July 18, 2022

Laurel Falls, well-hidden in South Carolina wilderness, isn’t much of a waterfall. It dumps Laurel Creek from a crest of rock about 80 feet high onto a long bed of more rocks to plunge into giant Lake Jocassee in the northwestern corner of the state. I’ve passed it three times, the third just last week.

From the east, the Falls is an eight-mile hike from a place called Laurel Valley, which is just a name for a wide, dense patch of forest. You find it about two miles north of a settlement called Rocky Bottom on U.S. 178 and about eight miles south of Rosman, N.C. From the west, the Falls is accessible by boat from the lake.

The Falls isn’t a tourist attraction. Really, it’s only a map reference point for the few hikers who pass through the massive Jocassee Gorges Management area, which sprawls across the North-South Carolina border region north of the lake. It’s one of probably a dozen waterfalls and water-roiling rock formations along the Horsepasture, Thompson, and Toxaway Rivers. Other wild rivers, smaller ones like Frozen Creek, Bearcamp Creek, and Coley Creek indent the area. Water thunders across rocks, it seems, everywhere in the forest. The big draw is Whitewater Falls, just across the line in North Carolina, the highest waterfall east of the Mississippi.

The first time I made it to the Falls, last summer, I tacked on a half-mile to the lake boat landing. I looked down at the clear, deep water. A small motorboat drifted offshore, the owner threw sticks, his dog leaped into the water to fetch them. Then in November my Virginia buddy Alex and I passed along the trail as we slogged the thirty miles from Bad Creek, near Whitewater, back to Laurel Valley. We stopped, took pictures, and plodded on as darkness closed in.

Last week, starting at Laurel Valley, I thought I’d turn back at the four-mile point. That meant a scramble up two steep mountain miles then a couple of fairly level miles to where the trail meets the rushing white-water creek, then the return for eight total, good enough for the day. But at four miles I thought I could go farther, and the remaining four to the Falls is mostly level single-track trail and fire road. I went on.

From the four-mile point the trail parallels and crisscrosses the creek over five or six narrow footbridges. Within another mile I passed Virginia Hawkins Falls, a stubby bunch of rocks that gets in the way of the water, which cascades angrily. I paused. Five miles out meant 10 miles total, six out meant 12, and so on, since I would have to backtrack my distance outbound. But I still felt strong, and 16 total seemed like a good day.

I pushed on around the curls in the trail, running the level stretches, hiking the climbs. Weeks sometimes passed with no foot traffic along the creek. The thickened underbrush, the vines and thorns, reached out at me, grabbing and scratching. Early morning had been cool, but I could feel the sun warming my back. Mosquitoes whined around my head. I brushed my trek poles against the growth and moved forward. In an hour I was at the Falls.

The Foothills Trail runs along a precipice 100 feet above the creek, the Falls embankment is inaccessible except by a steep, dangerous descent. From a narrow overlook you can hear the explosion of water. The roar rose from below, a lonely, hollow sound. Tracking west, the trail quickly disappears into the thicket. To the east is a sign pointing to a campground, a small clearing with scattered evidence of old campfires.

I dropped my hydration pack, leaned against a tree, and caught my breath. In November the foliage had thinned a bit, allowing a better view of the rushing water. Now, in mid-summer, after a week’s rain the forest was thick and lush, the air heavy and damp. I ate some beef jerky and sipped water. I was looking at eight hard miles back to Laurel Valley. The contents of the hydration pack had to last eight miles. Running out: bad news.

The roar of the water over the rocks didn’t inspire thoughts of nature’s beauty or majesty. I felt in my solitude the nearness of wilderness, the loneliness of the place. Laurel Falls shows nothing like the postcard or calendar-photo view of Niagara Falls, or even nearby Whitewater. I recalled for a moment the disorder and chaos of the world outside Laurel Valley. But in the deep woods there was only nature’s way, the water relentlessly finding its path, the creek pitching wildly forward across huge fallen trees and massive boulders. The Falls doesn’t know whether anyone is admiring it and snapping photos. Nature doesn’t care.

