Glitches in the earth: Saturday 5/11 to Thursday 5/16. Boise, Crater of the Moon, Idaho Falls, Yellowstone National Park, and the Grand Tetons

Saturday I say thanks and farewell to Corinna, her housemates, and the chickens, and start heading back east, following the south side of the Columbia River (Wimahl, in the Chinookan language). Much of highway I-84 that I’m driving on runs along the old route of the Oregon Trail. In the evening I’m back to sleeping in my car at Hotel Wal-Mart, this one a little to the northwest of Boise, Idaho, in the historic lands of the Shoshone-Bannock Indians.

The next morning I go to see the historic Idaho State Penitentiary nearby, which I hadn’t really planned on going to, but the old dusty stone building looked cool from afar, so it makes for a good impromptu visit. It can be more lighthearted to learn about the prison’s Wild West history from 150 years ago, like a notorious inmate who killed several husbands to get their life insurance money, but there are also some more recent stories of people jailed here for harsh and unjust reasons, especially in the women’s ward. As recently as the 1950s and 1960s, at least one woman was sentenced here for “procuring an abortion” (the penitentiary closed in 1973, after a few riots against its cruel conditions in its last years). Some women were also jailed here for adultery, even if they were legally separated from their husbands.

I stop in Boise to have my lunch, and it’s actually a surprisingly funky kind of place. There’s a whole open street art gallery in a bunch of alleys between buildings downtown. I have to say, from the couple times in my life I had ever heard Boise, ID being mentioned, I never expected it to be a Greenwich Village on the Oregon Trail. I get back on the road and keep moving east, and I can see some of the Rocky Mountains in the distance to my north (I’m currently moving through the Snake River Plain, the smoother region of central/southern Idaho). A couple hours later I make a loop through the Crater of the Moon, sprawling fields and hills of basalt, black volcanic rock. A lot of the region out here is volcanic; it gives me a taste of what’s to come when I get to Yellowstone in a couple days. The eruptions of lava that covered this particular land continued until as recently as just 2,000 years ago; the Shoshone people have continued to orally pass down stories about them.

I continue east through the town of Arco, one of the first towns in the world to ever have its electricity generated completely by nuclear power in 1955 (generated for just about an hour). As I get closer to the small city of Idaho Falls, I pass by more land where much nuclear research is still done today; there’s another town called Atomic City (population 29–not much of a city). I get into Idaho Falls. A Couchsurfing host who responded to me, Mark, said he wouldn’t be able to host me tonight, but he was still really determined to make sure I have a place, so he got his friend Desmond, who sometimes hosts people for him, to take me in. I hang out with both of them for a couple hours that evening. They’re Mormons—yes, I’m getting the true western experience! Except they tell me they’re not “Mormons.” They’re Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; “Mormon” is just the name of their book, it’s not actually what they call themselves. They’re really welcoming fellows, not as uptight as our stereotypes of them would have us believe back east. And no, they’re not polygamists. It’s also fun to hear them talk about the Church members further south around Salt Lake City, whom they see as being more snobby and hypocritically materialistic.

We say goodnight to Mark as he heads home, and the next morning I hang out with Desmond a bit more over breakfast. He’s got some cool cardboard-carving and painting art that he does, and insists on giving me a piece to take without accepting any payment. I thank him again, and I get ready to go northeast now. I see though that a little ways out of town is the National Potato Museum, which sounded funny. It ends up being one of the most disappointing things of my whole trip. There’s some stuff of agricultural interest, and a few quirky cultural artifacts, but it’s a pretty decrepit place overall. I cut my losses and head back into Idaho Falls, where I go to a café with my laptop to witness the single most disappointing thing of my whole trip—the second-to-last episode of Game of Thrones. God, what a colossal shit-show.

But hey, I’m still on a great adventure out here, so I just embrace that and turn north towards Yellowstone. I stop on public forest land a few miles outside the park to sleep for the night, and Tuesday I head east in the early, chilly spring morning, the sun striking the peaks of the mountains around in the distance. I pass briefly into Montana through the tourist lodge town of West Yellowstone, where there are lots of signs in Mandarin for all the Chinese tourists. I cross a small bridge and enter Yellowstone National Park (I’m in Wyoming now). After just a few minutes, I catch my first sight ever of a family of buffalo. It’s a beautiful thing to see. This noble beast of the West was driven almost to extinction 150 years ago as the railroads crossed their lands and divided the herds. Settlers deliberately hunted them to deprive Indians of their main food source, and passengers on the trains would aim their guns out the windows and shoot them down just because they could, cruelly proclaiming their dominance over the frontier. The buffalo population gradually recovered through the last century, and they’re now a protected species.

As the morning continues, I start to see some of the geysers and other weird natural phenomena of the place. This is all because the 3,000+ square mile area of Yellowstone is over a giant caldera, a supervolcano, mostly under northwestern Wyoming. The volcano last erupted over 600,000 years ago, but it still causes the water systems to reach huge heat levels and shift the landscape. I stop first at the Old Faithful Geyser, which as its name suggests, predictably shoots a huge water burst into the air predictably every 1.5 hours, on average. A couple hundred other people gather for each eruption, from a safe distance—the water can get as hot 400 Fahrenheit. When I see that it’s been an hour and 25 minutes since the last burst, I make my way to the benches closer to the geyser. I wait another 15 minutes; this time, it erupts an hour and 40 minutes after the last one. I’m joined by the dozens of other spectators in witnessing the faithful eruption. The geyser field around Old Faithful has the cool effect of other columns of steam constantly rising from other pits, though their subterranean pressures make their eruption patterns less consistent. About 20 people have died at Yellowstone over the past 150 years from accidents with the scalding waters, or with some of the highly acidic ponds.

I see some of the others erupt before going further north into the park. Thankfully the place isn’t that crowded yet; one of the park rangers tells me that it gets absolutely packed at the peak of summer, and that some of the visitors can get very nasty as tempers get even hotter than the geysers. There’s still some traffic as I drive north, and I pass one point where over a hundred cars are pulled over to the side of the main road as people stand on the side trying to get pictures of a family of bears a few hundred yards away. A friendly older couple lends me their binoculars for a minute so I can see them. I soon arrive at the Mammoth Hot Springs area to see some of the multicolored rocks, pools, and waterfalls. The colors in the water are caused by little microscopic bacteria that love extreme heat—thermophiles. Their presence causes some of the fumes from the hotter pools to stink really bad of sulfur, like rotten eggs. Walking among these otherworldly features, it feels like these are all a bunch of glitches in the system of the earth, blips in nature. But they’re beautiful glitches at that.

