My first memory as I was born upon a planet of the moon was of a small stuffed animal antelope. This is a lie. It was a small stuffed animal lamb called Lamb Chop. It had a Saint Christopher pendant that it wore. St. Christopher is the saint of safe travels. I did however buy a small stuffed animal antelope at a gas station in Kearney, Nebraska.
My next memory on this fair year of gasses traveling out of asses is driving through Wyoming. Just north of Cheyenne the land is desert. A big storm had caused my radio dial to stop playing music and only issue tornado, thunder storm and flood warnings. The majority of cars had pulled over to the side of the road. Some of us riders on the storm continued through hail piled up on the road.
Casper. Cody. In between these wind river canyon. In Casper I slept at a motel eight. I had caught an insatiable lust and immediately started to masturbate once I walked into the motel room. The Big Mac with large fries and a Coke sat on the desk as I busied myself for the next hour minding my own personal business. By the time I got around to the food the fries were no good.
I looked out of the window at a drainage tunnel and the horizon beyond. The old western feeling was beginning to creep into my bones. The room was done up in cowboy style with a picture of an old abandoned barn and a horse and cowboy. I located the bible and put it on the lamp post beside the bed and went to sleep after a bath.
In the morning I got down on my knees and prayed for the first time in a while. I prayed about whether I should be going on this trip or not. I argued with Him about how it would be if I did go and how it would be if I did not go. The benefits of not going would mean I would still have my money and the benefits of going would mean I would still have my honour. The honor seemed something that I could never earn back so I picked up my bags, checked out of the hotel and kept north.
Wind river canyon is gorgeous. Cody, Wyoming although a tourist trap holds special meaning for me as being the closest thing to civilisation east of Yellowstone. I once worked at a ranch that had Yellowstone as its back yard so it is always like a home from another dimension when I return to this part of the country. I bought a pair of black cowboy boots at a store at the end of the shopping strip and continued north.
In Billings I got a haircut at a sports clips. The MVP experience was awarded me for being a first time customer. This meant that along with my trimmed hair and beard I would receive a shampoo and electric massage along my shoulders as well as a hot towel. There is nothing in this world to a civilised white person in America like a hot towel, warm towel, or cold towel.
Once I got to my destination, Lewistown, Montana, I was still in the state of being dazed and confused no different from my last thirty two years on this earth. The first people I saw were some kids at a skate park. I asked them if people were allowed to camp there. They directed me to the pool. Once at the pool on the other side of downtown I asked a woman watering her garden if people were allowed to camp there. She directed me to a lake outside of town.
I walked the strip of the downtown. The country up here and everything about the town was idyllic. The Montana I had known was just west of Yellowstone called Paradise Valley and its charm is in its rugged, wild and dangerous beauty all added up to days and nights of epic and perilous adventure. Here in the Judith mountains it was Montana soft.
In San Francisco a person can walk, ride their bike, a streetcar, a subway, a boat, a car, and have the landscape, scenery, socio-economic level, and social scene change from block to block. Here in the northwest I have found that each locality has its own identity and one must sniff, taste, touch, listen and see to know what kind of a place a person is in. Feeling like I was in a town rated G from the 1940s, that is to say the safest I’ve ever felt since hippie preschool, which is to say the way a person feels listening to the Grateful Dead, which is to say the way a person feels after trying weed for the first time, which is to say a reference to Montessori, or Sesame Street, or Adam Sandler, or Jimi Hendrix, it is when something is referred to as dangerous but turns out to be safer than anywhere you have ever been before.
A town high up in the Northern Rockies should not feel like an oasis of civilisation after driving through the rugged landscapes I had just endured but it did. Just like a street named after a seed: full of strangers, monsters and an oversized bird and an undersized elephant should not be a safe place to learn early education but it is. Montessori, although regarded as mystical and foreign by most people is more home than you’ll ever know. So I bought another number one at McDonalds and watched Indiana Jones at the theatre. Pitched my tent by the lake and went to sleep.
In the morning I walked up a hill behind the lake. I found a pond. A pond overlooking a lake. In that pond was a muskrat swimming. Out of the pond led a creek. The muskrat swam out to the middle of the pond and stared at my general direction. When I moved it disappeared.
I climbed further up the hill and came to an opening above a small four foot cliff. In this small meadow a doe bounded straight up and down into a wooded thicket. Further up was the last gradation within purview and my intention was to climb this grade and see the view. Before I got to the top of this hill I walked into a fawn. It was sitting in a ball in the grass and did not move.
On the descent I washed my face and feet in the creek that led out of the pond that set above the lake. I drove back and forth from the town to the lake a couple more times after buying a Mcgriddle and a double shot espresso. I walked on a trail that gave a panoramic view of the Judith Mountains.
