Moonrise 1 2,
originally uploaded by haikuluke.

so last night I went up to the side of a mountain to check out the eclipsed moon rising full. It was a subtle effect, by then the eclipse had mostly passed.

I sat on my tailgate and checked my compass because I couldn’t even tell which way was east, exactly.

It was nice though to run into a fine fellow who was an amateur astronomer, he had a lot of fascinating stuff to say about telescopes, gravity, quantum physics.

Could be on my way to something, could not, you never know.

Change has been prevalent, and yet, as it is with most people, its not fast enough, big enough, rich enough, glamorous.

But I have a new job. Any kind of job at this point is somewhat amazing… and you know, it feels alright. I like to not feel like crying everytime I have to cough up rent. Rent is horrible. Especially in this town. But now I just throw my money away happily. Maybe that isn’t an improvement. But either way, jobs allow that to happen. Yay!

South Yuba River State Park – October – 1,
originally uploaded by haikuluke.

Up late last night, endlessly reading Kafka On The Shore, last book read was ‘no country for old men’ by cormac mccarthy and before that ‘the first horseman’ by john case. well, a strange mix of literature, a strange obsession with reading lately. an escape within an escape i suppose.

On the road out to Bridgeport State Park, only to find the road is closed. No troubles, drove down and past the signs and found a nice spot cropped out looking over the river.

On a sunny day the sound of the distant river moves from one ear to the other without pattern yet hypnotizing.

I spent the afternoon lying on my tailgate, listening, watching, thinking, absorbing the sun, reading, and taking pictures.

I’m such a loner lately, but that’s ok I think for now. Its how I’ve always been. nothing new there. Sometimes I think I just need to appreciate that so that I can appreciate my friends and friends yet to be. Or just so I can appreciate my own identity, and find solace in that. I think there is nothing wrong with a little solace in that. I wish I had more time to put into it, and that more people found that to be valuable in some way.

Tonight just letting time flow around me. Very quiet. Back and forth between books and wine and this computer.

October time.

Dracaena – 4,
originally uploaded by haikuluke.

The Yankees and Tigers are on the TV, I don’t know why I’m letting myself sit here watching it, but I am and I never do so that’s that. Last night’s beer bottles on the table. Lunch? Bread and cheese.

Kate left on the road today to go visit family in Sebastopol and then to head up to Portland to visit that fair city. Her sister and nephew are along for the ride.

And so I’m on my own in Nevada City for the week. I’ve got an album to finish, things to work on, but I will miss Kate. I’m a lucky guy with her in my life and I feel that when she goes.

Tea Shop – 5,
originally uploaded by haikuluke.

Those who know me lately know that I’m: anxious AND i drink a lot of coffee. You could reverse those and claim cause and effect. Either way. BUT all these things in my life are changing slightly at the moment.

For instance: I am drinking tea a lot, and I feel like it is different entirely.

I have a job to go to today and that is also different entirely

it is really cold

i feel that yes i have too much yet to get done, but the pressure is lightened.

TEA is good for you. I like white teas and oolong, probably because they are expensive and it makes me think they are fancy.

I took a lens off my old (real) camera and taped it backwards to my digital camera. I don’t know why I did this, I just wanted to see what might happen. Well, it kind of turned the whole thing in to a magnifying glass of sorts and hence, the macro pictures are amazing. that’s all you can do with a second lens taped to your camera, but nonetheless, its neat.

So this is it, checking in after all these months.

How is it life? It changes every day. Right now I’m sorting through old files and hard drives, trying, vainly, to get it in order. I want to bring order to things, to make them brighter.

I’ve been sort of in Nevada City for a while now, having my way and not. Suddenly I’m feeling stuck. As if too much has gone on without going on.

We went to Samoa, and felt the humid air, watched my brother get married, celebrated, fretted, felt what it was to be in tropical paradise with a lot of questions hanging around your life. Questions I can’t even relate here.

But they seem resolved.

Kate is in the kitchen making pumpkin pie, zucchini bread, and broccoli casserole. Couldn’t get any better really. The air is pushed around by the fan, Summer outside, as usual. Music in the making, the album sits on the hard drive. Couldn’t get any better really.

And yet, I’m feeling the missing of a vital part of my life. The part that feels that I know what I’m doing, that I’m in any kind of control whatsoever. This time here in this town has been up and down, but never really rapidly toward anything… each new alleyway seems to end up a dead end, back here, wondering what to do, and what I’m doing, with my self.

I’m so desperate for decent work, for a bit of cash, for direction in my wanderings. I long to have a bit more crystallized beauty in my mind and waking life, and I’m tired of having nightmares, regularly.

I’m tired of feeling old, older, and not feeling that it is leading anywhere. I long for the spiritual, and the practical. I long to be released from a long dry spell.

So here is to it. nothing new to report really, just letting it get down and out. letting it be where it will.

May. Day. Its that between Spring and Summer thing, where truly there is reason to celebrate, if you are into the sun at all.

Things have indeed changed here, finally, too long on the waiting list quickly evaporating.

I’ve found work, which, though I’m not anywhere near working my dream job, is a big huge sack of lead off my shoulders. I’m even doing some work that I really like and want to do a lot more of, working for a photographer and framing prints. The other work is another persona, where I show up, make money and leave.

And the apartment is alive, full flowers are bursting up from the warm soil all around the house. I’ve taken to planting as many houseplants as I can, attempting to start new ones, and generally fill this place with life.

Kate is painting and she is painting amazing things, her series on hands is so beautiful and profound I stop everytime I see them, and they are in our house everyday.

What else… o, you know, taking pictures, making music. Inspired, but in a slow way. I think that, oddly enough, now that I am working I will have further impetus to push the results of my work in music to further levels, and not discount it as much in my life… working crummy jobs gives me reason to want to put out great music.

My cello is to be fixed soon.

I’ve been discovering the rivers around here, and finding out that Nevada County (California) is a fantastic place, with amazingly beautiful Mountain and River scenery and feel.

And that’s that, I’m exhausted, but wanted to check in.

It has been a while to check in. I feel like I’m building up commentary for when the real excitement begins, but then, this could be it so… I’ve yet to find steady work, though things floating hallucinatorily on the horizon. That would be nice, idle hands are making me update my blog.

I don’t feel like documenting too much of the trip until I’ve got some income coming in. And so I am putting it off a little bit. I am right now, however, reviewing the minidisc recordings I made during the trip. Some of which are really neat. Some of which seem to have been recorded over accidentally.

Life is filling itself out, slowly, its like waiting for the shower to get hot in a freezing bathroom. And its taking a long time.

And yet though not a born optimist, I look forward feverishly.

The goal is to finish the albums I’ve got started, play a bunch of great shows, move in and out of different cycles at will. Enjoy. That is the goal.

Kate set four alarm clocks this morning for six o’clock, a necessary precaution to make it to work by seven. I got out of bed and as I walked past the mirror I unfortunately saw myself, looking as if I’d been asleep for ten years.

But then I got excited because it snowed last night, and I decided that I’d go out and take pictures before the whole loud world woke up. I drank like seven cups of coffee and headed out.

The world is loud, man, I don’t mean to complain about mundane things, but right now somebody is operating a leaf blower (in the snow), and its this constant loud annoying on and off of an engine specifically built to annoy the hell out of people. It might as well spray itching powder while its at it. Its far too early for leaf blowing.

Which is why I can’t do a landscaping job… OK, working at UC Santa Cruz there was this general hippy ethic that you didn’t really douse things in chemical solutions in order to make them grow. Around here its considered the work of God to plant bio-engineered pansies in rows next to astro-turf and then to coat in a few millimeters of anti-life solution. Many hyphens in that last sentence. In fact, I’m not kidding, I’ve read a ‘series’ in the local paper (two stories, should have been zero) about the big growing business around Nevada City: brush clearing. So rich scum buy promising real estate so that they can have a longer commute to jobs that they hate, and they look at their land, and they think to themselves, what if this were just… lawn. So they literally, quite sadly literally hire people to plow down every living thing, brush, trees, animals, flatten it, just flatten it, so that they can have a nicer view of the highway from their mcmansion. This is a true story, I wish I were making it up.

And then food serving. First of all, it is highly desirable to have a (very expensive) college degree (in music, so it almost doesn’t count, unless you live in Berlin) and work a food serving job. Everything you could wish for really. But that’s fine, I can’t knock it for now (desperate) because you can make a lot of money and literally be asleep in terms of actual responsibility, which sounds like shucking the idea of responsibility, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that you can go home and start right away to do whatever it is that you care about doing (in my case music) because its as if you just rolled out of bed mentally.

And there are so many positions for ‘admin asst’ out there, which basically is shorthand for ‘do the work I don’t feel like doing’. Including the ever stimulating data entry, for companies you can’t comprehend staying out of the red financially. Maybe someday you will be elevated to the person who buys everyone frappe’s a few times a day from the Starbucks down the block. Yay.

That’s my ever so optimistic outlook on jobs at the moment. I need to get it out of my head because it makes me insane how flat the world can seem some time, constantly striving for the lowest point.

But I do need work, badly. I need work to keep my hands from becoming idle. I need work because it makes me feel good. I like doing good work, and getting things done. That’s part of the reason I enjoy making music, I feel like there is an ultimate end that I have trained myself to get to (almost there) where I can produce quality music because I know how. Not as product, don’t get me wrong, music ultimately will never be product, but as something filled with intention. Good intention.

When I work I can focus on something intensely. I would not notice an earthquake if it happened to take out my neighborhood, I do not notice fluctuations in temperature, the need for food or hydration, I do not lose focus for anything. Its satisfying.

I took some pictures this morning, and now I’m creating the next project. I’m spending my days thinking about how I’m to pay rent somehow. I can’t wait to not have to think that thought.

Life has been settling in somewhat.

Playing the piano, looking for work.

I put up some pictures of our apartment I’ve been promising:

flickr photos from me

Sitting here in Cafe Mekka there are so many influences swimming around noisily between my senses, music in my headphones, the grinding coffee machine, new people everywhere, new faces, a new world really, called Nevada City.

