In a World of Sky

All my life, I've been surrounded—in the womb; in rooms, compartments; inside fences, hedges, and walls; in the shade of tree-lined streets that hid the skies from view; and inside the spaces of language and ideology. I've been surrounded by institutions, and by buildings, and towers that seem designed to block or obscure any view outside the human milieu. I've seen the world in glimpses, in snatches, through frames, and filters.


Decades ago, after finishing high school, a time when my compatriots took off out of the gate like racehorses to pursue higher education and lucrative careers, I began a long phase in my life of vagabondage. At that very youthful stage, any place that seemed like it could be natural and unspoiled was a place worthy of some kind of quasi-religious pilgrimage. I bought a jeep, and from my home-base in Cleveland, Ohio, roamed in all directions. Going itself was a good-enough reason to go anywhere at any time.


Looking back now, I can see that I was as goofy as an Emerson or a Thoreau; I was both insanely courageous and blithely oblivious. I took off alone on trip after trip around Ohio, and into Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, with almost no money in my pockets, nor any inkling, half the time, of where I was going or what I would be in for. Samson had his tresses to empower him; I had a tent, a sleeping bag, and a cook-set in my four-wheel drive jeep to empower me. There was a waterlogged road atlas always in the bed of the jeep, but I don't recall using it much. I was inclined to follow my instincts at intersections, tending, in a misapplication of poetic sentiment, to turn the way that looked least traveled.


I'd like to tell of a time when I experienced what I would call a breakthrough. I still call it that in spite of having learned since then that winning a battle does not preclude having to fight again tomorrow.


It was in the mid-70s. The draft of cannon-fodder for the Vietnam War had ended in 1973, and by 1975, the US was evacuating and that madness was drawing to an end. I had been watching and listening intently to the hawks and the doves throughout my adolescence, and had never bought into the war. I graduated from high school and moved into an apartment above a storefront on the main drag.

When I couldn't get time off from my job, I had to limit my travels to the countryside around northern Ohio in search of isolated places where I could be alone with my thoughts, commune with nature and friends, and read books in natural surroundings.


On one such ramble, I found a bend of the Chagrin River that was wide, deep, and slow moving. That branch of the river was clean, shallow enough to be effectively solar-heated, and great for some secluded swimming. It was accessible only from the rough access roads that meandered under high-tension electrical transmission lines a few miles west of Chagrin Falls. A couple hundred feet below the level of the access roads, down around the river basin, were glades as Arcadian as any ever known. I got into the habit of returning to the area with books, victuals, and friends.

Once while hiking the woods in the vicinity I came upon a flat area on a wooded height above the river that was clear of brush and arched over by fairly large trees. The ambiance put me in mind of the America of Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow, or the Kaatskill Mountains of Rip Van Winkle. I resolved to make it my weekend campsite for the summer.

I set the place up with a nice tent and sleeping bag, gathered stones to form a fire ring, piled up some tinder, and brought in several jugs of fresh water.

The problem—one that I glossed over at the time—was the difficulty of the path I had cut to reach from the high-tension lines where I left my jeep through the woods to the campsite. I had been out to the campsite only twice during the midday hours of broad daylight and thought the path was easy enough to follow for the quarter-mile that it wended its way back to the site.

Then I decided to come back after dark, after getting off work, to spend the night out there in my tent. I returned under the wan light of a waxing crescent moon near midnight, took up my backpack and headed into the mouth of the path—a pitch-black patch visible in the wall of brush—and only then realized my mistake. The moonlight didn’t penetrate the tree canopy and I didn’t have a flashlight. I decided that I could find my way and worked slowly by feel.


For a while, completely blind, I could feel the openings I had cut with my machete and could imagine that I was walking the right number of steps between straight sections of the path and the turns. There were sounds that might have been poisonous snakes and others that could have been brown bears. Branches were clutching and snagging my clothes. I was blind in the darkness, and it was a humid summer night.


A sense of panic started to build. Branches sliced my face and combined to snag me to a halt. There was no sense of a cleared path around me; the terrain didn’t feel familiar; my eyes stared, straining open as widely as they could, but in vain.


