Perennial

I've stories. Hours and hours of stories, and so too do you: this is our penance for living, this is our reward. A few stories in particular are my current fixation, one of the present or near past and one of the future, a future yet (and unlikely, realistically) to come. As always, both are informed by the past.

Another birthday's just come and gone, and that's as good a signpost as any for a nomad such as I. Remembering: the previous year I spent the day running the mountains of central Idaho, on a ridgeline crunch crunching through feet and feet of snow, icy streams audibly flowing beneath me. This birthday, I'd assumed, would be similar, save the trade in states.

It was not.

This year, I'd still a long run; I'd still this familiar heaviness at the back of my legs and behind my eyelids. But even after the subtracted elevation, I'd a much bigger addition this year. Namely, you.

*******

Fall down, find god just to lose it again... We were hammering it

This is my livelihood, my vocation; these are my miles. Escape the past in the present, forget the future in the present, just run and run and run. Just run and run and run, three four five hours at a go, the beauty of simplicity... I'm finding god with each stride until too tired to hang on anymore.

*******

This was also my birthday: popcorn and cheese and apples and a movie about everything and nothing. Reminders of the past, ties to the present, wishful dreaming of the future. The cul-de-sac someday. Traveling east and out of the mountains, traveling west and back into them.

*******

On a bus, the second (or fourth, or... going forth, still), rolling west on an asphalt ribbon from Bismark to Dickinson. This land's a scrubbed savanna, a Martian prairie; I can't help but miss what I call family, the borrowed sort of a city of lakes. A city of lakes I'm only now realizing is home: the place I'll return to again and again, 'til this paper I call a body wears through and my bones make their way back to the rich black earth, midwestern soil. We'll have our cul-de-sac someday. The future of yet.

*******

"I'm acquiring skills," this friend told me of her journey these past years; so too, I think, am I. What skill it'll be next, though, I've less than any real idea. Nor, for that matter, have I much of an inkling the where. I am probably more okay with this than some would say I should be. I am probably more okay with this than I would say I should be.

*******

This idea of skills, and I've a project I've been toying with: what do strangers believe? Interviews with America, so to speak. But who I to ask, really, what do I even believe?

Does a list make a set of beliefs? If so, I guess I've this, standing in for what I believe:
I believe in contradictions. That people are born assholes, and some of them outgrow it; that people are inherently good, and some of them forget it. That the sun is most welcome in the middle of winter, and rain in the summer; that contrasts are essential for a full appreciation of the depth and breadth of life. That rivers and mountains are riddles not meant to be solved, but certainly treasured, and that sometimes contractions say best what it is exactly we're hoping to say. That two spaces belong at the end of a sentence, and one after a semi-colon. That love and hope and opportunity are what keep us going, and especially I believe that physical fatigue is a clarifying fire. Are these beliefs?

But, the project. I start to ask these strangers, other hippie outdoorsy traveler types, but of course we get sidetracked. Tales of place are infinitely more accessible, and by the end of these most recent forays, I've a few more couches to crash on - and no more in the way of answers. Or maybe that is my answer: I believe in movement.

*******

Traveling, still. Thinking of family, and of place. And how dad would love some of these drivers. By which I of course mean he'd love tearing them apart, incompetence by incompetence. There's the several near-crashes, sure, but also heading east instead of west (twice!), difficulties in getting gas, a passenger nearly left (and then nearly run over), a passenger injured (tumbling down the steps), two bathrooms out of toilet paper, the droning monologue tour guide impression (in which facts hardly mattered, and we were all thankful he didn't know how to use the mic). Some interesting stretches of road, yes.

Also? It was a Greyhound trip; I think I'd've been disappointed otherwise.

*******

Back to the road. The sun's setting now, North Dakota and the beauty of the northern badlands (a merry trip of prankster adventures through here I'd so love to lead!) having given way to rolling eastern Montana. The sky's on fire, as are my IT bands, as is my heart for people and place. To do all things at all times - to be god! - yes, this, I think, is what I want. The only reasonable solution I can see, really. It's a terrible love that I'm walking with... it's quiet company.

*******

So, Spokane now. A four-hour layover, and at first I'd this suspicion a wino and I would share it alone. Wasn't quite English he spoke, and quite sure I am I witnessed a shatting, but still... there was a strange beauty in sharing so much space with him. It didn't last, of course - a janitor, unable to rouse him, made a call; the cops came and got him - but for a while, there was a sense of being lost that was ours, and ours alone. Then the cops came, and he lingered for a few moments in the limelight afforded me by the other weary travelers beginning to assemble, then stumbled off, his languorous steps emphasizing all the more how quickly we then forgot him.

*******

Wino gone, a new traveler friend and I in the station talk. She's just back from raft-guiding in Chile, backpacking and wwoofing across South America. We talk, yes we talk, kindred spirits - a thing I've a knack for forgetting possible. We talk of how our liberal arts educations have better equipped us, not for the 'real world' per se, but for the unknown searching, meandering lives we're carving for ourselves; we talk of how our travels inform the choices we make even after we've made them; we talk of how little the money'll matter, provided we're at least keeping some tenuous grasp on our bills and loans. We swap philosophies and adventures and future travel advice; later, we'll add contact info to the list with the promise of at least a warm shower and a hike even if that's all we can give. A parting - how much better equipped we are for the backcountry and woods than the suburbs and city! - and then we've our respective buses, off. Across Washington I start, and after two days of sunny traveling, it rains. Naturally.

*******

Another snapshot of Spokane: forty-four degrees, wet grass, misting skies; barefoot striders downtown in a small patch of green I stumble upon, until my feet go numb; soon as they warm, I repeat the cycle. Simplicity is happiness, finding remnants of the before, especially where it's been forgotten, is happiness.

*******

Wenatchee I'm back to, but it's hardly an endpoint. These words, I realize, are at best a light tracing 'round the rough edges of blurred memories. Some shared experiences we've vastly different recollections of. In words? In words we're all children; in our words we're all playing; in our words, we're all lost. And lost, I'm realizing, is precisely it's own sort of found.