We landed from the trip and instead of feeling the launch off energy of faithful hope and new beginnings I kind of collapsed into a troubled half state of worry and disappointment. Disappointed that the trip was over. Disappointed that back in California I was no more close to a new life than when I had left: new life being a career, a direction, no complaining, just doing. Disappointed though in a more vague sense, tired, able to be happily numbly in and out of my parent’s house, mostly in, and afraid to make the big changes.

So it was a period of transition. Kate was in Auburn, diligently going back and forth to Nevada City looking for places for us to call home, while I drove all through the familiar but alien towns of “my” Northern California, Geyserville, Sonoma, Petaluma, San Francisco, looking in all of these places for a place that felt like home in at least some minor way.

Christmas gave me purpose. To spend it with my family for me has always been a sacred obligation, not to be broken, and being with my brothers was crucial for me, I have missed them so much in the last five years, and here they are new people, adults not kids, being not only that but the most amazing people I know.

And then I worked on cleaning out my parents overflowing and overwhelmingly cluttered garage. I mean, just a two car garage filled up stacked up mice running around and boxes full of important and not so imporatant all mixed into one. It took me a good near two weeks of working everyday to sort through it all in any kind of meaningful way. And the whole time I am uncovering trunks full of ancient memories, lost and forgotten locks of hair, family pictures that everytime I saw one made me pause and retreat into a place inside of my mind and self that is still a child. And it stretched me out in all ways, desperately lonely in my parent’s garage of all places, doing something utterly contemptible work wise and yet amazingly fulfilling AND I felt a very worthy duty for the family, necessary to protect the priceless artifacts that had not been eaten up by the passing of time.

And then that ended.

And Kate followed through on this apartment, a chance look one day, a couple of days before Christmas. It was a place we could afford. It was something. We’d been nothing homeless for nine months, couldn’t hurt to have a couch or a bed to call our own. I went and saw it and I really didn’t feel it… I was disappoionted, I nearly broke down the night before we had to tell a yes or no, but decided with Kate that we needed to get SOMETHING going, whatever it would be, and so reluctantly we said yes. And then the landlord calls Kate and reports that things have changed. We can move into HIS old apartment, an amazing spot on top of Deer Creek with a big old living room and high ceilings, big windows, two decks, and a piano on top of it.

Its a turn of fate and luck that I had I hate to admit been waiting for.

And so we packed the U-Haul with everything that had been sitting literally gathering cobwebs, pulled it out, painted all the walls white and established working areas in a few days, perhaps the fastest move in in my history.

So now I’m here. We’re here. The creek whistles its sound around our bedroom through the night. The space has this amazing feeling of freedom to me.

I’m jobless, need work, badly, not just money, but work. I’m desperate for good work.

The music is to come along.

And that, is where I am, today.

O wow. I have so much to report. So much that to sit here now and write it would take hours. Which I have this afternoon, finally, but do not have this morning.

In short, I’ve moved, and the apartment is great. That’s it in a nutshell. Which is also why my posts are so limited. More, of course, to come.

Buddy the dog and Noah the cat are slumbering indignantly while the crickets mumble loudly outside. Its not even close to cold, at the peak of darkness from winter here in Hopland, NorCal.

Just got back from dinner with the Welches, a holiday kind of dinner, number 7 of seventeen it seems, the kind of dinner you come home from both satisfied and regretful at once, full, tired, drunkish, where did the rest of life go?

Its good though to be doing these kinds of things, out to dinner with my family, meeting their family, two families colliding like a couple of galaxies, not even or symmetrical, but perfectly formed in themselves.

Its good because in high school, or whenever I last lived here, o, yes, high school, well, there was that stopover after the Europe trip, post graduation, but I don’t remember stuff like this per say, anyways, lets say high school I would have inevitably hid in my room and played guitar and listened to Creedence Clearwater or both, and drawn pictures of circles for six hours and told myself that was the way it had to be. You know, the true life of an artist. But now, accepting that maybe, maybe after all this I actually am an artist, I no longer have to prove anything. And so I went out to dinner.

Although I did have to prove something to myself post Christmas day, my hair was long, I was unshaven, wearing pajamas around the house had become commonplace for me, easy, easy to be slowly circling the endless questions that have become my identity upon return from this latest trip. I had to prove to myself that I had not slipped into something inescapable. I had to prove that though I didn’t have a job or school to go to, that I wasn’t starving or in jail, that I had some sort of deep purpose, some sort of day to day inner smile. That’s what it comes down to, something you laugh about with yourself, on your way to or from work you think how silly it is, this day to day thing we do. That’s what contentment is for me really. I remember 530 am on the way to work at the pear factory in Ukiah, Summer becoming a tragic memory, and thinking how silly it was, that I was in that car, the sun rising again, drastically sleep deprived and unsatisfied.

Anyways, I was around my family, Pete comes up with T from the city, to be married in June, and they are looking spotless and stylish, not over the top, not yupped out, not anything I wouldn’t wish upon myself, just kind of content and getting married and having jobs and apartments and happy to be young and doing it. I felt a million miles away from that entire existence and it bummed me out. I couldn’t understand the use of hair product, why? hadn’t used it in eight months, campfire was my stylist. Nate and Sam, beautiful and vibrant in college, the energy of the dorms of Santa Cruz wafting from their voices and stories, and their lives one great open highway into promise and potentiality. Mom and Dad, thirty some odd years later laughihng with and at each other, out to party with friends, old friends, more times in two weeks than I have in the past year.

And I don’t thrive on self pity, nor do I believe in it in any way. So I don’t go there, but walking soggy footed out to the back of the house, to see the view of the highway from above the rooftop of my parents house, the christmas lights glowing in the cold air, I think to myself steadily about the choices I ought to make right now.

I got my haircut yesterday in the department store salon, started cleaning out piles of boxes in my parents’ garage, and cleaned my room. Took a shower, shaved, and looked for jobs online. Ran into Joe Leonardo, close distant friend and person who asks all the wrong and right questions at the wrong right moment.

Ready to give up, in the best of ways, to say Oh well, I guess I just have to live my life from here.

Christmas, it came and it went. The days leading up to the Day, I was driving on the highway back and forth to mall land, Santa Rosa, solitary witht he rain constantly slamming the windshield, my own company with a camera to hold the days down one by one, presents to buy, things to distract myself with. At night I would settle down to turning on the christmas lights, putting together the model train set, decorated in completion with fake snow and clay gazebos.

I felt giddy thank god. The night before Christmas was and is a perfect crystallization of a whole year, a whole lifetime of affection and interaction in my family. I took the moment, the one moment I have always needed, to stand in front of the tree with its heavy syrup of colored lights, covering the hastily wrapped presents laid out in piles beneath the tree, the scene as primal to me as anything could be, a pure expression of my childish desires, something I can remember with clarity and reverence. I took that moment, and many others, sleepless on Christmas Eve, 27 years old. I thought about Santa Claus above the rainy clouds, how, in spite of everything, all evidence and clear thinking, so many kids were believing headily in his reality, its hard to not accept that in some way he is there.

Christmas morning we sat there, opening presents, making fun of each other, laughing, myself with my coffee, a little dumbfounded by the generousness of life and my family, my family really truly giving, and able to give, in ways that are more genuine than pop culture could conceive as fiction.

December is rolling by.

I’ve been caught in a space time continuum where in nothing moves too quickly, and at this point, with any certainty at all.

Coming off this epic trip I’m weighing the ever present questions of what makes my life my own, quality of life, ambition, progress, happiness, et cetera.

I find after a little time for reflection that my seven and a half months on the road with Kate has left me a bit out of touch with these questions. And I think that is good. I’m starting with a blank slate, looking at what comes next, and basically deciding what feels right.

I am lucky to have that luxury, if I do.

However, I don’t know what feels right. I can’t sleep at night, I don’t know where I want to live, I don’t know how to approach my life, my music ‘career’, my goals seem, out of reach.

On the other hand, if I can allow myself to relax, I’m at this peaceful place where I get to be detached. I feel too detached though, from my own life, and the direction it will go.

There are options, but I can’t even talk about them yet. They are too far removed to seem real right now.

OK, well, all is well though, beyond that. I’m just exhausted, and uncertain, and it mixes in with the holidays and its very interesting.

Here is to the next page.

Somewhere In The Sierra Nevadas its 343pm

Just got back from gathering a mountain of dried sage branches for the fire tonight. I expect it will be pretty cold, we must be somewhere around 8000 feet. The campsite is a perfect little hidden away spot next to a creek, with a rock firepit and the truck leaning one tire on a rock to make it level.

We’ve had a few spots like this, like in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where we parked in an old hunters campsite next to a creek and enjoyed absolute solitude. In fact, save for the hijinks of a tiny town called… shoot, something forgettable, maybe 500 people, two markets, both way overpriced, we’ve enjoyed absolute solitude for a while now.

The past three nights we’ve been back in California, camping in Death Valley National Park. All three nights we did back country camping, driving up treacherous roads, more bumpy and messed up than anything I’d ever driven, to camp out in these vast flats of desert, with no one around, maybe a coyote off somewhere, a few kangaroo mice, ravens. Death Valley strikes as odd at first, not much going on, just desert, but quickly as you turn the corner on the valley itself, it is this vastness of solitude and permanent warmth in the day time that is quiet, strange, and surreal. The colors of the sand and rocks are layered and warm, collapsing down from 11,000 foot peaks (Telescope Mountain) to the lowest point in the U.S., near Badwater, which is 282 feet below sea level. You can see millions of years of history, even if, like me, you have no idea of geology at all.

We spent the days rolling in the warm air through desert roads, in shorts and t shirts for the first time since Sandwich, on the east coast. The light is so intense it colors everything in slightly deeper hues than usual. And most of all the quiet, the sense of space, of mystery, of time sits hushed in the nights, especially at our desolate and beautiful campsites, just me, Kate, and the Truck among millions of sage and mesquite plants, rolling endlessly toward the layered mountains. Everything looks close, but in reality, what looks like it should take five minutes to walk could take three hours. There seems to be nothing small in Death Valley save for the towns, the outposts for radiator water and in our case, Miller High Life.