I find a place to sleep in my car, in a parking lot near the old army fort, and watch some more buffalo grazing just 30 feet away at dusk. The next morning I go further south-east through the park to see the main grand canyon where the Yellowstone River (Mi Tse A-da-zi in the Hidatsa language) runs through. Hidatsa, Shoshone, and Bannock tribes used to collect minerals from the springs to use as paint, and also mined obsidian in the mountains for weapons and other tools. As with the other national parks, these Indian peoples were forced out of the Yellowstone region by the US army when the park was created. There’s also one sign in the park commemorating Chief Joseph’s tribe of Nez Perce fleeing through the area from the army in 1877, as they tried to reach Canada. I continue to enjoy their homeland throughout the day, seeing more colorful ponds as well as some bubbling mudpots, spots where the earth pretty much farts, caused by the boiling water heated by the volcanic tunnels far below. There are also plenty more buffalo herds.

Late afternoon I saw farewell to the last of these enchanting natural glitches, and continue south into Grand Teton National Park. The Teton mountains are like a nice dessert to enjoy after the main course of Yellowstone. No geysers or other glitches here, but some all-around great Rocky Mountain scenery. There’s still plenty of snow all over them, as well as some year-round glaciers (most of which are slightly smaller each year due to climate change). I enjoy some great views before sunset, and I park in a mostly empty parking lot for the night. Thursday morning I wake up early to explore more and take a nice hike up Signal Mountain, overlooking the higher mountains, Jackson Hole Valley, and a bit of the Snake River (Ki-moo-e-nim) that flows west through Idaho and into the Columbia/Wimahl. I make some other nice stops as I continue south throughout the day alongside Jackson Lake, my final stop being the 100-year-old Chapel of the Transfiguration, a lonely little log building set against the mountains. I drive a couple more hour south in the evening north of Rock Springs, where I park for the night at a truck stop.

In the soil again: Friday May 17^th to Monday May 27^th. Fort Collins, Denver, Coaldale, Colorado Springs/Manitou, and Boulder

Friday I finally come to the vastness of the Great Plains as I cut east across most of Wyoming, passing prairie town after prairie town on the highway. At Laramie, where outlaw Butch Cassidy was once imprisoned back in the 1890s, I turn south down into Colorado and into Fort Collins in the afternoon, where I have a nice reunion and dinner with two family friends of my parents, Michelle and Roger. That night, I drive another hour south to Denver through the historic land of the Arapaho Indians. I stay with a Couchsurfing host, Brady, who’s able to tell me a bit about his own travel experiences in Britain, where I’ll be going next month.

As usual, I’m too overwhelmed with all the things to do in a major city, so I don’t get to see too much in Denver on Saturday, though I do visit the International Church of Cannabis. It may sound like just a joke, but while they may not have any clear scripture or theology, they do take themselves somewhat seriously. Random visitors like me can’t just come in and start smoking weed casually; they only allow visitors to partake during the set times of their smoky worship services. Many religions across the world have of course used cannabis and other psychoactive substances as sacred rituals throughout history, so having a church dedicated to it isn’t too much of a stretch. That night, I also meet up again with my friend Henry from Portland, as he’s in town with his wife on one of their weekend trips.

Sunday morning I find another religious community and join a local Baha’i house’s service, since I’ve wanted to meet some American ones ever since I got introduced to the Baha’i in Lesotho a few months ago. They’re of course welcoming and eager to hear about how I first met the Baha’i in Lesotho and the rest of my travels. And after that, I’m off further south, where I will finally get to do some more WWOOFing and help out some hosts with their gardens this week. I soon turn more west and drive towards the mountains, through the narrow canyons alongside the Arkansas River that flows southeast toward the Mississippi. These are historic lands of the Jicarilla Apache and Ute tribes. I roll in to the rural town of Coaldale, population 255. Four hours southwest of here is Durango, near Mesa Verde (where I was a month ago). I’m welcomed by Jill and Mark, a couple around 60 years old. I bring some of my stuff into an entire cottage of my own they have for volunteers.

I then get to join them for a dinner with the town’s residents in their community center, and get to see a fascinating example of local politics at work. The town happens to be having one of their planning meetings, and they discuss management of services like the fire department, ambulance, and cemetery, as well as social events. Most interestingly, there is a representative from a strip mining company that has been operating on nearby land for the past couple years. The town occasionally meets with people from the company, who share updates from the mining work and address any concerns about pollution and noise whenever explosives are used. From what I can tell, and from what Mark and Jill tell me a bit more later, the relationship between the company and the town seems to be respectful.

Monday morning, Jill and Mark acquaint me with their bit of land. They don’t have a full farm, just some nice gardens for produce; it’s a bit more like helping out in Avril’s garden back in Cape Town. For the days I’m there at least, Jill is in charge of most of the gardening, and she shows me around the patches of that I’ll work with. They’re lucky to have on their land a very reliable stream from the mountains, for irrigation. There are some carrots to harvest from last year, and some new things to plant for this year, like beans.

And of course, as always, there’s the weeding. Tedious as weeding can be, I’m (mostly) happy to be doing it again. I also get to work more with composting than I ever have; I saw some of it being done at the other farms I’ve been to, but never got a chance help with it. They have a couple big enclosed piles of compost here, and Jill instructs me to move around and turn over the material so that it continues to decompose. They’re able to use manure from a lot of their neighbors’ farm animals to help make some great fertilizer. Having some great scenery of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the distance while I work is an added bonus.

Jill and Mark’s main livelihood is currently from a home-run wool business, so the rest of the time I help them with that. They buy huge pallets of wool wholesale, mostly from Australia where the sheep are of high quality. They order bundles of different dyed colors, and then store and ship them out to online customers across the US. They usually only do one or two of these big shipments each year, and I happen to be there for this big event on Tuesday. I help Mark and Jill inventory in their mini warehouse, bring in over a hundred heavy bags of bundles (6000 pounds of wool in total), and store the new arrivals. Unfortunately we notice some of them inexplicably got wet and almost ruined during the journey, so I also help check for more of these while they contact their supplier to figure out what happened.

I join them each night for dinner. Jill’s great cooking and Mark’s home-brewed beer are made even better after my ascetic diet of mostly basic groceries in my trunk’s mobile kitchen the past few weeks. I get to hear more about Coaldale, and how they came here. While still a site of farming and some mining (the remains of the original stone charcoal kilns are still around), the town is now largely a rural retirement community that gets people from all over. They often are people with different social and political backgrounds, which Jill says makes for interesting book clubs. Jill grew up in Australia, and Mark talks a bit about his father’s time growing up during in eastern Texas during the Dust Bowl years.

Funny enough, I also thought they might be Jewish when I read on their WWOOF website profile that they keep Sabbath on Friday night & Saturday, but it turns out they’re part of a seventh-day Christian church—they follow more of the Old Testament stuff. They also avoid leavened bread during Passover, and they don’t really celebrate Christmas or Easter due to those holidays having more pagan than biblical roots (and also the fact that Jesus probably wasn’t born in the winter anyway). Jill and Mark aren’t militant about it or anything. It’s not like they condemn most other Christians who do those things–it’s just that from their own theological perspective, they don’t. I’ve seen a pretty wide range of religions over the past week; the Church of Cannabis, Baha’is who pull from multiple faiths, and now some Christians who don’t celebrate Christmas.

