Long Night's Run

I left work on Friday around noon, Tim’s flight was getting in to Cincy around then and we were meeting at my place. I gassed up the car before getting on 71, and then went inside for a hot dog in case we were on the road for a while before stopping to eat. I grabbed one off the roller and put it in a bun. Once I got to the counter the plain hot dog rolled right out of it’s bun and slowly meandered across the well worn transactional space in front of the cashier, who didn’t make any reaction to the sad escape attempt. I think they were acknowledging the understood agreement that some things are better left not remarked upon. I paid, put the dog back in it’s bun and ate it in a couple bites before I reached the car. The Western Road Trip had officially started.

The first leg of the trip was going to be the second worst one, only trailing the last stretch back to Cincy at the tail end of the trip. It was a long night’s run from Cincy to the Badlands without stopping for anything besides gas and dogs. We had to cover that distance overnight to make sure that our schedule for the rest of the trip held together.

As we were rolling through northern Iowa, starting to go road crazy after 8 hours or so, I came up with a ridiculous, kind of disturbing, and ultimately amazing (my opinion) game show idea, but I have to keep it under my hat for now because I have every intention of producing this game show at some point, and it would be a shame if someone stole it from me because I tossed I laid it out in detail for free right here. Fuck that. Let’s just say, people “die” when they answer incorrectly. Iowa brings the worst out in people. I think the point is that when you’re driving through Iowa at night, with nothing to keep your mind from wandering into dark corners, you may end up conjuring up the greatest idea of your life.

After midnight, past hour 11, a foggy hell descended upon us as we were trucking along I90 through Minnesota and South Dakota. There is a certain ‘fucked’ feeling you get when sleep deprived, driving fast in very low visibility, and occasionally seeing warning signs for deer crossings. It was frazzling but proved mercifully uneventful. The fog slipped away right before dawn as we started to get into some pretty rolling hills in mid South Dakota, but until then I was somewhat prepared to go to hell with whatever animal decided to cross I90 in the wrong spot that night. 

  

We got to the Badlands a little after dawn and took soooo many pictures at the first lookout. Fucking newbies. Whatever, we were jacked up on actually making it to the Badlands from Ohio in day, while simultaneously delirious form making making it from Ohio to the Badlands in a day. At that point we had both gone well over 24 hours with no real sleep. BUT, we had gotten through the toughest stretch of the trip unscathed, and we had nowhere to bed down anyway, so might as well let the adrenaline guide us for a while so we meandered around. The Badlands are weird. Perpetually dark and gloomy skies over shifting reptilian formations give way to foreboding ravines. We drove around and through them and over them for a couple hours. We found a dirt road that led us to a prairie dog city nestled up to a fence containing a herd of Bison. A group of them thundered across a field as we gaped.

While we were enjoying a sweeping vista Tim had the pleasure of having a 50-ish man with an expensive camera rig give him a dickheaded, “Its a grassland prairie,” salutation because Tim had the temerity to be excited about being there and greeted him with a friendly, “What a view!” Afterwards Tim and I both looked at each other and exchanged a, “Was that guy mad cause you were happy?” “I think so.” We eventually left the Badlands on a very long dirt road and drove towards Deadwood to find lunch and keep moving on our charted course towards Montana. 

Deadwood was trash but also a logical modern extension of what that town started as and is depicted as in it’s TV namesake. A place designed to remove people from their money as quickly as possible. Every building was an empty casino with a bad restaurant. It was overly built up and depressing. We were sleep deprived and cranky upon entering the town and spending an hour there only pushed further into a weird mood. As soon as we ate and left town the mood lifted.

We kept moving, eventually landing in Wyoming, where we went to a general store for beer and supplies before attempting to find our campground. There was a young guy in the store wearing a ‘Liberals Suck’ t shirt. The old lady proprietor told him that there needs to be more people like him at the rally she was going to. Probably nothing to worry about though, likely just a rally for peace and inclusion and understanding of all peoples and definitely not a KKK thing. We left and went to Cook Lake to camp. ‘Liberals Suck’ guy had told Tim it would be deserted when he asked him at the store. It was packed. We got one the last camp sites. I wonder which is more likely, that people have no idea what they’re talking about when giving recs to strangers, or they are willfully misleading us out of some dislike because we were obvious out of towners. I can’t even imagine what it would be like for non-white people rambling around, asking people questions. Pretty quickly after we parked and cracked some beers a hail storm dropped by to say hello. Somehow Tim got and kept a campfire going through the hail and then several sporadic downpours. His efforts eventually made the fire so hellishly strong that it could not be put out later that night without exhausting all of our water and beer. I wasn’t awake for any of that though. As soon as I had a couple pulls of whiskey and some beer I called it an afternoon. All in all, we were awake the first 36 hours of the trip, going from Ohio to Wyoming with a nice stop in the Badlands with nothing more than brief car naps. It was a good start.