Finally, in a full-on sweat, I stopped struggling in the clutches of dense brambles and just stood still and listened. I became aware of a whole symphony of sound. Scores of insects were busy about their lives, leaves were rustling, branches moving. The panic drained out through the soles of my boots to be gradually replaced by the sounds and smells of the night woods. A perfect calm eventually settled over me.


After an indefinite period of standing, listening, breathing, and opening up, I felt myself “at one” with the night and the woods.

On its own, my brain had achieved some identification with the world. I had gone over from outsider to insider and become an insect, a snake, a bear, a wolf. I didn’t think in words or talk to myself at all.


After a while I started to move, feeling the slope under my feet and finding the ways of least resistance through the brush in the direction I felt the camp had to be. It couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes until I found the campsite and, in the darkness, started a small fire.

My mind had become utterly quiet, full of the sounds and smells of the world. It had entered me, obliterated me, and replaced that with something very quiet, very aware, very alive.


I call this a breakthrough.

I wish I could say that I never again felt afraid of the dark or alienated from the natural world, but there are no such never-ending victories. It has happened again in different ways, times, and places throughout the years and decades that followed. It always entails a relaxation of my grip on ideas, feelings, values; a silencing of the internal monologue; a letting go of things that aren't working; and a willingness to adapt, and even to start over. More often than not, fear proves itself unreal, disproportionate—a dysfunctional phase to be got through as quickly as possible.

Another jeep-era trip was more ambitious: I was going from Cleveland to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in Tennessee and back in a four-day holiday. Otherwise, it was the same as my other trips: just a pair of hiking boots, a backpack, a tent, and a sleeping bag tossed in the back of the jeep.

Arriving there in the late morning as the mists were all but burned off, I parked at the ranger station, threw on the backpack, walked into the park, and climbed the trail toward the ridge line. I didn't know how far I would go or where I would stay the night—I just hiked along savoring the smells and gawking at the views. As the trail rose, the views opened out, became wider, more expansive. Other ridges became visible across the hazy spans of humid valleys. It grew progressively easier to imagine that I was seeing across the hills through the eyes of a hawk in flight.

In the heat of that mid-afternoon as I sauntered along like the proverbial philosopher, I was overtaken by a stomping rowdy gang of Caucasian men in their late twenties each impressively equipped and carrying a large, heavy, framed backpack. They passed with stentorian shouts, raucous banter, and backward sneers of derision.

Their voices faded away up the trail as I slowed my pace.

When the afternoon grew old and evening was coming on, I came upon their camp. They had set up in a cinder-block shelter with a door of thick iron bars like a free-standing jail cell. Their jarringly loud voices seemed to be testing the limits of the air as they shouted at each other. The picnic table was covered with groceries and bottles of whiskey. A cook-fire smoked and sizzled with burning steak fat. One of them shouted at me that this was the place—the only place capable of keeping out the bears—and I had better get my stuff inside; and at that, they all laughed as at something hilarious. I looked inside at the filth, the black grease on walls and floor, the overflowing trash bin, the wooden bunks claimed by heaps of equipment. I told the band that I hadn't been planning to stop there for the night anyway and hiked out of the camp trying to shut them out of mind.

I trekked about a half-mile farther along the ridge-line trail through the pines. I really couldn't go any farther in the deepening twilight without being caught out in the dark of night with no shelter.

I got off the trail into the trees on the north side, as far off and close to the slope as possible, yet still with a fairly level lay, and pitched my two-man, rust-colored pup tent on a deep bed of pine needles. I wasn't putting it past those guys that some Lord of the Flies-type bourbon-enhanced hazing could come my way, so I made myself inconspicuous to anyone going along the trail. The evening air was warm, the smell of the pines was sweet, and my meal of French bread and Gouda cheese with water from my canteen hit the spot. I made no fire.

It turned out that a half-mile wasn't far enough to get clear of the noise of those revelers. I could still hear their voices when they crescendoed to reverberate in the trees. Fortunately, however, I was tired enough from the day's work to be able to fall asleep in spite of the circumstances.

