Fences

It gets hard to find a place to sleep. Thus far we've not paid once for a camping spot (save one 2 dollar fee to get into a Navajo park on the Little Colorado Gorge), but it takes some good time to find our ever changing nightly destination.


Its the fences that get us. Barbed wire fences. They run endlessly along the side of the road, taughtly displaying a sharp and rusty reminder that the land is not ours. Someone else has bought it. The fact of the matter is that, there is no room for people who don't own land. Unless you've paid for it, it isn't yours.

I find it silly, quite often, how long we look for a place to stay. Parks charge money. Ranchers will shoot you. Police will ticket you near even slightly urban streets. The idea is that, in order to live comfortably and securely, you've got to have a plot of land that is yours and no one else's. You must buy it before you can build a house. It's a fundamental part of life in the United States - absolute ownership of your part of the Earth.


So where does that leave us? We live on all the land. To date we've lived in the mountains - we lived in the plains of Eastern New Mexico, in the dry and sunny deserts of Utah, on the banks of the Colorado river, in the high pine forests around the Grand Canyon, and now in the scourching hot desert wastelands in the south of Nevada - we pretend to own nothing. Frankly, it doesn't make a damn difference if anyone does. To us, the Earth is a place to dine a hold to build a fire. It's a magical mass that miraculously sprouts fuel in the way of firewood and food. It's rest from the long long road we travel every day. It'll be there always in the twilight, when the desert heat subsides and we can sit and breath and dress the day's wounds and bruises of the body and mind.


There is where the value lies, and it can never be quantified numerically. A purchase of land is like a purchase of the air - the transaction of currency earns you little more than the right to keep other people out. Why is that so necessary? Answer: it isn't. We're proof. Of course, it depends on how you want to live your life, but the more time we spend in this world that we spin around us, the more absurd it seems each time we're asked to pay for a plot of land to park and sleep on. 


But it doesn't make much difference. We've slept in the forest, as far down the darkest road we could wander, to where Ponderosa Pines stand tall and silent, silhouetted by the milky glow of the sky. We've slept by the bank of the muddy Colorado, right as the murky bronze fury of strength blows out the walls of the Grand Canyon and flows swiftly with apparent determination where the water's flowed before it. We slept aside a canyon in the Indian Country, where a tossed rock ignited a clamour of crushing claps of rolling rocks, bounching endlessly between the looming stone walls. Last night we slept on the property of a mine in the desert, and trucks passed by the dusty dirt road all night long, coming in empty and carrying out some hefty loads.


And now, we're leaving the desert. Through Western Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and now Nevada, we've sat out the daily highs of 115 and more, spending any time we can in the water we find along the way. We've sat nightly in the bus, waiting for the sun to go down, yielding the most hospitable time of the hot desert day. There is sand in everything, most noticeably in our food. Death Valley is our last of the burning frontiers, then its up the Sierra Nevadas to a more accommodating land in the North.


Tomorrow's my birthday, and we'll be in Las Vegas. I'm turning 20, so we're gonna set out to find some cheap come-in-our-casino lobster dinner offers. We'll be around until the 5th, when Antoine lands en route from Belgium. Antoine is a friend I encountered while in Cordoba, Argentina, and I remember him as being the one who was always willing to spend a couple pesos on a drink for a friend, but only so he could see them drunker and laugh and laugh and laugh. With him I shared my technical ignorance and my appreciation for minimalism. Likely out of my conversations with this silly French Belgian that much of what I believe first popped into my head. He's a loose wanderer, ready to disregard anything and just go because it seems nice at the time. I can't wait to see him again.