Friday I must be off again, if I want to have time to squeeze in some more things before racing back to Jersey to fly and meet Daniel in France in two weeks. I thank and say farewell to Jill and Mark, and Coaldale, before driving back east. As I follow along the Arkansas River again, I pass by the tinier town of Cotopaxi a little down the road from Coaldale. While Cotopaxi is just a site for whitewater rafting tourism now, back in 1881 a Jewish prospector, Emmanuel Saltiel, brought in about 70 Jews fleeing from Russia. It was disastrous, from what little I read and heard about it this past week; the immigrants were not given the housing and equipment they’d been told they would get, and what little crops they tended failed. Most of them left within a few years…who knows, maybe some of them were cousins of my great-great-grandparents. Further down the canyon road, I make a quick stop to look at the Royal Gorge Bridge, one of the tallest in the world, and the gorge itself is beautiful too. Some of the Jews in Cotopaxi worked for one of the railroad companies around here, since the farming wasn’t going well. There was a small “railroad war” around those years too, fought between gunmen hired by competing companies.

Once out of the hills, I continue east and north towards the town of Peyton, where I’ll reunite with my friend Levi. I also realize later that on my way that I passed within a few miles of the federal Supermax prison that currently holds Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) and El Chapo Guzman, among others. But even had I known at the time, somehow I don’t think I would’ve been able to stop by and have lunch with them.

I get to Peyton, and I have a great stay with Levi and his parents over the weekend. I get to take a break from driving for a bit as Levi shows me around the area. There are some great natural sites like the multicolored hoodoo stone formations of Paint Mines, and the less colorful but huge towering rock spires at the Garden of the Gods. The nearby larger town of Manitou Springs is also cool, with a dozen fountains across town that constantly spew mineral water from the nearby natural springs. The rest of the time, Levi and I just cook together and catch up back at his house, and each night I’m entertained by his dad, who tells me some wild stories from his youth that are definitely not appropriate to share here.

But again, I have to keep moving, so Monday I say goodbye to Levi and his family and head back north for my anticipated trip through some of Sioux country and the Dakota Badlands. Levi’s dad gives me a couple of masks for my mouth and nose, in case I ever work with cows or other livestock again while WWOOFing; he tells me it’s good to wear them so I don’t breathe too much of the animal manure. As it turns out, I don’t actually end up using them at any other farms, since I don’t find myself working closely around much livestock like on the farms in South Africa and Palestine…but I will end up using these masks for a purpose I can’t imagine yet, next year, starting in March 2020.

I stop off in Boulder in the afternoon for a reunion with my friend Shiva, who shows me around some of the town by bike, and we get dinner at the Dushanbe Teahouse, a building that was sent in pieces from Boulder’s sister city in Tajikistan and reassembled here. Shiva and her husband send me off with a bag of some provisions for the road before I drive up back into Wyoming for a couple hours, and I stay at another Wal-Mart parking lot.

Echoes on the plains: Tuesday May 28^th and Wednesday May 29^th. Fort Laramie, the Black Hills/Ȟe Sápa, the Wall Store, the Dakota Badlands/Makȟóšiča, and Chamberlain

Tuesday morning finds me on the Great Plains again, in the country of the Sioux—the group of American Indians that, perhaps more than any other, symbolizes the Indian and Indian resistance to the ethnic cleansing done by the United States (though others, like the Cheyenne, are also just as important in this region). A short note is in order–Sioux is of course not what they call themselves. “Sioux” was just a shorthand that French traders took from what another tribe called them, just as “Navajo” was what the Spanish came to call the Diné people. The Sioux traditionally call themselves Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, and are made up of three main language groups of tribes–Lakota, Western Dakota, and Eastern Dakota. Still, I will refer to them as Sioux here, since they use that name officially, similar to the Navajo. I will also likely just use “Lakota” much of the time, since the Sioux territory that I will be in is mostly that of Lakota tribes.

I continue north to the site Fort Laramie, a relic from the ethnic cleansing of this region. I remember reading (skimming really, let’s be honest) about it in James Michener’s Centennial in high school, and when I realized it was not too far off my path I wanted to see it. Signs stationed around the site do a fairly honest job at showing the brutality and deception of American settlers and the government, though they sort of treat it as an inevitable clash of cultures.

The fort’s individual story tells the larger story of US expansion on the Plains. The site was originally just another trading post back in the 1830s, when there was still peace between the settlers moving westward and the Sioux (though further back east of course, those settlers were already evicting the indigenous there, and their parents and grandparents had done the same before them). It then became a US army fort and site of treaty negotiations in the 1850s; thousands of Indians from several tribes across the region camped near here to negotiate the 1851 treaty. The settlers and the army of course violated these promises time and again, especially as more gold rushes sprang up each decade. As Sioux and other Indians fought back in the 1860s, Fort Laramie became a major base for the US military from which to force them onto the reservations.

Today, it’s just a complex of old buildings spread out on a wide range of land, not necessarily what you would picture as a heavily armored fort. There are no walls around; there was not much timber for the army to use, and they wouldn’t have been very useful anyway since the Indians did not do sieges when fighting. Most of the buildings are still in good condition, a few are ruined. There aren’t many other visitors on this gray mid-spring day, so I get a lot of the place to myself. I see the stables, the artillery, the hospital, the fancy quarters and dining rooms the officers would use, as well as the cramped bunks and mess halls for the soldiers they commanded, many of them probably dragged out here after the Civil War ended in the east. There is also a schoolhouse that was for the children of any officers stationed here.

The atrocities were not committed here at this site, of course. This was just the place where they were planned and organized, where the men were drilled, the guns and cannons were polished, the horses were groomed, the ammunition stocked, the uniforms washed pressed and folded. The atrocities themselves were carried out and committed many miles away in the villages and camps of the Indian peoples, out of sight and out of earshot to the army officers’ wives in their dining rooms, and their children in the schoolhouse. No longer important after the conquest of the West was mostly complete, and with new transportation routes focused around the railroads, Fort Laramie was decommissioned and cleared out in 1890—the same year of the Wounded Knee Massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation, further north.

That evening, I drive a few more hours north over the South Dakota border. I’m now in the Black Hills—Ȟe Sápa to the Lakota, and originally Moʼȯhta-voʼhonáaeva to the Cheyenne, whom the Lakota conquered them from. The Black Hills still officially belongs to the Sioux Nation under one of the Fort Laramie treaties, but settlers still stole the land during a gold rush in the 1860s, and then had Mount Rushmore carved in the middle of it about 80 years ago.  The Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the government should pay the Sioux $100 million (almost a billion in today’s dollars), but Lakota and other Sioux leaders have continued to refuse payment, since the land was never for sale—they will accept nothing less than the actual return of the land to them.