The sound of the water echoed against the trees. Suddenly it prompted a thought of that other eternal roar of nature, surf crashing against a beach, in and out, back and forth, loud and mournful, waves breaking on hard sand, the water hissing as it retreats. Somehow I conjured up Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem, Dover Beach. His narrator, standing along the cliffs above the sea, speaks to his companion, a wife or lover, warning her of the hint of mortality in the sound, the “melancholy, long withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.”

Arnold’s soft pitch and cadence and his sad imagery remain with me. In the 1860s poor and lower-class British people suffered unspeakable abuses of rampant industrialization and government indifference to poverty, disease, nightmarish working conditions. Arnold calls out, “Oh love, let us be true to one another!” in the face of an indifferent, hostile world, “where ignorant armies class by night.”

I stood on the cliff and again looked down. The water crashed below, as it has through the distant mist of history and the years, decades, centuries of human experience, like the pounding surf of Arnold’s verse. Yet from his mid-nineteenth century world he offers a spark of comfort: love and faith as solace for the suffering of his day and now, perhaps, for the bitterness and alienation of our time.

I shook my head at the strange association, my brief moment at Laurel Falls, deep in mountain forest, with a sublime work of verse of a century and a half ago. It would not leave my mind. I shouldered my pack, turned, and moved up the trail.

July 11, 2022

Mid-summer dawn breaks in northwestern South Carolina with a damp, delicate coolness. By midafternoon we’re close to or above 90F, a hot breeze wafts the heat. A few evenings ago it rained hard, raising steam on the asphalt. Thunder cracked, lightening flashed. Afterward a rainbow stretched across the sky. A rainbow—mythical beacon of hope, or odd atmospheric illusion. Depends on your point of view.

The parching heat is a small trial alongside the nightmares that afflict so many others. Here on our quiet street, we get off easy. We hardly ever think about someone showing up with an AR-15. That could change at any moment.

Our next idea for getting away is a visit to son Michael and daughter-in-law Caroline, near Philadelphia. We went three years ago, in July 2019, a weekend that turned into ten days when Sandy landed in Bryn Mawr Hospital with microstrokes. She felt numb, Caroline rushed her to the ER, then to the ICU. She’s still on the meds they gave her.

We went up again for Thanksgiving that year and got a sweet taste of southeastern Pennsylvania at the Brandywine battlefield, where in September 1777 the Brits whipped the Yanks and seized Philly for a while. We couldn’t miss the Wyeth Gallery at Chadd’s Ford, which shows portraits and landscapes of Andrew Wyeth, America’s greatest realist with watercolor and tempera, and the work of his father, N.C. Wyeth and sisters Henriette and Caroline, all luminous in their gifts.

It will be another road trip. The most direct route is I-85 to Petersburg, Va., then I-95, the north-south commercial grind. We’ll take our usual Southern escape route, I-26 to Johnson City, Tenn., then I-81 to Harrisburg. Then the Penn. Turnpike the rest of the way.

Like everyone else, we’re struggling to keep our lives carved out from the dreck of public life: automatic weapons for sale, no questions asked, to mentally ill teenagers; inflation wrecking budgets as people spend down two years of covid subsidies. The Supreme Court ruling killing off Roe v. Wade took over all the headlines and probably the talk shows, which I don’t watch. The Court then dumped EPA authority on “major policy questions” about climate change on Congress, promising more legal snarl, more polluted air.

One refuge from all that, in the cranky, obscure way I look at things, is Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place.” It goes like this, more or less: two waiters, at their café late at night, talk about the last customer, an old deaf man. He was a little drunk.

“Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.

“What about?”

“Nothing. He has plenty of money.”

The younger waiter went over to the old man.

“Another brandy,” the old man said.

“You’ll be drunk,” the waiter said.

The waiter poured a glass full of brandy. The old man motioned with his finger. “A little more,” he said. The waiter poured the brandy into the glass so that the brandy slopped over.

“Thank you,” the old man said.

The waiters talk about the old man, how he tried suicide with a rope, his niece cut him down.

“He must be eighty years old,” one waiter said. “He stays up because he likes it.”

“He’s lonely, I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me.”

“He had a wife once, too.”

“I wouldn’t want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing.”

“This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even now, while drunk. Look at him.”

The old man looked over at the waiters. “Another brandy,” he said. The waiter who was in a hurry came over. “Finished,” he said. “No more tonight. Close now.”

