I.







I stared absently out the window at heavy earth moving equipment. The great machines were growling, lurching, beeping, heaving as they clawed and scraped the earth in preparation to build a Natatorium.
I wasn’t really watching. My eyes were seeing this, but my mind was picturing a time over a hundred years before. Often I would stop writing and gaze without seeing out this window.
In front of me on the table were books with curled pieces of paper sticking out of dog eared pages, and a typewriter with a page of paper pompadour.
The attic room had a bed, table, chair, and small refrigerator. The ceiling was peaked down to four foot walls. This was where I pictured a Kafka might write. I rented this room to write an epic poem.
During the day the house was pretty quiet. The people who rented the rooms on the second and third floors either worked or went to school. I used the bathroom on the third floor that was shared with three other renters.
I left my room only to go to the library or grocery store, or once a week I met my Dad at a restaurant for a meal. I didn’t smoke, drink, or do drugs.
I practiced transcendental meditation and ate sparingly so my stomach would be small for fasting.
I had an aversion to relating to people. I didn’t know what to say to people. I fancied that I had “lost my personality” and when forced into some social situation would tell people just that.
I liked to be alone. I could be myself. I liked to sit and think. I liked working with ideas a lot better than working with people.










So I avoided as best I could all the other tenants in this large old house in Woodruff Place where once the wealthy elite resided. I would check the stairs and hall below by peeking out my door, making sure the coast was clear before venturing out to the bathroom, or further down more stairs and out a door.
There was one guy on the third floor who may have sung in a rock and roll band who was around in the day some, who used to yell at me when he’d catch me out of my room. I’d wave or nod and keep on going. Otherwise people left me alone, pretty much.
I’d eat raisins and spoonfuls of peanut butter, or deliberately not eat for a day. I experimented with my sleep, training myself to wake up out of dreams, checking the clock, recording the dream. Cutting back on sleep to where I would nap instead of going to bed.
I didn’t have a radio or TV. I had no desire to be entertained. I was determined to immerse myself in Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln would be my Arjuna, and the Civil War would be the grand struggle between good and evil that is required in the definition of an epic poem.
I was an English Literature major for the three years I went to college. I flunked out because I had lost patience with the academic life. I was eager to experience real Life. Reading the little biographies of writers that they had in the Norton Anthologies, many times these were more fascinating to me than what these people would write.
I researched and wrote simultaneously. I was in a hurry. I just wanted to get this done as quickly as possible so I could move on and so I could move out of this little claustrophobic room.














INVOCATION

Sing of heavenly Muse!
I offer heart and hand open to thy voice so grand~
I am a hollow man, not steeped in Greek, or aged in literary wines. I make a simple plea to thee to guide this verse.

Let me not flatter thee with vanity’s phrase, this mountain, that river, the dropping of names~ thou dost know the need I’m in, need I court thee with all pomp and show, your gracious hand to win?

Thou beyond time and space, being event’s impartial judge, seeing history taking place, seated at the balanced fulcrum~ through the ages having granted grace to mortals compelled to put thought on stone or page.


Look over this left shoulder, assist with thine objectivity and wisdom universal~ that I might of humble service be to thee that hath no voice but thousands and whosoever may herein read.









Should it move one heart rekindle flame of love for this our homeland~ and reinstate in this single breast this vital step toward love of all humankind~ then I should count this venture blessed and offer the laurels of this labor unto thee.





I lived for awhile in a tiny cabin in the mountains. It had a dirt floor with layers of carpets over the dirt. It was maybe eight feet by eight feet with a peaked roof and sleeping loft.
My best friend was a rat. It was a mountain rat, it was a clean grey haired, sparkly eyed creature. I named it “firestone” because the first time I saw him he perched on one of the stones I had stacked around the wood burning stove to hold heat.
This was in the southwestern United States up among juniper and ponderosa pines. Out behind the cabin on a piece of dead juniper tree I carved the word “LIFE”. I was alone and life seemed like death to me.
I was hoping to die young. As if in doing so I would become greater than I could be in life. I wasn’t suicidal, though. I wasn’t that brave. It was a romantic, philosophical relationship.
It was Joplin, Lennon, Hendrix, and Morrison. It was Keats, Byron, and Shelley. It was Jesus, and the Kennedy’s. It was Martin Luther King.
It was body bags from Viet Nam on the evening news.
























