From the Desert

From Oregon

From Oregon

From Oregon

The End

8/25- I think the reason that I stopped writing towards the end is that I ran out of thoughts. I had raked over all the memories and hopes so many times, but they were like ashes, with no heat left to release. The root of the mental blankness is the body. In 1600 miles I haven't taken a day to rest. I feel 30 years older than I am, like a machine with rusting gears. But the adventure was real and I cannot summarize all the good things. Every moment speaks for itself. And now ith 15 miles until the end I walk through the tunnel of blank light. Every ambition and worry is somewhere South, and all I can do now is feel the wind and smell the flowers and watch the trees sway. If all this is a cycle, perhaps I'll catch up to myself in the bend.

8/27- The end was not as glamorous as I had expected. The monument I had dreamed of waited in a green swath cut through the woods- the lenghty Canadian border. I planned on eating dinner at Castle Pass, 4 miles South of the end. But the urge inside me was too hot, and I didn't stop. The last four miles were tunnels of memory in a deep green forest. A montage of faces and conversations and places flashed over and over on the back of my eyes. Though I had seen few people in the day, I saw someone paused in the clearing. My old friend Smudge came to hug me and say Congratulations, but by then everything was muted and I fell on the monument and cried.

The next day I walked to the trail head on Canadian route 3- the final end of tread. For the first time there was no path on the other side. I walked to the closest outpost, Manning Park Lodge, down the narrow asphalt to my last big breakfast and last shower whose floor I made into a puddle of mud. This morning I tried hitchhiking for hours, but no one knew who I was. In trail towns I was a celebrity. They knew where I was coming from. This morning I had only shrugs and the cold acknowledgment of looking the other way. I can only imagine the quiet thoughts of the two folks in the front of an empty SUV. They look straight ahead or away, unflinching and silent, thinking, I didn't see anyone on the side of the road. But if I had, I would definitely have stopped to give him a ride.

Now I am on the Greyhound Bus, sailing through dark towns and rainy skies to Vancouver. Yesterday I was king of the mountains, and now I am a pauper in the city.

Photos from Washington

8/18

I overheard a conversation on a bus in Hawaii once. There was a man spouting ideas like a whale spouts water- pontificating about space, history, pyramids, presidents, conspiracies and all sorts of shadowy stories. He was loud and confident. Finally the man he was assaulting with words spoke back. You know what, man, the quieter one said. The people who tell me that they know everything clearly know nothing. It's the ones that tell me they know nothing, those are the ones I know that have something figured out.

We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started from
and know the place for the first time.

8/12

Boy what a day, I say in a voice ten years older than my own. Washington had given me nothing riveting over which to push my pen, only ghastly grey days and secret patches of snow, until today. In one day I passed between dimensions. The morning found me on the slopes of Mount Adams, by a lava bedded spring, and the ensuing fifteen miles were no more than a race through damp green woodland against hungry mosquitoes. Cheese sticks and dark chocolate were the proud sponsors of today's race. Breaking above the pine trees and into the legendary Goat Rocks Wilderness opened an entirely new perspective, standing in the jewel on the Yakima Valley's crown.

I chatted with curious people hiking for a day or weekend, answering the questiosn about equipment I can almost write a memo to address. Yes my pack is small- nine pounds. I walk thirty-five miles a day, and excuse me so that I can race ahead, after I eat this dark chocolate.

By seven in the evening I reached the lower slopes of Old Snowy, a mountain unsurprisingly covered in snow. By the way, it is mid-august. The fog descended on me but I plunged ahead, and over the ridge, fighting through a wall of white, kicking stpes into a floor, in a dense white room of the matrix. At 7100 feet altituted I suddenly received the radio signals coming from Portland, telescoped directly to my Alpine retreat. Little did the cosmopolitans in bars and clubs and homes with windows know I was privvy to their party. But I stole the dance when Katy Perry's song "California Girls" was played, and I stepped up the snow listening to the sound of gin and juice beneath the palm trees.

On top of the ridge was like walking the tip of a knife suspended from heaven. A three foot wide tightrop of rock held me in the sky. I was racing, racing fast, and though some say it is more rewarding to smell the flowers, I was thrilled to run down the side of that snowy mountain, down through the fog and past the last rays of light, to a lake where I crashed by someone else's fire. The fatigue of these adventures is creeping on me, but they can't kick me out of my own home.

8/8

At a restaurant this morning a woman inquired where the bathroom was. The closest one was across the street, the cashier replied. Oh, for goodness sake! the disgruntled woman moaned. Then I fantasized of smacking her across the face and letting her know that I walked from Mexico to eat at that restaurant. By the way, welcome to Washington, the final, mystic state.

8/6

Yesterday we walked 45 miles. Once you condition yourself to that sort of endeavor, all paths but one are a distraction. One path rules your attention; not for a destination or even for immediate scenery, but for the allure of moving, of going as far as the sun can reach. Time is a measurement, not an entity. Anyways, the day hammered both Furntiture and my brains, but he woke up sick as well. I hiked the 20 miles to Timberline Lodge without encountering him, but at the massive and lavish lodge itself I found him, and soon after his brother brought him back to Portland for a few days, which means my partner since Mexico is gone. I will go solo into the mystical horizon called Washington.

8/2

The calendar welcomes the intrepid month of August, blanketed in snow amongst the marvelous castle Mountains. The Three Sisters Wilderness in Oregon is beautiful in a new way, the regal way a queen still radiates her charm as a princess. The peaks are lower but they are wrapped in lakes as bright as polished glass. Obsidian lines the ground like broken black bottles. Light catches snow and rock and water, sending my shape whirring through a world of mirrors.

7/29

I began this morning with eight cookies, received with love from across the country, and carried gingerly around Crater Lake. The ensuing burst of energy propelled me through clouds of mosquitoes, and once AC/DC's song TNT came on my radio, I was in full throttle up that ridge. Below Thielson Peak, the lightning rod of the Cascades, I traversed slick fields of snow. At a point in the trees I heard a sound like the fiercest thunder, ripping up the mountain for a minute, and realized there was a rockslide right up the slope. The creek I encountered was the only water I saw today. I had carried water 26 dry miles before then, and packed 17 miles for the dry northbound stretch. The ground is often dry and cracked but mosquitoes arise in swarms, obviously birthed from the pits of hell. Furniture and I drank freeze dried coffee in the afternoon and I had a cheese and dry apricot sandwich to celebrate crossing the highest point in Oregon. And here we are again, ready to repeat the antics tomorrow after 35 miles today. I'm practicing peeing while I walk to thwart mosquitoes.

7/26

In the shade beneath an Oregon tree
I asked the powers that be
When it was hot and dry and maddeningly
monotonous in a tunnel of pine,
I asked them to remind me of the thrill
within the hill. So the sky spoke
back as we climbed acrross a bare and
broken ridge, a black chain of shale
suspended three thousand feet high.
The clouds opened to speak with hail.
First the long low grumble of thunder,
then the cold winds, then the rain
and then the hail came to remind us
we were tiny guests in a giant home.
The high and black mountain
we were climbing was called Devil's peak.
So we walked right to the front door,
through the darkness and rain,
and told him to fuck off. This is our terrain.

photos from northern California