Trailhead view outside the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness this morning.
Letters from the road: Convalescing in Berkeley
I’m in a coffee shop in Berkeley, a few blocks from my friend Ben’s apartment. Ben is letting me stay here while I recover from my wild boar attack. I’ve alternately struggled and dealt with my depression for most of my adult life, and being boar-hobbled has me feeling a little down. But the sun is out today, and it helps to be outside and near other people — I’m in a little courtyard area right now, and a nearby couple is talking about sustainable construction techniques. Jefferson Airplane was playing on the stereo earlier, and before that I walked through a gigantic cloud of pungent marijuana smoke with no apparent source. I’m happy that Berkeley hasn’t challenged any of my preconceptions about it.
On the other hand, I got some weird looks and prolonged stares walking down the street today [thanks mostly to my legs], and I’m slightly worried that in a place with a generalized weirdness quotient as high as Berkeley, I’m the one attracting stares.
There’s another person here reading a book with her laptop open in front of her. It’s a 12-inch G4 Powerbook, which was only available from I think 2003 to 2006, and suddenly I wish I could talk directly to the part of my brain responsible for knowing this and persuade it to replace this information with knowledge on what I should do with my life.
Hey Kim, I hope you liked this letter. I wasn’t sure how to finish it, so I drew a caveman playing a keyboard. I talked to a doctor yesterday and he said my legs are in good shape after the wild boar attack and I can “ride the Tour de France” if I want. Personally I think that might be a bit much, but that’s good news anyway. I hope you are enjoying Kansas.
Letters from the road: TV party with scientists
9:22 pm: Good evening, Kim! Right now I am hanging out with a bunch of Bay Area scientists gathered around NASA TV to watch the Mars rover Curiosity land. But right now I really need to touch down in the bathroom and release the number one lander into the porcelain valley, where we’re looking for traces of water.
Sorry, that was weak.
Well, I’m back from the bathroom and we’re still an hour out from the actual landing. The crowd is thinning out. Most of the local commentary in this living room consists of questions about the landing method and remarks about the one guy in mission control who has a mohawk. As you might have guessed from the fact that I’m writing a letter right now, I’m hanging back in a far corner keeping mostly quiet. I think mohawk guy looks like a hard worker who is maybe uncertain on a personal level about where he wants his life to be. But that describes a lot of us.
Waiting to land on mars got boring, so they changed channels. A Kenyan dude is kicking ass on the track. He looks like he’s hardly even exerting himself. Now it’s 9:43 pm.
9:44 pm: An Algerian just peeled out and beat the Kenyan. The American runner looks very vaguely like Abed from Community. Now there’s women’s long jump on TV. It’s really amazing how good these athletes are. Just looking at them, watching them compete, they don’t look like normal humans.
9:56 pm: Now we have the TV showing the Olympics, but the sound is from the NASA feed. This is working really well. It’s like the nerd version of syncing up Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon.
9:59 pm: “We live in a solar system of riches.” I hope that means there’s gold on Mars!
Letters from the road: Nevada and California
I’m in a little restaurant-ish place in Baker, Nevada, just down the road from Great Basin National Park headquarters. I borrowed their wifi signal in the parking lot and felt bad about stealing it, so I came in here and got a root beer float. There’s a TV on in the background blaring a commercial for cheap life insurance that even the elderly can afford. I’m the only person in here — a small group walked in earlier, then turned around and left. Before that the owner was lecturing her son on the importance of trying harder. My new goal in life is not to be depressed by stuff like this. Of course the font of choice here is Papyrus.
Addendum: Man, the dates on this letter are all screwed up. Yesterday was the 25th, so yesterday’s entry [i.e., the part written in Colorado] should say Wednesday the 25th. And earlier today I thought it was the 27th, not the 26th. I really screwed up.
Here I am in the hospital. Yesterday a wild boar attacked me. It’s kind of a weird coincidence that I began this letter by gluing in the encyclopedia entry for wart hogs … I did that one month ago. I thought I could write right now, but I’m still too loopy on painkillers.
Monday morning in Santa Rosa, California! I’m in room 294 at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, recovering from injuries incurred during a rare and exciting form of human-pig communication known informally as “oh Jesus this wild animal is attacking me”. I’m rattled by the whole experience and making dumb jokes in what I suspect is a pretty transparent attempt to psych myself up.
I’m on one Percocet instead of two — two leaves me completely nonfunctional — and I’ve got an IV drip sending antibiotics into my arm, where my now no-longer-taken-for-granted circulatory system does a great job of sending those antibiotics down to my legs, where they’re fending off infection.
When I posted on Facebook that I was recovering here and invited Bay Area friends to visit me, a lot of people thought I was joking. Apparently I am like the boy who cried wolf, except instead I’ve been abusing people’s trust by shouting “wild boar” my whole life long. And now it occurs to me that I didn’t even explain what the hell happened, I just said “pig attack” and kind of left it there.
I’m still trying to figure out how to tell the story. I was talking to my friend Tom last night, and as much as I want to have a cool, macho-sounding story about fending off a wild pig, he still spent a lot of time listening to me cry while I tried to sort out how I feel.
What a weird summer. What a strange thing. A few days ago I was hiking through meadows in Nebraska Nevada watching clouds form and dissipate like I was a latter-day hippie vagabond, and now I have puncture wounds [lacerations is probably the more correct word] and staples in my legs and just enough meds in my system that I can write a letter but still confuse words that begin with the letter N. Thanks for backing my Kickstarter project.
Letters from the road: En route to California
It’s night and the moon was out early but now it’s sunk below the rock outcropping to the west. It’s lighting up clouds that are hanging just above the ridgeline, and the stars are out and the crickets are going crazy. I’m two miles from Utah, two miles from the Colorado River, and still within earshot of Interstate 70.
The sound of traffic is distant enough that it sounds soothing instead of annoying. It’s one thing to feel like you’re in the middle of a big wilderness, and another to feel like you’re on the edge of civilization. I like the former, but after time it can feel isolating. The latter feels sort of like you’ve pushed some boundary that no one particularly cares about.
It is a period of civil war. Rebel vans, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil galactic anti-van empire. During the battle, rebels managed to steal plans to the empire’s ultimate secret weapon, the death smokey, an armored space station capable of dispensing enough speeding tickets to destroy an entire roadtrip. Pursued by the empire’s plain-clothes agents, Princess Vanna races home aboard her van, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore maximum cruise potential to the galaxy…
I’m in a 7-Eleven parking lot in a tiny town in western Utah, one hundred miles from Great Basin National Park. I filled up on gas and I got a strawberry ice cream bar and store brand donuts because I guess I no longer value my health. Inside the store the manager and a rep from corporate were spitballin’ about how they could reorganize the snack foods. It was amazing, I’ve never seen that before.
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