This morning I woke to the sunrise, the warmth of the sun already pushing into the camper shell across the great cool of the night before. We made coffee on the tailgate and sat like spectators to the vast empty ancient beach before us.

I think yesterday I was in one of the most strange and beautiful places I’ve ever been. Its a dried up ancient lakebed called The Racetrack, so known because the rocks that mysteriously are on its surface leave long twisting trails, indicating that they’ve moved, seemingly of their own intuition. The lake is just dried mud, miles of it, all cracked into tiny hexagonal shapes, natures favorite, endlessly stretching beneath and in front of you. As an experiment I closed my eyes and walked for ten minutes, not needing to open my eyes at all… the lake is one of the flattest surfaces in nature, and there are no obstructions in any direction once out on it.

Before Death Valley we had the strange “luck” of revisiting Las Vegas. We decided that from Canyonlands National Park, in Southeast Utah, that it would be more fun and just as fast to cut down to Vegas and up the way we are now (Hwy 395 heading to Tahoe).

We got ourselves a cheap (but surprisingly nice) hotel room at “Circus Circus”, one of the older, more tacky, and yet, more, how do you say, nostalgic of the Vegas Strip casinos. We rested up in the room, reading, writing, and headed out once again for the Strip. This time, it was bearable. I learned that to judge the Las Vegas scene in any way is too easy, and completely redundant. You can’t knock the tackiness and utter desolation of a place that prides itself in exactly those things. And so we just wandered, from casino to casino, taking in the kitsch, spending 7 dollars on slot machines, losing it all, and returning, exhausted to our hotel room.

Losing 7 dollars in Vegas is not as bad as it could be.

We spent two nights camping in Zion National Park. Zion is packed full of awe inspiring mountains, red and orange, strange peaks rising from the river that runs through the middle of it. Its best seen in the middle of the night, next to a river, with the moon bright and lively out, as we found out. We had time to kind of take in the basics, a walk up the canyons, along rimrock trails, past emerald ponds and tiny waterfalls, and warm breeze nights at the crowded campsite.

***

So after Death Valley we were clearly in our final stretch. We were in California towns with California people, California license plates, California attitude, ie., easy going.

In short, the trip is coming to an end, and it is nearly impossible to be sad about it. We find ourselves now in South Lake Tahoe, at a $25 motel, the last scheduled stop on the trip. Today was kind of a toss up, we didn’t get much sleep at all last night, the biting Sierra Nevada air crossed well below freezing, and even in our normally invincible sleeping bags it was chilly, often sleepless. In the morning we made a fire out of dried sage branches, made the coffee, and headed up to Tahoe.

Its hard to visualize, let alone vocalize, the final stage of the trip. Its something I kind of continually want to talk about, evaluate, figure out. And yet, my mind can’t really grasp not camping out every night. Can’t grasp what is to come next.

I want to offer a grand summary of the trip: Seven months of two American kids out on the road, dazed, impressed, broke and beautiful, finding what we could where we could, doing our best to live it up. And we have, we’ve lived it up for all its worth. We embody the lifestyle now, dirty jeans and thermals, a dirty truck packed full of memories and essentials. No clue where it goes to next. How to do it again. No answers, but nearly a year of doing exactly what we wanted to do. To see America. To live a life void of regret. To feel the air and the sky and the sun on our skin. To feel the weight of the road pass below us like nothing. To vacate our souls into campfire after campfire. Sure of one thing, certain of the trip. Alive and proud. Unbelievably free. That’s what we do here. That’s what we’ve done.

In a sleepy quiet cafe in Moab, Utah, stuck in the rocks.

We’ve been staying at the absolutely mindblowing Canyonlands National Park, and Arches National Park, both within throwing range of Moab.

The vastness of the desert, its quietness, warmth, and amazing features are somewhat addictive.

We’ve decided to try and make it back for Thanksgiving, being so close as we are to California. Its strange, we have an endpoint in a way, sad, going to be hard, but hey, it could be a whole new adventure, and wouldn’t that be ideal?

Plus it will be great to see my fam.

We decided strangely today that the best idea would be to pass through Las Vegas again (deja vu, and a scary one to have) and pass up the 395 through California to check out Tahoe, as the last stop.

Oooh, my chest feels sad just writing it.

Anyways, we drive to Zion National Park tomorrow.

Kate is painting right now, I’ve got to get over here so I can play some guitar.

That’s it. That’s the plan.

Signing off.

11)6(05 its 925am

We got snowed and blowed and iced out of Yellowstone. It was in the middle of a drive out into Lamar Valley to see the wildlife purported to be thriving there, bears, wolves and the like, when, while watching a small family of bison laying around bored like, off in the distance a big distance mind you, Yellowstone is full of those, this massive cloud looks like a down pillow that has a massive tear and is spreading its feathers all over the valley. And it would have been great if they were feathers, I’m sure we would have made piles of them and through them around, but it was snow. Snow that is cold and icy.

But I have to rewind a little bit about that day because there was more to it than just that moment of things changing, although, it is those moments we do remember best. It kind of began with even the hint of the idea of Yellowstone. I mean, we had gone WAY way out of our way to get to Montana/Wyoming, and really just for this. So Yellowstone was engraved in our minds from the early days of the trip, something we have to see, and can’t miss, and you know, its good advice. And then it began with leaving Bozeman, and driving through the valley that enters into Yellowstone, following a perfect river past perfect ranches with perfect horses staring off into eternity in their yards. It began there because apparently my Great-Grandmother, Marion Sullivan, had lived there. And all the while we are driving through this magnificent valley, with peaks on either side and the promise of four seasons hiding in each single one, Van Morrison on the radio and enough instant mashed potatoes to not have a trouble on our minds.

The moment we pulled into our campground we were met by something I’d never had the tingle to experience, a whole heard of huge elk kind of carousing through the sites, yawing and yeeing and making the strangest whale like sounds you’d never expect to come out of them. The big old female elk make this entirely unexpected and therefore funny high pitched squeak somehow come out of their massive frames, as if a kitten were strapped into a microphone booth somewhere within them.

In the morning we were awoke by the herd passing two feet from where we slept in the back of the truck, as if a friendly neighbor going off to work with a cup of coffee in the hands.

Part of what makes Yellowstone neat is its geothermal activity, its unsettled molten core bubbling to the peaks of mountains in the middle of nowhere these murky and primordial stews of boiling water and algae, dripping down their own manufactured shapes of strange bowls and ornamental cups. Off in vast distance geyser valleys steam like a fleet of riverboats were making its way through the mountains. Underneath you on wooden boardwalks, crystal blue and blood red water hisses and bubbles, pits of mud churn on themselves and geysers erupt out of nowhere in frantic excitement, short lived, but excited nonetheless.

The thing that I love maybe the most about “nature”, as in, those places you go that are not paved maybe, is the sense of vastness that is completely opposite the dimensions of say a TV screen, or an apartment. A few years back I hiked around Mt. Hood (well, I won’t kid you, part way around Mt. Hood) with my great friends Mark and Jason. There are parts and pieces of Mountains that you know go with mountains because they wouldn’t fit on anything else. Boulders the size of the White House teeter on the edge of rocks the size of, well, rocks that are really big. Standing there, on and below these enormous gaps in space was the first time I really needed to seek out that place of grandeur.

Standing on river canyon edges that plummeted 2000 feet down into churning waters that rode past rugged mountains and geysers off into the horizon inseparable from the feeling of vastness. Purity, beauty, this could be the definition, something, be it inside you or not of you, most likely not worded out: vast.

We rushed to our campground which was a bit disappointing because it was as if they had put this particular campground (the last open campground we could get to) in the most boring spot in Yellowstone. Which is not that bad when you think about it. Plus it was Freezing with capital F and getting dark and there was ice and snow on the ground. We set up camp, our tarp flapping over our screen house, out in the frozen air, and drove out to look at more animals and just be in the valleys of Yosemite in the evening. The horizon grew more and more dark and we passed herds of bison and elk into the thick of a fat snow cloud, grey and dark and pouring snow like scattered papers in the wind. The light grew dark blue and murky, and the elk continued to feed as the windshield wipers scraped away the fresh ice beginning to land on it like a nuisance. We drove slowly in the absolute silence of snow stopping to stare at the open

102805 its 928am

Its a soggy morning in Bozeman, the American flag with copper eagle soaring above it sits motionless in the wind against the flagpole. The sun is starting to pry open the clouds, and the mountains that surround the town are beginning to show their new coats of snow.

We’ve been crossing through the crucial landmarks of the American west, and specifically getting a feeling for the ultimate in truths that this country and its identity deny, which is that not very long ago, Native American culture was brutally wiped out, and the wisdom and profundity of so many people, whose home was this soil, was trampled and tossed aside like a tabloid magazine.

I felt something very strongly along these lines in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. We had driven up into them on a beautiful way, camped the night out above a pretty lake, awoke to frozen boots and frozen truck and frozen coffee cups and frozen us, and then we set off again, way high up into the mountains, whose peak is somewhere around 14,000 (feet that is) though the pass we went through was around 8000′. The craggly rocks leveled out and smoothed slowly, the white firs and thin aspens more thinned out over the yellow meadows whose ceiling was the sky, drapes over with soft linen clouds like handkerchiefs blowing away from earth. We approached Medicine Wheel, a spot I must admit I previously knew nothing about. Prompted by a sign that said that Medicine Wheel was indeed off to the right up a treacherous dirt road with boulder strewn cliffs on either side and snow packed up the walls of course I took it. The truck protested and bumped and rattled and cautiously pulled itself up the couple of miles to a vastly deserted place (save for the SUV full of loud tourists from Montana who apparently never leave the house save for to pick up some fast food). What Medicine Wheel really is, I don’t know. From what I understand it has been a place of worship for many different tribes of Native Americans for over 7,000 years. That people would walk the endless miles of the west, up into these brutal mountains, and come to the most exposed spot in them to pray. And that all people should and could come there. The trails that ran to and through Medicine Wheel are apparently some of the oldest in North America.