I stay that night on the roadside in public land near Custer, close to the Crazy Horse Memorial. I’m back to my car diet of sandwiches. Wednesday morning, I drive up towards Thunderhead Mountain, with a huge sculpture of the Oglala Lakota war leader Crazy Horse (Tȟašúŋke Witkó) that’s still very much in progress; only the head has been fully completed so far. The memorial was commissioned by Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear and others, as a sort of a response to nearby Mount Rushmore, which had been recently finished. Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski was chosen to lead the project, and work started in 1948. The going has been slow over the decades, due to the enormous scale of the project and difficulty with fundraising. Ziolkowski himself died in 1982, and since then his widow and children have managed the project. Crazy Horse’s face was finally completed in the 1990s, and since then steady work has continued on his body and his horse.

The project has not been without controversy. Some of Crazy Horse’s direct descendants resent that other Lakota commissioned the monument without consulting them, since they are the caretakers of his memory. Others say that it has become more of a monument to the Ziolkowski family, as they now make a profit from the work, than to Crazy Horse. Most of all, many Lakota say that it’s simply wrong to be desecrating a sacred natural mountain by blowing it up with dynamite into a human figure, no better than what was done to Six Grandfathers (the original name of Mount Rushmore, before the presidents were carved onto it).

The memorial’s visitor center does mention some of these concerns, though of course not too much; I learn more about those from articles online. I can definitely get the impression though from the short movie that they show by the entrance that much of the focus now is on the image of the Ziolkowski family. The visitor center also makes sure to point out how much of the money raised for things like scholarships for Indians, and that when the sculpture is completed, the site will also be turned into a university and larger museum. For now, there are still some good pieces of Sioux art and history to see. I don’t get very close up to the mountain sculpture itself, but I can still it from a distance. Mostly, it’s just been interesting to witness this major source of debate among Lakota about how to best curate the legacy of one of their leaders, if not their whole collective legacy.

I keep moving late morning, driving north and east through more of the scenic Black Hills. I sadly just don’t have time to stop and see any of the other great natural sites around here, like caves and trails, since I’m on my tight schedule to get back to Jersey in a few days. I do pass by Mount Rushmore after about a half hour, and pull over for a moment to get a fair look at it from a distance. Eh. Not surprisingly, some American Indian Movement protestors briefly occupied Rushmore in 1971. Indians (and any non-Indians) in the Black Hills area are also threatened by environmental effects of mining here too. While the days of the gold rush 150 years ago are past, there still is some mining of gold and other minerals here; in recent years, uranium mining projects have also been planned.  Some locals have organized groups to resist this, like the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance. You can donate to them at https://bhcleanwateralliance.org/

I soon exit the Black Hills, pull in for a quick rest stop at Rapid City, and continue east towards the Badlands. I’d heard some people over the past couple weeks talk about the famous Wall Drug Store roadside attraction in South Dakota, and now along the highway I start seeing dozens of billboards advertising Wall Drug. I figure I have to at least see it, so I pull into the small town of Wall and park at the store, or whatever it is—it’s kind of hard to describe. It’s mostly a tightly packed indoor mall of lots of shops and restaurants run jointly, with Wild West memorabilia all over the place, cowboy and outlaw wax figures, galleries of paintings and old photographs. Oddly enough, what Wall Drug is known most for is their free ice water, millions of cups of it served to roadtrippers since the 1930s (there’s also coffee for 5 cents). Definitely a tourist trap, definitely campy, but I can’t deny that the place grows on me during my visit.

As the afternoon goes on, I cross back over the highway and (after being briefly pulled over by highway patrol for speeding, apparently) down into Badlands National Park. I get out of the car at the first overlook I come to, take a deep breath, and see. I may still have a couple more days before I get back home, but this will really be the last adventure I have of this roadtrip. I’ve always been struck by this place ever since I first saw a picture of it in my 6^th grade earth science textbook.  The jagged formations, with their sedimentary layers from thousands of years of wind and water erosion, are awesome to gaze upon any time of day. The different shades of the layers are from different materials built up over time—shale, sand or gravel, and volcanic ash. What’s also striking is how in a lot of places, the clumps of dusty red and brown hills quickly drop off into flat green grass prairie, creating a sharp contrast, like the hills are rocky islands in a sea of grass.

The Sioux and other Indians never really lived deep within this dry area; they were after all the first ones to call it Makȟóšiča, literally “land bad”—bad to live in, even if still beautiful. They would live on the outskirts, and often pass through for hunting. After most of the Sioux in the surrounding area were forced onto Pine Ridge Reservation, to the south of here, many of them then participated in the Ghost Dance, the cross-tribe spiritual movement started by Indians in Nevada in the 1880s, dancing and praying for the spirits to fight off the Americans and restore the land as it was.

Even after staying on the reservations, just as harsh as the other reservations around the country, the Lakota were not left alone; in the 1940s, the military confiscated parts of the southern Badlands to use as ranges for training, and relocated over 100 families, including one octogenarian man who had survived both the Battle of Little Bighorn and the Wounded Knee Massacre. Today, the Lakota have joint management of the southern Badlands with the National Park Service, but they still do not have anywhere near as much autonomy over the land as say the Navajo do with Monument Valley.

For the next few hours, I continue to drive the main winding road through the Badlands, getting out at more of the overlooks and appreciating the hills from many angles. There aren’t too many animals around this part—they’re further to the south in the wilderness area of the park, though there are some nice areas with plants in the middle of it all to walk around too. Towards sunset, I start to take one last walk for a half hour around one of the small canyons. There aren’t many other people; one group is coming back from the lookout, and there’s another guy coming out of a big camper van. We end up following the same path, and join together for this evening walk. His name’s Brian, from Boston, and though he’s the same age as me he’s a much more seasoned traveler; he’s been driving around the continent in his van for well over a year now. Some time before that, he also trekked the 3,000 mile + Continental Divide Trail for half a year, from the bottom of New Mexico up to northern Montana (it’s pretty much the western version of the Appalachian Trail), so it’s awesome to hear him talk about that. Like I’ve said before, there’s always those travelers I meet who make what I do look like an easy luxury vacation. No shame in that, of course—it’s all just about style, and what each of us has the time (and balls) for.

We catch the last of the modest sunset over the park, Brian and I get back to the parking lot, and I meet his dog as he lets me take a look inside the van he’s been living in, really impressive stuff. It’s not a full RV or anything—he’s hollowed out the back of the van, put in a bed, a little kitchen and everything. We part ways, and while I would probably see a damn beautiful sunrise tomorrow morning here, I sadly must get back to driving east. I had only a few hours in the Badlands total. I drive a couple more hours that evening to the small city of Chamberlain, just south of the Crow Creek Reservation of Dakota Sioux. I stay in a Wal-Mart parking lot one last time.