Sometime in the middle of the night, something brought me half out of a deep slumber. The ground was shaking. And it shook again, and again, and again.

I held my breath and listened.

Water was pouring on the the tent.

Rain?

Not rain. I slowly realized that there was at least one heavy bear just outside whose footfalls were shaking the ground, and it was pissing buckets on the tent to mark it. The remarkable resonance of the sound of its sniffing around the tent recalled to my half-asleep mind the image of an enormous bloodhound—the Baskerville Hound—with vacuum-cleaner snout and cavernous lungs.

I continued to lie motionless breathing shallow breaths and being thankful that I had created no lingering food smells, nor had I littered. I had left nothing outside the tent. Even my boots were inside.

The whooshing wind of the sniffing against the tent sides and the thumping and thudding footfalls continued to shake the ground for a long while. The night was otherwise silent. The racket from the drunks had ceased while I was asleep.

I'm not sure how long it took, but I still felt the thudding footfalls until I dozed off. I didn't wake again before the pre-dawn light lit the tent walls.

With that dawn, I felt myself reprogrammed. Where the day before I had come into that place filled with a naïve, almost religious reverence, the new day held for me only one mission: to leave. I packed up with one eye out for late-retiring bears and headed back down along the trail with a rolling stride that contrasted sharply with the indulgent saunter of the day before.

I came down past a scene of devastation at the camp of the brigands, trash and empty bottles about as if scattered by an explosion. Their snores still echoed out of the bunkhouse while one of them, bleary-eyed and catatonic like a character in Night of the Living Dead, was trying to start a fire for coffee. He asked me how my night had gone and I said I was fine and asked about theirs. He only said that there had been bears everywhere.

I hardly slowed down to hear him out. I was down the mountain in a fraction of the time it had taken to climb it, back in the jeep, and out on the northbound highway before most folks had risen for breakfast that day.

On the freeways, there's not much else to do but think. That day, I had time to think about parks, and people. It seemed clear that the big parks were all that was left of the mythical American wilderness—the Wild West—where people could still go and express the worst of themselves without having their fun cramped by civilized restraints or laws. The bears were confined to the parks just as those Native Americans that survived the invasion were confined to their reservations. The bears were just out looking for food, eking out a subsistence. They were the have-nots scrounging for the scraps left by the haves, the masters.


It was the story of America in microcosm.In the end, I realized that I was the thing that was wrong with this picture. I had been driven to climb the mountain by some religious instinct, by some poetic advice. It was I that had been blind to both human and natural reality.

But too often, such realizations do not wisdom make.

That jeep was one of the older, more primitive kind, built by AMC before jeeps became a fad. It was painted tan, had a decent six-cylinder engine, and a manual, 2WD/4WD transmission. The top was wide open and its windshield was hinged and could clip down to steel loops on the hood. If needed, one could erect a cloth top with cloth doors.


It had a padded roll bar over the driver's head that saved my neck twice. 

On freeways, wind howls through every crevice in the soft top and starts flapping oscillations and whumping pockets everywhere.

Out there, music played loudly could make it bearable; and at the time, nothing could be finer, for me, than rolling along to blaring cassette tapes of the Allman Brothers, or Robin Trower's Bridge of Sighs.

Singing off-key at the top of my lungs along with Dickie Betts, “Don't fly, Mister Blue Bird, I'm just walking down the road. Early morning sunshine tells me all I need to know,” I headed north from Cleveland one early summer in the long ago. Northward through the forests of Michigan's Lower Peninsula on Interstate 75, the jeep and I rolled along singing our hearts out—me to the music and it whumping, whapping, and whistling. I was headed to discover the wilderness of Canada inside of one week's rambling.

I remember now nothing of the miles of woods we traversed to arrive at the stunning Mackinac Bridge, the third-longest suspension bridge in the world, spanning the Straits of Mackinac between the Lower and Upper Peninsulas in northern Michigan. 