Backtracking a bit, one thing we initially noticed when we were talking to the old stoned out white bearded dude running the campground and then the nice old bearded ‘Nam Vet Hatted camp neighbor is that people have convos in slow motion out here. They don’t reply right away and then you’re just kinda staring at each other for a while before they eventually respond 5 seconds later. I would say something or ask something, and wonder if I had offended him or something because they are staring at me intently, then they would answer as I was about to start talking again. It took some getting used to.

We woke up and packed up and left Cook Lake at dawn. The way out was a one lane dirt road that had been commandeered by wild cows at some point between when we had entered the afternoon before and that morning. We bid good day to each grouping of them as we slowly sidled by. It seemed like they were living a pretty good life, living in a grassy wooded mountainous area of Wyoming. They could come and go as they pleased. The first town we saw that morning was Hulett. It was a real western town compared to whatever the fuck Deadwood was. One road, all rough wooden buildings, and the only gas station in Wyoming. The station was closed because it was Sunday, but it was thankfully still selling gas. Shit, what would have happened 10-15 years ago before the pumps had card readers? You go visit Wyoming and just die on some deserted highway, picked over by nomadic warthogs, because they don’t sell gas one day a week?

Devil’s Tower makes no sense, there can be no real explanation I’ll believe besides alien intervention. We first saw it jutting out on the horizon like a galactic petrified tree trunk from about 20 miles out. When we got closer we saw buffalo and longhorns grazing near the base of the tower. We decided to get as close as we could, really bask in it’s devilry, so we walked the rim around the Tower. It was peaceful (the tourist buses didn’t arrive until we were leaving), there was a bunch of wildlife minding they own business, taking in the tower as well before the crowds arrived. One badass deer standing up on a little rise of earth squared up with Tim when he was taking a picture of it with the tower in the background. We left after getting some breakfast and two hologram commemorative cups that were going to get a good workout from the whiskey. 

  

Heading north to Montana we started noticed a lot of white filing cabinets randomly chilling in the rolling fields of Wyoming on Rt 212. Eventually after seeing enough of them we did the mental deductions and figured that they had to be housing bee colonies.

At some point we crossed into Montana after a while Tim said, “Only thing that would make driving through Montana better is giant buffalo herds.” Which, yeah, it would be nice if we hadn’t killed those off. They were noticeably missing.

Before the trip my dad had been worried about us getting pulled over on the trip so he sent me a link to an article comparing state by state speeding violation fines, which was peculiar because I was and still am under the impression that my dad doesn’t know how to use search engines, maybe he asked Jeeves. Anyway, after I looked at the article and saw that Montana doesn’t give a single fuck about speeding I replied to his email with, “Thanks for the info on being able to go really really fast in Montana!” … we broke 100 mph for the first time on the trip on 212 northbound driving away from Broadus.

As we passed Custer National Forest, “Custer can eat shit. He shouldn’t have a portapotty named after him, let alone a nice forest.” We then passed through the town of Lil Bighorn, which if fair is fair, should have easement rights over the neighboring Custer Forest.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve slowly realized that driving on big highways are trash. Unless you’re strapped for time always take the lonely roads. Less traffic. Less semi trucks. You actually see the sights from the original routes that were set up back in the day. Those are the ones that weren’t set up for maximum straightness, but went by landmarks and cool shit.  

We had some hot dogs and gassed up in Billings. Then heading northwest across Montana we took the 3 to the 12 to the 89 to Many Pines Campground. It was a beautiful camp spot by a creek. We grilled some more dogs, and had our first struggle over the scarcity of said dogs. I argued that I should get to eat Tim’s share because he was eating at a normal pace compared to my raccoon-like pace. Little did we know that we were already begun on the great hot dog contest of 2018. We both won in the end, cause we both got to eat a lot of hot dogs and constantly threaten one another that we were willing to eat more to stay ahead in the overall count.

Other campers came by and chatted us up after we finished dinner. Unfortunately with a lot of them there was a shitty undercurrent of anti native american to it. “Just drive through, don’t stop in reservation land. Don’t make eye contact, don’t talk to them.” It was going to be a theme throughout the trip, cordial conversation, veering wildly off into white Americans’ delusional fears of ‘others’. Even when the ‘others’ were here way before we arrived. I guess when you’re driving around America, you should be prepared to get the real America, which is racism and othering and extremely misplaced victimhood of who should be afraid of who when it comes to violence and dirty deeds. At one point a lady drew us a map of how to get from Many Pines to Glacier without going through any reservation land. I think Tim wandered off and I was drunk and stoned and stopped talking altogether before the lady and her husband shuffled off and I headed to bed.

I would like to note that the trip up to that point had needed more warthog, we hadn't seen a single one yet. I was imagining that the whole west would be lousy with them. A lot of these anti native american convos would have been a million time less angering and depressing but infinitely more terrifying if the warnings and fear pushing were about towns overrun by vicious gangs of drunk warthogs. “Don’t look them directly in the eye.” Would have been a lot more informative about ornery warthogs in the area.