The site itself was quiet and subtle, lines of stones lined up like the spokes of a large (35 feet or so diameter) though not giant, wheel. At the four points of direction there were larger pits built from rocks, presumably for fire. The area was wisely roped off, and a sign asked people to walk to their left around it. Along the ropes were thousands and thousands of prayer flags, bundles of sage, necklaces and other offerings tied to it. Inside the circle/wheel were the same, along with jawbones of animals, feathers, dreamcatchers, all, presumably, sacred to someone.

The place was wildly exposed and I felt the chill of desolation as I looked off to the west, where the mounds of dirt were pressed some 10,000 feet below. I felt the power of someone there, in prayer, while the lightning storms and blizzards rushed across the face of this place as if creation were taking place from that mountain top every day and night.

And coming back down the thin road I realized in a profound way the sadness that is inherent in the destruction of Native American culture. Its so simple, and yet, its as if people don’t take the treasures of knowledge and wisdom that cultures practicing rites and reason for more than 7,000 years in this land, the most beautiful place in the world, the American West.

Two nights before we spent the night below the towering and endlessly imposing/impressive Devil’s Tower, in Northeast Wyoming. It is known to most tribes from the area as Bear Lodge, or Home of the Bear, or something along those lines. You may know it from Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind”, its the mountain that everyone goes crazy to make out of paper mache and mud and where the alien spaceship lands and makes music with the CIA or whatever. Anyways, you might not have seen that movie. But this formation is truly, and I’m not just trying to impress you here too, but its one of the most grand and awe inspiring things I’ve ever seen in my life. Its literally just thousands of rock columns, from afar looking like small and compact but up close being massive hexagons of about 20′ in diameter, pure rock, all pressed together and skyward. It looks as though the biggest tree in the world ever by far, as in a Redwood Tree that reached out of the upper atmosphere was cut, and all that was left was the stump. This too was a revered sacred space, where all kinds of people came to hunt, live, and be reverent. Its nearly impossible not to feel reverence for this thing. Its so much bigger than words or even pictures can convey.

And today we head into Yellowstone.

And so, nothing to complain about, off to get some coffee, off to see some wolves.

10)22(05 its 1121pm

I-90 relentlessly pulls West, mile after mile of flatlands, billboard after billboard, big sky overhead, the clouds pushed by North wind down with taste of ice finally in the air.

We spent five days days in Minnesota, kind of by accident, but a good accident, the accident that Minnesota is gorgeous, the weather was gorgeous, and the sights were amazing.

We found that the camping of Minnesota was some of the best so far. Our first state park found us rolling along dirt roads underneath the sparkling golden fall trees. The colors all around the Mississippi River Bluffs State Park were blasting into the sky and the warm weather pushed a gentle breeze around it all. The park sits on a perch above the Mississippi river where it twists between Wisconsin and Minnesota and the views down to the river are fantastic as you walk gentle paths through the gentle aspen and ash forest. We stayed there two nights and had enough time to settle into putting our scrapbook in order, making mobiles out of aspen bark and apples, and taking long walks among the falling leaves. Our neighbors were kind and interesting, and interested, and it was a great couple of nights.

We crossed the whole state in a day and made our way to the Southwest corner of Minnesota. And then…

South Dakota, oh, South Dakota, what do I make of you, so desperate for attention and granted, deserving it, and yet longing with its kitsch and hardiness to be taken seriously. Taken seriously thank you and pass on through and have a cup of 5 cent coffee but don’t drink it or you may be seriously regretting it. The speed limit is 75, the towns are not closer than 30 miles apart, and the ‘towns’ themselves, well, a Flinstones backdrop of motels and diners and tourist traps. You find yourself reading billboards for entertainment, even though they say the same thing again and again, attractions 400 miles away begin to advertise from the Minnesota border and pound at you, every 5 miles or so: Wall Drug, Reptile Museum, Mt. Rushmore, 1880’s Town over and over again until you get there and you find yourself thinking “wow, I’ve got to go see that”. And then you do, and you know, its a heck of a lot more entertaining than the freeway rolling by at 73 miles per hour. 73 because it turns out the truck and its little four cylinders and a back packed full of firewood and blankets and all the other stuff we need just can’t quite zip along in the face of steady South Dakota wind. Amazing that the pedal can be to the metal and big rigs hauling 15 new cars zoom by you. And you go up a hill for a while. And down. Yippee.

It is really actually beautiful though, the vastness of the place, the endless places that you’ll never set foot on and no one else will either for a long time, and if they do they’ll probably wonder what they’re doing out there, in the middle of nowhere, which is pretty much everywhere in the plains outside the farms wrapped in bony trees. The clouds give you lessons on perspective and light, and you get plenty of time in for non thought.

And so it is that we’re finally close to the border of South Dakota, even though its only our second night here mind you, and ready to head West further still.

Last night we crashed in the ultra budget but clean and weird Sioux Motel, where across the street we had a few Rolling Rocks in the Rusty Spur Saloon while the locals filtered in in cowboy hats and filled the place up chatting over greasy cheeseburgers.

Today we drove into the wonderfully desolate and eerie Badlands National Forest, now completely vacant in the late October post tourist season. We stopped into the Circle Ten cafe where we were easily the only customers of the day and enjoyed home cooked biscuits and freshly grated hash browns. We drove and drove twisting through the landscape that feels like the dusty corner of the earth with hills and spires of dirt and clay like pre giant gothic cathedrals washed under a couple of ice ages. The wind blew constant 25 miles per hour and the air tasted icy, piles of buffalo dung littered the straggly sagebrush gardens and it felt like if anyone had been to the place we hiked out to today it was a cowboy taking sleeping on his hat after a long cattle drive.

10)8(05 its 1142pm

Its late in Ottawa, and the degrees celsius is dropping. We’re holed up in a cheap motel for the night, resting and preparing for the next leg of the trip.

This last week and a few since leaving Sandwich have been amazing.

We headed up to Dover, New Hampshire for a couple of days, where I enlisted my dad to help me track down some details on our family’s ancestry there. It turns out there is a direct line from my bloodline to the Knox family, some of the first settlers in America. Thomas Knox landed in 1633, and the Knox family stayed right around the area for 5 generations. I’ve never done genealogy before, and believe me this was amateur stuff, but it was like I was in an action movie with no crucial tragedy awaiting me sifting through the piles of information, trying to find the keys to some secret. I found enough information to be able to visit the graveyard where the first settlers were buried, the first church site, some of the buildings in town that Knox relatives owned, and the patch of land that used to be the Knox’, Knox Marsh Rd.

Dover was charming and very pretty. The weather held up nicely, and all too soon we were heading out on the road, due west for the first time in a long time, on our way to Kate’s aunt and uncle Cacki and Pete’s place.

Pete and Cacki built the home that they live in on gorgeous land that they bought back in the 60’s. There life there is ideal in many ways, close to the pretty town of Woodsbury, which is quiet but full of community minded folks. Their garden was in full swing and we ate delicious meals every night from home grown vegetables. We watched PBS in the evening and I started to read “All The Pretty Horses”, which is a new good thing in my life.

I can’t begin to talk about how beautiful our time there was. The leaves were starting to change radiant colors and slowly falling from the trees. The air was crisp and clean, the weather beautiful and it felt like we were living life as it was meant to be lived.

I’m most proud and thankful for the work that we were able to do there. Peter had just recently built this amazing house on the property and sold it, and there was a bit of painting left to do. The design and feel of the house is fantastic, I was jealous of the new owners. It has this really neat feeling of being thoroughly modern, with vast high slanting ceilings and full views across to the gorgeous hills, with skylights lining the uppermost walls, very open and spacious. It also blends somehow perfectly into the landscape, with its wood tones and its layout feeling just right for the space it was in, like it was meant to be out there in the woods, in other words, it will be a timeless house, as impressive 30 years from now as it is now, brand new. Kate and I spent our days on the interior, painting and painting the primer and final coat, listening to music, talking a little, and having plenty of time to think. It felt so rewarding to be able to work that way and actually get something done. Meanwhile Peter and Cacki worked all day every day in this natural pace of life that was inspiring. They do what they need to do to be happy and survive and they put everything into it and they are content. It was very inspiring.

It was hard to leave, the country was so beautiful and our hosts so welcoming. The last night we were there we all feasted and drank Vermont brewed beer from Alex and with Cacki’s brother, in from Seattle. It was the kind of scene you want to have a lot in your life.

But the truck was calling and the road was waiting and believe me we are aware of the potential of the weather to turn the trip short on us. We cleaned it out and backed out of the driveway and headed north to Burlington.

We only got a glance at Burlington before the sun beginning to wane led us north of town about a half hour. We found a nice little spot on the shores of Lake Champlain, and sat with a big fire and a few beers that night while the waves calmly repeated themselves over and over.

So we headed out the next day bound for the glorious unknown that was Canada. We approached the border crossing unprepared for what was to come.

We rolled up to the window and the Canadian customs guard asked us

“where are you headed?”

“oh, we don’t know, up to Montreal and then around for a little while”

“where do you live?”

“oh, we don’t really have a home right now, we’re just out and about”

“what’s in the back of the truck?”

“just all our stuff, camping gear, guitars, everything we own”

“where do you work”

“we don’t have a job, we’re just on the road”

“I’m afraid you can’t cross this border.”

It came as a shock. Here we were just being honest and the pride of Canada thought, and reasonably in retrospect, that we intended to move to Montreal and take advantage of all that Canadia has to offer.

It was a major frustration as well, the idea of heading south back through New York, past Baldwinsville where we had already been was not only depressing but impractical. Going around the Great Lakes from the South was a big detour, and would take us days off course.

We were shagrinned. We camped for the night outside of Plattsburgh, NY, had some pizza in a dingy joint and played scrabble into the night. We were still on the shores of Lake Champlain, on the other side but nowhere near where we thought we’d be.

The next day we resigned ourselves to our long journey south, but decided to try one more time at the border. This time we told them we had a regular job and loved America and had to be back at work on Monday. They passed us right through without another word.

