Blacktop Conestoga

On that last day along the North Fork of the Big Wood River in Idaho, I reluctantly tried to tear myself away from a piece of perfection that I haven’t seen in over forty years.  I decided to forestall the inevitable for just a moment longer and wade upstream in the liquid cathedral that I had immersed myself in for the past few days. It was as if in fact I was trying to not only imprint my own soul and psyche with indelible memory, but was also imprinting the setting around me with the essence of myself there in the eternal, in the tapestry of green forest. My being was like a dry sponge soaking up the sound of the river, a watercourse that begins not far from where we were in occult springs and seeps far up the rocky mountain slopes of the Sawtooth range. Flowing water speaks gently in an ancient and untenable  language that only our hearts can understand amid the dainty, almost mystic roll of native trout as they gently inhale an offering of fur and feathers ti...

It was a warm and lovely day the day before Christmas, the day we buried him. We all struggled to get through that day and Dee and I were comforted by our family. The twins both arrived to say goodbye to their Uncle Sean and were invaluable in the planning of the events that must take place. Of course Dee, being the strong, compassionate and take charge leader that she is shouldered a huge part of the weight of that miserable stone. An addendum, which I will always cite is my absolute sense of amazement that she fills me with each and every day. This year we celebrate 25 years together and I often feel as if I am just learning this complex and rare being. About all I was able to do was a song by Jimmy Eat World, Hear You Me .  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=537v5Avw_mU Before he died we had several conversations about a strange new virus that I had been seeing people posting videos about in China. Health care workers in level 3 Hazmat gea...

On a hot day in October we tucked the blacktop conestoga into a stall at Dumas Storage  with the help of our friend, Sean.   Immediately we set out to begin the next step, organizing, cleaning and filling up the place, something that had been ignored for literally, years. There were roughly 25 empty units and a 30% delinquency rate when we arrived  Nights were filled with cleaning and more cleaning of the "nice" house trailer outside the front gate, and making preparations for hunting season at Seans 600 acre ranch in Marquez. The days flew by and we really didn't have much time to ask ourselves what the hell we were doing in Houston Texas. The storages occupied a great deal of our time but we also saw our kids, cooked for folks and pretty much settled into a routine of sorts, with the blacktop conestoga peacefully sleeping behind the doors of a dark storage. Weekends were spent working or traveling to Marquez and back, and it was a comfortable time for al...

There are precious few places to boondock, or even camp in the state of Texas. It  is a state almost totally, privately owned and because of that very little is available for road nomads to utilize for even one night.    As we were leaving on a hot, windy morning from a night of boondocking in the parking lot of a Dennys in a truck stop somewhere outside Lubbock, Dee glanced in the rear view and was startled by what she saw. A large section of the roof covering on the front of our rig, a material I came  to know as EDPM had pulled loose and was flapping happily in the Jenn-Air hot early October winds. The thermometer was now hovering around 95 during the day dipping down to a balmy 85 or so at night.  I pulled over, and taped the chunk down with Gorilla tape, alarmed. We had noticed what we thought was a small leak during a heavy downpour when we pulled into a county park to camp in Pocatello, Idaho so we knew there was some roof work to d...

We're currently in Houston. been here since October when we decided to take the plunge and landed here at the insistence of our friend, Sean. Prior to that we had been on the road for the majority of the summer, in an interesting  albeit less than financially profitable experience  The prior two summers we traveled to Alaska to work and did pretty well both times, with an epic road trip to the Kenai Peninsula and back from Deep South Texas in a Kia Sportage towing a small teardrop trailer. Along the twelve thousand driving miles that summer, we both were captivated with the enormity and shear majesty of the continent west of the Rockies. It was a resonant chord in us both, and for me a reconnection with the high, wide open space I loved and lived in so long ago. You can literally become a road nomad in these wide open spaces, traveling from one mind boggling vista to another in an infinite suspension of time as we understand it...