I woke up at dawn and took a very brief swim/roll around in the creek to kind of clean off. We hadn’t had a chance to clean ourselves since we embarked on the trip. We headed out of there and stopped at a store in Neihart for caffeine (me: Mountain Dew, Tim: insta-coffee). There were a group of people hanging out in the store gabbing I assume starting their days. The guy behind the counter was an old hippy. He seemed bemused by us stopping in. We paid and left and were on our way to Glacier. Getting to Glacier was the main impetus for the trip. The rest of the itinerary had been built around being able to get to such a remote place. A lot of the thought process had been, if I go to Glacier, how do I get there cheaply while also being able to see other stuff along the way, and really the only option had been driving from Cincy and taking enough days off for it to work (PTO Baby!). The rest of the trip was gravy after Glacier.

A thought I had while driving through so much tribal land in Montana is that America needs a movie about how awesome it was when Sitting Bull obliterated Custer. Like real one-sided, none of this noble civil war hero bullshit, just all, “Damn, Sitting Bull, you fucked him up.” Everyone knows Custer dies, what this movie presupposes is, "maybe he deserved it?"

  

We got to East Glacier around lunch time. First thing we did was take a lovely, cleansing swim in Two Medicine Lake. As the first thing we encountered in the park, it was a real doozy. The water was cold and crystal clear, the mountains loomed over the water in all directions. It was everything I knew it would be. And it was quiet. There were a lot of people around but it was still quiet. Probably because we were in a holy place. There is a certain amount of reverence for a place that pretty. We dried off and got back in the car, mixed some whiskey into a couple bottles of Iced Tea and then went a bit north to link up with the Going To The Sun Road. That road is 40-50 miles of mind bending beauty. 

You go past St. Mary’s Lake, which is flanked by several mountains, almost creating an optical illusion with how they stretch in parallel lines into the distance, and up through the mountains. At the top you find Logan’s Pass, and you look around and all you can see is natural beauty. Then you start heading down the other side, twisting and turning between a dizzying cliffside and sheer rock wall for a half hour before reaching Lake McDonald at the bottom. We hung out on the beach of Lake McDonald for a while. I wish I could drive that road every day for the rest of my life. Later on during the trip I read an article about how their were forest fires raging along that same beach where we were lazily tossing a couple rocks into the lake.

We camped that night in West Glacier at a place with real showers, which was a minor miracle after four days going without water pressure or soap. The lady that ran the place marked on a map the places where Grizzlies had been spotted in the camp. She didn’t seem particularly worried about it, an interesting tactic to take with newcomers, genuine or not.  

The next morning we drove south down Rt. 83 through Flathead National Forest to Missoula. Then took Rt 93 from Missoula south to Challis. You hit the border between Montana and Idaho at the top of a mountain in the Salmon Challis National Forest and then go downhill on your way into Idaho. The road from the border to Stanley is an extremely pretty drive. It follows the Salmon River the whole way, although the river was flowing the wrong way, defying gravity upstream towards Montana, which was odd. Tim didn’t seem to understand why I was confused by it. I eventually figured out why it was flowing upward. It was named the Salmon for a reason, because it went the wrong way. 

We pulled off the road and took dips in the Salmon at a couple different spots that would have been amazing camping spots for how secluded they were. There were signs for an abandoned mining town, so who were we to not check it out. The town was named Bayhorse. It seemed like it would have been a very easy place to get robbed and murdered back in the day. The guide hanging out in the lot collecting the visiting fee ($5) told us it had 8 “hotels” back in the day. They were all by-the-hour hotels.

‘All I Got In Bayhorse Was This Lousy Shirt (And The Clap)’

We met my close friend Ollie in Stanley at a motor hotel we had arranged for the night since it seemed the most reasonable place to meet and have somewhere to stay without any of us knowing the area and probably having very little cell service to figure out locations. We had several drinks on the balcony outside our room before going to dinner. There were hummingbirds zipping to and fro along the balcony checking in on the feeders hanging from the roof. The Sawtooth Mountains sat jaggedly in the near distance. Eventually we went into town for dinner at the Kasino Club and then had some more drinks at another establishment in town. Ollie and Tim hustled the shit out of some cowboys at pool. The cowboys did not seem amused by that development.  

According to Ollie I undertook the sawing of many logs while I slept. Tim and him concocted a story where I woke up our neighbor with the woodwork, and I ended up confusing her with an apology she was not looking for when I saw her that morning, before then telling her to, “Have fun in Montana,” even though she wasn’t going to Montana. The wheels were off. Whatever. 

That day after having some coffee and booze to wake up we took Tim’s friend’s murky advice about finding an unmarked road off Potato Mountain to make our own campsite. I don’t think we made it to Potato Mountain but we did find an unmarked road outside of town and it led us to a wonderful camp spot on a ridge overlooking the Sawtooth Mountains. It was too hot to hang out there and drink all day so we went over to Stanley Lake and went swimming. Tim swam a long distance across the lake. Looked refreshing. I didn’t have it in me. We fucked around for a while at the lake, driving the jeep through a small pond, did some hiking, and then left the lake area in search of our first and only meal of the day. We found it back in town and then afterwards went back to our camp spot to really dig in and get to the drinking. At one point I slugged some whiskey that had a couple bugs in it out of my Devil’s Tower commemorative hologram cup and immediately had to toss it back up into the bushes. Later, while Tim and I were doing some real deal stargazing a little ways away from the lights of the camp, Ollie tried and failed to grill 10 hot dogs over the open fire. No one knows what really happened to the hot dogs. Ollie’s explanation didn’t really add up. If I had to guess I would say that he opened the pack of 10 hot dogs, tried to wrap them the pillsbury dough that he had brought for that express purpose, and then one by one drunkenly miskewered them and dropped them into the fire. I would love to see the footage of it sometime.

