Yesterday I declared my intent to no longer hide my desire to wander, which I've long held apart from my professional side, and I think today what I had was a little sense of the freedom gay men feel when they finally come out of the closet.
Oh, and a whopping dose of surrealism atop that freedom – if anyone else has a strange experience planned in which they'd like me to participate I'm going to ask for you to please hold that thought until I've had the time to digest today's errata.
The day started innocently enough – up out of the hotel room all freshly scrubbed and looking like a busy professional on the road. The surrealism set in at once ... I knew as soon as I saw the black lab lounging in the driver's seat of a battered Bronco with Alaska plates ... the ghosts of the adventure of Chris McCandless were not taking the day off. Check the stuffed moose with the RCMP uniform behind the dog - that totally made the shot IMHO.
I was in Indianapolis for a meeting with Barry Welsh, the candidate for Indiana District #6, and an unnamed financier. Barry is very focused on getting renewable energy projects into his district and I've been there once before to tour facilities and check the lay of the land. This is very early in the process but after our funded project in Niagara Falls and the recent USDA grant for similar work in Iowa these things feel like genuine plans rather than fever dreams.
I scooted out of Indianapolis headed west and it wasn't too long before I found a fellow traveler by the side of the road. Those on the road generally fall into two broad categories – the substance abusers and the mentally ill. This fellow had the air of a thirsty man and an almost twitchy fear of police cars, both parked and moving. I let him off at a truck stop with two cans of baked beans and best wishes. He talked a good bit in a disorganized fashion about his life, but I garnered no special message from this one.
My next stop was in Champaign, Illinois. I kid you not – this particular task on my billing detail says "Spank Sprint". They've got some wonky fiber patches in a hut along the railroad tracks that have twice caused us lengthy outages. An apologetic tech showed me a temporary fiber run outside the normal cable management they'd used to bring us back on line and we talked a bit about how to get the whole thing cleaned up and stabilized.
I can't go to Champaign without going to Champaign Surplus. I escaped nearly intact – only four fuel canisters for my stove and package of waterproof matches made the cut. I've had this little stove for a while, it's made several batches of scrambled eggs, a little soup, and those vital cups of morning coffee for my female friend, and the first canister of fuel is still going strong. I'm going to try to always have one spare in reserve and I expect I'll be going through a bit of it as I go from place to place. Oh, and I stopped to paw the kayaks, too ...
You can almost drive with your eyes closed in western Illinois – arrow straight roads over pancake flat terrain facilitate this. I crossed the Mississippi at dusk, officially making the move from 'east' to 'west' ... but it feels funny to me to say that. While that river might be the 'official' demarcation the Missouri, all the way on the other side of Iowa, is the one where you find a distinct increase in 'westiness'. You don't have to go all that much further beyond the Big Muddy before you find men with giant belt buckles, cowboy hats, and boots who actually work with cattle. Dressing like that in Iowa on any day other than October 31st would draw some looks.
Due to a variety of issues I won't share in detail I found that I have no where to stay tonight right after I crossed the river. Not such a big deal, but this information totally drained the urgency out of going any further in the dark. I got a nice truck stop shower and on my way out I spied a most interesting tramp.
The road is a forge – you're heated and whacked until you're very, very tough. Part of that, at least for the leather tramps, is almost always the acquisition of a largish, solid backpack, perhaps with a small bed roll tucked underneath. You quickly learn what is and is not essential. Except for this guy – I mistook him for a worker in one of the stores in the area, as he was pulling a two wheeled dolly stacked clear full of stuff. I watched him for a bit to be sure, not quite believing my eyes ... he had three sizeable suit cases as the first layer, what might have been a guitar or mandolin in a case, and many other tramp necessities adorned the many straps holding the suitcases in place.
I rolled up, stopped next to him, and good naturedly demanded "Where the HELL are you going with all that stuff?"
This one, he was a straight up harbinger. I've written about this here and there in my dairies – I occasionally meet men who seem in some way to show me where I might have ended up had my life taken slightly different turns, and he was definitely one of them. I'm on my way to speak at the Ammonia Fuel Network conference. He is on his way for "an appearance ... on television". I travel a bit, he travels a bit. He was, I think, as amazed as I was by his rig when I told him I was a rubber tramp, and then he really opened up. They're after him and they'll spray him with chemicals. My problems are more pedestrian – the bank would like either a large payment or the return of their automobile. He brought out his bible and read Psalms 141 – 150, and then we talked about how it applied to our lives. All along, for the hour or so that we chatted, I felt as if he were mocking me ... I'd told him nothing about myself beyond the fact that I too was traveling, so the many parallels came unbidden.
As we talked more and more of the messianic delusions came out. His appearance ... has been scheduled for 2,000 years. He showed me what he claimed to be stigmata on his wrists. He never came right out and said it, he just kept hinting and waiting for me to call him on it.
I feel like that some times about the stuff I'm doing. It is awfully cheeky of me to go about meeting with bankers and future congressmen on my way to get up in front of a room full of 140 experts in the field of ammonia production when I'm not sure if I'll have a place to stay when I get to Minneapolis, isn't it?
So ... I've driven far enough west to start encountering steadily increasing 'westiness', but I got the sound track to Into The Wild and I've listened to 'Hard Sun' a dozen times in the last three hundred miles. My desire for empty roads and open skies is almost overwhelming.