Rainbow Road

    No pictures this post. I am on my way to the national rainbow gathering in the Uinta national forest in Utah. I will probably be there for a few weeks, and I suspect that I will not have any internet access while I am there. I promise to take pictures and a couple videos and not loose myself to the hippie woodland magic. See you all on the other side.

Quick Update

    Hey folks, I made it back to Texas to see my friends graduate, and I couldn't be more proud of them. Right now I am spending a few days in Dallas, then I will be leaving to head north east up to Boston and maybe Maine. No pictures or anything fun this time, so I will try to do something interesting soon so my blog stops being dead. Take it easy and stay out of the heat.

Night time time

Secret for my readers

    So my dear readers, my more academically minded friends are achieving there goals of getting really expensive pieces of paper soon so I plan to attend these ceremonies. Now for the game. My friends like to say they read my blog, but they always seem to have not gotten around to it in a while whenever I ask. So I will test the truth of this statement by measuring the surprise on their faces when I show up. If someone to who this paragraph is relevant reads this, please don't spoil the fun and don't tell the others.

A creek I found in Idaho

    I have been traveling around through Montana, Idaho, a bit of Washington, back into Wyoming, then back to Montana, now I am in North Dakota in the Williston boom town. The weather in Wyoming was super terrible, its actually kind of nice here, never thought the weather in North Dakota would be better than Wyoming.

Right on the border of Idaho and Washington

    I got a ride through the whole of Idaho with some guys who were Jugging. Jugging is the act of walking up to somebody pumping gas, open with a nice "hey man, were out of gas, any chance you can spare a splash", let them fill up your can a bit, use the gas to get to another gas station, do it again. The guys were a couple of crust punks, they pretty much asked for everything, food, gas, cigarets, everything. In the 2 days I traveled with them, they ran out of gas 3 times and we almost got arrested when a cop searched their car and found huge amounts of pot. Somehow we ended up not even getting a ticket.

You wouldn't think there was anything like this in the potato state

    The reason I had to ride with those guys for the entire north-south length of the state is because it is illegal to hitchhike in Idaho. Hitchhiking is illegal in Idaho, Utah, Nevada and Delaware, but only enforced in Idaho. Just recently while passing through the pan handle, a cop told me from his megaphone as he drove by that it was illegal to hitchhike and that I would go to jail if he drove by again. First of all, I would like to clarify that hitchhiking laws are vagrancy laws, and the only reason Idaho still has them is because it hasn't had its ass handed to it in supreme court yet. Second, the problem with laws like this is that they don't leave you any other alternatives for people like me. "Hey you can't hitchhiker here", "ok, can you give me the classifieds because apparently I live here now." This is similar to when a cop in Louisiana told me I couldn't hitchhike there, and my only option was to walk 20 miles to the nearest town or go to jail. 

    This study published in 2006 showed that the part of peoples brains that activates when dealing with homeless people is the same part that we use for processing objects, not the part we use for processing people. I have to deal with police officers often, and it is often refreshing when they treat me with courtesy and respect, because that is not how most treat me. I am often on the receiving end of barked orders, or a quick ID check to make sure I am not Charles Manson and nothing else. My old travel partner Kyle can confirm that the hitchhiking tickets we got in Austin were mostly a result of the officer feeling like we wasted his time.

North Dakota, I have spared you from all the cloud pictures

    This is a new slice of life for me. Many times I have to acknowledged that the treatment I am receiving from not only police, but from many regular people is because I am now perceived as the lowest part of society. Now maybe I have no room to complain, because my status is voluntary, and can be reversed at any moment due to my means and my friends and family. But I still think this says something about us. People who pass on the on ramps often don't even acknowledge my existence, they just glue their eyes forwards and pretend I don't exist until they are safely past the scary homeless guy. People cross streets and even change lanes to avoid being near me, as if my caste is going to rub off on them while they drive by at 60mph.

    But readers please remember, that those scary bags of rags on the sides of roads and in street corners are still people. Sure some of them are drug addicts and alcoholics and will screw you over any chance they get, but lots of us have people like that in our own families. They are still people, and this doesn't mean that you have to serve them escargot on a silver platter, but you should at least acknowledge the fact that they are people. Look at them, and make sure you look at them like they are people, not like they are objects.