E PLURIBUS UNUM

Let us drop into our history’s midst into heated passions of its near division~ growing debate threatens union in conflict of two ways of life~ whether government can dictate to states what be their virtue, what their sin.
Whether Union over all shall rule, or whether any issue can so inflame the hearts therein that they be moved to seek division~ making mockery to the world our founding fathers vision of one nation, under god, with liberty and justice for all.








America, America, O great ship of hope!
Thy southern states would split thy hull to have their ways of life upset.
The dreamy remnants of feudal Europe shining knights and high born ladies~ the rich tradition of aristocracy and grand plantations rooted deeper than the cotton plant.
Old king cotton, like billowed clouds of heaven, soft, fibrous, and white~ the crowned bolls upheld by dark and woody stalks and limbs~ the gnarled fingers of Africa extend, reaching for the New World.
Though captive in advance to ride the cresting wave of hope across the great expanse~ was it not ordained on high, the hearts of Africa should be so swept to suffer ‘neath the learned minds that these minds should no forget the heart that pumps into them life.




O bold self-righteous north, proud upholders of the Constitution, progressive peoples of industry~ that make of money their sacred institution , art thou not prodded by thy conscience?










Thou that drives thy women, children work a day that’s long and short on pay in the din and dinge of factory~ high profits and low wages be the American way.

The Puritans whose providence was twisted into profit and progress to be the evidence of a love of God.

Thy righteous indignation slavery outright should exist one hundred years in a nation founded on equality does not shine so brightly as it might in thine eye.



















Let us turn our gaze west a ways and fix it on one man whose name be Abraham~ a human being of the earth out of clay the Maker’s hand had molded into man from hearty pioneering stock.

It was as if from birth the Lord had fixed a finger on his crown to keep him steadfast down the path he was to follow.

The laws of nature around him worked to join in him with the law he learned of this our land~ his practice grew on honesty on Truth he hung his shingle.





Out of this came recognition that over years spread to every corner of the state~ as a public speaker it was said a rare light would grace his eye as he’d debate with clarity and humor.
















I’d been up through the night writing and didn’t eat food the day before. I had a dream one morning when I was napping. It was more like a series of out of body experiences in rapid fire succession. My senses fleetingly erupted into and out of real life scenes in a matter of seconds. It was like this huge wave moving me helplessly through these eruptions.
In the last eruption I was holding a Tibetan Book of the Dead, paperback edition. I was reading a blurb on the glossy back, the book was flexed with that vertical bar of reflected light.
It read, “ A forum of benevolent Kings shall rule the earth…” That’s all I remember. I awoke in a state of exhilaration and started crying.



















There was a growing need in the heart of our nation, a need so common no one man could see it fully.

Underlying growing passions for division is union’s steady hand at work to fashion its salvation~ playing through the hearts and minds of humans to bring about a balanced end.

Abraham’s simple open heart provided vehicle for a nation’s deeper hope of Unity and harmony~ this was to pull him from his private practice to speak before the people of this land.

Little would he realize his destination was to rise from the tiny cabin in the wood to the troubled halls of the White House.



Through hook and crook and politics with fate’s decree and God’s own hand his party’s nomination was given Abraham.









As if upon some ocean swell he was swept into ascent toward the seat of President~ somewhere in this dream or waking he remains the boy on the prairie’s edge.

The boy who looked out now wide-eyed at crowds before him gathered~ the boy who can’t believe his destiny squats to hide inside the man of Abraham or turns in desperation to his Maker.





