The Straits of Mackinac are the channel by which Lake Michigan communicates with Lake Huron, and the vicinity is home to the famous resort on Mackinac Island where the film Somewhere in Time was filmed in 1979.

But that hadn't happened yet, and it was no part of my goal anyway to hob-nob with the well-to-do, even if I could have afforded to, so we just kept on straight ahead for the equally stunning Sault Sainte-Marie International Bridge over the busy locks on the St. Mary's River, and crossed over into Canada.

The jeep and I turned eastbound on the Trans-Canada Highway at Sault Sainte-Marie and went right along the northern shore of Georgian Bay. It was beautiful, and by comparison to most places I'd been in the United States, cleaner and much more sparsely populated. There were long stretches of rocky gray outcrops, crystalline blue lakes and lakescapes, and green pines under clear blue skies. It looked to me like we were driving along in a real life picture postcard of the Canadian woods, but in reality, each time I stopped at some postcard-perfect bit of shoreline or lake, there were terrifying clouds of sanguivorous mosquitoes, horseflies, midges, and who knows what starving insects for whom my blood was the very food they craved.


The terrain on the Canadian Shield is distinctly different, with its Precambrian bedrock exposed between patches of shallow soil and shallow lakes. The region is entrancing; saved from human exploitation, perhaps, by its unfitness for agriculture. Instead, it features mineral-rich areas, and I was headed east toward, but not for, Sudbury, a nickel and copper mining and transportation center in North Ontario. I planned to enjoy the scenery en route as much as the horseflies would let me, and then use Sudbury as a place for deciding which way to turn next.

I don't remember what got into me when I arrived there. It could have been that I thought, “Well, I've come this far north, and I may never come this far north again; so why not try to see James Bay?”


I was young, free, and almost impervious to personal discomfort. I also happened to be particularly vulnerable to self-persuasion by the “Why not?” argument, which I seem to have never been able to refute.

So, at or near Sturgeon Falls on Lake Nipissing, the jeep and I turned north; I with an accelerated heartbeat in a spirit of blithe adventure. 


James Bay! Hudson Bay and the many Northwest Passage expeditions! The days of the Hudson Bay Company! 

Two more hours of driving north under gray skies, however, through blustery chill winds that shoved and buffeted the jeep rudely, and through the same kind of Canadian Shield terrain of rocky exposures, lakes, and ever-more-pathetic-looking pines and brush, had worn all that high spirit away by the time I approached the Lake Temagami area. The thought of the hours more of driving north through increasing desolation and hardship started to outweigh anything that a glimpse of the historic bay could offer me.

And something had begun to happen to my soul.

Intending to see Lake Temagami instead of continuing on to James Bay, I turned westward off the lightly trafficked, two-lane, northward route onto some unmarked, unimproved road, engaged the four-wheel drive, and motored in low gear through dark stands of pine.

The jeep and I went on and on at an easy pace over dirt tracks, clambering over bare rock, never seeing another vehicle, human being, or sign of settlement or civilization.

At some point in that wending and winding, my heart started to frost over, and whatever had done that also hit my head with a sobering jolt.

I got the feeling that I was way off the beaten track of the human world and had been a little too casual about getting there. 


I could die out here and be dead for a long time before anybody found my bones. Steady, now. I came this far to see what the world is like way up here. Heck. I haven't even gone as far north as the 49 degrees north latitude that is the boundary out west between Canada and the USA, let alone the 66 and half degrees of the Arctic Circle, or the 69 degrees north latitude where John Franklin's expedition to find the Northwest Passage was lost with all hands in 1845.

So I tried to calm myself.

At long last, the jeep broke free of the trees and confronted an enormous body of water that I couldn't see across—an inland sea.

I got out of the jeep into a brisk headwind and walked around on the exposed rock by the water's edge. It was a dark, gray lake under a steel-gray sky, and a cold wind was blowing out of the north, white-capping the surface and chilling me down to the brains and bones.The surface of the water started to look heavy, like liquid mercury; and where I could see down into it, seemed almost black.

I sat on the rocks to get under the wind and surveyed the visible shoreline.

