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.

Continental Divide

Our faithful bus will never die. It can smoke and choke and boil over, but it gets us around all the same. The mountain roads we faced yesterday were a trying experience for out little yellow home on wheels, and not just one steep mountain grade left us powering up the shoulder at 15 mph, flashers on, exhaust pipe billowing white smoke, as the engine carried three tons of steel and her resident tribe up into the lesser-touched regions of the atmosphere.

Summer snow melt transforms the alpine slopes and valleys of the Rocky Mountains into a cold and rocky marsh, sending a fury of clear and frigid water raging with such elogant aggression over polished boulders and logs, between Birch and Pine and accoasionally across the road. The entire air is filled with the raging whisper of snow melt on the move.

We stopped along side a white and rapid river to wash our clothes and ourselves, although only the clothes were ever clean after the water temperature proved to be prohibitively awful for human contact.

Coming off the interstate, we hit the Byway at the Top of the Rockies, a road that would lead us to Independence Pass, the highest point in the mountains passable by anything less that a tank. We ate lunch parked near an expansive tangled of mountain streams that rushedly snaked through and across one another as they rolled over their bulky boulder bedding.

America has always seemed so tame. It's two well known - too well documented. People have made if as far as they can, and then they built houses and schools and Walmarts and Starbucks and McDonalds, and it doesn't seem like there's anything left to discover. That's the view from the interstate, the glimpse that most of my countrymen have chosen to make their own out of interests of speed and simplicty. We drive solo, our surroundings completely void of any other human presence, and we wonder, were these roads just built for us? Up the mountains we see alpine towns built of rocks and logs, and Birch tree thickets about the rushing water that overload your sensory perception with such an unbelievely complex construction of the roar of the water and the bright and saturated green leaves sprouting from the straight white trunks of a million trees packed like a sardine forest. The beauty is endless, and I feel like I coluld sit and stare out the window for days, just as long as the bus keeps trucking.

Then again, there are other ways of exploring. Even in the places where vehicles pass, we can twist the situation and really be there.

Near the top on Independence Pass, we found a spot on the edge of a sheer and rocky cliff, along side a grade cut straight into the side of the mountain, where the road clung desperately to the rocky slope. From our lookout, we saw straight out and above a glacial valley at 12,000 feet - the source of the mountain streams where 15-foot-tall blocks of snow, compressed into miniature glaciers, creeped out from the mountain to face the road.

We pulled out our chairs, paints and sketchpads (I ground some mineral-laced rocks into nice little pendants), and sat from what we can only assume to be mid afternoon, until the black sky did well to expose the celestial drape of stars, hung over the mountains, that the daytime blue hides always from view. We felt close to the stars, like all it took was 12,000 vertical feet to get just close enough that we could see all of them, each and every one.

We built a fire in a pit we dug by the side of the road, and feasted on some delisciously steamy hot grilled corn and Chicago-style hotdogs (per the requirements of our own culinary construction techniques). Then we sat, boiling pot after pot of chai tea over our fire, and keeping warm as the night-time cold took hold on our valley for the night.

So maybe we're learning well how to be. There's adventure out there to be found, if not in where we go then in how we get there, and in how we make our way and keep warm and full in the places we discover.

We caught many a grinning glance from passing motorists catching view of a school bus on the side of an alpine cliff and three dirty kids crouched around a fire for warmth.

Goin' Places That We've Never Been

 Willie Nelson plays the Rocky Mountain air, and we sit peacefully awaiting our bedtime in the RV parking lot of the Red Rocks Park, just up the mountains from Denver, Colorado. We'd seen an add for the show while wandering Denver yesterday, and made the drive out to the natural mountain ampetheater to see if we could find a way to catch the show, or maybe get ourselves in.

The stage is set in the side of a bulging red cliff, facing directly up a Rocky Mountain foothill in between two massive rock formations sporting 200 foot sheer drops on each side facing inwards toward the ampetheater. They parallel eachother as if a 300 meter wide swath of red rock had been scraped clean from the side of the mountain, and a stage was built in between.

Around back, you can climb some boulders and a wall to enter the ampetheater, assuming an abscence of authority at the time of entry. I did so, leaving Christian and Mark behind with fears of potential interactions with security inside, and agreeing to meet them back at the bus in time to leave and meet Mark's friend Olivia back in Denver. We met back up, but our meeting fell through, so we headed back to climb the mountain face that looks down directly on the stage. We climbed and sat and waited for Willie, then heard loud and clear, projecting from between the monumentous walls of the earthy sound tunnel, Whiskey River, take my mind. A couple songs in it got what we deemed to be dangerously dark to make a descent, and thus we now find ourselves huddled, waiting to sleep in the chilly mountain air that carries the high and lonesome voice of our own Texas idol. He'll sing us to sleep tonight.



Garden of the Gods



In the last days, we've hit Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs, and Denver, meeting Olivia and Jonson, two of Mark's friends from Chicago, along the way. For the past two nightsw we've, by necessity, woke up before daybreak to move the bus and avoid confrontations with either suspicious property owners or parking guards that would be out in the morning.

Two days ago we woke up near 5 and chugged into the Garden of the Gods outside Colorado Springs, where we waited for the sun to come out and the rain to leave before starting our day fresh, scaling the huge rocks formations that penetrate the ground like lawn ornaments of the divine, and create somewhat of a dwarfing walk-about sculpture garden. From there it was onward to Denver, and a missed connection with a friend of mine who had warned me that she was not going to be around, and yet we tried to find her anyway. Oh well.

Denver was a nice place to wander, and we sought out Colfax, the road that I had previously been warned was the sight for all thefestering of low-down and dirty business that went on in the city. It was nice. They like bars on that street. Bars and thrift stores. It was, by chance, in the window of one of these bars that we caught word of Willie's show, so after a night spent parked infront of someone's house and a ham and egg sandwhich dinner cooked in a city park, we woke up to head to the mountains. And thus, we find ourselves here.


From this point onward our pace will slow. We've made it out of the plains and into the mountains, so movement westward will grind down to a crawl as we make the time to stop and cook and bath and explore that paths we chose to follow. Tomorrow morning we'll head across the mountains.