II.



I moved out of my attic room. The poem was not finished, not by a long shot. Feelings of claustrophobia cooped up in this one room…and a feeling of maybe pushing this too far. I was sort of panicked and wanted to get back with people and not spend so much time alone.
I notified the landlord and packed my bedclothes, towel, and dishes into a box. I threw a backpack of my personal affects over my shoulder and walked out.
I took a city bus out to my folk’s place to return the bedclothes and dishes. They were both school teachers. It was good to see them and be out of that room. I stayed there in a small camper parked beside the garage and continued to write for a few weeks.
I did manual labor for a temporary help outfit for minimum wage during the day. Most of it was warehouse work; unloading semi’s that sort of labor. Then I’d write in the evenings.
I had come upon the notion of walking to Lincoln’s birthplace, one hundred and seventy five miles away and to start a pilgrimage on Lincoln’s birthday February 12.
I refused to own a vehicle. I would tell people it was like another mouth to feed like this was clearly undesirable. In these years I learned to walk, and learned to love to walk. I could find my stride and put it on cruise and cover some ground in a few hours non stop. This is on pavement or gravel road for optimum stride. Twenty, twenty five, thirty mile days I could do comfortably. I was used to carrying a backpack. But I’d never walked cross country before.
Also I believed in pilgrimage. All the major religions have pilgrimages. The Moslem Hajj recently had an estimated two million people participate.
The Buddhists have several cites for pilgrimage, the Hindus too.









When I was a teen-ager I got into J.D.Salinger. I forget now who in the Glass family, and it may have come from the last thing Salinger ever wrote that was in a New Yorker Magazine in the mid to late sixties. I think it was Seymour Glass who mentions a book called “The Way of the Pilgrim”.
From this piece of fiction I discovered there actually exists an anonymously
written book with this title. I found a paperback copy at a library and read it.
I don’t remember much about the book now. It’s the story of an Eastern Orthodox Christian pilgrim who took Paul’s urging us to “pray unceasingly” to mean tying the phrase, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me” to his every stride as he walked.
This captured my fancy and since I did a lot of walking I thought I’d give it a try. And over a year or two this prayer became a part of my stride as I walked. It would start up automatically as I was walking.
Beyond this I wasn’t much of a Christian. I had fleeting knowledge of the bible being raised in the Episcopal church. I had no interest in being a part of any Christian church, or any church for that matter. The way I saw it, its up to the individual. There are many ways to climb a mountain.
My spirituality was a mix of Hinduism’s Maya, Buddhism’s desire based reality, Islam’s surrender, and American Indian vision quest. I had used a variety of hallucinogens over a handful of years and experimented radically with my diet and fasting. There is a spirit world that exists simultaneously to the world we wake into.
I wanted to show the spirit of Abraham Lincoln that I was here in a body, if there was any more to be done.

I awoke before sunrise on the morning of February 12. I snuck quietly into the house and left a note with my rent money on the dining room table. Going back outside through the screened in porch and I threw on my backpack. I took a bus down to the Circle in the middle of town and that was where the pilgrimage started, from The Circle.
The first day was pretty mild for mid February in the Midwest. I got as far as Stones Crossing. The sun was setting and it dawned on me that I didn’t know where I was going to sleep for the night.







