Day Seventy-Three, Part II, My Last Stand

On very sore feet I hiked to Crow Agency, thirteen miles in one great big chunk. It was hot as blazes and I was staggering but I knew that if I stopped I would never get moving. I did not want to camp on the praire tonight, not least because for weeks now I have been told I would be murdered if I try to walk across Crow land. "Oh, I wouldn't say that," said the librarian in Hardin. He seemed to shudder a little. "But I sure wouldn't want to do it."

As I bought my last Gatorade heading out of town, the woman at the counter asked where I was headed. When I told her she went pale in the face. "You'll surely be..." she started to say. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," I said. "I have heard it all before."

I am reminded of all those rugged fellows who warned be about bears. You wouldn't catch them out there without this pistol or that. They'd tell me third-hand stories about bear attacks and follow up with vivid descriptions of the sort of holes they'd put in any bear who dared attack them. And they always sounded so heroic and made me feel timid and small.

Which doesn't make a great deal of sense. Hell, I was in bear country armed with nothing but my gentle nature and a few dozen winning anecdotes, and I came through more or less unscathed. By these heroes' standards and not my own, I am braver than all of them. May God save these United States, where I am the epitome of manly courage.

I have spent my adult life boldly going, a bit frightened most of the time. I have been places and done things which, on paper at least, would scare the crap out of you. I have stood up to bullies; I have told the Truth. I have dated far out of my league. And all the while I've been avoiding adventure. I am just not very good at it.

I ain't altogether sure how I formed this cowardly image of myself. Maybe because I am nervous on ladders. Or because when I was a little kid I didn't want to get beaten up by people two and three times my size. Between you and me, I still don't. Good thing there aren't many of them out there.

You know what scares me? Dying in obscurity--forgotten, unloved, alone. Oh, and snakes. And vending machines. Though I think that last one might be better termed a neurosis. I have several of them as well.

The point is, I guess, that everyone is afraid, nearly all of the time. I am just cowardly enough to admit it. That is all that distinguishes me. One of these days I'll get some kind of medal. I won't sleep the night before.

So long story short, I still ain't dead, but I maintain a sharp fear of failure. My feet are an absolute ungodly mess. I ain't going anywhere tomorrow. Every blister I had in the early days is back, every last one. Even now in my tent I am in considerable pain. They throb at my every heartbeat. I might go at them with my nose hair scissors. I might just go to sleep.

Find me now camped on a broad patch of land, beside the Bighorn River. It was my original intention to stay at the Pentecostal church. Thank God no one was home. I had seized on the idea as the only way to save myself. I ain't quite ready to be saved.

I am conspicuous as the only non-Indian I have seen since leaving Hardin. It really is a different country. There are families camped with me in this park, laughing around campfires. I would like to join them but they did not come here to spend quality time with me.

So far everyone has been really nice to me, though some of the young men look awfully fierce. I'm hoping to hang out here all day tomorrow and camp in the very same spot. I know it is possible to wear out my welcome, but I have a very long walk ahead of me and there is no way I can do it on these toes. Anything less than a twenty-plus mile day would result in my destruction.

I might hike up to the Little Big Horn Memorial Museum tomorrow. It is just two miles away. I burned up a great deal of battery power reading up on Custer, with an eye toward relating it here. But the whole thing is a lot more complicated than any one historian would have you believe. Basically, he rode against what he thought was a small group of women and children, only to learn that pretty much every warrior on the Plains was in town that week for a weapons and tactics seminar. It was a very short battle. Custer lost.

The Crow, by the way, were not involved. They got shoved in here later. It is a sad bit of history and it ain't over yet. I tend to side with the Indians. Manifest Destiny, it was called, our nickname for westward expansion. To open up the northern plains to pale civilisation. In point of fact, we ain't done all that much with it. It's rather a desolate place. If it were left entirely up to me, the Indians could have it all back.

My blisters await. Goodnight.

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