Due to the heavy overcast, everywhere I looked seemed dark, forbidding, obscure. There were no houses, no docks, no boats, no electric lines. The scene could have been—no, it certainly had been—the same for thousands of years.

As I sat there ducking the wind and having my small measure of human warmth sucked out of me, I had been psychically shrinking, feeling increasingly like I was marooned on a deserted foreign planet.

Never in all my years of camping, hiking, and cross-country skiing had I ever felt so small, so far from home.

A mote on the world.

An invisible hand swatted down the whole array of switches in my mind shutting everything from on to off, from go to no-go.

As mentally chilled as I was physically, I got back in the jeep, which now seemed the greatest luxury in the universe, and backed it slowly out the way it had come in until I was able to turn it around and head out.

I did not lose it. I drove slowly and deliberately all the way back out until I reached an improved road, then disengaged the 4WD and headed south at speed.

I beat an existential retreat.

I drove straight south, reaching Toronto before entirely reconstituting as a real and substantial human being.

Toronto is a beautiful city; the people very friendly, and the food good; nevertheless, I was done with the pines and lakes and Precambrian bedrock of the cold north, and lingered for only a day, before pushing in the cassette tape of Brothers and Sisters and running it up to Southbound.

The jeep was finally sold off to pay for another stretch of college tuition.

After high school, I had put in a few years at Cleveland State University in liberal arts and philosophy courses. I was going to be a philosopher; until, one day, I realized there is virtually no such remunerated thing.

Unlike then, this time I had a practical goal in mind. I split my time between studies in art and education. I was going to be an art teacher.

All of the coursework was done except student teaching.

I was sent out into the Cleveland city schools like chum tossed to sharks. The students treated me like a piñata. The camel's back broke when I smilingly addressed a student who looked and me and spat on the floor in reply. I apologized to the teacher, went outside to find the tires on my Ford Maverick slashed, and walked out of the neighborhood to where I could catch a bus home and call a tow-truck.

They couldn't pay me enough to make that worth my while.

The goal of becoming an art teacher drifted away like a helium balloon.

College could wait.
I fell back on rambling.


I was spending a lot of time on America's interstate freeways going from rest stop to rest stop, from state to state, and city to city, trying to get an idea of what all the places I'd ever heard about were like.

I can only wonder now at the naivety that led me to think that different cities and their residents were really different. Maybe the great rivalries between professional sports teams that were so hyped-up on TV and radio had me thinking that there was some real difference between these arch-rivals. And maybe there had been some historical distinctions that were significant in their day and age.

Not so in modern corporate America.

It didn't take long to find out that modern American places all looked pretty much the same. The same corporations had the same emporiums in the same arrangement and style everywhere I went.  Cities were box after concrete box, and car after car after truck. Every place in between seemed like the identical stretch of freeway over and over again, and every exit ramp a detour onto a strip of highway littered with identical gas, motel and fast food franchises.

I ate the same generic food everywhere I went. There was no choice. All the essential sameness ran together. The old saying, “If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all,” was making so much sense that those words began to come to mind more and more frequently until they beat like Jumanji drums that only I could hear.

Near the end of one summer-time stint of driving south along the east coast all the way from Provincetown, Massachusetts, to Florida, I had stopped for a while in Orlando, a nice enough town, and was ready for the ocean.

I drove to a less famous stretch of the Atlantic coast and checked into a cheap motel a few blocks back from the beach. It didn't matter. A short walk through the streets, the people, and the hotels along the beach-front took me to an ocean that was idyllic.

The water was warm and inviting.

I swam slowly out away from the beach, and soon was afloat on my back just below the surface of large warm ocean swells with only my face above water, cloudless blue sky and blue ocean all one. So warm and calm were they both that my brain and body were as silent as if they had drifted away or sunk.

A while later, back on the warm sand of the beach, thoughts returned and whispered of the dangers that had surrounded me: sharks could have taken my body for a meal; my nose and mouth could have been swamped by a wave and I could have drowned; I might have dozed on the swells long enough to have been floated away in a current. Ironically, these shadows grew longer across my mind as I sat in safety on the beach, condominiums lining the road behind, and bodies walking all around.