We were rough the next morning, slowly peeling ourselves off the ground and then going to the lake for a little ‘fuck you hangover’ wake up swim. Afterwards once we had our wits about us I rode with Ollie down to Boise. At one point as we were cruising through the mountains we saw some riff raff emerging out of nowhere on the side of the road, we surmised that they had been doing rails of k in a cave somewhere out of sight, as shifty Idahoan youths are wont to do. We also had some good laughs about how one our old friends had gotten IMPEACHED from being high school president. We laughed for a long time about that. And then laughed about me drunkenly talking shit to the impeached president’s inlaw about her question about where I summered. Which is such a fucking ludicrous question. Jesus.

 

We got to Ollie’s house in Boise and Tim and I took turns in awe of the running water coming out of the sweet rain shower that his house had. I think it had been 3 something days since we had last showered. I also got to catch up with Al Bal for a bit, Ollie’s better half in their marriage, before we made our move towards Oregon.

We stopped at Brian’s Service Station in Harper, Oregon (unincorporated) because it had a sign that said, “Last fill for 73 miles.” The whole town, population of 5 I’m guessing, was seemingly hanging inside the station because it was hot out and it was the only building I could see in any direction. Everyone inside was having a good sit. It was nice and shady, they were amiable, asking me if I wanted to have a sit as well (they were all lounging on rolling office chairs). One of them told me the president had sat in his chair. I didn’t ask which. Then he asked how much I was willing to pay for a sit in the president’s chair. I laughed for a couple seconds, said, “probably less than nothing,” they had a good laugh at that, and then I finished up paying and we bid farewell to each other.  

I had brought some old forgotten acid on the trip and I don’t know when it happened but at some point during the trip I tried to check up on it and found out that it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Still don’t know where it is. Such bullshit. Tim said he knew something was wrong when I stood stock still for several minutes outside my car, grimacing with my eyes closed and my head pointed up towards the sky.

Another thing lost in time on the trip was when I was riding on a semi’s tail for being in the left lane and the driver nailed our windshield with a mystery liquid. Let’s be real, dude had a cup of piss and perfectly tossed it out his window so that it would nail us. I was more impressed than mad.

We got to Bend, Oregon and had some good quick tacos from a stand in the side yard of a brewery. There were lots of young good looking people there. It turns out that there is a shitload of money in Bend. A couple days later Tim’s friend told us how people make a daily commute VIA PLANES between Bend and San Fran. Which...jesus fucking christ. These goddamn tech people. America is broken, turn the rich into mortar and rebuild.

We left Bend and drove to a deserted canyon called Steelhead Falls where we made camp. We were lounging, having some drinks when Tim went over to take a photo down the canyon when he ‘thinks’ he heard a rattle. We looked up some facts on rattlesnakes in the area and the facts made us severely shook. We immediately moved our sleeping pads/bags about 75 feet away from the canyon onto some flat non-rocky ground. This was the first night we used our phone flashlights extensively when moving around. Once we settled in and it got dark there was a lot of good stargazing, all the constellations and the Milky Way. We also started noticing orbiting satellites. Like lots of them. I had never seen any before. Probably because Ohio and New York’s light atmosphere is trash compared to places out West. Satellites are crazy looking, cause they’re so far away they don’t look like they’re going in a straight line, it looks like they’re sort of staggering along, but really quickly.

At dawn we walked down to the waterfall, it was deserted besides a McDonald’s big gulp and an empty beer can stuck in the sand on the overlook. On our way back up to the top of the canyon we had a family of deer mirror our path about 30 feet above us. They kept the same distance the whole time, kind of watching us, moving along at the same pace. I wondered if they were using us as a way to ward off any predators in the area, figuring the predators wouldn’t attack while humans were so close by. Or they just were curious of the people there that early in the morning. Anyway it was nice sharing time with them.

Before heading out we cleaned up our shit a bit. Some of the coolers had taken on personalities, as in hot dog water, and essence of blueberry. After getting our shit in order we geared up and drove to a campground at Gold Lake in Willamette National Forest, meeting up with two of Tim’s old college buddies. Our camp spot was 10 feet from the lake nestled inside a bunch of old tall fur trees.   