I felt light. It was great. The signs were in french, the speed limit in Kilometers per Hour, and Montreal was on the horizon.

We rolled into the city in the afternoon, and found that most of the reasonably priced motels and hostels were booked due to Canadian Thanksgiving. So we did what every reasonable person would do and parked the truck and had a few beers in the lively nightlife that is Montreal. The streets of Montreal open up late, even with the freezing rain that we had, the bars were empty until 11:30 and then they just packed full. Montrealians stay out on the weekends until 3 or 4 am like their french speaking counterparts. We didn’t last that long. We walked back the pretty old tree lined streets to the truck and slid in the back, warm and comfy in our sleeping bags.

In the morning we woke up to the sounds of Canadians shuffling by the truck, and stumbled out into the day. We chose breakfast from a picture menu in a cheap cafe and headed into Old Montreal, a quaint and neat touristy area of town. The architecture is old and the streets are cobbled and the Notre Dame was closed for the day. We had a good time.

And then we drove to Ottawa. The landscape up here is flat and agricultural, the farms huge, and the sky vast.

We haven’t seen much of the town, just dinner in an Indian restaurant while Kate fends off a cold.

The months have rolled by on the trip and it feels better than ever. We will be back in the states in a few days, heading headlong to Colorado and Yellowstone, just to see what happens there.

From Ottawa, signing off.

We took a day trip to Providence, RI yesterday. First off, sorry to Kate’s cousin for not getting in touch with you there: we simply dign’t have the phone number and the whole trip was not premeditated in any way, very last minute. Kate really wanted to find a way to say hello, but… alas.

Secondly, Providence was very nice. We went primarily to check out RISD, (Rhode Island School of Design) a highly reputable school for artists and designers. It sits adjacent to Brown University which is also very pleasant, very Ivy League.

We didn’t really have time to check out much more than the general campus area of RISD, and the museum there, but it was a great day, a nice excursion, and, despite previous grudges toward the state of Rhode Island in general, a fine way to spend a day.

In the evening upon our return to Sandwich we stopped by the Hoxie House, one of the oldest buildings on Cape Cod. We sat on the dock below it while the turtles peeked up from reflections of sunset in the water. Some of the pictures I took are some of the best I’ve ever taken I think.

I’ve always had a side of myself that tended to get sappy unreasonably. I would get furiously angry at my parents for rearranging the furniture, let alone moving to a new town.

This morning I woke up and realized that we only have one more full day, tomorrow, in Sandwich, and then it is off on the road again Monday. I’m feeling all cramped up because of it, as if it was an impossible task, to leave Sandwich. I feel like its like, leaving childhood, again.

We’re lucky to be so free, so untied, so lucky. We’re lucky to be lucky. And we appreciate it.

Soon enough and no matter how far it seems, ‘reality’ beckons. in fact, I would venture to say that the farther you get from it, the louder the bellows of the real world become. This has been a focus of my thoughts and energy while in Sandwich, trying to get and take the time to resolve ongoing and stomach wrenching ideas of what it means to live the life you want to live, careers, planning for the future, ambition, resolution of dreams and the satisfaction of relationships. You know, the little things.

Somehow I came to a conclusion, perhaps out of necessity for my troubled mind about it… but I think really out of just being honest: I wouldn’t want to live my life any other way.

Yes, I could have worked for a degree in business or health care, and be steadily employed and paying mortgage on a suburban house. Yes, I think that’s great and all. Yes I could have a dog and a yard and even dinner parties with friends, a high credit limit and a television show that I recorded every week. And I miss those things strangely, I think they are great, but I don’t have those things. But I have a road trip with a woman who I was lucky enough to meet because, simply put, she is right there with me in it, sharing the same kind of excitement and hope and anxiety. I have the contentment of knowing that my fingers have callouses from playing music, and that my camera is full of amazing pictures. That this trip isn’t the first or last trip.

I’m just saying that finally, after weeks of really struggling with this, I finally feel that I am on the right track.

I do hope to find a place to live that really works for me. I hope that Kate and I can find a place that works for us. I want to have a decent job, play lots of gigs, make new music, work with new people, have a social life, meet new people, learn new things, build new stuff… et cetera. And all of those things seem really far away right now, and I have no way to control whether or not they will arrive intact from dreamstate to reality. And that’s fine.

Anyways, we’re leaving Sandwich, and this has been the best summer of my life. This time in Sandwich has been the most Summer of Summers I’ve had since I was probably 12 years old, having towel fights with Pete and Tyler around the swimming pool, jumping from shady spot to shady spot down Cromwell Drive.

And I’ve always wanted that, to have that again, I think we all should have another summer like that.

Yesterday around 3:30 pm I was sitting in on eof the seats on top of the green monster, the legendary backdrop for Red Sox games since 1911. I had seen Fenway Park hundreds of times in my life, from reruns of “Field Of Dreams” to baseball highlights all summer long, to compulsive Red Sox watching whenever the chance arrived. So much of it had to do with the field, this oddly magical place full of legends and gravity and basically a time capsule of boyhood.

And so I was there looking out over the empty infield (I was on a tour and there wasn’t a game going on) and it was good.

We drove up to Boston yesterday, it being a surprising only an hour from Sandwich, arriving early enough in the morning. We parted from the truck on a sidestreet in the financial district and headed out into the biggish city. Boston’s financial district reminded me a bit of San Francisco, imposing buildings, rich history, and yet eerily calm, quiet and nearly empty. The size of the cities must be pretty similar, by my highly inaccurate gauge, but the feel is different, of course. The immediate thing once we got out of the financial district was the distinct feeling that all the kids there, and there are many, are doing college type things, recovering from hangovers, on drugs, enraptured by thesis ideas, professing, anything really, everyone in that town seems like the are affiliated with a school in some way, and they probably are. But its loose, not too academic. We sat on a bench in the Boston Commons, we saw Paul Revere’s tomb. We caught the oldest subway in the country and had greasy pizza in the Boston Market. It was a fast day, ending with a past sunset sweep out of town on the interstate, glad to be heading back to the closest thing to home we have.

Time is as usual kind of crawling by in a speedy way, like a stealthy baby through a house with no furniture. The air has noticeably changed even in the time that we have been here, now the evenings carry a hint of bite, and the air moves real confused like, with leaves not knowing whether to fall or not.

We’ve been on Cape Cod for a good long time, and here’s why, as if an explanation is needed.

Because in the months before we set out on this trip, this tiny town of Sandwich was marked on our map. It was a detination in itself, and at the time it was unearthly, as if getting there would be akin to crossing into a different dimension entirely. And yet it was there, waiting for us to make it there. The whole country was in between, and the whole of time and weeks was in between, and money spent, but what really awaited us was congratulatory post cards and a sense of accomplishment, of relief.

Another reason is because when you have the privilege of staying in a beautiful house with a big back porch within walking distance to the tiny village center in the most quaint and untainted town you’ve ever been in, you tend to try and relish it. It doesn’t happen often. The simpleness of riding a bike underneath old reaching trees along bumpy sidewalks in front of classic old victorians is like being a chance to be 10 years old again, racing to see what it feels like to go fast, that’s it, no other reason.

And yes, it sounds trumped up but believe me its not.

The other reason may be that you are suddenly across the continent from everything you’ve known, and the goal in your life that had been there for a while, a long while, to cross the united states in a goofy and nonchalant manner, with no timeline and no destination and not even enough money really and to just say you did it. You needed to see the whole of the country as a promise to yourself and to the person inside you who may make it someday to live to be 79 or older, and to tell yourself that you did it.

It may be now that everything is too big to really rationalize and that it simply takes a few weeks to begin to break it down: you are in your twenties, you have no career necessarily, you may or may not want to go to grad school, it depends on how much deeper in to debt you go, the road trip will end at some point anyways, so no reason to rush it because it will feel sad enough when it does, et cetera. In other words: you have your whole life to figure out, and you had better do it soon, lest you should end up another sad minded person whose dreams never quite materialized, whose mind kind of got keener and colder and more closed.

The last revelation is that sometimes its ok, important, critical to shut your mind up and say “OK, I think that I can handle this, I deserve this. i’ve waited my whole life for this, worked shit jobs for this, struggled through the lean times for this, gambled on this: my life now. In Sandwich. Sitting outside the library on a perfect calm Sunday, hushed conversations hanging on the air, cars filing by towards the weekend destinations, not much else really.

Yes, I know, we are still here, and it has been a long time.

However, I just completely adore Sandwich. Its a great, magical place.

And so, we are enjoying every last minute of it to the fullest extent possible.

And then we head west.

We arrived in Sandwich sometime last week, Thursday it was.

There is this exclusivity that sticks to the tongue after uttering the words “I’m going to Cape Cod” that now seems funny after being here a while. The Cape feels surprisingly down to earth, and the lifestyle traditional and informal.

Kate’s family has been on the Cape for a while. Her Grandpa moved here long before it became the tourist hot spot that it is now. He had a studio on the rural highway where he carved wood into startlingly alive renditions of local birds. Kate’s mom grew up in an adorable old New England style house that sits literally on Main Street. After Grandpa Peltz passed away the family decided to sell the old house. Kate’s uncle Pete and her Mom (Shawnee) now have separate places in Sandwich, small, manageable and adorable vacation type places that they can rent to pay for their cost, and that they can use for the family as a base and an escape back in time. That’s the short story.

The first day we arrived in Sandwich I almost felt like I had entered a movie set. In the middle of town there is a peaceful pond stocked naturally with geese, ducks and flowering water lilies, which runs off into a grist mill with a giant water wheel, and then down into a babbling brook that cuts through the town to the ocean. Near the pond there is a drinking fountain, always on, that supplies the most delicious water directly from the spring beneath the town. The old church steeples proudly weather above the meticulously maintained houses whose thresholds bear unthinkable dates like “c. 1680”. A mile from the downtown is a boardwalk path that cuts over a sea of green marshland on its way straight to the flat sandy beach that stretches for miles either direction. Down at the marina the fishing boats deliver their goods direct to the fish stores, and fishermen work intently on their vessels. The train sounds its blaring yet calming whistle twice a day or so, and there is a pond just outside of town, Hoxie Pond, where we can go swim under summery skies.