Facing east, looking down the beach to the gentle surf, the vast sky over the calm sea of that late afternoon in August developed colors that struck me dumb. I stayed there until all the color had gone and the gorgeous hues of twilight had deepened into darkness.

Heading back to the motel over the sandy beach-side roads, I saw myself seated on the varnished mahogany deck of a small sailboat far out to sea—in the wind of a world of sky—horizon lines melted into the oceanic mirror. I shuffled along under palms in the harsh quartz-iodine light of street-lamps with scenarios playing themselves out in my imagination: me clinging to the mast as my boat slid down the sides of waves the size of mountains; shark fins cutting little wakes as they circled my becalmed boat; parching and starving somewhere in the millions of square miles of the oceans.

All seashores are wonderful, hills and mountains magnificent, big rivers awe-inspiring, and big, old trees beautiful, but it was never truly difficult to frame them in the rear-view mirror and watch them shrink in the increasing distance of departure.

Back on the road, I peered through the windshield over a long, mind-numbing stretch of interstates that took me back to the Lake Erie shore, to the home fort, to the job. No cassette tapes this time; just the whine of tires, the thrum of pistons, the occasional heart-rhythm of windshield wipers in the rain. 


I hit a slump.

It hadn't paid off. I had driven thousands of miles and seen hundreds of places, but it was getting through to me less and less.

Then, in an inspired stroke of genius, I got a motorcycle—a used, abused, 1970 Triumph Bonneville 650, some parts painted red, some green, missing its fenders, and affordable.

I found myself flying out the back door as soon I woke up every one of those early autumn days that followed. I couldn't wait to push the Triumph out of the garage, turn on the FM radio to WMMS, and get going flushing the old gas and oil into pie pans on the gravel drive; re-filling with fresh; cleaning the carburetors with a toothbrush soaked in gas; setting the gaps between the points and the rockers; putting in new plugs; checking the sparks; going over every bit to make sure it was right with itself and the system. After a few days of such attention, it fired up on a couple kicks.

I climbed on that motorcycle, twisted the throttle and took a baptismal bath of rebirth in noise, fumes, and power. It was like I had tuned-up myself right along with the motorcycle.

The motorcycle and I cruised the streets, I in a state of rapture. I hardly saw the houses or the trees. Seeing things was no longer the point. Yes, I was still going out after a quasi-religious experience, but the object had moved from out there to in here. It was the feel and the sound of the engine, the smooth grace of the motorcycle's dynamic balance, and the fantastically mobile ease of covering distances that absorbed my attention. The fat rubber tires tracked lines over the pavement as graceful as the cuts of a figure-skater's blades in ice. It was not hard to imagine riding bareback on a Bengal tiger, gripping the scruff of its neck to steer. It didn't matter to me which road I cruised or which way I turned or how long I was gone. The motorcycle looked so good, sounded so good, and felt so good to ride that it was sufficient unto itself, and for a time, it was all I wanted to do. The motorcycle became an unconscious part of me.

Riding that Triumph afforded the experience of riding through the world with an unrestricted field, all the senses engaged with it. Again, like on the ridge line trail in the mountains, I was seeing the world through the eyes of a hawk in flight. As long as I was in a state of the union that did not mandate the wearing of a safety helmet, there was nothing but the great dome of the sky overhead as I rode.

I had spent years, on and off, and what money I had, on college; but I had lost heart in it. I had spent years earning the dollars I needed to live. I had spent years in the cabs of cars peering through windshields at the world and it hadn't paid off. Now, I just wanted to live in that space—the infinite head-room of the open motorcycle—and fly over the roads like gliding on outspread wings, eyes wide, taking it all in.

At the time there was money enough for gas, I figured, but not much more to pay for things like food or shelter. Somehow, though, those very real things seemed as unreal as had the bears outside my tent in Tennessee. 


I'll eat simply. I'll camp out. I'll see the light if I'm out there on the motorcycle immersed in the world. 