All over and back

   Sorry again as always for the delay in posts, but traveling with another person kind of makes you forget to update. Me and Kyle traveled back through Colorado, down through New Mexico, to El Paso, spent a week in Texas, got a ticket for hitchhiking in Austin, went up north through Oklahoma and Kansas, back into Colorado to Glenwood Springs, spent a day at a Hot Springs, then split up in Craig, after which I went north into Wyoming and then Montana. Got all that? Sorry but I didn't think I could type up a long story of how I went from place to place, and the small interesting anomalies that accompanied each one. If I am wrong, and that is all my readers want, then let me know, and I will detail the hell out of that sentence.
    There are two reasons my summary was so quick. The first being Evasion. When I was getting ready for my trip, one of the websites I used was hitchwiki.org, which on its recommended reading list had Evasion, by the anarco-publishing syndicate CrimeThInk. Evasion is an anonymously told story of a person or people who lived on the road, and bummed around by squatting, hitchhiking, train hopping, and shoplifting. I made it through half the book. It was terrible. The book read like a shopping list half the time. "I went here, slept here, stole some food, went here, met this guy, then slept again." My rides often tell me that I should write a book about my travels, and I always tell them no. Books are stories, even the historical ones are specifically chosen out of all historical events because they are interesting. Nobody wants to read about David Jefferson from Nebraska because his life is not a story, it is a list of things he does. My life is also not as story, it is just a list of things I do. Which brings be to my second reason. My life may be more varied than most peoples, in fact I am ok with saying it is. I know that the nuances of my day are different from day to day, where I sleep, who I meet, what I do, but they are still nuances. They no longer strike me as crazy or interesting. Some still do, but not all. For example, at the time of writing this I have had 5 rides today, I had 9 yesterday. They were all interesting people, most very nice, all memorable to me, but they were all just people. They all asked the same bland "What do you parents think?" and "Where do you sleep at night?" questions. If I did not make any effort, I would forget them in a week.
    This being said, I still do have interesting experiences, even more interesting than the now common interesting experiences of my day to day. I am going to try to shift the focus of this blog to those kinds of experiences, and to the other realizations I make on the road. And again, if that is not what you readers want (if there even are any of you that are not just my friends) then let me know, and I will continue to catalog my day to day for the enjoyment of my followers.

    So, onto the good stuff. (or what I think is the good stuff ie. the things that I realized on the road, and the handful of interesting pictures and experiences.)

    Sometimes when people drive by, the pantomime to me that they don't have room to fit me and my huge bag. Which is fine, I don't expect them to throw out their stuff to pick up some random hitchhiker. But something occurred to me, there is no way that all of these people would have picked me up, rides just aren't that common. Which means that if they were driving a car that had room for me, they would have just driven by without giving me a ride like so many others. For some reason, the fact that they can't give me a ride allows them to think that they aren't doing anything wrong by not doing something good, but many of them would have done what they view as wrong by not giving me a ride. It seems to me that people are using the fact that they have a full car to let themselves think that they would help me if they could, or that people have a natural predilection to avoid uncomfortable moral choices. I am thinking it is the second. Once I realized that people will tend to avoid moral decisions, specifically those that are more theoretical in nature, I started seeing it in a lot of actions that people do. For example, people who just refuse to think about thought problems. Working with a dust speck problem, or any other morally tough though problem, you will hear "but that will never happen" a lot. Peoples brains are instinctively dodging the question because it predicts it will make them feel bad if they answer it. I find this to be a useful understanding when trying to model the actions of others.
    So maybe this isn't what you came here for, my random realizations about he nature of people that I made on the side of a road in New Mexico. But this is the most interesting thing I have formalized recently.
    Some interesting things have also happened on the road. Me and Kyle got a ride in a school bus, and I had my first experience with a snow storm, something my southern psyche could not handle. I learned that they close roads in the winter, which lead to my detour around Yellowstone, and we spent a couple nights sleeping next to rivers, which is super relaxing. I also have been super lazy about adding pictures, but I will post a couple at the end of this article.
    I don't know exactly where I am going from here, but I think I am gong to travel east, to all the northern states. If anybody has some recommendations of things I should visit in this area, let me know.