I still am in historic Sioux country, but that’s it really for my brief exploration of it; I didn’t get enough time as I did in the Pueblo and Navajo lands down in the Southwest. I didn’t get to actually interact with any of the indigenous people themselves, except perhaps briefly with those working in the parks, the museums, the stores, the gas stations; there wasn’t much Couchsurfing going on in the towns here, and I didn’t make the proper time to search more. While the Indians here are of different tribes, they’ve still had overall similar stories to the ones in the Southwest, at least in terms of their experiences with colonization. Onto my last few days now driving home.

Retreat back east: Thursday May 30^th to Sunday June 2^nd. Chamberlain, Madison/Ta-ko-per-ah, Chicago/Shikaakwa, Cleveland, and Mahwah

Thursday morning, I have my usual car breakfast, and go in to brush my teeth in the Walmart bathroom. There’s a guy busking with his guitar outside, and he’s looking to hitchhike—not a common sight these days, but people do still do it sometimes. He’s on his way west though, towards the Black Hills, so I wish him luck and throw him some change. I drive to a hill overlooking the Missouri River and much of Chamberlain; there’s also a giant steel sculpture of an Indian woman that was placed here just a couple years ago. I stop at a small Sioux museum nearby for an hour before getting on my way again—I should be able to make it to Chicago tonight.

However, later in the afternoon, as I’m crossing Minnesota and Wisconsin (shout-out to my cheesehead history professor Doug Little), that damn check engine light that I last saw come when I was driving with John from San Francisco to Seattle (before it disappeared the next day) comes back on. Of course. A couple hours west of Madison, I pull over and think about what I should do. The light is not blinking—it’s just on solid, which means it’s not an emergency…yet. I figure I’ll stop at Madison for the night, let the car rest, and maybe get the car checked tomorrow morning. I find a truck stop and sleep in the trunk one more night, bitter that I didn’t make it to Chicago today. This whole last leg going back east is more me tiredly running away from the sunset at night, driving late, than it is chasing the sunrise in the morning and driving early.

When I start up the car in the morning, the light is gone again, but then it comes back as I’m driving to Chicago. I just keep going, since I have to meet my cousin Gideon for lunch, then I’ll decide what to do about the car after. After driving through the lands of Ho-Chunk and Kickapoo tribes, I get into Chicago, find a place to park near Gid’s job, and run to meet him in time for his lunch break. I arrive out of breath and looking like more of a mess than usual; I haven’t showered since Levi’s place in Colorado Monday morning. We get a quick deep-dish pizza lunch before Gideon has to go back, and I go to meet some college friends who will host me for the night (the car light has disappeared again).

I get to my friends Amanda and Roury’s place later that afternoon, and we have reunion dinner with our friend Amira as well. Amanda and Roury just got married a couple weeks ago, and while I unfortunately missed the wedding they do still have some leftover pieces of cake in their freezer that they defrost for me (after I shower). That night, I go to Shabbat services at the Tzedek Chicago synagogue, the first officially non-Zionist congregation in the US (at least since the 1950s & 60s, when most congregations were not explicitly Zionist). They have a nice community, and worship that places less emphasis on the whole ethno-nationalism thing.

Saturday morning I thank Amanda and Roury, then continue on to my last stop—Cleveland, Ohio. The check engine light comes on again later in the day, but I don’t care at this point as long as it’s not blinking. After six hours of driving through historic Eriechronon land, I get to my friend Ethan’s house, and we catch up over a much needed end-of-roadtrip drink. In the morning we get a filling breakfast from an event at his family’s synagogue, go into town for a quick visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and then in the afternoon Ethan sends me off. I drive Josephine once more across Pennsylvania into the night, the signs for New York City and then Mahwah start appearing in the darkness, and I pull in to my parents’ garage a little past midnight. Back in Ramapough Lenape country.

As it turns out, that’s the last time I ever drive Josephine, the green 2006 Subaru Outback. Later that week, when I’m in France, my dad tells me over the phone that he got the car checked and that its auto transmission is failing, and can’t be repaired. With how old the car is (though it’s still in good condition otherwise) and not being worth much anymore, it would cost more than it’s worth to get a new transmission put in, so Josephine gets turned in and scrapped. My dad clarifies that it wasn’t anything about the way I drove it—these things just happen sometimes as cars age. At least I gave Josephine a glorious final adventure across the continent before it died.

Final thoughts

My little reflections at the end of my journeys in Palestine and South Africa were from the perspective of a foreigner, looking into those places from the outside (the Palestine trip did have a little more personal connection, since as a Jew there was my relationship to the state of Israel to consider).  Here, I can talk more about the experience of being a traveler in my own country. But because of that, it’s not really worth it as much, is it? I’m just another American saying some stuff about my own country, stuff that has already been said by thousands of other people, stuff that we all say to each other every day when just talking about anything in the news, politics or culture.

Well, I didn’t really learn too many new things about the US as a whole in my short and very ambitious road trip. yeah, I learned some new little things, like about different ecosystems, specifics about local history and all that. Some of it’s just because I’ve lived in the US my whole life (just one small part of it, but still I’ve grown up in the overall culture), and since I already know so much about it, more than I do about any country, I’ve sort of hit diminishing returns with how much I can observe that’s new to me, compared to say going to Palestine or South Africa, or anywhere else for the first time. Yes, there’s things you can still notice like the “west coast people are more friendly than east coasters”, or “wow rural culture is much more conservative than urban culture”, etc., but even that stuff I just didn’t have enough time to really observe more significantly.

What I found myself thinking about most during my long hours driving or ambling around national parks, and in the months since, was my relationship to this country and “its land” as a citizen (and about the relationships of all people to their countries in general). I could ramble on disjointedly for pages about this. I just happened to be born in Mahwah, New Jersey, and now the entire huge land called the United States of America–from Detroit down to Houston, from New York to Los Angeles–is “my country.” Why can’t I say, for instance, that eastern Canada is part of my country? The actual lands of Toronto and Montreal are much closer to me than say those of Houston or LA. Yes, of course I get what states and nations and borders are, and that they have been around for a while, I’m just trying to do a sort of deconstructing thing here.

Anyway, on a more tangible note, foremost is the reality of the stolen land and labor the country was built on and maintained in the first place, most relevant here since I have been focusing in particular on the indigenous aspect of each country I travel in. In the northeast, I had seen evidence of and heard more about the legacies and continuing effects of slavery and anti-black segregation (even if I haven’t fully “understood” it), for instance. But the legacies of ethnic cleansing and genocide of America Indians were always more abstract, since in the east it had happened so much longer ago (and even more thoroughly), and you have to really look hard for traces and descendants of the original inhabitants like the Lenni Lenape. But traveling around out west, even for just such a short and quick time, the slightly more recent and still ongoing theft of land and resources was easier to notice (although again, I am very far from fully understanding it) in the lands of Navajo, Lakota, and others. It’s crazy to think how recent this all really is. It may have started hundreds of years ago, but when my dad was born, just about 70 short years ago, there were still a few people alive who had been born slaves, or Indians who had survived massacres as well as battles, and had their homes stolen.