I had a sleeping bag, but it was all private land. I walked into the gas station there and explained that I was on a pilgrimage to Lincoln’s birthplace and I needed a place to sleep for the night.
The mechanic behind the cash register looked at me real hard like he was trying to untie a knot.
“Just a minute, I’ll be right back.”
He goes into the office, closes the door and gets on the phone.
“Is this the sheriff’s office?...this is Jeb over here at the Sinclair station some character just walked in with a backpack with a gittar in a trashbag on top, sayin he’s on a pilgrimage…that’s right…and he’s lookin for somewhere to spend the night…yeah…sure, thanks.”
In a few minutes a state trooper pulled abruptly into the station. My heart sank as I watched him stride toward me. These people called the cops on me. Wow, they didn’t believe me. They thought I was crazy. He approached me and asked for a driver’s license. I did have one and I showed him.
“You’re lookin for a place to stay tonight?”
“Yessir..”
“Well, there are no rooms in this town, but I can take you over to thirty one, there’s a best western motel over there.”
I didn’t really want to stay in a hotel. I don’t honestly think I considered beforehand where I would stay at night. I had a bedroll, but it was mid winter. There was patches of dirty old snow on the ground. I just didn’t have a lot of money to spend on hotels. But under the circumstances I elected to go along with law.
I slid into the front seat of the police car and rode the ten miles over to the motel. He questioned me on the way. He was curious and as we parted I think he believed me.





















The second day I walked down a four lane highway in a driving rain/sleet that pelted the exposed skin of my face with little icy stings.
I quickly learned not to tell people I was on a pilgrimage. I just kept my mouth shut. When I’d stop at a gas station to fill up my water jug and buy some crackers, use the restroom.
I was pretty odd looking with backpack, bedroll below it, and a small case less guitar wrapped carefully in trash bags awkwardly lashed to the back pack.

This was my Haj, and with every stride I had a mantra locked into it. The same mantra an Eastern Orthodox Christian pilgrim had centuries before me.
I had made up my mind I was going to do this no matter what anyone thought.

This was something between myself and the spirit world. That is what pilgrimages are. You set out to unite yourself with some spiritual state and you achieve it by trashing out your body. Well not trashing it out exactly, more like taxing it to the max.















He ran in silence as the opposition did divide.
Election eve saw the rail splitter, the homely gangly boy, the dream he barely dared to dream beside the candle in the cabin~ when his eyes would weary with his reading and would bid him sleep.
This dream, was it real? The hoopla out his door through the streets, down the lanes, through the veins of our troubled nation.


The returns were in… Abraham Lincoln, our next President























I didn’t want to stay in motels. My options were to camp or stay with people I knew. It was cold and wet outside. I called an old friend of the family that went to college with my mom.
She graciously invited me to stay the night at her house that night. I was careful not to be an imposition and did the dishes after dinner. I told her I was on a pilgrimage and we laughed about that. It was a relief to see it as some kind of youthful folly and to make good natured jokes about it.
The next day I was up early and gone before they woke up.
These years I was having trouble saying good bye when it comes time to leave. It was awkward. It was drawing attention to me in an awkward way. It was a personal statement or announcement of one’s departure that I had a hard time making. So whenever possible I would just leave at some inconspicuous moment. Slip silently into the dawn and maybe leave some cryptic note of thanks, or some attempt to explain myself when it probably wasn’t necessary to do so. Such was the extent of my self-consciousness, of my self absorption.
I felt I had to keep moving so I had worked out an annual route. I’d winter at my folk’s place, work for the temporary service. Come spring I’d head out to Albuquerque, stay with people and either pick up paying work or work in exchange for a place to stay. Then up to Seattle or Colorado, back to Marshall, Michigan, down to Steven’s Farm in Tennessee, or one of its satellites.
I’d stick around until people started to want to get too close to me. It was only a matter of time wherever I went. It made me claustrophobic and I’d be gone the next morning.