The camp spot had Cray Jays and Stellar Jays divebombing our food. There were precious Damsel flies all over, giving the spot a surreal fairy tale feeling. Our site also was near an impeccable men’s pit toilet. Just...pristine. I had never felt so welcome in a no-plumbing situation. Smell was minimal. The room was spotless. I’m not sure it was real. After we settled in, Weiss, Tim’s friend, showed up. He was familiar with the area and was an avid outdoorsman, but he wasn’t sure if there were any warthogs to worry about when we were talking about animals in the area. I remained hopeful and vigilant that we would encounter one of these majestic woodland scoundrels. Eventually Tim’s other friend Dan showed up and we had some drinks and some campfire fixins, including some gloriously bloody and chewy undercooked flank steak (it was dark and the grill wasn’t very hot, sue me), and much later an entire bag of ‘lil smokies.

The next day we took a drive to Blue Pools. Upon entrance we encountered Bushy. Who did not introduce himself, but did have a rent-a-ranger nametag that said his name was Bushy. Bushy did not understand why we were looking for these Blue Pools. Apparently we were supposed to know that the Blue Pools had gone to ruin, even though if that was the case then why was he there? Lots of questions and Bushy offered no answers. I kind of think Bushy was keeping them for himself, luxuriating on his back in the pools and laughing it up about all the rubes taking his word on the nothing-to-see-here-ness of the Blue Pools. 

After being rebuffed by Bushy we backtracked back to the Salt Creek Falls.  They were very tall. I think the sign said it was a 380 ft fall, which gave me slight vertigo while looking down at the bottom and trying to grab a photo. We then drove down the mountains to Oakridge for dinner at an old brewers union turned bar. It was a really cool place. I read the community flyer board on my way out and it gave a me a twinge of sadness, there wasn’t that much to advertise or talk about on the board. The town was lovely but desolate. There were no logging jobs anymore, which meant no people. Or at least not nearly as many. Weiss and I briefly talked about how Oakridge was a microcosm for America. Giant swaths of our country have no jobs, no economy, just a whole bunch of people surviving however they can. We’re Wile E Coyote suspended over the cliff, sooner or later we’re going to look down.  

We woke up early the next day, packed up, said our goodbyes to the Gold Lake Pit Toilet, and Tim’s buddies, then drove to Crater lake. It was still pretty early in the morning when we got there, so there was no one there yet, including anyone at the guard shack taking money/passes (which we had, but it is worth noting for all the people out there on a budget, if you get there early enough, you don’t have to pay to enter).

On the rim we encountered a retired Myrtle Beach Cop. Tim and I were both pretty stoned, and I was bracing for some more racist shit considering the factors going into the equation (southern, cop, cargo shorts, oakleys), but somehow, thankfully, it didn’t go there. He ended up regaling us with stories about all this crazy Evil Knievel stuff he had seen in his travels, and then about how he had played a minor role in Eastbound and Down. It’s the one where Kenny Powers is in Myrtle Beach and flips him the bird (as his back is turned) while holding a bag of coke. I miss that show. It was a fun convo and we could have sat there and talked to him all day on the edge of the crater, and he seemed to want to, but we had to keep it moving southwest toward the coast.

We drove through Umpqua Forest, which was heavily wreathed in the smoke from nearby fires, and then we hit the coast at Crescent City. Not long after we saw our first Redwoods of the trip, then our first Elks of the trip in a small foreboding “NO TRESSPASSING” trailer park lined street near Berry Glenn. We wondered what would happen if a person walked out their front door and a bigass, hornery Elk was chillin 5 ft away. Bout half a mile down the road we saw a whole herd of Elk just doing some grass chewin in a field. Looked nice.

We arrived at the entrance to the southern part of the Lost Coast in the early evening. To get to beach camp we had to take a switchback one lane 6 mile dirt road up through a primordial forest out along some cliffs and then down to the inlet where they beach was. I was a lil nervous when we were out on the cliffs, and we had our fingers crossed that no car met us because one of us would have had to back their way to a turnout. None of that transpired and eventually we got down to the beach. We looked around for a secluded camping spot, and decided to venture the car out onto the beach to see of there was open space around the corner. Welp, we were going way too slowly to be driving on sand, and started to slowly sink. Tim’s confidence quickly went from, “We’re fine,” to, “GET OUT AND DIG.” We were probably a couple seconds away from beaching the jeep when we started digging, Tim backed up real fast as I pushed, which worked thankfully.

Let’s take a second to acknowledge that I would have MURDERED Tim if we had beached. I told him as much as it was happening.  

We ended up finding a good spot that we hadn’t noticed before and set up camp before walking out to the water to watch a good ass sunset accompanied by a bunch of marine life doing it’s thing in the shallows. 

Once it got dark we went back to our camp and started a fire. Not long after we met the one and only Lander. He had rolled by in a VW sedan and parked and walked back to us to ask directions to the check-in area for the beach rave that HE HAD BEEN INVITED TO, AND ALSO, IN CASE YOU DIDN’T KNOW, HE WAS A FIREDANCER. Lander was not real. You can’t convince me otherwise. The non-real california stereotype apparition named Lander then got back in his car and drove off into the night. Except he didn’t, because in his infinite stoned wisdom he had showed up after dark to a off road beach camp without any info, besides that HE WAS INVITED, and drove his car into the sand, where he got stuck. I watched and heard all this happen and told Tim that we would be seeing Lander very shortly. Lander, then, in true Lander fashion, walked back to us and asked us if we could push him out. We tried, and I actually put 100% in only so that Lander would be free to drive farther away from us, but his car was stuck, and only got more stuck after our attempts. We ended up saying sorry man, maybe the beach ravers can get you out in the morning. He tossed a bunch of weed for our troubles, and then a while later took his firesticks to the beach rave for the night. We never saw Lander again, his car was still stuck there in the morning. He may still be there. RIP Lander. Gone but not forgotten.