The old man stood up, took a leather coin purse from his pocket and paid for the drinks, leaving a half a peseta tip. The waiter watched him go down the street, a very old man, walking unsteadily but with dignity.

The unhurried waiter asks the younger one why he wouldn’t let the old man stay and drink. “I want to go home,” the man said.

“I am one of those who like to stay late at the café,” the older waiter said. “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.”

He goes on. “This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well-lighted.”

“Good night,” says the younger waiter. “Good night,” the other said.

Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing he knew all too well. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanliness and order.

The waiter descends into a sort of blackness. He understands the café matters, order, cleanliness, courtesy matter. A place to sit late at night and sip a quiet brandy matter, for those who come.

We all need our clean, well-lighted place. It could be a silent chapel that conveys the mystery of God’s grace to strengthen us against the bleakness and pretensions of public life. Then too, the humility of the old waiter, which is his power, can teach and sustain us.  

I thought of the waiter when I finished simple things: I wound new line onto the spinning reels I had given my grandsons, attached them to the rods, and stowed them carefully against the day I’ll take them fishing. A small thing done.

It was another warm morning. I took the compost out to the yard and stacked tools where they belong.  I stopped for a few moments and breathed deeply. It was quiet, no hint of a breeze. I remembered the rainbow that flashed briefly across the sky the day before. I looked around the yard, and shielded my eyes against the sun.

July 4, 2022

The neighbors came out in the evening of last year’s Fourth of July and set off fireworks in the street. We walked the block, introducing ourselves, we still were new and didn’t know anyone. They had all the do-it-yourself stuff, the rockets, sparklers, the Roman candles, and put on a show. We talked with folks who were out with their kids up and down our street and on the next block. The rockets soared and boomed well past midnight. It was good enough.

Last week we were still on the Wyoming trip when June raced to an end and summer settled in. I fought bronchitis, picked up somewhere in the Midwest, maybe while sleeping outdoors, maybe while caught in monsoon-like rain. The Fourth barely registers this year, we’re exhausted, the country is exhausted. Parades and fireworks used to buck us up, not this year. Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican from Wyoming, speaking last week to young women, said that “for the most part, men are running the world and it is really not going well.”

Like everyone else, we’re looking for calm. We have the photos of forests, mountains, and ranchland we captured as we puttered along interstates. A few capture the richness of the rugged forestland and wide grazing land of Midwestern and Southeastern America, some of it tinged the pale green of grass struggling in dry soil, some of it dark and lush.

Meanwhile many Americans are lost to their addiction to the headlines and believe the whole country is, like them, in a perpetual rage over politics, or should be. It all disappears when you put down the phone and close the laptop. You can shut your eyes to it. You’ll feel better.

We stopped at the Hitching Post in Abilene, Kansas. The tables were filled with people having breakfast and coffee, most of whom looked to be regulars, in dungarees and overalls. They may have noticed us walk in and take a table, but they kept talking about the weather, town business, hunting, farm equipment problems, and so forth. Weather was big since it was raining buckets outside. No one preached about Trump or the Democrats.

The January 6 hearings weighed down the holiday weekend. Once-diehard Republicans reported on the mendacity of the former President and his gang of hangers-on and witness tamperers. I guessed it’s unlikely the Hitching Post diners would talk about that, but you can’t assume.

We fought all that off and looked for good around us. From Abilene we drove relentlessly. We passed Kansas City, staying on I-70, and finished the day at a hotel in Columbia, Mo. In the morning Sandy navigated through St. Louis then across Illinois into Indiana. We made a bad turn that led us into industrial Evansville, but we did see the stately old homes of downtown. We recrossed the broad, brown Ohio again, Sandy looking nervously away.

We dropped the plan of the straight-line shot to Lexington on I-64 and instead turned south toward Henderson, Ky., across the state line into Clarksville, Tenn., and took a local outer highway around downtown Nashville.

It was familiar turf. We set a course east on I-40 and called a campground near Crossville, 75 miles west of Knoxville and reserved the last site available. Past Lebanon the Tennessee forest grows thick and richly green, the craggy hills rise and fall. Just west of Cookeville we crossed the gorgeous, swift-flowing Caney Fork River, which rushes clear from the Cumberland, winding under the interstate four times.  It’s one of those wilderness (maybe near-wilderness) rivers I wish I had explored years ago. Things kept getting in the way.