I decided instead of going a direct route to Lincoln’s birthplace I would take a more serpentine route where I could find people to stay with, rather than staying in motels.
To be real honest to this day I don’t understand why on the third day out I departed from the most direct route. Instead of walking south I spent three days walking due west.
It snowed again and my leather boots were soaking wet and wouldn’t dry out. I found a hardware store along the way and bought a pair of rubber boots, the kind that buckled with clips up the front. But they were so cumbersome after the first day I cut them down to the height of my leather boot…still I felt like a Clydesdale.
I left the guitar at someone’s house. It was given to me on my fifth birthday by my grandmother. It was a Hawaiian guitar that came with a chrome slide. I never learned Hawaiian guitar, but played chords even though the action on this guitar made to be played as a slide guitar was really high, making chords really hard to form.…until I gave it up, simply because I grew weary of carrying it. Wish I had it now though.. of course.
At some point I headed directly as I could walk to my Mecca, staying in motels. I was absorbed in my mantra and in the age old tradition of pilgrimage. I didn’t care what people thought. I rarely discussed with a stranger what I was doing. I was just passing through, minding my own business.
Still the way people looked at me on the road or in gas stations, grocery stores, motels. I got tired of battling this. I began doubting this whole crazy notion. Most people were going to work to survive, they had families, responsibilities, and what was I doing? A pilgrimage? Get real.

I had had a couple days of overcast skies and a case of shin splints. I was ten days into this, but I was having grave doubts about my folly. There was no one I could turn to for encouragement. I walked all by myself along side this highway.
It was a cold morning when I was to walk across the bridge over the Ohio River into another state. I had always walked the left side of the road, facing traffic.











I was bone tired, but worse was feeling so out of step with the rest of the workaday world. People looking at me like I was peculiar. They were a little leery of me. I was starting to see me as they saw me, judging myself as they judged me. A lone, bedraggled stranger…
All I had to do was stop and put my thumb out and I’d be hitching back to Indy.
So I did.
And after a few cars one stopped. I squeezed into the back seat with back pack. The sun was out for the first time in what seemed like forever. The radio was rocking and these young people were bubbling with energy for so early in the morning.
They didn’t ask me where I was going. They pretty much ignored me…except to pass me a joint. I took it, looked at it, and thought about the Hindu belief that what our senses perceive is an illusion. It was my philosophy to accept what was given me and be thankful.
So I took a toke.
Looking out the suddenly sunny window watching the familiar highway I had walked the previous day fly by. I had a change of heart. I didn’t want to go back.
These people were going to work at a factory. They were getting high before punching the time clock. I think they picked me up because they wished they were on the road. This seemed to be the boost I needed.
I had invested 10 days into this venture. The sun was shining for the first time in days and most of my journey was behind me. I had renewed vigor for my pilgrimage. At least I will know that I have done this and I could care less what anyone else might think. It is all an illusion anyway.

They let me out and I started walking back over the same shoulder I had walked the afternoon before. It would take three more days of walking to reach Lincoln’s birthplace.







I hobbled past a green highway sign, “Lincoln’s Birthplace 1” mile ahead. My shins barked with every step, my Achilles tendons were raw where the cut down rubber boots rubbed them.
It was a grey overcast day, an old blanket of snow on the ground. I had covered two hundred fifty some miles in thirteen days without a day’s rest.
Tears flowed as I set eyes on the museum housing Lincoln memorabilia.












Word went out across the nation, southern states stepping toward secession.
Abraham, weary of the celebration, retired into his chamber room to stretch his lanky frame upon a lounge there.










Across the room, a bureau, on that bureau, a looking glass, in it, Abraham
Saw his frame reflected near its length entire~ saw he of his face, two images, distinct.
He bolted up a closer look to have the illusion vanish.
Lying back down, he looked over again, the double image reappeared~ this time was clear, one face five shades more pale pulled away from the other.
It took his shoulders, then the whole of Abraham seemed slipped into a dream, or out of one into another~ he saw himself in the looking glass standing full as he lie upon the lounge.
He walked this image to the window and looked out over the rooftops of town~ high in the sky he saw a speck that caught his eye to watch it.
A bird in flight, circling downward, a large bird in majestic spiral~ coming closer into view, tilting wingtip to the currents it did command the sky.
What a sight thought Abraham he stepped out to the terrace above the milling celebration in the streets~it was an eagle he could se it now a tilt it broke its spiral to a swoop that saw it light upon this terrace railing.

