Going To Yellowstone

 I took off early on Saturday morning for my trip to Yellowstone. Originally, there were to be a bunch of us and I was driving to bring gear and food up for our trip. It ended up just me and my son made the trip. Anyway, I drove out of LA and made Las Vegas by lunch time, stopped at Wendy's or some such and then filled up and drove on. Made really good time. I was expecting to be in St George Utah by 3 or 4 and had a room reserved at the Dixie Motel. I had told them I'd be there by five to be on the safe side, when they emailed me for a time of arrival. I get outside St George by 40 miles and the entire freeway slows to about two miles per hour. Nothing! I was approaching a little corner of Arizona there I immediately wondered if they had closed the state border for some ungodly reason. Still we inched along. I called the motel to ask them if they knew of something along the highway that would hold us like this. They didn't know, but told me the Gorge where we were trying to get through had a lot of accidents. I called my wife in LA. She looked it up and texted me about a huge fiery crash between two semi s. The phone connection wasn't good, but I could hear her but she couldn't hear me.

Two big trucks had collided. 

So we inched along for miles. I called the Motel back to tell them it might be real late before I got there. Would there be someone to let me in. She said she lived there so just ring the bell when I got there.

They moved us all off the Freeway to a turnoff that would take us across forty miles of a little country two lane highway to St. George. I watched as some of my fellow travelers thought and treated the little highway as if there was no two way traffic on it. We all made it through. I got there about six and went into the room asap, dead tired.

Didn't see the Gorge until I returned the other way coming home. Well worth the concern.

 

Yellowstone In Real Time

                  I'm leaving Saturday morning bright and early to drive to Yellowstone for a backpacking trip. Been planning it since last year. First night I'm staying over in St. George, Utah. It started out when I realized it was only a two day road trip up there. I mentioned it to my son in DC if he was interested and he said yes, but he and his fiance were planning a trip to Egypt. I mentioned it in passing to my daughter that lives in France permanently now and she decided she and her boyfriend were definitely interested in coming. And I invited my new found family in Texas. My full grown grandson and fiance wanted to come.
                    In February, I put in for the back packing permit and because I wouldn't hear until maybe May and all these folks wanted to come I reserved car camping for the same time in August.
And then the pandemic. So Chelsea and Vincent made reservations to fly into LA and drive up with me. They have French vacations that give them off weeks in a row if they want them. I start looking at my gear and realize that I'm missing half of everything I had. I'd been loaning things out and apparently not getting them back. I had three of everything needed, for me and my two kids that used to go with me. But Chelsea's sleeping bag is gone, I have one of three camping stoves.
                      I still have three bear kegs, what you put your food in that is critter proof. So I need gear. I need 5 sleeping bags, five backpacks, six bear kegs. It's gonna be an expensive trip. Then the pandemic. France tells Chelsea and Vincent that they are not supposed to leave the country and if they do they will have to spend two weeks in quarantine when they return, so they have to cancel. They got a voucher for their airfare that can be used later maybe next year.
                       I put together gear and food for the remaining four of us. And then my Grandson and fiance in Texas tell me they can't come, His girlfriend has lost her job and they don't have enough money to pay their rent. The tickets I bought for them are turned into credit vouchers that they can use over the next couple of years, so they could come next year on the same tickets. I told Chelsea in France that if it didn't work this time, that we could try for 2021. I don't know the park, I don't how cool the route is that I've picked for the back pack trip, etc. etc. Next year might be better.
                        So Chris and I are still going. We talked about virus concerns etc and I don't think it's going to be a big deal. I'm driving up alone in my car with gear, staying in motels along the way and driving back, again with little or no contact. He is flying in and I'm picking him up in Jackson Hole from the airport. There's going to be very little close contact with anyone.
                        There's probably more danger in those little old ladies in the supermarket that have to feel every tomato or every avocado, before they choose one. I bought a can of bear spray. I've not met the bears of Yellowstone as an adult, and everything I read says they are more mellow than Yosemite bears, but you never know. There was a video I watched about an encounter in Yellowstone between three Yellowstone employees and a mama bear and her cubs. And one of the guys got seriously charged by Mama, but he and his friends didn't retreat. My buddy and I ran into a Mama and her cub at Kings Canyon a couple of years ago, we yelled and retreated. Mama didn't come after us, she ran off with the baby in a different direction.
                         Anyhow, I'm off Saturday morning. I'll try to give you photos and stuff along the way. See if I have anything to say. The second night I'm stopping in Logan, Utah. My very first marriage was there fifty years ago and we lived together all of ten months and I did my second year of college at Utah State there. Thought I'd look around. You might get some strolling down memory lane. See two blogs entry back: "Journeys of A Different Kind" for a little background.

Going to California

Journey 1976

                   It was time to go. My personal love relationships had tanked. I had spent the winter with a bad cough that wouldn't go away. I felt I was drinking too much and doing more dope than I should. And I realized that the guy I worked for was madly in love with me and I couldn't/wouldn't reciprocate and I felt guilty about that. So I shipped a few things on to my mother in Los Angeles, got rid of almost everything else and packed up a pack and stuck out my thumb.

                    A friend said I was going off to California to be a 'bronze god' - thanks. I had also finished the first draft of an entire novel. I don't even remember getting out of New Orleans now. Somebody picked me up. There were a bunch of rides. I was reading "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers" by Larry McMurtry and lost it somewhere along the way and never finished reading it. I sang to the traffic and practiced my whistling skills. I thought I had a pretty good rendition of Poor Wayfaring Stranger just in whistling it, but now realize it was probably pretty bad, but almost anything sounded good while being drowned out by traffic.