We woke up and went for a swim in the ocean at first light. I was a bit worried about going in since seeing the marine life at sunset which had included some seals and mysterious fins. It was a quick swim. Then we drove out of the Lost Coast the way we had come in and got on Rt 1 South. There was heavy fog for the first portion of the drive along the coast that day as we passed a bunch of pretty small towns set on the cliffs.

For a too large portion of this trip my phone has told me NO SERVICE in all caps. Had none in Oregon, had none on the Lost Coast or south on the coastal drive. Didn’t get any service until after I had dropped Tim off in Marin at his brothers and trying to figure out how to get to Oakland proper. Was a lil nerve wracking to figure out how to get from Marin to Oakland with no service for the first ten minutes of the route. One false move and you end up in traffic hell. SPRINT is a company of shit.

I got to Cal and Kyle’s place in Oakland. My buddy Deano was staying there on his own western vacation. He was supposed to accompany us to Yosemite for a couple days, but that shit was on fire, so unfortunately that wasn’t happening. I got to take a shower for the first time since Boise, which had been 4-5 days prior. It’s wild how much you miss things like that when you no longer can take them for granted. Met Ramsey, Cal and Kyle’s little cherub baby. Then took a cab up to my aunt’s house in the hills of Oakland for a drink and to say what’s up, then back down to Cal and Kyle’s. We ended up going to Burmese Superstar for dinner. Place was extra tasty considering my diet so far on the trip. The trip diet has been lots of tacos and hot dogs, so pretty much the same diet as at home in Cincy. Every roller dog is better than the last, so why ever stop eating them. 

Kyle had to mind the baby, so Cal and Dean and I went to Kona Club, which in theory should be a fun tiki bar except the whole thing where Cal forgot her ID so the dickhead bartender flexed on her and made her wait outside while Kyle drover over to deliver it. So we finished our one round and then went to a much better, more welcoming place, Geo Kayes, the much discussed, rarely frequented greatest dive bar on the west coast. Had a couple very cheap beers there and then retired to watch and quietly yell at some episodes of Chopped before nodding off and SLEEPING NOT ON THE GROUND.

  

Since we couldn’t do Yosemite because of fire, we decided to keep rolling down the coast through Big Sur before making our long eastward return drive. Big Sur is Big Sur, it was amazing the first time I experienced it 20 years ago, it was amazing when my friends and I took a minivan all around and over it about 8 years ago, and it has had no drop-off since. Tim and I finally got around to listening to the lost Coltrane album as we slowly made our way along the cliffs. I became WAY too high off this cone Tim had bought that morning. The thing was supercharged weed and I did not need that shit. We were both blunted more a good portion of the stretch, stopping about a million times on turnoffs to take photos. My favorite part about that drive is that you are soooo high up in the air. Waves breaking are just little white slivers.

At the tail end of the coastal drive we pulled off near San Simeon and saw a whole beach of elephant seals sunning themselves, snorting and flopping and looking for a better spot among their mass of bodies. We then finally made the left turn and headed due east into and across the Cali wastelands. West of Bakersfield we passed an army of endless oil derricks on Rt. 46. I subconsciously put on Merle Haggard as we made our way through through the zombified Bakersfield listening to Merle Haggard. I think an apt signifier of the whole town is how cutting through the center is a depressing scar with bridges over it that used to be the Kern River.

That night we arrived and set down our camp after dark at Red Rock Canyon. There was no one else in the place as far as we could tell. We did the quick camp, which he had been doing at basically every stop which is no tent, just pad, bag, ground, alcohol. When Tim woke up he noticed that he bedded down next to a very lively ant hill and a very noticeable snakehole, which could have ended up big bad for him. We decide from there on out not make camp after dark at all costs from then on out. That morning and into afternoon we busted through Barstow and Mojave and stopped on the outskirts of Vegas for gas and Inn n Out, grabbing lunch and a couple extra burgers for later. We then kept moving into Utah. I noticed that the Virgin river was all but dried up only ten fifteen miles south of Zion. That was becoming a theme, crossing bridges with no water underneath them. 

  

Utah is an alien planet. The landscape is all towering moon rocks and pretty nothingness. We took scenic route 12 past Bryce Canyon, and then up and through Grand Staircase - Escalante. We saw Hell’s Backbone in the distance as we drove past sign after sign for slot canyons. We didn’t have enough time to explore any as we had to get to and push past Capitol Reef to find our camp up in the Henry mountains before nightfall. At this point we were up against the sun dropping, so we took in Capitol Reef from the road. Afterwards we found a gas station carved into a boulder, which was a really sweet. It also had running water outside so we could fill up a bunch of loose jugs for free somehow in the middle of Utah desert. 