“They said I’d find you here
So it seems tis true
Though to you it may seem queer
A talking eagle in front of you~







It’s not that I am talking
But thou dost lend thy tongue
To nature to be heard~
Nature will have its say
Quite a tale will it spin
I want to thank you by the way
For opening up to let me in~
O ye civilized humans who think
You are the cream of the crop
You are a passing fashion
Fad about to drop~
Do you mind flying
I’ll show thee what I mean
Don’t worry with lack of wings
We’ll go where we won’t be seen~
This trip won’t last an instant
Nor will it cost a dime
We’ll merely disengage ourselves
From this point in time~
It wsill ever be here
As it is now found
Center thyself in this eagle
And lot’s go round and round~”





I took a bus out to Albuquerque. Spring was coming now. I had studied a map and was brainstorming about walking from New Mexico to Indiana. I was proud of myself walking to Lincoln’s birthplace I was full of a sense of
accomplishment.
I’d have to find some work in Albuquerque. I liked doing manual labor. It feels good to work hard. My body feels good and tired, and I like to think my mind is clearer at the end of a day’s work. You can release a lot of stress and tension through manual labor. And if you work hard enough the mind releases endorphins like runners get.
Sometimes unloading or loading semi trucks you have to hurry to get the load in or out. Then it’s like basketball practice running sprints. You work your body to the max. You go home exhausted, but you feel really alive.
I like that.
I could usually get out pretty quick through the Albuquerque temp service. I was on file with temp services in several cities. I had to work wherever I went. I told myself half jokingly that work was the only thing that kept me sane. Looking back it’s not so funny.

When in Albuquerque I always buy my peanut butter at La Mantanita Food Coop. This was before it moved up town and got more mainstream. Like coops across the country this one had a large bulletin board with curling cornered notices as you enter the store.
I entered the Coop a week or so after setting foot in New Mexico. I glanced at the bulletin board and read some bold print “The Longest Walk” poster. I thought to myself rather smugly, yeah, well try two hundred and fifty miles for a walk. I went in, shopped, and on my way out stopped to read the fine print on that poster.
It said Native American people began walking from Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay on Feb. 12, heading to Washington DC to protest 11 pieces of legislation wiping out more treaties…
I was taken aback. My little walk paled next to this three thousand mile journey. It started the same day I started walking to Lincoln’s birthplace.
They were camped outside Pueblo, Colorado for a week before heading on east.






It was a no-brainer for me. I gathered my things onto my back and caught the next bus north toward Denver.


As a smoker I always sat in the back of the bus, and I can still smell the chemicals they used in the restroom. I had quit smoking a year or so, so I was free to sit anywhere on the bus but sat in the near back anyway. There was an order to the seating on a greyhound. The older or wealthier folk occupied the front of the bus, usually white people. In the back seats was the riff-raff. That’s where the smoking and drinking and what not went on in the darkness of the wee hours between the 2 hour stops at seventy miles an hour.
As that bus powered through the Sangre de Christo mountain night I gazed absently as was my wont in those days through the window, seeing the highway go by, seeing the reflection of the interior of the bus, seeing only what I was thinking about.
When I was in my late teens I saw a very old photograph of my grandmother wrapped in an American Indian blanket with two other teen aged girls also wrapped in similar blankets. They looked like they were dressed up for something.
My grandmother never indicated she was American Indian, though their house had many American Indian rugs and turquoise jewelry, and a drum. A real animal skin and raw hide painted drum that was still sturdy enough for me to sit on as a small child, but looking old and well worn to me then.
She was born in Oklahoma before it became a state. She married a Colorado Lumber Salesman who used to ride horseback on his sales route as a young man. I knew them as Dommie and granddaddy when I was growing up. They had settled down in a small northern Indiana town where granddaddy owned a lumberyard.
As a kid I played cowboys and Indians and always wanted to be the Indian.
But it never occurred to me that I might have Indian blood. I was raised mostly in small town Midwestern United States. I rarely saw a black person, and what I knew about American Indians I learned from Tonto.