Its pretty perfect. I really love Sandwich already and am going to miss it when we go.

Kate’s sister Tess (whom we stayed with in Austin), her one year old son Gabriel, and her dad Phil made it in that first evening. The week since has been packed full of family time for Kate’s mom’s side of the family. Every night its been a gathering at one of the two family houses, barbecuing fish, drinking wine, talking, being family. We’ve been swimming in the ocean, in the ponds, and walking along the sides of canals that wind through the marshlands. We’ve been playing tennis and doing yard work.

And now I’m trying to spend as much time as I can in the library, thinking, reflecting, figuring out what exactly to do with my life next.

In the meantime, Sandwich is a good place to do exactly that.

08)27(05 its 1112am

The woods of Massachusetts are thick and vine-y, with dense underbrush and spindly, clumpy trees. The thickets of trees created this dense shadowy motion, where the sunlight kind of dances calmly in the breeze.

I’m looking out the windows of the Sandwich public library into a patch of thick Massachusetts forest. The library has come to be and is becoming more of a refuge for me everyday. These books, the silence, and most importantly the extent of resources feel comforting to me now as I put together the pieces of my life from the past four months. Its a good time for me to, though I hate to say it, come up with a plan.

It feels good to have a plan, and it seems essential to me now to have a purpose.

It seems that all my friends have a purpose, whether they know it or not, and I am slightly offended with myself that my purpose is so vague. My friends are getting married, building decks, starting businesses and becoming immersed in fields that will lead to careers. I’m still on the same track: obsessive compulsive about my music, the production thereof, the potential for success thereof. And I feel that I need more purpose.

When we are on the road and the truck is moving there is a purpose, a blind and young and potentially ridiculous purpose. Being on the road and in the truck is also an important, difficult to attain, harder still to write about, harder even still to convey purpose. I would venture into cliche and utter the word freedom, but that doesn’t sum it up. Mostly because I don’t truly understand what that word means to anyone else, let alone myself. But being on the road… it makes me feel, (in relationship to the word and idea of purpose) as if I am stocking up on firewood for the winter, even though it is the middle of summer. It makes me feel as though I am completing something that is imperative to my mental and physical well being.

Being on the road, with Kate by my side makes me feel as though we are deciphering a sacred text, reading simple instructions for life that truly tell the obvious: how to live, how to live well, what it takes.

08)16(05 its 138pm

Kate is boiling the coffee on the propane stove, and now pouring it into our black and white specked camp mugs, the indestructable kind that could be hanging from a hook in our ne house for years and years. Yesterday we nearly lost the mugs and everything else in the back of the truck when we drove from our campsite to Lowell, MA, about a thirty minute drive, with the tailgate open. It had fallen open somewhere right as we were exiting the campground, and almost everything fell out along the road, our oil lantern (flattened), our candle lantern (in the middle of the freeway), our cooler (disappeared), our food container with all the spices and a stock of wine (disappeared, someone’s lucky day I imagine) all flopped out the back of the truck. Of all the cars behind us, only one, person, all the way in the town of lowell, bothered to try and signal to us in some way that we were fast losing everything we owned. Thanks to that man, very much. When I pulled into the new car lot and walked around to the back of the truck, our two chairs, propane stove and sleeping bags, not to mention fishing poles, ropes, guitar and other lanterns (propane and electric) were hanging close to the edge.

We retraced our steps and managed to thankfully, so good really, recover the laundry basket that housed all of our utensils, pots, pans, plates, soap, sponges, et cetera. So not having lost that was a lifesaver, that would have been the kicker, rendered us somewhat archaic on our trip, and made it so that we would have to restock everything all over again, as we reluctantly shelled out to do at the beginning of the trip.

And so we are still outside of Lowell, camping on the banks of a quiet Massachusetts pond, with lily pads and flowers in bloom. Its our first week back from theinsanity of our lives that was Portland and New York and two weddings, back into the swing of camping out.

We’ve been camped purposefully or not on the edge of ponds the entire time we’ve been in Mass, there seems to be no end to the abundance of pond life here, something I wasn’t aware of. Ponds are ideal in many ways, warm, peaceful, fed by creeks, not full of things like alligators and generally tranquil. Which makes Massachusetts generally tranquil, and indeed, a nice state.

To track back what feels like an eternity, but in reality is only a week ago, we left Portland on a jet plane. The week and a few days was, to say the least, packed full.

When we arrived on a Thursday, I was just in time to make it to my friend Mark’s bachelor party. Our 6am departure of New York left us in awe to be striding down the purple and green corridors of Portland’s airport in any kind of shape whatsoever. Portland feels so very tranquil after New York City, it feels, at first glance, like the ideal small city, and everyone Oregonian seems deflated of pressure, utterly calm. The skyline is clean, and so are the streets. The hot air is dry, and a breeze blows over everything in a fresh pine scent kind of way.

So I got a ride over to Mark’s bachelor party that night, we had parked our posessions in my friend Keith’s apartment, where we would be staying for the week. That night went by fast and blurry, the way that bachelor parties seem like they should, but not awful or raunchy, not worty of regret. In fact, the crew of six or so dudes ended up at a newish rock club in Portland (every club in Portland can be designated as newish, as they all close soon enough) and saw some amazing live music. The new deco architecture cooled by full blast air conditioning and a smokeless room of 20 somethings wearing raggedy clothes and bored like nodding their heads felt so like countless nights past for me, save for the air conditioning and smoke free ness. Every once in a while one person in the crowd of 50 or 60 would actually kind of dance timidly, and it matched the energy of the musicians on stage, fiery, potent, and yet, reserved in a insecure/cool kind of way. Typical my generatioin music, but exciting nonetheless, and perfect for Mark, who kind of just wanted a simple night out, with the passion of a good band or two behind it. Speaking of Mark, I spent the evening with Maker’s mark and ended up walking three or four miles home in the early early morning, not because I was so bachelor that I couldn’t possibly be expected to procure a more intelligent way of getting home, but simply because I had no idea how far Keith’s apartment was from everything, and stubbornly pushed myself home, to collapse at 3:45 am. The day had started almost 24 hours earlier, waking in Sarah and Richelle’s apartment, to catch a cab to the airport.

The week in our former home base kind of followed this theme of unplanned drunkenness mixed in with more formal get togethers such as weddings. It was surreal for both of us I think to be back in the city that we met in, watching our best friends get married and settle down.

Mark and (his wife, not my Kate, obviously) Kate’s wedding was on a Saturday, in a wooded setting, an intimate affair that was really affirming, everything about the two of them and the life they were setting out on seemed set and right. Following that, the preparations for Tyler and Katie’s wedding kind of enveloped the whole week. I practiced cello for hours on end, working out the many kinks in Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major and eventually collaborating with Tyler’s uncle Jerry for a processional performance. I spent some time riding around in a limo in the wine growing region of Oregon with Tyler and a bunch of Bud Light chugging bachelors, touring wineries, sampling wines, and eventually pouring wine on Tyler. I spent time at rehearsal dinners and pre rehearsal dinners again drinking and chatting and seeing old friends. I spent a lot of time with my best friends and I spent a lot of time on busses, getting to and fro to all these events, and mooching rides off of everyone. It was hard to not have any real freedom, no place to call my own, no truck, which was stranded in New Jersey, no sense of being somewhere for very long. It was good and bad that way. But the week was amazing, topping itself off with Tyler and Katie’s well planned and emotional wedding, where everyone, including grandmas and aunts and kids dancing to hip hop at a rooftop bar in downtown Portland. At then end of that night, our sober driver piled seven non sober people into her tiny car (thank you Mari) and drove us all home, in our now wrinkled suits, to settle back into the somewhat ordinary existence.

I had the pleasure of catching up with Mark for a good long while at a bar around the corner from his house, where a former cello student friend worked and supplied us with still more beer. We talked of change and love and life, and it was very good indeed, no time to be tired out by it all, just time to experience the joy of being in my twenties, with my girl, across the continent again.

We caught a ride with Mark and Kate the next day to the Portland airport, and boarded a 6:30pm flight to Salt Lake City, sat in Utah for an hour or two, and boarded another plane to New York, where after sleepless turning in a miniature seat we were again in the sultry heat of the east coast. The flight ended up in NYC at 5:30am, and we were exhausted. We tried sleeping on the concrete benches that sit around the food courts to no avail, and eventually abandoned the airport at around 8:30, having passed time over coffee and staring blankly into space. The airport train connected to the subway, which connected to Brooklyn, where we hiked around with our heavy load of stuff bearing down on our backs. Whatever hostility is present in the city’s harsh environs is eventually smoothed over by the sometimes overwhelming niceness, which is unexpected, of its citizens. When we were lost it was as if people could sense it, and they would approach us unsolicited, asking where we needed to go. We were the only white people on our subway car, burdened with huge backpacks and looking haggard, and no one seemed to notice. Anything goes in New York, and its ok by everyone.

We stumbled over to Kate’s cousin Suzannah’s apartment, where she graciously invited us to sleep right then and there on the futon in her spare room. I have never felt so relieved to not be invited to go out to eat or go to museums or do all that fun visiting stuff. We just slept, until 4pm, and groggily entered reality again. We had dinner in Brooklyn and talked the night away atop their brownstone’s rooftop, watching as the Empire State Building turned its lights off at precisely midnight. Suzannah’s husband Rolando regaled us with tales of New York’s old school gangs, the mafia, and life in general in NYC. It was brilliant, and it was stark contrast to the life we had just left in Portland the night before.

And it was time for us to go again. We’ve spent so much time in the protection and comfort of our friends’ and families’ homes that we were basically needing to set off on our own again, rebelliously exploring the US of A.

We said goodbye to Richel and Sarah, gathered the truck from New Jersey, (Stephanie’s family was so cool and so welcoming to us when they were doing us a huge favor, so many thanks to them), and headed out of the city as it prepared for another day of barely reasonable heat and humidity.