At this point Tim was flying to get to the Henry Mountains before dark. We were already starting to lose the sun battle when we found the unmarked turnoff onto BLM land. It was an unmaintained dirt road with some long shadows concealing how treacherous some of the ruts and gulleys were, so instead of following it in the fading light for the hour it said it would take to get up into the mountains we only went a mile or two until we found a turnout and settled in for the night. 

We ate the inn n out burgers we had saved from lunch as the sun disappeared out over the desert. As soon as the sun went down a whole horizon of west coast wildfire smoke dropped into the area from higher up in the atmosphere and quickly overtook the stars and all light. Eventually it was so dark and quiet and the turnout was surrounded by what I assumed was thousands of ornery snakes, so we ended up rethinking the open air sleeping and put up our tents in the darkness to avoid whatever was crawling or slithering around in the endless black void of Utah’s moon terrain. 

 

We woke up with the smoke still hazing out everything in all directions. As we left the BLM dirt road we were literally in the middle of nowhere with no cell service so it took us a while to see a road sign that told us that we were in fact not headed towards Canyonlands. After some high speed backtracking we found our way there. Lo and behold, Canyonlands is probably incredible, but that day all of its expansive views were obscured by the wildfire smoke, so it wasn’t as long of a stay as it might have been in better conditions. We did make our way to Upheaval Dome, a collapsed volcano, to check out what the hell our entire planet will look like at some point after all the fault lines have had enough of human life on earth. It was cool. We left and went to Moab where we had lunch at a place called Eddie Mcstiffs. The bartender was nice, and it was nice talking to someone that wasn’t Tim. 

  

From Moab we headed to Mexican Hat, the northern entrance to Monument Valley. As we got close to Monument Valley, we decided to stop at as many roadside stands as we could in the Navajo land. I ended up finding a beautiful handmade item from each stand. One tiny young girl gave me a hard sell on the bracelets she had made at her Grandma’s stand. At another I found a tiny pocket-knife inlaid with Navajo art. 

 Tim and I had a long convo with a middle aged Navajo man about Bear Ears getting sold off for drilling and how that would cut his people off from gathering certain herbs that they used in their tribal ceremonies. He didn’t know what they would do when that came to pass. He wasn’t willing to completely give the US Gov all of the blame though, saying the Navajo Tribal Council had to shoulder some of it as well. He also told us about problem his family. He had to drive a couple hours to the nearest Walmart to stock up on canned food because of the steep markups for basic food staples in Kayenta. Couple that with the fact that their community has never had running water and it’s a damning reminder that America doesn’t give a fuck about fixing even the most basic problems in its most vulnerable societies.

As we drove in to Monument Valley it was hard to not notice how many people were stopping along the Forrest Gump stretch to take pictures in the middle of the road with cars zipping by. 

We paid Navajo Nation for access to a back road to see part of the scenery from the valley floor. Afterwards we drove to camp at Goulding’s. As the story goes, and there may be some revisionist history in it, but the Gouldings were the ones that introduced Hollywood to Monument Valley so that the people that lived here could make money off of visitors. I have a suspicion that the Goulding’s had a more self interested angle to get Hollywood to come that may have been sanitized from the origin story over the years. Their compound had running water and showers, which was something we hadn’t encountered since leaving the Bay Area. Later on, Tim and I were dragging our feet on making dinner over our rudimentary grill when out of nowhere some nice Caribbean ladies appeared out of nowhere and gave us a bunch of food they didn’t need, uncooked kabobs of chicken and shrimp. We grilled those and ate them and then discussed why our camp neighbors, this large group of college aged Parisian kids, were spending so much time in and around the camp bathroom. They would go in and do something in the mirror, then they would stand outside and chat, then they would go back in, and so on, in infinitum. The bathrooms were not nice. The whole situation was puzzling. Why were they here? Maybe it was a church group since they weren’t drinking or anything? I guess we’ll never know. 

The next morning we got up, showered again, and then packed up and were out of there. We busted ass through a couple hours of Navajo Nation in Arizona to get to I40. Every town we passed was poverty stricken. There were lots of billboards telling you to vote for one guy or another for Navajo Nation President. Once on I40 I played a cat and mouse game at 85-90 mph with a fellow traveller for a couple hundred miles all the way into Albuquerqe. We stopped there at a mexican place called Papa Franks for fast cheap delicious enchiladas. We then got back on I40 and rolled to and through Tucumcari then turned north at Amarillo, TX and headed to Lake Meredith where we were camping. Lake Meredith turned out better than my wildest expectations for a random lake in Texas. 