And of course, not all the carnage is over and done with, neatly confined to the past. Yet enormous as they are, just looking at America’s main racial crimes can be a limited view, even if they are more apparent as the “original sins.” There are millions more people past and present–brown, white, black, native, foreign, from any background–who have suffered from negligence and outright hostility by the American government, corporations, and military. Trying to mention them all too here just turns into a tokenizing laundry list that doesn’t do them justice (I did discuss them more, barely adequately, back in the intro). And still, while it has meant destruction and despair to many, America has also meant salvation, even just a chance to millions of people past and present—to immigrants looking for a way out of hopeless conditions in their home country, like my own great-grandparents. Not just abstract platitudes, but real people, even if they’ve been exploited by bosses and landlords, fired or even killed while on strike demanding better treatment, or subject to prejudice, their kids’ accents made fun of at school.

But of course, the people who might be reading this most likely already hear a lot about the struggles and tragedies of US current events and history. So how does it all relate here, to me and my “relationship with America”? I’d say where I’m at right now is that I’m not a proud American, and I’m not an ashamed American either—I don’t “love America,” I don’t “hate America.” I also am not just simply in the middle, either; I wouldn’t say “I love and hate it,” and I wouldn’t even say “I neither love it nor hate it” because then I’m still defining my feelings in response to that way of framing it. It sounds like a cop-out, but I think it’s a fundamentally flawed question. I don’t actually think that we really should “love” or “hate” things as big and immensely complex as countries. Nations, sure, can be proud of things like resisting domination. But countries are vastly intricate overlaps of millions of different people, thousands of bureaucracies, local and federal government agencies, land, businesses, cultures, subcultures, intersecting, competing and cooperating interests.

I think I can say at least that I’m a thankful American—thankful that me and my family, since my ancestors first came here a little over 100 years ago, have been able to have great and happy and extremely comfortable lives, more comfortable than those of many other people on the planet now and throughout history, more comfortable than we would have had if my ancestors had stayed in Poland and Russia. I think that’s the mistake many Americans make—we make the jump from just being thankful Americans, to then being “proud” Americans. We assume that just because we have been fortunate to make it, we therefore owe it to be proud of some abstract patriotic concept, all those national myths, instead of grateful to the actual people who have fought to gain and keep these opportunities–fought for citizenship, for votes, for wages, for dignity. Because so many other Americans have not had as comfortable lives as the one I have, I still can’t go and really say that “I’m a proud American.”

Well, that’s the most adequate way I can say how I feel, for now. It’s not meant to be an objectively true, universally correct way for anyone else to feel; I never mean to come across here as telling others how to feel about any of these things, just sharing my own in relation to all the traveling. It’s all really just a product of my own life and experiences so far, and taking into account what little I’ve seen and heard of others’ experiences as well…it’s in moments like these where I’m reminded how limited words are. There are many more thoughts I can share here, but I’ve already rambled enough as it is and I’m probably getting a little bit ahead of myself, since some of this heavier stuff I’m going to have more to say about once I’m done with the other trips, when this whole cycle of traveling thing is wrapped up. Next stop, Britain and Ireland.

California speed-run. Thursday 4/25 to Thursday 5/02, Los Angeles/Yaanga, Yosemite Valley, and San Francisco/Ahwaste

I’m in Los Angeles now–once the site of a Tongva Indian town called Yaanga, which was forcibly relocated by Spanish & Mexican settlers multiple times, before eventually the Americans completely destroyed it 150 years ago.

Most of my time in LA is spent seeing some friends and family. I catch up with my friend Stuart while staying with him Thursday into Friday, and while he admits he hasn’t actually explored much of the city since moving out here and can’t recommend much for me to see, he’s at least able to show me some of the good nearby Mexican food spots. Around the city on Friday, I go to the Japanese-American Museum, where there are some old items and remains of cabins from the Japanese internment camps during WWII. I also see the Great Wall of Los Angeles, an almost 3000 foot-long mural showing California’s history and many cultures. That night Stuart is going out of town for the weekend, so I hear back from a Couchsurfing host who can take me in for Friday, Kiel. We don’t get to know each other much since he has work the next morning, and I give him a lift there after an early breakfast.

Saturday afternoon, I have a really nice time meeting some very distant older cousins, David Berman and and his sister Thelma (my grandpa on my dad’s side met them a couple times, though my dad never has). Thelma, 95 years old, is a stubborn little thing bent over practically at a 90-degree angle, but is still sharp and very energetic, always chatting away. They keep very extensive family tree records; we’d known about them through the years since they send us Hanukkah cards every year. They take me to an old Kosher deli nearby, though they’re more secular. We talk more about our family connections (they do more of the talking since they know more about all that), and share a lot of stories. I don’t always follow what Thelma is saying or who she’s talking about, but it’s still just as fun listening to her. Sometimes they’ll joke around with each other with Yiddish words, though they’re not fluent. They’re definitely some of the last standing members of that bastion of old second-generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and I’m very glad I got to meet them for a bit.

That night I then rush off to another quick family reunion that night with my cousin David and his family. I catch up for a bit with David and Dorothea and their son Otto, stay the night, and they send me off with a great breakfast the next morning before I go up to Yosemite. I found another traveler over Couchsurfing, a Canadian named Rebecca, who’s in LA now and is trying to get to Yosemite, so I got to pick her up and we share the cost of gas (very good for me here, since gas in California right now is as expensive as the desert is hot). I haven’t really adventured much with other travelers these past few weeks, unlike when I was meeting them all the time in hostels around South Africa, so it’s nice to have a companion for a bit.

So Rebecca and I get into Yosemite that evening, park in one of the campsites, and Rebecca embraces the life of a rubber tramp for one night, turning the front seat into her bed. The next morning we wake up early to get started. Rebecca is also on a tight schedule as she has to get to San Francisco tonight to meet a friend before she flies home the day after. But this past month traveling across the country, I’ve become the master at squeezing things in to unreasonably short amounts of time, so I agree to the injustice of giving Yosemite only half a day. We drive out of the campsite, and after passing through a tunnel we get our first view of the valley. It’s hard for me to explain exactly what makes it so uniquely beautiful. The sheer rock walls on either side with small waterfalls cascading down them, the masses of pine and fir trees at the bottom jutting up, and the still, mirror-like pond that you see the further in you go all combine to just make a magical place. We take in the sight as the sun rises, then drive further down into the valley, passing one of the waterfalls, where there’s still some snow.