We wound up having one of the worst nights of the trip that first night, when it turned out that the entire states of Connecticut and Rhode Island were booked up for camping, leaving us stranded. At one park, we were rudely told by disgruntled and testosterone fueled Rhode Island folks that we had to pay for a campsite before we could look at it. And that there were no refunds. And that there was a $6 surcharge for non Rhode Island residents. So we went and looked at the campsites anyway, and then were told that we couldn’t stay there. It was embarassingly dumb on all sides. No one was feeling compassionate or even understanding, and on top of it all, Kate had come down with a terrible cold/fever she apparently caught on the airplane back east. It was such a wretched feeling to be driving across the tiny state of Rhode Island into the deep not real friendly looking woods without a place to stay, unable to find tiny campsites marked on the map but apparently not in reality existing, while my sweet girlfriend is utterly sick and in a terrible state. But she’s tough, and we finally found a private campsite in Connecticut, where we paid $31 to stay in an RV park next to limpid ponds. She is amazingly tough in fact, and never complained once, lifting my spirits when the whole ordeal just seemed too much to handle. So I can’t say I enjoyed Connecticut and Rhode Island, and I have a feeling this sentiment may be shared by more than a few people.

But the past few nights in Massachussetts have been wonderful, save for Kate still slowly getting over her sickness. We’ve had good luch with gorgeous campsites by waters edge, and again are living the dream, whatever it is.

August 14th is and was Kate’s Birthday, and I felt dumb because I really truly haven’t had a second apart from her during which to find her a suitable, deserving present. So I bought a whole bunch of flowers, spread them all around the campsite, and made her french toast and mimosas when she awoke. We went swimming in the pond just by our campsite, and settled in for the evening when this tremendous lightning storm rumbled in all around us. We sat on the tailgate of the truck underneath our screen house while the sky literally lit up with lightning at least 20 times a minute at its peak. The strikes were ridiculously close to us, and the ground was overcome with water, creating rushing streams underneath our feet and all over everything. It was strangely beautiful and appropriate, and we opened up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, telling stories into the night while the rain kept hammering down. Late late into the night Kate dared me to go swimming with her in the pond, and I went, although freezing and not quite as resilient as her… nonetheless, I’ll always remember that night as monumental some how, and fitting for Kate.

I’m starting to put new photos at the flickr site I’ve started. You should click on the funny moving picture thing on the right, or click here:

flickr.com/photos/lukejanela

Still catching up, still in motion. I’ve started to write about Portland, but haven’t even gotten to the good part yet…

08)08(05 its 915pm

We are in Salt Lake City, UT, the second time I’ve knowingly been here. Its not all that tremendous, especially considering I am sitting outside of a closed Pizza Hut in the confines of a crowded airport waiting gate. C6, Delta Airlines. Departs in over an hour.

This week marked the accumulation of many things, most importantly the marriages of two of my best and most trusted friends. I saw their lives reach this important stage of completion and commitment that I’ve yet to witness from any of my peers, and I watched them do it confident that it was completely right and fine.

We flew out from JFK airport in New York City at about 6:30 on Friday morning, the 30th. We woke at 4am and made some half decent coffee, grabbed our pile of possessions from the corner of Sarah and Richel’s living room, otherwise known as home for the previous week, and headed out into the pre dawn Brooklyn air, strangely quiet and nearly peaceful. Our cab driver silently and passively raced through the empty streets while truckloads of produce and livestock unloaded, stragglers roamed the projects, and inexplicably, a crew of about 10 guys played basketball outside the window of the jet black cab. We got to the airport in due time, but spent ten minutes trying to find change for our cab driver, who insisted that he didn’t have change for the $40 I handed him to cover the insane enough $30 cab fare. I scraped change from my pockets. $27. Good enough. The airport was packed. Here it was 5:15am and for no rational reason the check in area for Delta is crammed with groggy confused New Yorkers, which is not a terribly pleasant scene to be in the middle of. Everything felt like we were being punished for being bad school children, rush this way, rush that way, get on the plane dammit we’ve got to get the right runway time, no time for coffee, no time to chat, just sit down and shut up and enjoy your flight.

A woman from Kentucky chatted with me for the duration of the 3 hour flight. Her husband hauls cargo to the Mississippi, she teaches junior college. Her town lies between four rivers. Life is interesting, they have a house in southern France, where they summer for a month or so. Everyone is courteous as I explain “Yes, I’m a musician, no, I don’t know what that means.”

Stopover in Atlanta, five minutes to run across the airport. Groggy flight, nothing to really, pay attention to, you know.

Portland. The hills are green, the interstates even are quaint, and the air is dry and hot. It already feels familiar, newbie hippies camped out on the airport floor with guitars and piles of luggage all around. Sportswear wearing yuppies nurture their kids into Volkswagon station wagons. Once again I’m in the airport in Portland, and yet this time there is Kate there with me, and we’re free to do what we want to do. We don’t even have to head home, because there is no home to go to.

We packed all our stuff clumsily on our backs and climbed onto the MAX train headed into downtown, skimming past the highway exits I used to turn onto to make it home, those mornings after having coffee at Kate’s downtown apartment. The advertisements, still the same, the glittery dry air. It seemed like such a tiny city compared to NY, and it was. Everything was quaint, and manageable, everything one could desire in a city that way, even traffic felt innocent enough.

We climbed off the train in the middle of downtown and straight into a million memories. Over to Stumptown, the downtown coffee shop where I’d played a couple of shows and where we’d meet friends or just end up so many times that the baristas recognized me even then, a year and a half later. I recognized faces, and it was OK, it didn’t feellike they were stuck, it felt like they had grown, experienced things, enjoyed Portland and its easy going lifestyle, and it was good.

07)27(05 its 1107pm

Since I have been so occupied and or so far from the orbit of the laptop and writing I want to do a quicker, if not less artful summary of where we are, and where we are going. Sometimes it can be simple!

Basically we landed in New York last week (read next post) and it was overwhelming and magnificent and exciting. We headed to Philadelphia around July 14th, where we got the one night run through with Kate’s cousin, Alex, who was wonderful and put us up in his splendid apartment.

The rest of the time in New York, and I know this sounds sad, but, the rest of the time we were looking for suits and gifts and tying down last minute details for exactly how we would be flying to Portland this Friday, the 29th to attend two (2) weddings of two of my best friends.

We took a break from the city and headed to upstate New York, where we explored the Catskills, Ithaca, Baldwinsville, and the Adirondacks for a week, before returning this evening to Brooklyn.

Its been a beautiful week, its been an amazing month really, and I have a lot to say, but sometimes I get long winded and right now I just wanted to sum it up for those of you who are following the travels.

Plus, I have a feeling I may have trouble writing it all down while flying to Portland and all that craziness. But I DO look forward to it immensely, and aim to write epic accounts of it all.

Thanks for stopping by, there are more pictures up on the pics page.

TAKE CARE AND LOVE FROM ACROSS AMERICA!

Luke & Kate
–
Professional Campers

07)23(05 its 536pm

As if held away by the persistent wind, the thought of New York City and its grandeur is finally passive. For days in anticipation and in all of the minutes inside of its rusty stomach, and in shell shocked exit from its fingertips my thoughts have been captured by this amazing place, the only place of its kind, anywhere that I have seen.

We rolled down the New Jersey turnpike in perfect summer traveling families in minivan weather, stopping to tell toll booth attendants that we didn’t have any cash to pay the tolls with every ten minutes or so. We were still warm and glowing and excited and rested from our stay in DC, all of its museums, the comfort of Marilyn’s apartment, the rediscovery of the runaway kitty. I felt oddly at home on the east coast, and its cities, as if it was an accident that I had lived my whole life never seeing them. Baltimore, Philadelphia, DC, Boston, Chicago, all of these places had identities to me, strong ideas because of the endless hours of rapturous baseball watching I did growing up.

Also, we were out of the SOUTH. The south still in retrospect is so different and vivid from anything that the West or East coasts can even offer, and yet, I was happy to leave again, to not be stuck deep down there with the swamps and alligators and fried food and evangelicals and baptists and humidity. I think Kate and I began to feel that its embrace from New Mexico to Georgia had become an accepted part of our lives. While we were in the south we got used to the big deep darkness that sits around there waiting to awake, and we got used to the warm pie crust of friendliness that sits on its windows daring you to enjoy, and any Metropolitan sense of us was becoming obscured, nearly forgotten.

And then one night, mid July, we paid the last toll (or rather, couldn’t pay) on the New Jersey Turnpike and saw a massive and eery glow to the left of us, somewhere out over the water, the island of Manhattan, more grand and glorious than I would have ventured to guess or place in my mind.

New York City. Enough has been said about it being the capitol of the world, and yet, from my perspective, growing up in the peace and grooviness of Northern California, I want to be redundant a bit.

First off, as I walked the streets of Manhattan, whose skyscrapers really do tower over you like some holy and profane anomaly of beauty and power, I couldn’t think of a single idol or person I admired, artist or not, who hadn’t experienced or been experienced by New York City. When I say been experienced by, i mean that this city is an influence, sometimes THE influence for many a serious novelist, artist, musician, businessman, anything you want to name, the city is influential on the heart because it promises so much. It promises that someday you will turn a corner and walk right into your fate, your inspiration, your answers. It seems to cast a spell over what seems possible, and it wakes you up how much of it is real.

I know that I am venturing into newagespeak here, but that is fair, because that is how New York affected me.

Sarah and Richel, our friends from Portland and beyond, live in Brooklyn and they agreed to put up with us for a little while sleeping on our mattress on their floor. I might add that they very graciously agreed to put up with us and in fact made us feel very welcome. Its good because I was excited to see them too, to see how their lives are going in New York and to live it with them for a bit. Its good because they were instrumental in our having any sense of sanity attached to our exploration of the city, setting us up with maps, books, bookmaps, itineraries, and then on top of it all, taking the time to walk us around in their sparse free time. They would call us during our day from work to see how we were doing, wandering around the neighborhoods, and then meet with us in the evenings to take us to amazing cheap restaurants in cool neighborhoods that we never would have found on our own.