Persuading myself was nothing more than a pretense. As soon as the idea had come to me, it had already been a done deal.

I tied my old camping gear onto the Triumph, attached some army-surplus ammo pouches to frame rails and cross-members to hold tools, spark plugs, and spare bits, and put some of my hardier clothing into a small, brown nylon duffel.

Even at that bare minimum of stuff, it was a load of luggage for the lean, tigrine Triumph. It took some time and bungee-cord magic to get everything bound up in such a way that it wasn't heaped too high and wouldn't shift too easily.

I took a leave of absence from work, said goodbyes to uncomprehending family and friends whose questions I could not answer, and took off westbound.

Joy, bliss, and nirvana made my head swim and my eyes throb, cruising west through canopies of gorgeous fall foliage, leaving in my wake only the mellow growl of the Triumph engine and the sweet smell of well-combusted gasoline. If I could have separated those emotional drugs and taken them one at a time, I might have planned my trip. Northern Ohio, Indiana, and all of Wisconsin rolled away around us before a single rational thought took shape:


Hell, it's late September.

But while that engine was running the bliss was pumping, and I was coming into Duluth, Minnesota, before that thought grew teeth and chomped into me hard enough to sober me.

Approaching the outskirts of Duluth, the motorcycle and I rumbled up to our first stoplight in six hours under heavily overcast skies. We slowed, we stopped, and we fell over in the middle of the road because my legs were completely numb, didn't work, and I didn't even know it. People in cars all around must have been startled, but not a single one got out or offered to help. They probably thought, “Damned drunken motorcyclist! They're all the same!”

Of course, I couldn't get my legs working fast enough to beat the clock on the stoplight, and had a real fight on my hands getting my tree-stump legs to work and get the heavy motorcycle upright, and it and the spilled luggage off the road while cars sped mercilessly by around me.

I must have looked like a lunatic dancing at the curbside to get the blood going in my legs, face pinched like a prune against the pain of pins and needles in my legs, while I cursed and rearranged the gear on the bike. 

Up the road ahead I saw a big J. C. Penney department store. Between shivers, I resolved not to skimp on their best thermal underwear, and didn't.

The additional expense doomed me to weeks of eating hot soup and soda crackers, but I added a good windbreaker over my shirt and sweater while I was in there. Months later, the extra holes punched into my belt to shorten it became a matter of some pride. And I had learned the secret that the billion-dollar weight-loss industry didn't want anyone to know: eat less and you'll lose weight. Guaranteed.

All warmed up and brazen in my new thermal armor, and then hit with a shot of adrenalin when the engine fired up, nothing made more sense than heading northwest toward Bemidji, then to Fargo, North Dakota, and beyond that into the northern plains.

The pine forests and chill rains of Minnesota waited.

On the edge of west Bemidji, pinned down in a little café in my damp clothes, looking westward through the rain-glazed window through most of the day that followed, I wrote down the thoughts of the road in a notebook that is lost. Minnesota in September, like Wisconsin before it, was wet, forested, and cool—that much I'll never forget, or miss.

It could have been around three or four o'clock in the afternoon when the rain stopped. Sunlight blazed in the puddles and raindrops with a molten white light that blinded me through the café window.

Reprieved!

I had been sitting around in my damp clothes all day and had had enough of looking out the window. My waitress had long-since stopped asking if I wanted a refill.

I went out into some of the freshest air I've ever tasted to mount the drenched dripping Triumph. It cranked to life and we cruised slowly out of town splashing happily through pond-like puddles. That big sun light was out there ahead of us in the west, and we chased after it.

In the miles that followed, we rolled on a ribbon of two-lane blacktop between big barns and farmhouses, over long sweeping waves of terrain. The trees eventually began to thin out, whether from farmers clear-cutting or from being ever farther out onto the prairie lands, I can't say. For the first time on that trip I was running to make time, flying to dry my clothes and get clear of the cold, wet east and its damp forests.

Finally, there came a moment when we broke free of trees and hit out into the gently rolling land that had far fewer of them. The air had become drier and easier to breathe. There was no more damp chill in it and I took it in extravagantly by the lungs-full.