Finally, the slapstick: we locked ourselves out of the van at a Stop ‘N Go in Smith County, near Gordonsville. My keys lay on the driver’s seat, where I tossed them while I pumped gas. Sandy stepped out, leaving her purse inside. We stared at each other.

The young woman at the register inside smiled and called the county sheriff. Within 20 minutes a young officer showed up with his unlocking tool and snapped the door open. We thanked him, embarrassed, and got back on the road.

We set up camp next to two families from Texas. They offered us beer and burgers, but we wanted some air-conditioning. The Crossville chain restaurant we picked reminded me of the Hitching Post, fewer farmers, more folks in shorts, more kids. The sky suddenly looked like rain, we rushed back to camp. With the gray of dawn we lurched into our morning drill: light the grill, make coffee and oatmeal, break down camp and go. The final leg was a blur. After Knoxville the highway meanders through the breathtaking Smokies. Then Asheville and the sign, the plain blue “Welcome to South Carolina.”

It’s the Fourth. We have photos of ourselves standing next to the Liberty Bell near Independence Hall in Philly with our son Michael and daughter-in-law Caroline some years ago. It actually was in January or February. But the crowd was there, celebrating those solemn places of 1776, the shrines of American liberty, that over the next century inspired others to throw over tyrants, first in France, then decades later, throughout Western Europe.

It’s not the fireworks and the parades that teach us that liberty simply is an aspiration of the heart, all hearts across all cultures, languages, continents. We know somehow, perhaps through the mysterious working of God’s grace, that liberty lifts and defines the human spirit. The sense of what it means remained with us while we crossed prairies, forests, and mountain ranges, then hunkered down in a humble tent next to a lake.

Meanwhile, we, all of us, are learning the dark lesson that liberty is fragile, and can be destroyed by seditionists among us. The memories of those carefree moments at the Liberty Bell cheer us. We’ll skip today’s downtown parade, the neighbors will help us celebrate. It should be a clear night. We’ll crane our necks with new friends and watch the homemade stuff fire off. Good enough, again.   

June 27, 2022

The people at the Kansas state tourism department know their marketing. When visitors wander into the state welcome center at the western end of I-70, they meet larger-than-life-size cutouts of Dorothy, the Wicked Witch, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion. Only the flying monkeys are missing. It’s not the Kingdom of Oz. It’s Kansas.

The cutouts stand next to another, of Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife Mamie. Eisenhower’s Presidential Museum is on the main street of Abilene, his boyhood home. The Ike and Mamie cutout brought home a few memories of that faraway time: Eisenhower, then Truman. They have no equals today.

We had visited the Harry S Truman Presidential Museum in Independence, Mo., a week ago and spent four hours there. We could have stayed longer. The collection covers his life and his presidency, but starts with his younger years in Independence. He returned from World War I service in France and opened a men’s clothing business, which went bankrupt. He didn’t go to college and dropped out of law school (a college degree wasn’t then necessary for law school) but with the backing of local political fixers was elected a judge, and in 1934 a U.S. Senator. In 1944 the Democrats, unable to agree on a running mate for FDR, drafted Truman.

When FDR died suddenly in April 1945 and Truman took over as 33rd president, national leaders groaned. He had been vice president for 82 days. Truman had met alone with Roosevelt twice. He had not been briefed on top-secret research on an atomic bomb. It was Truman who made the awful, still controversial decision to use the bomb on Japan.

Truman faced down the Soviets when they cut off road and rail lines to Berlin by authorizing the Berlin Airlift, which from June 1948 to September 1949 carried more than two million tons of supplies to Berlin. He instituted the Marshall Plan to support U.S. allies as they faced the Soviet-Warsaw Pact armies. He sent troops to Korea to counter the North Korean invasion, but later relieved Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who wanted to take the war to China.

Truman desegregated the armed forces, issuing an executive order over Congressional opposition. He called Red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy “the biggest asset the Kremlin has.” He fought steel strikes and corruption within his own administration. He declined to run in 1952, retired to Independence, and started work on his presidential library.

