I drove out
to the middle of this salt wasteland in August trying to figure things out.
Thoroughly distracted by thoughts of Quilting and the impending excitement of The Man there were definitely no conclusions reached that evening.
The evening before I took this photo, I ate red meat for the first time in about 15 years just after speaking on the phone with a junkie dropout who found some solace in whatever jungle Hawaii has to offer. It’ll likely be another 15 years before I chew on more bovine deliciousness. I hope Hawaii treats my friend right and I get to talk to her sometime again. That night I watched a bank robber beat up one of his friends, a british soldier, only to have the whole thing broken up by his wife, a local police sergeant. The next morning I was attacked by a bird inside their home before the robber came ’round to give me a tour of a $15M house he helped build. We stopped at the dump on the way back to his log house to shoot assault rifles and an Italian 1911 at a washing machine and a hunk of metal that used to be a car but were turned away by a guy refueling a front loader with a gasoline nozzle in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. On the way back out the dirt road with a car full of guns we drove past a VW bus filled with the usual suspects awaiting the rainbow gathering that apparently was on the calendar in the very near future. It didnt seem like such a mind bending day at the time and yes, this all really happened.
I left the Mountains that morning with a foggy head trying to put together the events of the previous 24 hours. There are few places on earth quite as effective as this one when it comes to activities like clearing thy head, discovering the heart of stillness and driving a German machine in a straight line as hard and fast as your nerve can grip a steering wheel through the sweat lining your palms. Palm Sweat: Nature’s unbeatable Polygraph. This is the place where your mind can never get quiet enough, the music can never seem to blast loud enough and no matter what you do, the clutch can never find its way out from under your left foot instantly enough. There would be no stillness that day, completely burnt from the last 2300 miles and fully fired up about the 358 miles left to go… By the time I got out here, it was still well over 100 degrees, the ants in my pants had begun to stir and after a brief yet passionate fondle of the Super Angulon, the Circus left town, just like that. This incidentally was the last time the side of my righteously awesome Audi would look quite like the above photo. I massaged an orange safety cone on the highway at about 105mph and it performed a unique, but somehow pedestrian modification to my driver’s side panels… All this and Winnemucca was still hours away…