I hadn’t payed for my camp site yet. I left my tent out and never saw it again. I dressed in black Ariat boots, black Levi skinny jeans, an “end of the line” belt buckle from an estate sale, my leather belt that I had worn for the last couple years that had warped to match the thrust of my bony waist, and an H & M black dress shirt. I had hoped that I didn’t smell too bad and that if I did that it was good bad not bad bad bad bad bad bad bad but to my luck once I arrived I realised the wedding was outdoors.
Feeling nervous I decided to do something strange to calm my nerves. There was sun protection lotion that had leaked out of the bottle, collected in a cup holder. This had been sitting there for about a month and had developed a glue like texture and was no longer white. I put this in my hair and all over my face and arms. Having done something strange I felt relaxed and ready to be a witness to my friends wedding.
The father greeted me along with the son. Some of what I guess were his cousins whistled at us as we walked toward the stage. We were all done up in the style of western cowboys. I took a seat at the back of the rows on the grooms side after consulting a small boy about whether he was related to the groom or the bride. The groom and the father stood at the stage waiting for the bride. The bride came forward.
If the reader wants a story about someone driving across the country to attend a wedding then they can stop reading now. If the reader would like a story about someone driving across the country to attend a wedding and then driving back across the country to their home then they are invited to continue to read. I gassed up at a gas station and changed my boots to my all terrain converse shoes. I stopped at an Albertsons and bought a tuna for two sealed package. Drove to the lake campground and found my tent gone. A wind gust had picked it up and thrown it into the lake. Some rangers fished it out according to legend.
I am still feeling free and easy but somewhere a clock is ticking. I wake up at a rest station and look at my tire. It is flat. Before pulling on to the rest station there was a car on the highway that had rearview lights that looked like dark menacing feline eyes. Gillette, Wyoming always kicks my ass.
A small nail had entered my tire. Luckily I have a spare. A man at the rest station lends me his tool bar to change out the tire. He thinks it strange that I had a spare but no tool to replace it. I think it strange that I can’t remember the proper, lug bar, that is it. A lug bar to change out the lug nuts. Right. Having some pride for having done something mechanical besides checking my oil I stop at Spearfish and buy my own lug bar for eighteen dollars.
What is a thirty two year old man doing dressed in full cowboy attire and attending a real cowboy wedding in the Northwestern rockies who does not know what a lug bar is until July 2 of 2023? First I am not a cowboy but a hipster. I am a working class hipster who found a job on cool works dot com for a ranch in Montana and took the job. The groom was my buddy and after having studied the cowboy culture of Paradise valley for six months I can identify with parts of it namely the clothes but mostly just Levi jeans.
Driving on a spare, minus a tent but plus a lug bar I begin driving through the black hills on a scenic route to Lead, Deadwood, Custer, Hot Springs. I think about the groom being sick during the wedding and how the black hills would be a nice place to honeymoon. I think about driving slow because of the flat tire. It is fourth of July weekend in the black hills and the place is packed full of white middle class families. The Black hills is like the Disney land plus of the plains.
I drive past a waterfall and a hot spring. In Deadwood I take a short trail to the top of Roosevelt Mountain. I pay the fee at a lake and walk in with my jeans after eating my tuna for two and lose my pair of Oakley designer sunglasses. I put on my other pair of Oakley designer sun glasses and remember to keep driving slow on the spare tire. The teenage girls in the black hills during fourth of July weekend are like the ones at the College World Series and I am glad that I had two pairs of dark expensive sun glasses to survive them.
The only time lust brought me to my knees was sudden and quick in Casper, Wyoming. Now after the day at the lake it is latently beginning to build back up to rival the stress of the clock ticking somewhere and the tedium of the flat tire and the loss of my money. In Chadron, Nebraska I meet a fellow traveler at Chadron National Forest. He reminds me to get my tire replaced after my mind has been strained to think that I could drive to Valentine, Nebraska on the spare.
“Oh, yeah. That is what I want to do.”
The tire was patched and I was relieved but what to do about this clock ticking somewhere and my money disappearing. There was nothing to do about this conundrum except get home. What began as wander lust, sex drive, and endurance on the way to the wedding had turned into latent lust, sexlessness and despair on the return. It is hard to describe the country to town folk and it is harder to describe the feeling of the country that a person from the city gets to country folk. It is more difficult still to describe to city folk the feeling of the city after having been to the country. The best way to describe it is to take the adventure of the condensed form I have represented here and match that with what I had started to say to myself as I drove east through northern Nebraska.
“Now it is just masturbating to ass and working all the time.”
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