I mentioned a bit before about the Indians who lived in the Big Bend and Grand Canyon areas before they were turned into national parks, but Yosemite is a much more severe example of the colonial foundations of American parks. The main indigenous peoples of Yosemite are Ahwahnechee. They were ethnically cleansed from here in the 1850s by the Mariposa Battalion, a rampaging California militia that took charge of subjugating the region during the gold rush, along with many other practical death squads. Some tribes, like the Miwuk, were allowed to keep living in the valley through the 20^th century after it became a national park, and many worked in the growing tourism industry. But the National Park Service itself evicted most of them in the 1960s. In the past few years, the NPS has slowly allowed Miwuk refugees and their descendants to return to the valley and rebuild their villages in certain areas.

There’s not much more I can say that really captures the beauty of Yosemite—it just is. Rebecca and I use our short time to go up one of the trails, by Columbia Rock, absorbing more views from the middle of the valley and some more waterfalls. In the afternoon we have to leave since Rebecca needs to be in San Francisco, much to my regret; of all the places I sped through on this trip, Yosemite was the one I probably did the least justice to. After getting a quick look at one of the sequoia tree groves, we head three hours west, and the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge soon shine out in the evening as we approach the San Francisco Bay Area, historic land of the Ramaytush Ohlone Indians (they would call it Ahwatse, “place by the bay”).

After crossing the huge bridge, I drop Rebecca off near where she’s meeting her friend, then head a little further out of downtown to a truck stop for the night. Tuesday I just wander around the city, still feeling yanked out of my brief hours in Yosemite. I do get to see a bunch of the old counter-culture pilgrimage sights around Haight-Ashbury, now unsurprisingly an extremely commercialized area, and the nearby Golden Gate Park. In the evening I go towards San Jose to stay with Sarjan, my first college roommate, and we catch up. The next morning I go towards Berkeley to visit with my mom’s friend Nancy and her family. I watch the sunset over the bay, and think about how in a few months I’ll be further west over the Pacific, in China for the fall. That night I also meet up with Nadya, who was also on the Palestine delegation. She tells me about some of the work she and other locals have been doing to combat evictions from the skyrocketing rents and costs of living in the Bay Area. I have another Couchsurfing host for the night nearby, John, who gives me some good advice for when I go to Yellowstone in a couple weeks.

Thursday morning I thank John, and I’m off again. I found another companion through CS who’s also going north, another Jon (this one from England), willing to chip in for the gas. I go to pick him up near the Tenderloin neighborhood downtown. So far I haven’t said much on this trip about gentrification, rising homelessness, and similar problems in American cities, in the middle of everything else I’m seeing, but here it’s impossible to ignore. San Francisco is fast becoming one of the most expensive places to live in the country, largely due to the growth of the tech industry in the area. Homelessness is off the charts here, as it is along much of the West Coast cities, and Tenderloin, infamous but still home for many people, is one of the last holdouts in the main part of the city where residents haven’t yet found themselves forced to move somewhere further away.

I pick up Jon, and cross the bay once more as we begin our fast trip north. He has to get to Seattle, where I’ll rendezvous with my friend Daniel.  We go quickly towards Oregon, and that’s it for my time in California. I unfortunately didn’t get to see much; I didn’t even make it to any redwood trees. But the West Coast in general is pretty expensive, so I’m spending less time here before making my longer return east, and hopefully I can come back one day to get a fuller experience.

Cascadia. Thursday 5/2 to Friday 5/10, Ashland, Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland

I haven’t said much so far about the actual driving, the “road” part of road trip. I’ve mentioned how just traveling with my backpack and taking buses around back in the Middle East and South Africa wasn’t always as glorious as it sounded, and that’s the case too with my “rubber tramping,” for some different reasons.  It’s not always as easy as it sounds, cruising across the continent, dashing from place to place with the freedom of the road. Sure, I don’t have to deal with the type of problems when it’s just me and my backpack, like figuring out public transportation routes and times, always finding a place to stay each night, things breaking inside my backpack, sweating while hauling the thing around in the sun. Sometimes I can get pretty gross and unkempt after a few days straight of staying in the car while in more wild areas, especially during my travels through the national parks, though I can sometimes get showers at campsites. And in the crowded cities, I’ve always got to find a place to park the damn thing! No way to win. It also doesn’t help that I’ve given myself a pretty tight timeframe before going off to Europe at the beginning of June.

But of course, I’m not complaining about having two months of my life to roadtrip across the country, I’m just mentioning some of the difficulties; traveling is still awesome as ever more often than not, and the challenges are a part of it. Hell, I’ve got AC for hot days, and heating for the occasional cold night (and blankets for sleeping on those cold nights). I’ve got plenty of space for food in the back, and I’ve settled into a pattern of cereal, cold toast & cream cheese, and bananas for breakfast, peanut butter & jelly for lunch, and turkey sandwiches for dinner, with some side options of crackers, apples, or chips. Occasionally, I’ll sample some of the cuisine of whatever region I’m traveling through when my budget allows for it, and of  course whenever I stay with a friend or a host I can make more interesting meals in their kitchen, instead of my sandwich diet in the car.

There can be long, uneventful hours on the road through uneventful landscapes, but I don’t really mind long drives by myself. I do like my company around other people, but I can be pretty introverted, so I can keep myself busy with my thoughts, my observations of any towns or more colorful landscapes that I pass. Sometimes I get temporary companions, like Rebecca and Jon recently. And of course, there’s always music. Since starting my drive going through the South from Jersey, I’ve mostly been listening to the radio. I’ve got some music and podcasts through my phone, but I like hearing the stations in the different places I go. I sometimes used my phone’s radio app in Palestine and South Africa too, and it was pretty cool to hear their music, even if it was often in a different language.

And I have to admit, I’ve started to appreciate country music over this past month. Not all of it, mind you—not the real wailing ones about trucks, the flag, or guns—but some of it is actually really good. I already liked folk music and blues, and all these genres are kinda related anyway, there aren’t always clear boundaries between them. Some of the instrumentation is cool, the twangy singing is alright in moderation, and the lyrics can be pretty meaningful, especially since I’ve got my newfound interest in farming and agriculture now. “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys”— it’s all about how tough a life of farming and ranching is. That’s poetry right there, the fundamental struggles of rural living not just in the US but anywhere in the world, anytime. I wouldn’t be the first one to point out how the mockery of country music is often very elitist, coming from urban and suburban people like me against the country hicks they see themselves as superior too, and I’ll admit I’ve been guilty of this myself.

