Day Forty-One, Orange III

I am staying a third night at Orange Acres. I did not do much today. I fed the goats but failed to bond with them. I gave stale bread to the chickens. I cleaned up the kitchen and baked some potatoes and cooked up an armload of greens. Mostly I just sat in the sun and thought about not much of nothing.

It is beautiful here in the Treasure State. You call it Big Sky Country. There the rocky hills with their sagebrush and pines. Beyond them are the high mountains. A waterfall is visible on a sheer cliff face, fed by the melting snow. Then the clouds rolled in and the sky went black and a wind rolled in out of nowhere. And there were cyclones of dust and cottonwood seed and it just started pouring down rain. It was all very dramatic.

I spent some time visiting with Henry and his wife Karen. She was born in Connecticut and looks like Meg Ryan and he was born in Mississippi and does not. They are permanent residents here. They have got their own motor home with an attached living room and a covered porch. They have photographs and knick-knacks and such. They have made it a real home.

Karen works at a fancy hotel in Missoula. Henry does body work and fixes up speedboats and helps paint trailers for Orange Acres. Henry is sixty-one years old is made of wire. He came here in the sixties in the Job Corps and just sort of stuck around. He has worked for the forest service and has owned a business and has been a boxer and a bouncer and, rumor has it, an exotic dancer. He insists on a certain precision of language which makes my own particular brand of bullshit hard to spin. But he is patient while I reword and clarify and has kindly refrained from breaking my neck.

I could not help but remark that Henry is the first black American I have seen since I left Seattle. "Winter lasts eighteen months here," he explained. "Dark meat likes heat."

He made me repeat it. I had only his word to go on but he challenged me to think of one black person who lives where it is cold. I could not. I think Bryant Gumbel hosted a Winter Olympics, but he was all bundled up.

I also spent time talking to Smitty, the "homocidal redneck" of an earlier post. I will not emend that assessment, but he is properly addressed as Smitty. "Shitty Smitty," he would insist. It is his nickname from Viet Nam. It has something to do with an enemy rocket hitting a latrine he had been tasked with cleaning.

He is also a sailor and the proud owner of a decommissioned Coast Guard cutter from the 1930s. It looks like a proper battleship. He ha vague plans to sail it around the world and shoot pirates. He invited me to come along and I have promised to think about it.

Dinner was elk steaks from Smitty's private freezer. He shot and butchered the animal himself. There were murmurs about poaching but he was unconcerned. He cut the steaks thin and fried them in butter. He made gravy, too, and it went beautifully with my potatoes and greens. Chewy, though, but it is not for me to complain. Elk lead a very hard life.

After dinner I put on an old borrowed sweatshirt and a mask and a leather apron and learned how to weld trailers. I was using what I think is called a wire feed arc welder. It is very hard to see what you are doing. I did make one or two welds I ain't completely ashamed of. We'll see when the thing hits the road.

Speaking of which, I am back on the road tomorrow. I never meant to stay this long. But you get to talking and I don't know. And it is nice to have a shower. And the mountains are pretty and the people are kind. We eat pretty well around here. The chickens are laying three dozen eggs a day. It is all they can do to get rid of them.

One day I hope I have a ranch and can open my door to strangers. But unti then I have got to keep walking. My journey has barely begun.


IT IS WORTH NOTING that the whole time I have been typing this up, I have been sharing a one-hundred-fifty square foot cabin with an agitated bat. Ordinarily this would be just the sort of thing to really bother me, but for some reason it does not.

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