[ Wednesday, June 04, 2003 ]
Day 98 to Day 101
Jamestown, ND. Deep in the homeland. Staying with Mom and Dad. It's good to be home again. Time to relax, slow down, clean the Bad F*cker Mobile, clean my bikes, work on my bikes, throw out several hundred pounds of travel brochures that have piled up in my van. Address the massive toxic Thai food sauce spill superfund site in the back of the van. Print map after map after map of mountain biking trails in the West.
Mom gave me some cash to buy some new clothes, primarily, I think, intended for new t-shirts, i.e., ones which don't say "Fuck the War" or "Girls Kick Ass!" Went to K-Mart and scored a 5-pack of FTL underwear for 9 bucks. Woohoo! Bought some new pants on clearance at J.C. Penney for 10 bucks. Didn't find any new t-shirts, though.
Worked out with my dad at the YMCA. Burned some CDs. Watched a team from North Dakota kick ass in the Junkyard Wars semi-finals. Said team captained by the former state governor, no less. If you don't already know, Junkyard Wars is the only good thing on TV.
Have been reading a good local website on how to determine if you're a "Jamestown Lifer." Numerous criteria there are, such as whether you "can differentiate among the ten different Lutheran churches in town by their synod and historical ethnicity." This is important data here in NoDak, where nearly everyone is white, and a marriage is thus considered cross-cultural when an "Olafson" marries an "Olafsen."
Said fact - that nearly everyone is white - is a major drawback of living here, and the cultural life of the state clearly suffers from it. That, and the extraordinarily bitter winters, which last for exactly six months, until the only other season - summer - starts.
But it ain't all bad here. NoDak is clean, more or less friendly, beautiful in a way, no crime, and lots of parking. North Dakota high school students place the highest average ACT and SAT scores in the country year after year, which probably means that something is working. When I was in SF, I was thus always simultaneously amused and irritated when some "sophisticated" Californian (usually one with the vocabulary of a 12-year-old who could barely speak or write a complete sentence without a glaring grammatical error) would make some ignorant comment about the backwardness of the Midwest. They're half right, or right for the wrong reasons.
I ride my bike out to explore the only singletrack dirt trail riding in town, conveniently located in a park near the buffalo herd, by the National Buffalo Museum and the World's Largest Buffalo, of course. I visit the buffalo herd to see White Cloud, a 7-year-old albino buffalo, of great (perhaps even cosmic) significance to many Lakota people and other Indians. White Cloud is shunned by the other buffalo. I saw it. It's weird. The other photo is a buffalo calf, probably White Cloud's offspring, who is normal-colored.
The white buffalo is a genetic trait of extreme rarity - estimated at something between 1 in 10 million births to 1 in a billion births. Oddly, there were four white buffalo born, unrelated, in one four-month period in 1996. The appearance of the white buffalo, ergo, is a sign of a resurgence of native power, unity, and/or some calamity, for some native people. I ride around town and the various parks, looking for trails and jumps. Tour the BMX track. It's a good day.
The next day I get my Dad to dust off the old .22, and with that and the pellet gun and my revolver we head out to the Pipestem dam for some target shooting. We spend much of an afternoon trying to align in the rifle's telescopic sight. I manage to place 17 of 18 rounds (some .38 special and some .357 magnum) into an 8" x 8" cluster at 25 yards. Not great, but not bad either for a pistol. I still believe, however, that the constitution should be amended so that only women are allowed to bear arms.
Editorial Note: One reader has written to Homeland Drifter recently, complaining that the world’s tallest living tree is not in Humboldt County, as was previously asserted in this travelogue, but in Mendocino County. We are very concerned about this potential error, and will do everything in our power to investigate and, if necessary, take measures to correct the previous assertion, despite the fact that the complainant is NOT EVEN AN AMERICAN CITIZEN and comes from a country that cut down all of its trees to build ships used to dominate and enslave the rest of the world. But having said that, and because Homeland Drifter holds itself to the highest imaginable standards of truthful and accurate journalism, we will do our best to immediately investigate the matter.
On a completely unrelated note, as everyone on the face of the earth has already heard by this time, the whole Jessica Lynch hero rescue story was total (or nearly total) bullshit, concocted by the Pentagon spin machine and eagerly lapped up by the herd of sheep mainstream press. Now there’s an interesting story on Alternet called “Rescuing Private Lynch, Forgetting Rachel Corrie.” Please read it, especially if you don’t yet know (or have already forgotten) who Rachel Corrie was . . .
Thanks for reading homeland drifter, and for knowing where the tallest trees are . . . homelanders.