While I’m preaching about how we all shouldn’t ridicule country people in the South and West as uncultured rednecks, I also should add that Dixie and Middle America mustn’t be romanticized either. Driving through as a white guy, for just a few weeks, I don’t personally see much of rural American-style bigotry, beyond symbols like some confederate flags and Trump signs, which I’ve also seen around back in the suburbs of the Northeast as well (my own hometown of Mahwah definitely leans more Republican). But flipping through the radio stations during my southern odyssey, my growing enjoyment of country music has often been interrupted by something darker that deeply offends my New York metropolitan-area progressive persuasion—conservative talk radio. You can hear some of these guys on AM radio back in the Northeast too, but definitely not on your average FM frequency. Down here, they’re all over the FM stations. I hear some of the regular icons that people in these parts grow up hearing, like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, along with some mid-tiers ones like Mark Levin, and even some of the newer “young and hip” voices like Ben Shapiro. I listen to some of them with interest for a bit, the usual stuff about blaming poor people and minorities for their own problems, but I can only stand about five minutes of Shapiro’s facts and logic before switching it.

Anyway, I’ll cut off the political ranting, but I will also mention that I hear some disturbing trends of more ideologically Alt-Right talking points seeping into the screed of the more mainstream conservatives. Most notably, I hear an interview with Elizabeth Johnston–better known as the Activist Mommy on Facebook, who has perfected the art of the “angry right-wing rant in the car video” genre–where she mentions how (((“cultural Marxism”))) is indoctrinating kids into supporting transgender rights, rails against the Deep State trying to take down Trump, and goes on about George Soros destroying America by funding groups like Black Lives Matter, etc. Even just four years ago before the 2016 election cycle, you definitely wouldn’t have heard a run-of-the-mill conservative voice using phrases like those. I can report that unlike my feelings for country music, my feelings for conservative talk radio do not improve during my drives. I’m always down to broaden my musical horizons; my political ones, not that much.

So, back to the trip up north. Jon is a good companion to have. He takes some turns driving, since this is a long haul, and he’s got plenty of his own travel stories to share; Jon’s in his late 30s, and has been traveling now for pretty much all of the past three years. He was a microbiological researcher before, but he became disillusioned with it after he saw how much effort and time he would put into experiments and studies on different microscopic subjects, only to find that most of the time the research process didn’t actually yield any useful results at all. Jon is able to give me lots of advice for traveling in South America, which I’ll get to later this year. I also share with him my new appreciation for country music on the radio, and he also marvels at all the evangelical Christian preachers while tuning through stations; he’s never heard anything like that on the radio back in England.

We pass through some scenic countrysides, at one point with Mount Shasta in the distance to our east. That evening we stay with a great Couchsurfing host near Ashland (Oregon), Pam. Pam, almost 70 years old, is a huge veteran traveler, having made her own trips across the US and India using Couchsurfing. Jon and I make dinner for all three of us in her kitchen using some ingredients we picked up earlier. The next morning Pam sends us off with breakfast, and insists on hosing down my car’s dirty windshield as we pull out of the driveway. Jon and I keep driving through the beautiful woodlands and rivers of Oregon and into Washington.

Towards the end of the afternoon Josephine’s check engine light suddenly starts blinking. We pull over to a rest stop, turn the car off, and check online for advice on how bad this might be; I can’t tell what’s wrong just by looking at the engine. I try turning it back on; the light is still on, but not blinking anymore. It’s not likely to be anything too serious yet, and it’s just a couple more hours to Seattle, so we press on, and I plan to get the engine checked tomorrow. We roll into Seattle that night and are hosted by Heorhii, a Ukrainian with a bunch of roommates from Belarus and Kazakhstan. Talking to some of them about Kazakhstan makes me much more eager to visit Central Asia someday.

I thank our hosts Saturday morning, and say farewell to Jon Kirby, the wandering disillusioned microbiologist. I pick up my friend Daniel from the airport, and I was going to have the car examined next, but the check engine light has completely disappeared. I keep an eye on it for the rest of the day, and it doesn’t come back. There’s not too much more of interest for me to report on my days in the Northwest region, also known as Cascadia. Daniel has come out here for his own trip down the West Coast before flying off to China for another friend’s wedding. We head up together across the Canadian border through the lands of Coast Salish tribes, and visit our friend Doga in Vancouver for a few days. Vancouver’s more laid-back than the other west coast cities, there’s plenty of great Korean and Japanese food, and we get to hike some of those Pacific Northwest woodlands and a mountain in the area.

Tuesday I get the car an oil change, and we head back south to Portland, on historic land of the Multnomah Chinook tribe. Daniel stays one night with me at the house of Corrina, my Couchsurfing host for the next few days. The next day I explore a bit with Daniel before I see him off to the bus station as he heads further south. I mostly take the next couple days easy, and do some planning for my next few weeks heading back east from here. Corrina’s got a really cool intentional community-style house with half a dozen other people. There are always other travelers here; sometimes Corrina has travelers from Workaway (similar to WWOOF) stay to help out with housekeeping and their gardens. I help out a bit with cleaning their chicken coop, and I get to help them cook up some communal meals in the kitchen.

Portland is another city that competes with Austin for being weird; the fact that Portland is the home of maybe the only vegan stripclub in the country says a lot (no, I can’t report back on any personal experience there, I just heard about it from other people I met). They’ve got great public transit in the form of a light rail, so it’s easier for me to get to downtown here. There’s good live music as always, though I don’t find one single nexus of anarchy like I saw at Austin’s 6th Street. I also have a reunion in town one night with an old friend from summer camp, Henry. On Friday, I finally get to see some of the infamous underground tunnel systems of the West Coast cities. San Francisco and LA have some too, but I have a bit more free time here, so I join a tour group. The guide takes us to a trap door in the sidewalk, and we just walk down beneath the street. Most of the musty, dimly-lit passages are actually pretty roomy, though some are more cramped, and there are even entire rooms.

These tunnels were used starting over a hundred years ago for everything from flood control, moving legal goods between hotels and restaurants, moving more illegal goods like opium and alcohol during Prohibition, and perhaps a few times, shanghaiing—kidnapping unsuspecting drunk men to work on ships in the Pacific. It’s debated as to how often that last one actually happened; in reality it probably wasn’t all that common. Still it’s cool to walk through these, even though their possible use for human trafficking is a bit gruesome. There are plenty of old artifacts throughout the rooms, like decaying shoes and grisly-looking rusted tools that make it look like a natural horror movie set. Urban archeologists are still excavating the tunnel system today and uncovering more stuff.

And that’s really it for my two-week speed run of the West Coast. Mostly just a bunch of reunions with friends and family, and I got to see a few things along the way as well. It’s already time for my trip back east! I made my deadline to meet Daniel in Seattle, and now, I’m setting myself another tight deadline, with Daniel too: in three weeks, he’ll be flying from China to France, where he wants me to join him for the 75^th anniversary of D-Day on June 6^th. I’m gonna get back to Jersey in time, even if I wear myself and the car out, so I can fly to meet him there before my traveling in Britain.