Toward the end of my grandmother’s life I lived with them to help tend my grandmother who had had a couple of strokes and was just out of the hospital. I helped with her physical therapy, getting her up out of a wheelchair to try to walk. Granddaddy couldn’t do this he was eighty years old.
It was understood, but never stated that Dommie would not recover, and it was assumed that we should still do everything we could to get her back on her feet. To “give up” was unthinkable.
Sometimes my grandmother would cry because she didn’t want to try to walk, but we kept saying “you can do it.” They lived in a single story dwelling, but many times she spoke about the people upstairs and the shenanigans that went on up there. It worried Granddaddy and he’d try to hush her up.
In her prime she was a very dignified, gracious person. It was sad to see her dying in this way. And she did pass away a few months after my stay.
I thought about her as I traveled to Pueblo through the interstate night. And I thought much as I’d like to claim some Indian blood. I had no proof.
I had gotten into American Indian lore some as a young man, and read the Carlos Castaneda books, that went beyond Tonto, but I knew I wasn’t going to pass myself off as an Indian.


It was a gusty grey high plains March day. I found the fairgrounds where the Walkers were gathered. As I approached I got kind of scared. I approached through a small woods and got to an observation distance and watched a burly chested, gnarly featured long hair Indian driving a white pickup with four raggedy looking people in back and a couple silhouettes in the cab. He looked a little scary and the whole vibe was like nothing I’d ever been around.
Still I thought I’d come this far. What’s the worst that can happen? I could die. But I didn’t think that would happen really. So I mustered up the courage, spun around the tree that I’d been hiding behind and eased into their camp.







“Ya goin out to camp?” Came a raspy female voice from inside the cab of the pickup I’d been watchin. I was taken aback. I thought I was invisible. I thought this was camp. And the gnarly looking Indian was sliding in behind the wheel.
“Uh…uh…okay.”
“Climb in.”
Four people were in the cab of the truck and seven of us in the open bed. We sped across open junipered mesas to camp. The wind pulling everything supple. Now I was alive. It was scary, because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know how or why I was alive, but I felt an exhilaration, an excitement. I took a deep breath.


The camp was on top of a mesa, you could see for miles in every direction. It was overcast without threat of precipitation. The truck stopped at “the gate” they motioned me out of the truck there. I jumped out pulling my backpack with me.
“The gate” was a canvas tent and three raggedy people squatting around a fire trying to brew a pot of coffee. I walked over to the fire. They were intent on getting this aluminum percolating pot to start percolating. They didn’t acknowledge me. I stood awhile then dropped into a squat.
They knew I was there, but they didn’t look at me. They ignored me. It was two American Indians and a bearded bespectacled white guy.
“You see that sign?” One of the Indians said, still not looking at me. There was a hand lettered sign on a piece of plywood leaning against a rock not far away. “NO DRUGS, ACOHOL, OR FIREARMS” I had read the sign and since I carried none of this I didn’t give it a second thought.
“Yeah”
“No drugs, okay?” He looks my direction but doesn’t make eye contact, as he takes a tin of Buglers tobacco being handed him.
“Okay, I don’t have any drugs.”
“Where you from?”
“Just come from Albuquerque.”
“We got people here from Albuquerque. You gonna walk?”






“Maybe, I don’t know.”
“Go on in.”
Slung my pack over one shoulder, walked up the gentle slope of the mesa top, there were campfires with people clustered around them. There were several teepees, but mostly canvas tents and small white bus. I really didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t comfortable just strolling up to a cluster of people. So I squatted near the white bus that was sort of in the center of all the camps. I took off my back pack, found that bag of granola, and had me a snack and some water.
I kind of liked being left alone. I could walk with these people and they would leave me alone. This was perfect. I didn’t have to relate. I could just eat, shit, sleep and walk.








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