                     I was inspected by the Texas Highway Patrol at one point. I had cut off all of my hair before leaving so I resembled a clean cut kid. There had been a little pamphlet published years before entitled something like "A Hippies' Guide to The Man" or something like that. You needed to call them Sir. I did that. They checked me out for weapons and dope. And one of them wanted to take me to the Greyhound Station and make me pay for a ticket, but I told them I didn't have much money and I was going to Los Angeles for my family reunion and I wasn't ever coming back. They finally left me to my own devices.

                       So I got as far as Ft. Stockton and was let out on the west side of town in mid-afternoon and stood there forever. The kids cruising stopped to visit before the sun went down. I ended up just walking down from the highway into a clump of bushes and laying out my bedroll and sleeping and the long night of waking up and traffic and then no traffic and finally finding myself at dawn and putting myself back together again to go back up again to the edge of the road to try again.
A rancher gave me a lift and offered me a beer for breakfast which I accepted and then let me out fifteen miles down the road out in the middle of nowhere. He was turning off to go home.

                        I wrote a song a lot time afterward about that. (Actually it was a poem first, and then I made it a song thirty years later). https://open.spotify.com/album/3QnU3HQaQ1oJseae3yDnSz
The song is a scroll down "Where Are You Going?"
I made it over to a creek and refilled my canteen and went back and waited. Finally I got picked up by a moving van and rode blazing all the way across west Texas at 90 and then at 100 mph. And told the two guys about New Orleans. They didn't think I should have left the girl I had been living with the year before.

                        They let me off in El Paso, A sweet gay guy picked me up and took to the west side of the city all the while offering to take me home with him and he promised to treat me right. I declined. Then again standing out and a guy in a van picked me up. He wanted to drive straight through to LA, was I up for that and I said sure. He had a German Shepherd in the back. So we drove and drove and switched off. Smoke a little dope. I think I napped first. Then he crawled into to the back to nap and I drove and was stopped at the California state line. They wanted to know if I had anything to declare. I told them no, 'thinking shit, don't search the van.' They let me go. I think he relieved me again and he woke me as we pulled into downtown LA near the main bus terminal. I thanked him and walked in to get a public bus down the Carson where my Mom and Stepdad lived. And walked into their mobile home park by 10:00 in the morning. 'You should have called' they told me.

Journeys of a different kind

1972 -

             So I had a hard childhood. Had very little to show for anything. I didn't particularly achieve anything or succeed in anything. My grades were lousy, I had to go to work at 14 to make some money. I was a carhop at a drive-in. The tallest carhop in the world I would guess. I read a lot of books. I had read a lot of comic books, and then paperback action and sci-fi novels. Stumbled on to some better books: Steinbeck, Sherwood Anderson, Maybe probably Jack Kerouac, then Tolkien and Herman Hesse and a bunch of other stuff. Oh and a college student had given me Ayn Rand to read while I was working my way up from Cap Hop to Soda Jerk to Kitchen cook.  I was boy journalist, writing for the High School Paper and they had a teen thing for us to write things for the local city paper. I went to the Bloomington School Board meetings with my clip-on tie to report on the Board meetings as a high school student.
               I had no life. No girl friend. Just a bunch of nerdy friends to hang out with and share weird things with. The kids from the south side of town that I worked with were cool and we did dope and went on illicit camp-outs which the parents never knew about and drank, but were still pretty nerdy.
At fifteen I wrote a short story that was sort of based on a story out of Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson which was basically a tale of me going to work, going to a party and getting drunk and the fantasy of the perfect love. Well, it turned out I wrote it pretty well, or better then well. And all the adults told me I was genius. Probably a big mistake to believe them. But no one ever had told me I did anything really well.
                 I had already been making up stories about myself to compensate for my nothing life. There had been a silly story in Harlan Ellison's first book about how he pretended to be a teenage hoodlum to write a book about gang life and had supposedly learned how to flip open a regular pocketknife to make it seem like a switchblade. I kept that one to tell other kids. I quit a fry cook job I hated in my Senior year because it was a terrible job. I made it into a story about how a friend wanted to to cold turkey his heroin habit so I went to help him do it. I had told this to one of the waitresses and she called me when a group of her friends were setting up a halfway drug crisis center and asked me to come help. Despite my bullshit, I wasn't too bad at it.
                  I was a good little actor. I had portrayed my guilt about a a supposed knife fight to a co-worker at the drive-in and somehow everyone became afraid of me. It was helpful for warding off the bullies. I had a guy in High School accosted me because he wanted me to do all of his homework for the drafting class we were in. I asked him if he was serious and did he hear about the bad knife fight. After that he left me alone. I guess I was writing my first novels in my head.
                   People believed me. Which was a real problem. My best friend and my girl friend bought into the bullshit because I was such a believable actor. You always had to have regret and angst about your life and it bought you belief, whether it was true or not.
                    So married at 18 and off to Utah for my second year in college. I had not admitted my virginity to my wife to be out of embarrassment and confessed it on our honeymoon trip to Utah. This became the betrayal of my love. It went downhill from there. In Utah I went to my first group therapy session, where you have a group of five or six people all confessing themselves in a room with a therapist there to help act as guide. I confessed all. And no one hated me. I was sure they would. So after that, I decided to try and tell the truth. It was hard.

King Lear: