A Rocky Start Toward the Rocky Mountains

I’m off on my next Great Adventure, a large loop of the Pacific Northwest -- if all goes to plan -- followed by a stint in Montana where I’ll finish the second draft of my novel.

And with any great adventure, it got off to a rocky start.

The week before I left New Orleans I lost my wallet. I suppose I’m glad it happened before I left and not after, but a pain nonetheless. Ah, yes, Louisiana, where you can be whomever you wish. When I finally changed my CA license over to reflect my new residency two years ago, I was never asked to prove my home address; I simply rattled it off to the lady behind the desk. Her neon talons went clackity-clack on the keyboard as she typed it in without question. This time around I had to show proof of insurance on my vehicle, but was never asked for any form of ID at any time during the proceedings. If you’d like to become someone else, I highly recommend relocation to Louisiana. I could be anyone right now, but instead chose to remain myself.

 

At least I had a lovely companion for the Louisiana-Colorado segment of this trip. I’d placed an ad on Craiglist offering a ride from New Orleans to Colorado Springs or points in between and got messages from some very… interesting ladies, such as:

“I am a very easy to get along w/ humorous,outgoing and positive lady,mature,but extremely young at heart. Love 2 explore, laugh and b goofy, and I am non-judgemental, respectful and spiritually minded.
As of now it would b just me, but just checking 2 c if my 2 itsy-bitsy well behaved dogs may b allowed. […] Im not sure if I will take them yet, may have sum1 bring them up later,just lemme know if its a possibility.I would,however, definately need room 4 luggage,the back seat is fine. June 12th is awesume,so plz call me 2 talk bout it, may b meet 4 coffee so we r both comfortable,but Im alota fun!”

 and

“My name is *** and I saw your ride share ad and it made my mouth water in a good way. I have a hankerin for a good road trip. I am flexible with my dates.

You asked for some personal information. I am 64 years young and have traveled the US, mostly to research BBQ because my dream is to write a book about the best BBQ in the US. I am easy to get a long with. [...] The only thing (or two things) that you should know is that I am a nudist. I am actually allergic to many clothes fibers and can't stay in them for long periods of time. So while I would be in my clothes for some of the trip, I would prefer to be out of them for the long stretches of road where we are just driving. The second..well, I don't think that's important. I am happy to pay for my share of gas and I do my own pickeling. Let me know when we leave!”

I fibbed and told both these ladies that I already had found a rider, though in retrospect I wish I’d drawn the nudist pickler out to find out more about the “second thing.” Was it that you are an axe-murderer madam? I can see why you’d prefer to tell me that once we got on the road, instead.

I finally received a message from my passenger-to-be:

“Hey there are you still in need of a rider? My name is **** I'm also a musician/ creative type and smoke cigarettes and enjoy music of all makes and models. Unfortunately I don't Have a liscence so I can't help with the driving but I can give you gas money for sure and keep you entertained with lots of stories and ukulele songs:) Hope to hear from you soon!”

Tracy (name changed to protect the travelin’ kids) is a 21-year-old hippie waif with a history of hitchhiking and a level head for her age. Apparently she started wandering around Europe at age 16, though this trip was to be the furthest west she’d ever been in the States. When Tracy got in the car she told me that she could afford the gas money we’d agreed on but not much else, and that if I stopped at restaurants and the like she probably wouldn’t get anything. We’d both brought food for the road so that was no big deal, and while my comfort level is a higher than hers, her lifestyle is no mystery to me. We had pleasant conversation along the way, and I feel like I imparted some wisdom from the road to her: odd-numbered highways go north-south, evens east-west; mile markers generally line up with the exit numbers. Useful information for hitchhiker and traveler alike.

I was regretting the decision to remain my own self in Louisiana when I was pulled over shortly after crossing into Texas, mere hours into our trip. I was going less than 10 miles over the speed limit and keeping up with traffic on the interstate, so I was surprised when the police vehicle in front of me slammed on his brakes, moved into the slow lane, merged in behind me and flipped on his lights. Not only that, the officer asked me to get out of my car and come over to his SUV as four lanes of 18-wheelers screamed past so he could write up my ticket. Safety third, Texas! I can only guess that the cop saw I was from out of state and knew I was unlikely to show up at a court date.

Shortly before sunset we stopped to camp out at a hidden reservoir near Wichita Falls, TX, so hidden it took us three passes on the gravel road to find it. While we celebrated the mid-point in our journey with a PBR tallboy in the fading light, the Aaron Eckhart of game wardens stopped by with a puzzled look on his clean-shaven, clefted-chin face. He said he’d never seen women camping out here alone before, except for one old Native American who was here to mediate under the stars, which he thought was strange. (I said that they’d be doing that for a long, long time before we got here, and he laughed, “I guess you’re right.”) He asked us many questions: “Where are you from?”  “How old are you?” “Do you have any weapons?” “When are you leaving?” “How did you even find this place??” For a minute we thought he was going to ask us to move along, though the Texas state website said that camping was allowed. Eventually Game Warden Eckhart told us that the yahoos didn’t really come out here until the weekend, so we should be pretty safe and drove off in his muddy pickup with the lights off so he could “sneak up on people.”

We settled down to sleep about an hour later, I in my camping hammock and Tracy in her sleeping bag under the stars. Around 3am I roused her.

“We have to go someplace with a bathroom.”

Yes, I had developed food poisoning from the pulled pork I’d finagled three days before I left New Orleans (lesson learned: religiously ice down the cooler when meat is involved). Within 10 minutes we had the car packed up and were zooming down the muddy gravel road to the nearest truck stop, where we spent the next hour waiting it out. Tracy was a champ. Yes, her having the ability to help drive the last 450 miles would have been a great help to me, but what she lacked in licenses she made up for in patience and understanding. I had to take four naps that day to get us all the way to Pueblo, CO, and she made no complaints of any kind along the way. She even gave me a little massage at a rest area in New Mexico to alleviate my excruciating lower back pains.

It took us 12 hours to drive the last 450 miles of the trip, but with her moral support I was able to pull it off. She was off to see her sister in Gunnison, another 4 hours west of Pueblo, so we found her a good spot to hitch from and off she went. I myself found the nearest cheap motel and crawled into bed at 6pm.

Today I’ll be headed out near Cripple Creek to see Katie, whom I spent almost every day with while I was in Berlin last summer. Her mama is a llama farmer here in CO, and I’m going to meet the llama she named after me, as well as Katie’s new bambino. After that it’s off to Woody Creek to have a drink in honor of Hunter S. Thompson, then Salt Lake City and San Francisco to help Chicken John out with a crazy maritime festival where we’ll build boats out of junk and dreams. The adventure continues!

Yours Truly, A Pyromanaical City Mouse

Here I am in New Orleans again, a far cry from the Amish countryside of Pennsylvania, though NOLA and farm livin' are much closer akin to each other than my parent's hermetically sealed house in the suburbs of DC. Here there are no screens on the windows to keep out the bugs (not that a measly bit of mesh would be any match for the beefy, steroid-laden insects that terrorize New Orleans anyway), and chickens out in the back yard. Heck, gunshots even resounded off the hills in PA – though from deer hunters, not drug dealers – so that was a little piece of home. And the architecture is drafty here, too, though I don't have to light any fires to keep myself warm.

I lit of lot of fires in PA. In the Shack Shack on Cherrymont Farm (see previous post) I became a connoisseur of newsprint. At first I only used the local broadsheets – Morgantown's little weekly, farmer's monthlies, horse rags, whatever came in the mail. Then I cleaned out my car and out came publications from my recent jaunt around the East Coast – alternative press from Key West, Ft. Lauderdale, Atlanta. My favorite was The Flagpole from Athens, GA: big pages, no staples to hinder my progress, paper supple and easy to manipulate, yet thick and long-burning*. Setting things on fire as a matter of survival rather than entertainment also imbued me with a special reverence for the nightly process.

