. Instead of dealing with disputes between strangers and neighbors, you do your work. Pay your taxes and the police will do it for you. Maybe for ease and simplicity, people have twisted the system of human life into a way that, aided by the concept of currency, you can do the same thing all day every day until you die, always with your mind and efforts dedicated the singular fountain of paper and its imaginary value. And in this way, you don't actually have to do anything for yourself, or trouble the mind with all the bothorsome tasks involved in keeping people alive. Just give your paper to an endless beurocracy of far away people, and you can get everything you need to live. No need to ever think about anything else ever again.

Anyway, our engine temperature has receded to a healthy hundred degrees, and so we're off to hit the mountain roads that'll take us to Colorado Springs, where Mark tells us he has friendlies awaiting our arrival.