Because it was dry, the air was utterly transparent. I could see for hundreds of miles. The sky seemed to double in size when there was nothing around the horizon to eat into it. The land, too, now appeared to spread out to infinity because nothing was blocking or limiting the view of it.

My eyes telescoped into the tawny distances in all directions, and just like my eyes, there was nothing out there to stop me from expanding. I felt myself opening outward in spirit. There was nothing and no one pushing back. I was not surrounded any more.

Visibility had become so great that distinctly different weather patterns were visible at different ranges in the distances around the horizons. I looked around as a storm system could be seen in its bounded entirety well away in the southeast, sheer gorgeous blue skies and orange sunlight ahead in the west, and cumulus clouds ranging away in a pattern to the north and to the east behind me.

By the time I got well into rural northern North Dakota, I was in awe, just like that time in the ocean swells off eastern Florida, but better. Here, there were no abyssal depths below, no mountainous waves above, and no sharks on the hunt for my flesh and bones. My motorcycle had become the skiff that I had imagined, sailing on ocean waves of grass under a shoreless sky so big around that it pegged the mind's meter on “infinity.” I couldn't stop from smiling for joy, and like a well-traveled car radiator, my teeth filled up with gnats, (though my sun-burned face had been caked with them for the past thousand miles).

The motorcycle and I settled into a smooth rolling cruise of about 45 miles per hour. With each passing mile, the sensation grew stronger of being windblown in a small boat on an immense, gramineous ocean.

Why have I not heard tell of this place and this experience before?

Cruising slowly along, just as it had when I was a long-distance runner, freed the mind to reflect in depth. How odd that people see mountains but don't see plains; see the sculpture, but not the plinth. For two hundred years, the plains and prairies of the heartland of the American continent have been like the plinth on the pedestal of the nation. People see the uplifted features and the relieved features just fine, and these things are named and known by contrast with the plains. But the prairies and plains themselves—why, there's just nothing there.


In Shakespeare's famous terms, the plains are a stage empty of players. If “all the world's a stage,” then the play upon it is a human envelope, a giant ball of string of entwined humanity, set upon a stage for an audience of people who are so desperate to program themselves as proper human beings that they study and judge each other in a life-long process of mutual obsession. Where and when humans and their complexities are absent, people find it difficult or impossible to care—they have little interest in, or fraternity with, the non-human.


Out here in the real world of the planet, away from any theater of recursive human madness, the senses heighten in the same way they would if occupied with human dramas, but are more richly rewarded. The eyes find themselves situated at the center of a grand sphere of stunning abundance. They scan around to see innumerable grasses and flowers that defy naming; overhead into skies of infinite depth in which color gradients appear that, too, defy naming. Cloud formations of infinitely varied forms appear there that defy the ability of the mind to name them. And once the sun has set, night skies composed of the lights of an infinity of stellar objects appear to dumbfound, again, the rendering capability of the human brain. The ears are treated to wind-song, the sounds of grasses and leaves harmonizing in the winds; to the songs of life: to birdsong that beggars our turgid musical compositions; to coyote-song, wolf-song, and the songs of a thousand other animals and a million insects. The nose takes in the unparalleled richness of the uncountable and unnameable smells of life and death in the air.


There are so many things for which people have no names, and these words are the limit of human power. Without our names, we are small. Without our words, we are animals among the rest.

Back in the human envelope, people have surrounded themselves with names and words, with frames and measures, with shields, shelters, blinders and barriers—all in the nature of valves on everything to control the rate at which the real world comes at us; that is, when we let the real world approach us at all.

Out in the plains, the absence of that came to me as an immeasurable relief. I felt as if I had been released from a life sentence in prison.


I stopped the motorcycle and stood alongside a road in the prairies of rural North Dakota. In every direction, an ocean of grasses moved—singing—in the shifting winds. No cars followed. No houses were visible. For an hour no other people or vehicles passed.

The world is not a stage for the played-out plays of humanity. The world is beyond naming, and I was a mote on the world, in the wind of a world of sky.