The Shack Shack during a rare snow this winter.

Yes, it's amazing what happened to my perception of cold out in that drafty little shack. I always disliked winter, even as a child, and have not lived more than a few miles north of I-10 in many years as a result. To be fair, it has been a mild winter, but while walking around in New Orleanian shirt-sleeves last January it would have been hard to fathom sleeping – by choice! – practically outside in 14 degree weather. My little potbellied wood stove was not airtight, so while I could get the shack warmed up relatively quickly, it burned fast and by morning the place would only be a few degrees warmer than the out-of-doors. My mother brought up an electric blanket when she came to visit and it was like magic. Rather than dreading my inevitable extraction from underneath three comforters in the chilly mornings, the electric blanket bought me a couple of minutes of warm extremities, long enough to throw on my jeans, boots and coat and gather up clean clothes for a warm bath in the main house.

And now I'm back in 75-degree weather, gearing up for Mardi Gras and my bicycle tour. Having finished the first draft of my novel before vacating Cherrymont, the fire burns bright inside me.

*A Kindle ≠ kindling, it just smells really bad when you set it on fire. Yet another argument for hard copies.

The Walden Experience

Daddy-o jams out on his birthday

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live." - Henry David Thoreau

And here I am at Cherrymont Farm in central Pennsylvania, which is probably as close as this city girl will voluntarily get to the Walden Pond experience.

Cherrymont is run by Patrick, AKA Daddy-o, an old jazz aficionado with a gruff voice and a big heart. He dresses like an old Irishman in a wool sports jacket and sweater, his white hair reaching out from beneath a plaid newsboy cap. Daddy-o, like his ex-wife Jane in New Orleans, acts as a surrogate parent to many of the “degenerati” artists that regularly stop through for a few days, weeks or months. We celebrated his 69^th birthday just the other night, and I'm amazed at what he accomplishes around here at his age. Cherrymont is no longer a working farm but there are still chickens and goats and plenty to be done.

Chopper the Dog in front of his home.

Daddy-o and Miss Jane purchased Cherrymont in 1980 and turned it into a flower farm for a spell, “selling perennials wholesale to the trade,” but it was a working farm for a very long time before that. The original part of the main house at Cherrymont may have been built as early as 1715. The huge property was slowly parceled off over the centuries, eventually bisected by the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the 1940s and then reduced to it's current size of 50 acres. We're deep in the heart of Amish country, and many of the local stores are staffed by the wives and daughters of the Mennonite population.

There's certainly a timeless feel to the lifestyle here. We're currently conserving gas until it gets refilled later this week, which means no cooking on the gas range and no baths. This morning I “showered” in the tub with a large copper kettle that had been warmed on the wood-burning stove that is the main source of heat for the house. It was charming in a novel, “wow, people used to live like this,” preparation for the apocalypse sort of way.

The Shack Shack, my new digs.

Daddy-o and Miss Jane have been collecting cabins since they bought the place, and the acreage nearest the house is dotted with little shacks, a barn and a tiny church that is used as a library. I've been staying in Hydrangea House, the nicest cabin on the property, also heated by wood-burning stove. It's a cozy little setup, with a loft for the bed, large windows, and a real porthole at the peak of the roof. I'm just shack-sitting though, and today the usual resident of Hydrangea will be back, so Daddy-o and I are going to go chase the squirrels out of what's lovingly referred to as the “Shack Shack” further up the hill. The Shack Shack used to house a ski-lift motor at Fairmont Park in Philadelphia up until the 70s. It's nine square feet, and will be my new home for the next month, or until I finish writing my novel. With any luck we'll be installing a pot-bellied stove in there before I move in. I haven't been through a real winter – never mind a real winter without central heating – for almost eight years now. I'm hoping the anticipation of the cold is worse than the reality to my thin Cajun blood.