The view from a hill in Utah

Trying to get out of Provo

4 inches of fresh snow in Denver

Kansas looks like Kansas

In the Yampa valley in Colorado

The subtle beauty of Wyoming

The Tetons from a small highway around Yellowstone

A Road Buddy

   So I left Big Bend and made my way up to Amarillo to hook up with the hitchhiker I met in Santa Fe last fall, thewindandtherain, or Kyle. We met up 2 days after I left, and crashed out on some grass in the city. Kyle agreed to take me on the scenic tour of Colorado. Our first day on the road landed us in Santa Fe again, turns out rides were easier to get with the two of us, something neither of us expected. We took a few non optimal routs through New Mexico up to Taos, and then over and up into Colorado through Alamosa. We spent that night in an abandoned fire station north of Durango. It was awesome

Burnin the house down

Our Safe Haven from the possible rats

Kyle crashed the engine, it wasn't even on

Don't worry, I am only pretending to drive

The upstairs was nice, but we were afraid we might get eaten there

The garage

Our Safe Haven from the road.

    The next day we only caught one ride but it was a good one. Elizabeth and her two sons were heading up to Grand Junction, and were going to go hiking along the way. We stopped in Ouray to have a nice short hike into a box canyon, and spent some time finding crystals in gravel on the side of the road, before grabbing lunch in a small diner. We spent the night under an overpass in Grand Junction.

Elizabeth and the boys, a cool ride if I have ever had one

    Today we made it to Provo, but our plans changed so we are turning around, heading to Denver, and then back to Texas for a little bit.

Road Thoughts:
    Traveling with another guys is pretty cool. Me and Kyle have different styles, and different perspectives, but they seem to meld together pretty well. Kyle has a more aggressive approach than I do, but with my more personal approach, we have met at a happy medium. I think I will possibly travel with other people more in the future, since me and Kyles time together is short, he has to be up north in a few weeks.

Bonus Pictures;

Those beautiful Amarillo mountains.

The Plaza in Taos New Mexico

Kyle on the fire engine we slept on top of

The Scenic rout

Some of the best ice climbing in the world is in Ouray Colorado

Where the box canyon waterfall runs, notice cool rock sticking out of wall

More Colorado

I am pretty sure he is violating his parole.

Sun Down in Grand Junction

Open Country

    After I left Kerville it only took me a few rides to get to Junction, where I was held up because there were already some hitchers on the road I wanted to take, and nobody ever gets a ride if there are 2 groups hitch hiking on the same road right next to each other, so I had to wait. But it turned out to be a lucky break, because while waiting in the near by truck stop I met Walt, who offered to take me all the way to Alpine. Walt was a nice guy and easy to talk to, and he also worked at the small local airport and offered to let me crash in the Pilots lounge for the night, an offer I gladly accepted. I killed some time walking to the nearby carnival, but I had no cash so no rides for me. I spend the rest of the night watching movies and taking it easy.

My campsite in Kerville, there was a lot of cactus

Study Butte Texas, nothing but mountains and shrubs

    I was woken up early by about 15 pilots doing pilot-y things, so I decided to pack up and get on with my day. Since it was early I grabbed some donuts, bought some groceries for the park, and read maps and comic books in the local book store. I finally hit the road around noon and made it into the park about 5. Then I learned that it is against park rules to hitch hike in the park, so I had to just catch rides by asking people in person. I somehow made it to Rio Grande Village for the night, where I met a group of guys my age who wanted to hang out. We chatted and watched a movie and threw the football and Frisbee around some.
   
    The next morning I slept in, and got up slow, I went down to the Rio Grande and played in the water and stacked rocks (see photo and videos).

My first try, flat rocks but still rewarding

Larger rocks and harder to balance, was seriously worried about my feet getting smashed.

    I decided I am going to meet up with thewindantherain, the hitchhiker I met in Santa Fe last fall, and together we are going to go to Colorado. He is leaving tomorrow out of Kansas City, and I will leave out of here, and we will meet someplace in the middle.

    The video is actually a little dumb because I couldn't keep the camera steady and throw the rock, but dammit if I was going to rebuild that thing, so here you go.