this summer

June 1st was my initial departure date from Battle Creek, MI. I had been planning on hitching with my Dog Brady, but while I was packing I decided to try and simultaneously make stove-top popcorn. My first mistake was being scatterbrained and trying to rush. My second mistake was leaving the kitchen and letting the oil catch on fire. My third mistake was not using the extinguisher that was right next to it, trying to take the pan outside, and spilling 500 degree oil onto the back of my right index finger and hand. Sounds painful, right? It wasn't, because I boiled the nerves endings away, hence no pain, but some grisly looking skin.

So I had to take the Jetta after a week of burn clinic and doctor office visits and finally deciding that I probably didn't need to get a skin graft. I worked at Keystone Science School in Summit County, Colorado this summer. Wonderful place, wonderful kids, wonderful staff...it renewed my faith in camp. Ask me about it if you are interested.

I left Colorado on August the 10th. Salt Lake City was my first stop, where I toured Mormonism and tasted the first discomforts of freedom of life on the road by sleeping in my car. The missionary I spoke to the next day told me that they believe in God’s creation, although God’s words are not our words, and God’s time is not our time.

About an hour outside Boise I picked up Tim. Tim lost his license to drive about a year ago for multiple drunk driving charges. He had always been a drinker. But he said that something clicked for him when they finally took his license away. He knew that something was up. He began attending AA, and hated every minute of it, but knew he had to go because it was healthy for him. He’d been sober for 6 months. When he left, he handed me his three-month sobriety coin, I think because he knew I needed it more than him.

In Boise, Abby and I danced around the affection of old and new friendship, and floated down the river in laughter. Hitchhiking is definitely easier with a woman.

Seattle was a return to Michigan. Blake and Paddy and Jenny and I played video games, and reminisced about our old high school days not by talking about them, but by recreating them for just a few short days.

I met Big Happy Chris with Blake down in Corvalis, Oregon, and had dinner with Leanne in Portland.

I dropped by K-9 companion of four years, Brady Boy, off on an organic farm in Northern California. I had been preparing to take him with me south of the border and tough through the red tape, but the pavement and the dangers he would have gone through convinced me that the woods and the vineyards and his new temporary master fit him too well for me to pass up. Thanks Jack and Jono.

In San Francisco, I met Jake's friend Gail for breakfast and a good chat about Big Mind meditation, among other things. Istayed with Jonny Wheeler, whom I had not seen in a few years. We climbed a mountain overlooking the entire bay, got paranoid about shadow-mountain lions, and on the way down the mountain, because he asked, I told him the biblical story of the Jews and the Arabs from Abraham to Moses. He was right, too, when he corrected me about Ishmael being born before Issac.

There were no tickets to be had for the Radiohead concert in Santa Barbara, despite two hours of waiting with likeminded lastminute ticketwishers.

My Korean, Khazakstanian, Russian-Speaking, Newly Married, Twins-on-the-way-and-how-the-hell-can-he-prepare-for-that, former high school exchange student, and good friend invited me to stay at his very nice condo north of L.A. Yuri, thanks for the good conversations.

I kicked my niece out of her own bed for a week in Oceanside before moving into my tenting hammock. During the first beer I drank with my bro Matthew in three years, I told him I was giving him my diesel-powered Jetta for a year, and asked him if he could drop me off at the Mexican border in a few weeks. I think he was a bit astounded, but he agreed.

I got to know his two beautiful and well-raised children, Reese Shelby, and Matthew Henrick, and I learned how to be comfortable both loving and provoking my sister-in-law at the same time. Thank you, Kalifornia Kunitzers, for welcoming me into your nucleus for a short while. I know you yearn for snowy mountains and traffickless roads to plow, but I hope you can find the contentedness and the possibilities right around you, even if they don’t know how to drive, and even if they do put bedrooms in their garages.

Matt, Lisa, Reese, and Matthew dropped me off at the Tiajuana border on September 14, and I walked South with my pack on my back through the unguarded, lineless, one way turnstile into Latin America.

More soon.