Day Sixty-Nine, A Candle in the Wind

I had every intention of staying in a motel tonight, whether I can afford it or not. I've got a long bleak stretch ahead of me and I wanted to ice my feet. But as likely as not I would be up until four a.m. sipping root beer and watching Law & Order reruns, so maybe I should be glad the town is booked up. It may take longer to reconcile myself to how snotty they were about it. Without question the rudest people I have met on this trip are sitting behind motel desks.

So find me now camped cleverly, if not in the very heart of Billings, Montana, then somewhere very near its spleen. I had a similar spot in Missoula I remember. It gives me a certain pride. You need hobo skills to conceal your tent inside a metropolis.

I slept soundly but not horribly well not far from Park City, Montana. An oil refinery blots the center of town, with its towers and scaffolding. An its eternal flame, burning off gases which I guess are not good for much else. You think they could put that heat to work somewhere but I ain't an engineer. I was content to have it light up my tent from nearly five miles away.

I was on the road early by James standards. I did not dally in wrapping up camp. I had the odd sense that someone with a shotgun would soon enough ask me to go. The only folks I did see waved at me, some of them from boats on the river. It looked as if someone is running tours. It reminded me of Apocalypse Now.

I had at first the vague urge to throw up. That is stress getting the better of me. We all have our worries but on the road the physical results are clear. When I trip over money my legs get weak. When I worry about the road ahead I get blisters. I want to live in the moment like Kwai Chang Caine. He was a walker too.

Speaking of grasshoppers, I have seen millions of them in the past several days. Maybe more. I don't know how many it takes to make a proper Plague, but they're getting there, I am sure. From time to time one will land on my harm. They grab you with their little claws. And when you walk through the tall dry grass they go springing up all around. It is magical, really. Like taking a bath in champagne. Pop-pop, pop-pop, pop.

There is too here cactus, low in the grass. I don't know that I have ever seen it in the wild before. And turkeys and their families often close enough that you could bag one of them with a stick. They stand their ground until their babies are safe, then they fly heavily away.

I walked but a few token miles until I found my place in the shade. A cool spot up under an I-90 underpass. There is always a flat spot up top. I sat listening to the trucks rumble by a few inches over my head and settled my stomach with a 99-cent can of cocktail weenies (now with "mechanically separated chicken parts!") and a piece of stalish bread, warm from my pack and mashed flat as a cracker.

But somehow it failed to energise me. I was content to remain in the shade. The high nineties are for me losing their charm. I don't know how long I sat there. It was clean and cool and a nice place to rest. I thought hard about taking a nap.

I then saw a fellow in an orange safety vest, pushing a baby cart. He was moving west on my frontage road. I knew what he was immediately. It takes one to know one, we fools of a kind. He was Walking Across America.

I can't say why I was so happy to see him. I guess I felt less alone. I tried to whistle but my mouth was too dry so I went scrambling down the steep bank and literally ran up the road to meet him. He probably thought I was a maniac. He's lucky I didn't give him a hug.

Introductions made, he was Anthony Nicaj of Long Island, New York, a gentleman of twenty-four. He is wiry, better suited to this nonsense than me, and closer to his last destination. I remember John who gave me his knife, with whom I drank beer in the Cascades. He mentioned that he had seen another walker. Was he in good shape, I asked. He looked at me and laughed out loud. "Better than you," he said.

I was honored to remain under my bridge, talking to Anthony for two hours. I guess I talked too much, I was so glad to see him. We shared our stories of the road. He will take the odd ride but is capable of as much as thirty-five miles a day. He taught me a new hat tipping move where he slides his fingers left to right across the brim and ends with a sort of you-da-man pointing gesture. I believe I'll practice it tomorrow.

Having said our goodbyes I was back on that gawdawful, high speed, narrow-shouldered frontage road into Billings, a city I have learned to dislike. I can probably blame that on my dread of the future, or the dicks who staff their hotels. But it is ugly and sprawling and goes on for miles. I have been walking in Billings all day. I did stop at a gas station to study my map, an effort that failed to cheer me. My next five-hundred miles are, on paper at least, something close to impossible.

If I make it out of Montana ive, I will find myself in the Badlands of South Dakota. I remember going through there as a kid. It is a most peculiar landscape. And every bit as hospitable as the name might make you think. The Badlands are some distance south of Sturgis, where every motorcyclist in America is gathering this weekend. The roads are absolutely clogged with them, grim in their black leather chaps.

I stopped in the evening to beg water from a nice lady sitting on her porch. Her name's Normajean, that's one long word. We had a nice chat about life. She has two vicious dogs who licked my face and a good attitude about life. She has lived here since 1957, and elsewhere for some years before that. She says folks in Billings weren't always so snotty. She blames it on folks from back east.

I never did get around to charging my battery today. I'll be late leaving town tomorrow. But I'll need a huge breakfast and I'll need to tank up. I've got a sixty-mile stretch of dry ahead of me. Am I scared? Hell, yes. I have been scared all along. Now I'm just a tiny bit scareder. But know that if I drop out of touch, it could just be a battery thing. I figure my odds at like four to one in favor of my survival. Peace.


FRIEND ANTHONY tells me that Fish and Game sets up robot deer on the side of the road and waits to arrest anyone who shoots at them from their car. Now I suppose it is possible that whoever told him this was just having fun with him. He is a city boy, after all. But I like to think it is true. Putting aside all issues of entrapment, I, like most men of my generation, really like robots.

"I AM 42," I told Anthony. "That's the same age as my mother." I found myself wondering if she was cute.

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