Wrote this so's I can read about it when I turn 90, drooling on the pages ... wishing I'd had a chance to do this sort of thing when I was younger, but I can’t remember doing it. That's what this is. Memory-bilia.

Irreverent and reckless stuff. The way a roadtrip itself should be. Figure I'm really going to need this at 90 as a reminder of where I've been ... the other day, I told a friend I thought I was slipping into salinity.

Road tripping's reckless. Looking for a bit of fun. Less in the way of approval. Approval's cheap, easy enough to come by ... you just bend over and follow the rules. A good laugh, or a smile of shared understanding's a lot harder to find .

Roadkill's a part of roadlife. Stuff gets killed out there. Furry things, like squirrels and deer. Other furry things, like some of the bikers I write about later. A lot of it's going to end up as roadkill. But I respect furry-thing life, and I treat it with sensitivity. About as much as you'd expect.

Something else about the road. Things, images, people come at you hard and fast. No apologies. You get them like they are. And parts of it might piss you off ... it did me. And other parts get left behind too quickly.

****

I do Slammers on the road. Non-alcoholic quick-thought. Stuff to slam alongside, blast into the head and out the invisible exit wound. Not stuff to keep in there or think too much about. Lay it down on the tape recorder. Walk away from it for now.

But, it's time to get on with it. So, let us turn to the statistics ...

****

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

ROADKILL:
Four (4) small critters; (one each, of four species).

ROADSQUISH:
Two (2) long lizards; (same species).

PROBABLE SELF-INFLICTED HUMAN ROADKILL:
One (1); possibly more, in overturned and burned wreck.

POTENTIAL HUMAN ROADKILL IN THE BEST NEAR-HIT INVOLVING THE AUTHOR:
Minimum of ten (10) people.

****

MONTANA -- There’s something about the colors and the landscape tossed together here in eastern Montana that makes it seem that you're looking further than ever before, yet ... you feel that you can reach out and touch it. Distance is more real (more real? ... already, I'm losing it).

The green of the fields slammed up against the blue of the sky, the deep blue of the streams cutting through the fields, the purple of the clover in flower, the yellow dandelions ... those ain't dandelions. They're yellow ... flowers. Yeah, yellow ... flowers. If you got out of the car you could tell whether they were buttercups ... but you're on the road now.

You're driving to somewhere. No time to look at flowers.

****

WYOMING -- They've got miles of snow fences up here. Built along the edge of the fields sort of like skeletal grandstands for an audience concerned with the growth of the grasslands. Farmer Bob scrunches up to Bessie and nods,

"Got ourselves some fierce growth this summer, Bess." Bess grins as best a cow can grin and,

"Moo-oo."

"You think?" goes Farmer Bob. "A bit more nitrogen in the fertilizer next year?"

Bessie giggles, then passes methane.

****

NEVADA -- Before you get to Las Vegas (the diminutive term, Vegas, is old-style, gangster-style, and we must not have that), Highway 93 offers at least one thing to think about. Pinheads. The people who dump their garbage out here in the middle of the desert.

Somewhere along that long stretch miles from anywhere between Wickiup and Wickenburg, pinheads have been dumping garbage. Broken glass shards, crumpled plastic, strewn cans. What bothers me is that these pinheads, these leaders of the new-age garbage cult, have chosen to drive 50, maybe 75 miles into the stinking desert, wasting valuable gasoline that I could use, to dump their shit when a simple gas-saving drive to a place just a couple miles outside their little towns could do the job.

It's like they're really serious about getting rid of this particular garbage. This fixation on garbage they have ... pinheads who have found nothing better in life to think about ... sitting in their trailers in the desert, the sun beating down on the aluminum and the people inside quietly going mad from the heat, the stale oppressive air, and the stench, munchin' Doritos and drinkin' that Milwalkee's Best until they've finally got a full bag of garbage and a bagful on, and it's high noon and time for that glory drive into the desert ...

Later, in northern Arizona, you notice something very strange. The pinheads have mutated. Alongside the highway, at what seems to be regular intervals, the pinheads have parked alongside the road for a second or two, opened the door, and leaned out. There, in the middle of freaking nowhere again, they've dumped their garbage. But this time, it's a single empty pack of beer bottles. You don't see this just once. Twenty times, maybe, throughout the state. An empty six-pack of Bud beer bottles sitting upright on the side of the pavement. Each bottle whole, complete. You wonder, where'd they get the money to step up to Bud?

Earlier on the drive, outside a New Mexico Indian reservation, you saw one of those small, carefully assembled piles of rocks which act as markers, direction pointers. You learned about how to do this back in the Boy Scouts. Today, you drive along the Arizona highway, knowing that the Bud packs are the rock piles of a new generation, a new-age people. Of some mutant sort.

****

UTAH -- Two young women in the car that just went by in the opposite direction.

Blue, Chevymake, station wagon in style. But that doesn't matter.

What concerns you is how soon it'll be before you're able to erase the mental image of the driver and the passenger going by with their tongues stuck out, their thumbs stuck in their ears and wriggling their fingers at you.

****

WYOMING -- Chugwater. This is a land of trailers. Home trailers. But a lot of them are busted open, spilling 2x2 timber-sticks and wooly yellow-ugly insulation on the ground like broken eggs from the aluminum shell. And the mess lies there, rotting in the sun. I wince at the idea. Sometimes metaphor ain't pretty.

Sometime back, a friend and I rebuilt a trailer like that from ground up. I'd bought it for $300. A summer job for a couple dudes in their early 20s. Noise. Screaming. Frustration and injury. Learning stuff that seemed so marvelous ... sweating. Me so broke, I can't find the pennies to buy him lunch. It gets done and after two years living in it, I sell the trailer to some rancher for $1500 who promptly blows himself and the trailer up while trying to hook up a gas line I'd never installed 'cause I was scared of gas.

I don't think about the guy dying. Or the busted and burned trailer. I think about the summer of building something.

And losing that friend one night 'cause the woman I was with said he'd tried for her while I was in the john, and I had to tell him to leave. And then I spend time wondering if the woman had lied.

****

MONTANA -- The border is 3.5 miles ... thoughts ... first come dwarves, then fairies in Ireland ... about horses, eating hay, alfalfa, and the hot feeds giving them colic ... old machinery, Fordism, how all that intellectual stuff doesn't count for much riding a range fence in a winter snowstorm ... about how long 3.5 miles is ... about the pigmentation blot under the nail of my big toe, and the fact that it's fading, does this mean that I'm losing all my melanin ... I'm thinking about the dolphins I heard screaming one night in a water tank in southern California, sounding like the devil's in there ... and I cross the border.

And I realize that I've had three minutes or so to do some thinking and that was the entire range of thoughts I had and there were an awful lot of blank times in there and I get worried.

The names on crossing the border tell you where you are ... Wyola, Hardin (without the "g"), Billings, Lodge Grass, Little Big Horn.

Doesn't matter who you are ... even if you've been asleep for three days, you know you're here in the west.

****

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Copyright 2003-2009, Greg Stene