The day after we arrived Kate, Richel and myself walked through Central Park, which is on a sunny Sunday, a spectacle unto itself. In one field, the size of maybe two softball fields in a normal crowded city, five, I kid you not, five softball games were going on, when someone hit a fly ball into the infield of the other game it was no big thing. Any section of the park that was open to the sun was crammed tight with all shades of skin as New Yorkers rushed out to lie down in the grass, relishing the little patch of earth they were on as country folk would relish an acre or two. Merry go rounds sang ’40’s jazz tunes and street performers flipped down flights of stairs, musicians played top notch jazz in echoey bridge underpasses and miniature sailboats brushed past eachother serious and competitive, artists painted people staring at the lily ponds, lines of overheated underclothed folks waited for a chance to buy ice cream, and all the while the towers of Manhattan peeked over the trees like a mischievous school kid playing peeping tom. All of this reverence for simple things, all of this humanity, playing itself out in simple elegance and profundity, simply a sunny day but not so simple in New York, I felt that I was feeling what every person felt in some way, because we were connected to this city.

Now I know why Henry Miller’s paragraphs go on for four or five pages at a time, sometimes more. He is my favorite New York writer and a secret ally when walking down the streets of Manhattan, and he seems ready to burst every time he describes the city. So do I in a way. It shook me awake in some ways.

07)08(05 its 337pm

Suffice to say we never planned on being anywhere, let alone Washington, DC for as long as we have. We’ve shattered our record of four straight nights in Austin, TX by staying a whopping 14 nights. Wow. I didn’t even expect it to add up to that much.

I think we were really tired. I think we had to have been so tired to stay in one place for so long. Thanks go endlessly to Marilyn for the use of the apartment. We feel whole, rested and inspired again.

I think that this part of the trip was a completely anonymous fog to us, and now we are here, entering it blindly. We were supposed to know where to live by now, supposed to be working somewhere by now, supposed to, basically, have it ALL figured out.

We don’t. But you know, I feel that there is something of a revelation on its way for me. I really do.

Also, the realization that we had these two weddings, two of my best friends are getting married within a week of each other in Portland, OR, we had to get to these weddings and we kind of freaked out. Right in the middle of the trip, granted, we were supposed to be long back to the west coast by then, but we had to really change plans, or at least a way around the whole concept. So its ended up being, see our friends and the places to be on the East Coast, fly back to Portland, fly back to East Coast, find temporary work, live happily ever after.

It sounds pretty crazy, I know.

Well, the time spent in Washington has been fast for us, flowing by way too fast, but to sum it up in a way I will say that we’ve seen so many pieces of art, exhibitions, galleries, historical monuments and sites that it is as if we didn’t stop traveling at all.

We’re heading to New York tomorrow, it turns out, we will be skipping Philadelphia for the moment.

We are here in Washington, at the end of an extended break here. It has been nice to be in one place, to do normal things, make dinners indoors, take showers, walk to a coffee shop that is ours. It has been really exciting to be in DC, an amazing city, doing so many things. I have a lot of pictures and a lot of writing to put up soon, but for now I just wanted to check in. Tomorrow we will be heading for Philadelphia, assuming all goes well. We will be definitely sad to go…

06)28(05 its 915pm

The humid air of Maryland has cooled a bit, and a gentle breeze blows through the screen porch I’m sitting in, nicely appointed, in Rockville, about 30 minutes North of Washington D.C.

Almost by accident, our sails were allowed to deflate, and the urgency that we had been feeling since the pushy rainstorms in the Smoky Mountains has begun to let up a bit. In fact, today I haven’t accomplished much or seen much at all, and it is a welcome relief.

We left the grand old south and its sturdy cities of Savannah and Charleston in a hurry and immediately met the frustrations of camping out head on. All of our gear was still soaking wet and beginning to carry questionable odors, so we pulled into a campsite north of Charleston to air it out and stay for the night, but only 45 minutes into unpacking everything, the camp hosts approached us and told us that the site was taken, even though it wasn’t reserved and there was no-one currently there. This was strange, but some things you can’t fight, so we headed off on a search for a place to stay that took us through three more extremely grungy campsites that we opted out of and a fourth, almost worse, that caught us as the Summer night was setting in. And so we stayed, in Myrtle Beach, at a horrendous and overpriced state park. This area of the Carolinas is almost shamefully overdeveloped and tacky, lined with mile after mile of oceanfront junk stores, fast food places and overweight vacationers toting golf clubs and oily suntan lotion. The ocean is of course, pleasant and beautiful, but looming cryptically over it there are decidedly socialist housing project style ‘resort’ hotels.

And so, when the morning came, we jetted out of there en route to anywhere but there.

True story: back in the mountains of Asheville we became disconcerted with all the hard times and went out of our way to find a way to entertain ourselves in the back of the truck while the rain sloshed about everything. We decided that it was important to find a dvd of “The Dark Crystal” an epic Lord Of The Rings style movie done with muppets. We scoured every video store we could find, and out of some strange chance found it buried away in an Asheville mall. We also found “Big”, and “Big Fish” for real cheap, and so we grabbed those. Anyways, it has felt sometimes silly, but for a few nights we’ve been able to huddle over my computer (which has a dvd player in it) in the middle of nowhere watching silly movies and loving every minute of it, the convenience and comforts of home so far away, but somehow available to us in a small way.

We found a campsite that sat near a pristine swampland, and sat on a rickety old dock while a crazy songbird attested its territory and a lightning storm slowly rumbled towards us. That night we watched “Big” inside the confines of our screen house while the rain fell all around us.

Our route has taken many twists and turns, and we were having a tough time deciding which way to head up to DC; were we to go through the potentially cool and pleasant Appalachians, or were we to head toward the mysterious, pirate plagued islands of the Outer Banks, off the coast of North Carolina? It was a tough decision, but by this time we decided that adventure was more along our lines than safe. So we drove up to meet the ferry which took us sleepily towards the island of Hatteras, and deposited us and a few seagulls and tourists there to enjoy the salty air.

Since the very first explorers arrived in America, the sandy reefs of the outer banks have spelt trouble for big ships, and yet the currents that wash along them were apparently strong enough to make the risk worth it, were it successful. Not only that, but pirates abounded between coves, and there were very few places to hide from them. In the end, the tiny strip of land that makes up the outer banks is riddled with hundreds of shipwrecks, lots of pretty lighthouses, hearty island types and neat pirate stories.

As we walked over the sandy dunes on the way from our second camp spot to the dazzling bright and wind swept beach, we imagined we had shipwrecked, looking for food and water. In a way we felt that way too, somewhat exhausted, but somewhat free in that, worn and smoothed by the months of travel, able to deal with the passing storms, able to find what we needed, and able to have a really good time doing so.

That second night in our campsite, as the wind blew steadily and littered sand over every single piece of equipment we had anywhere in or out of the truck, we grilled fresh caught tuna over a charcoal fire, and washed it down with cheap beer. It was a perfect kind of moment, the kind of moment that becomes giant in memory, though at the time it just tasted right, with bits of sand in our teeth. We were regaining our health and our happiness, and the ocean and the strangeness of place, and the coolness of the air were all welcome to us again, as the sediments and dust piled up in layers on our clothing and on our truck and on our skin. I remember feeling that easy laugh resurface, we were out of the south, out of everything we had felt or known again, and it was easy to be pretty alright with it all.

Even though there is uncertainty, and yes, the uncertainty hangs over us now more than ever. Where are we to live? What are we to do for a living? Was this trip all a big experiment that would do little more than leave us dangling over a cliff while our future sat on some other route? Were we supposed to be in grad school or in the city or getting married or working in a coffee shop or running errands or making epic albums or making connections and planning retirement funds while we sat there in the dunes under the moonlight and the remnants of a perfect meal sat in our stomachs? What exactly is it that we are supposed to be doing? Is it ok not to know? These are the kind of thoughts that we talk about often, always ending in an optimistic “this is right. THIS is what we’re supposed to be doing.”.

We rolled down sunny gray asphalt between the salty dunes back to the mainland of America, back to land it seemed, and up to a campsite outside of Virginia Beach.

To make a long sad story short, we unpacked a bit at the campsite and left my guitar there and headed into town, saw Norfolk Virginia, and I never saw my guitar again. Someone very cursed now stole it, and though we spent the rest of the night and all the next day looking for it and them, filing police reports and launching our own detective style investigations while trudging the beach in search of any clue, peeking into every single campsite there, judging campers by their looks, trying to decide what we would do when we found it. And yet it disappeared. That guitar that I played hundreds of gigs with, wrote thousands of songs on, worked all summer in a factory for, elated myself anytime with, it is gone for good.

Its been a theme that repeated itself here in Rockville. Kate’s aunt and uncle, as I was saying, very graciously welcomed us into their house. They had just got a little kitty, sweet and timid and quiet. The first night we were here, chatting over wine on the outside porch, the kitty jumped off, escaped through a hole in the screen porch, and has yet to be seen again. I guess I can’t really measure or express the disappointment I feel at this, and I don’t have a place for the loss in my mind or body. It makes me feel a bit numb, and strangely, makes me want to: get a better guitar, save some abandoned kitties, more forward, become brighter, burn brighter, find good things, roll over and get up, and get going again and not let it seem like a wayward curse that settled onto us. I can’t feel sorry for us, and I don’t. But I do feel bad for Andy and Marilyn, and wish I could do more to answer for the loss.

From the trouble of Virginia Beach we headed to a beautiful, perfect start of the summer, green leaves and cool swimming pool, pretty river and lots of deer campground called Westmoreland State Park, about 10 minutes away from the place that George Washington was born. We spent four nights there reading through two books a piece, eating nice food, communing with the foxes, huge and colorful moths, lightning bugs, bald eagles, deer and even a few stray dogs. It was a perfect start to the summer, June 21st feeling long and precious. We baked ourselves by the poolside while kids in bathing suits splashed and played and ran all around us, concentrating on our books and on the sweet smell of the air, the warmth of our skin. We woke up in the mornings and had coffee while listening to NPR and in the evenings east coast baseball games. It was a nice interlude to where we are now, in the orbit of DC.