As we settled in to a cliffside spot with a beautiful view of the lake an old local rolled up and started chatting with us, he told us that the lake was bone dry last year and that they had to release dam water from the Canadian River to get it back up to levels that constituted a lake and not a big empty hole. He mentioned that the enticing island out in the middle was literally covered in snakes and was named Snake Island, and then of course he had to veer off into some racist shit about when some cruise he took stopped in Jamaica, and then how Trump was standing up for all of “us” on immigration. We responded diplomatically since were in Texas and didn’t want to get shot and rolled off the cliffside in the dead of night that through our travels we had met a lot of different people of a lot of different colors and nationalities and everyone had been been great (BESIDES THOSE WEIRD FRENCH TEENS AND THEIR PRECIOUS BATHROOM). I think he got the message or had tired himself out, and quickly left us be, but why do all these fuckers all over the country think it’s cool to tell people almost immediately that they’re racist pieces of shit? I mean, I could venture a guess, because Tim and I are also white? So there’s a chance we’ll agree with them and then we can have a good bitch session about how us whites have it so hard in this country because of the other people. I mean POC have it so good right? They’ve gotten the hundreds of years of genocide and slavery and exploitation, and what do we got? Besides their land and money and resources and not having to worry about a white person killing them or getting them fucked on by the police over so little as a sideways glance. It’s shitty that white people feel so comfortable striking up a racist tone in a conversation with strangers and not ever have to worry that they might get their ass beat. America is on some bullshit and has been for too long. A lot of people will never look inward to see that the problems in their lives are not because other people dont look like you or speak like you. Don't pass them off onto others, they're yours to face. There is a phrase that I'm definitely bungling but it goes something like, "If you encounter an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole, if you encounter assholes all day, you're probably the asshole." Anyway, there is a lot wrong with America, but it stems from the systems we have in place to benefit only the people at the top, not the people at the bottom trying to survive.

Sunset came and went and then as we sat having some drinks and some dogs looking over the cliff there was a ferocious lightning storm across the lake in the distance. We watched that for as long as it was within eyesight, making sure it wasn’t take a hard left towards us.

The camp spot had running water and showers. In the morning I rolled up to the bathroom to wash off. Once inside I noticed that there were a whole lot of bugs hanging out, too many. Specifically there were a lot of zombie cockroaches chillin’ in the shower area. After so many days on the road I could not pass up running water when it was present. The next shower was not guaranteed anymore, so I disrobed and tiptoed into the cockroach pit. The shower was a single spray hose job with a whole bunch of pressure behind it. At one point as I moved among the roaches I got blasted right in the dick. At another point I had soap in my eyes and I stepped on one of the cockroaches. I did not enjoy that shower experience. Afterward we were both cleaner and yet more haggard from our experiences in that shower. We got back on the road and drove to Oklahoma City, where we stopped for lunch at Taqueria Del Ray. Del Ray was an old school fast food mexican place with an order counter and a salsa bar and giant servings and I loved it immensely. We then headed northeast through the rest of Oklahoma and then into Missouri and the Ozarks. I was under the impression that the Ozarks were mountains. I was wrong. Apparently it is a plateau. We took a side route through Mark Twain Forest, and found a lake on the map to maybe take one last dip in, but it turned out to be a private lake, or at least the land around the water was private. It was some serious bullshit either way.

We stopped in St Louis for the night, staying at my friend Cassie's house. St. Louis open container laws are the shit, as in you can do whatever you want. New Orleans isn’t the only french city that understands how drinking should be done.

We woke up the next day and had breakfast before making the last leg of the trip from STL to Cincy. Compared to the driving we had done throughout the trip, the 5 hr drive through Illinois, Kentucky, up through Louisville, and then on to Cincy was nothing. We got back in the late afternoon, took one last drive to pick up my cat Bowser from a friend’s house, and that was that. 

  

It was a long ass trip. A lot of driving. A lot of places. A lot of hot dogs. A lot of whiskey and cigs and weed. A lot of sleeping on the ground. A lot of not seeing any warthogs. I was plum worn out by the time we were in Texas. But the miles and the outside living was extremely worth it. It is so hard these days for people to carve two plus weeks out of their lives to just drive and see places. I’ll never have a chance to see some of those places again. Lonely roads out west are hard to get to and beautiful to travel down. How much longer will any of us even have them to take for granted? I hope long enough for me to find more.

Counting Stats: 9 bottles of whiskey, 12-14 station roller dogs (per person), 6 creeks/rivers/lakes/oceans bathed in (per person), 5 mexican places eaten at

Animals - deer, bison, golden eagles, longhorn cows, wild cows, wild horses, donkeys, sound of rattlesnake, unknown texas spiders, rainbow trout, sheep, goats, damsel flies, dragonflies, garter snake, wild dogs, elephant seals, regular seals, unknown dorsel fin, murder birds, ducks, cats, no warthogs (unfortunately), prairie dogs, tiny black squirrels, stellar jays, cray jays, ants, mosquitos, snake holes, snake island, rabbits, rooster

Other Stats: One vomit in Stanley (me), one motorcycle backed into (me), one albuquerque pile up, one flipped truck in oklahoma, one cup of liquid (most likely piss) tossed on us by a trucker ahead of us, zero cop scares, zero pull overs

States: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky

3 choppers seen, too many trains seen to count

Dirt roads travelled - Too many across 8 different states

States camped in: 7 + Navajo Nation