Soundtrack:classic rock radio, and a very old mix tape from Jen Dowling
Reading List: The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
[6/4/2003]
[ Sunday, June 01, 2003 ]
Day 89 to Day 97
Seattle, WA. Here’s a nature photo I took. It depicts a swarm hive collective family of caterpillars on some kind of web-like structure that is related to their existence in some way. How is that for a scientific explanation? Taken on nature hike at the pre-wedding friends and family picnic somewhere across Puget Sound. (see: three-brained prong, infra)
Three-Pronged Brain entity, (aka Three-Brained Prong) and friend Braveheart Ass having drinks below the Showbox, and next photo Eric, Floss, Sandy and Cody, same (aka Diet Max, Duo, and Dr. Bold; aka prong, prong, and prong). The nickname situation has gotten completely out of control at this point. Oh, well. Errata. SubCodymante C. Nice to see old friends in Seattle, make new friends in Seattle. Seattle rawks.
And just to clarify. I started putting my photo on my travelogue, primarily in response to a suggestion by one reader that I was NOT actually on the road, but sitting in my house tripping and constructing stories using stock photos pulled off the REI online catalogue and mountain biking websites. Listen up, homelander, I have real photos of myself riding my mountain bike ALL around Wal*Mart parking lots ALL over the country!
Living in a van rocks. Everybody should live in a van.
Still in Seattle. 10 days up here, hanging with my brother, doing wedding stuff for Erich and Katherine. Here's a photo of them at the ceremony. I spoke in the wedding - read a Whitman poem, quoted James Baldwin for good measure, and talked about how great E and K are. And it was fun, because they are great. It was all very happy and good there, except for the part very late after the reception when we had to scrape all the salmon debris off the massive rental grills. Happy trails, Camp Quality Time and Vitamin V! (see: International Campaign to Stop the Proliferation of Nicknames, infra, homelander!)
Seattle Underground Tour. Found the sub-basement to the MATRIX on the way down to the underground tour. Mushrooms growing under the streets, where the streets used to be, where the first stories used to be, before the founding fathers were smart enough to build a city above high tide and sewage drainage level, saw the remains of the original city sidewalks and storefronts and debris, and a rat or two.Bad F*cker Highway Health Update: Urban biking dangerous; off-road biking not dangerous. I rear-ended a fucking pick-up truck at speed in Seattle while on my old steel playa bike. Walked away from it intact, bike o.k., body o.k., pick-up truck slightly damaged. Realize that my only other crash was in downtown SF, on the way to a protest in March. After three months on the road mountain biking, oftentimes on 9 to 10+ technical terrain, I have yet to have a big crash on the trails. Just thought that that was ironic and notable.
Missoula, MT. On the road to the great plains. Camped in the Lolo NF, just south of Missoula. A good college town - progressive enough, just enough coffee shops, book stores, and bike shops to make it homelanddrifter.com temporary residence friendly. I'll go back later this summmer, camp, drink beer, and ride my bike. For now, I explore one trail (photo above) in the rattlesnake mountains and then continue down I-90 towards NoDak.Butte, MT. What a shithole. (Hey, who says there is no useful travel information in my travelogue?) (see: Fun Road Trips for Homelanders, 2nd ed., Grove Press, infra, homelander)
Continue down I-90. I sleep in an interstate rest area near Billings. I live to tell about it. When I arrive home the next day my parents are aghast. They saw a show on TV, and - evidently, no one has ever previously survived sleeping in an interstate rest area without being simultaneously beaten, raped, robbed and murdered. I realize that there should be a TV mini-series made (for the History Channel, perhaps) about the 8 hours I spent sleeping - completely uneventfully - in an interstate rest area. Ah, the potential. Hey Princess D – knock on wood!
near Theodore Roosevelt National Park, ND. Arrived the other morning back in my homeland - North Dakota. Crossed the border right into the park, and Medora, checked out the bike shop and visitor center for maps and local knowledge for the Maah Daah Hey Trail - one of the holy grails of mountain biking. The MDHT is 96 miles of continuous singletrack - the longest in North America open to mountain biking, apparently. I will return mid-June to ride it. For now, I ride part of the connector trail, Buffalo Gap (photo above), and camp near the trailhead at a quaint little forest service campground. (It’s a national grassland, not a forest, actually). It is already practically summer, great weather, and the campground is deserted but for an RV and me.
Deserted = ND is 50th in the country in tourism. But hey, NICE interstate rest areas. No shit. ND has the cleanest, most modern, and fanciest rest areas in the country. They even have little internet kiosks with travel and weather information. And that's something. In fact, I would feel even safer sleeping in one of these pretty rest areas than I did in Montana’s. In any event, since there are no people here (or 9 people per square mile, average), and no one visits here, I can usually say whatever I want about the state and get away with it. But I'll be here in Jamestown for awhile with my parents, so I'll do all that ND talk later, at length, homelander kin.
Hey, here's a photo of the largest butterfly I've ever seen in my life, taken in Buffalo Gap, ND! I think it’s part moth and part spider, too. USDA bred, Area 75 tested, genetic-warfare butterfly moth.
Soundtrack: Witchdokta, Nice Acid
Reading List: I stopped reading about a week ago. Writing is more fun for now, and riding a bike is more fun, for now, than writing.
[6/1/2003]
PAY ATTENTION BLACK ROCK CITY