Before Kansas we stopped in Burlington, Colo., a tiny spot on a glistening flat sea of green and yellow grain. The town of about 4,000 keeps a museum of its history, which started around 1887. We paid the eight dollars to wander through the original telegraph office, barbershop, one-room schoolhouse, church, and other preserved frame buildings. Two or three others strolled the quiet grounds.

The plain, rough-hewn structures and the meticulous replication of detail told of the hardiness and hardship of life in these parts. We thanked the lady in charge and headed for Kansas, looking for meaning in the inscrutable mystery of Upper Midwest vastness.

What we know about Kansas is what most older folks know: Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, who followed Truman as President, grew up in Abilene. Sen. Bob Dole came from Russell. Both places sit along I-70. Dole, World War II hero, 27-year U.S. Senator, 11-year Senate Majority Leader, and 1996 Republican presidential candidate, now rests in Arlington National Cemetery. Truman is buried at his Independence site. Eisenhower and Mamie are interred on the Eisenhower museum grounds.

Eisenhower’s museum rivals Truman’s in scope, eloquence, and sensitivity in measuring the man. While Truman bounced around in his early years, Ike persevered through Army ranks. In December 1943 FDR named him Supreme Commander in Europe. Most know (I hope) about his command of the campaigns in North Africa and Europe leading up to D-Day, his focus on total victory. Fewer know about his visit to a liberated concentration camp, where he viewed burned and starved corpses, in order to publicize and reinforce the reality of the Holocaust.

In 1952 Ike was elected president in a landslide, the first Republican to win the job in 20 years. He led the West through the early depths of the Cold War.  He brought the North Koreans to an armistice in 1953 and promised to support the Republic of China (Taiwan), but refused to intervene in Vietnam to help the French when Dien Bien Phu fell to the communists in May 1954. He declined to start World War III when the Soviets sent tanks into Hungary in 1956. He opposed the French and British invasion of Suez in late 1956.  

At home, Ike backed Truman’s desegregation policies. In his second term, in 1957 he sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect black students as they entered newly desegregated Little Rock High School. He funded construction of what now is the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. He ended his presidency with his powerful farewell speech that warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

The lighthearted greeting to Kansas helped me out of the daze of squinting at the endless flatland of the corn and wheat belt along I-70. The sun beat down, the mercury hit 98F. In late afternoon we camped at Wilson State Park, bounded by 9,000-acre Lake Wilson, near Dorrance in the center of the state. The glassy surface of the lake shimmered among gentle hills pocked with evergreen. Orioles and sparrows swooped around our tent.

The evening was warm and humid. We sprawled in our chairs and stared at the hills and the lake, struggling to catalogue what we learned of this alien place. Two days earlier we left the jagged peaks and cool dry air of Wyoming and Colorado. This is another world, tranquil, not to say lonely, where thousand-acre farms and ranches create livelihoods for tiny communities.

The park was absolutely silent through the night. Towards dawn I perked up, cattle were lowing, the sound echoing off the lake. Thunder rolled, lightening flickered. We moved on that day through relentless rain. I wondered about leadership, about these giants, Truman and Ike, who came from this deep center of the country. They served, with different parties and philosophies, as the nation recovered from one grievous war, then endured the Cold War nightmare and the vision of Armageddon. Both stood against evil, both pushed us forward, slowly, yet still forward. Who remembers?

June 20, 2022

We walked up and down Main Street in Sturgis, S.D., 20 miles north of Rapid City, a quiet place 51 weeks of the year. The remaining week, in August, about 250,000 bikers show up for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. They celebrate amazing feats of motorcycle design and engineering, and other things: biking skill, leather outfits, for some, booze, for others, politics. This year’s rally is set for August 5th through 14th.

Sturgis, for some who have never been within 1,000 miles of the place, has become an icon of a bizarre strain of American life. Depends on your point of view.

The streets leading to Main Street resemble the streets of lots of other small American towns: modest homes, churches, supermarkets, gas stations. Most of the year traffic to and from southwestern South Dakota suburbs and southeastern Wyoming scoots by on I-90.  In August Main Street and the adjacent neighborhood becomes Biker Paradise.

Many Americans think of bikers as rebels. Lots of classic films reinforce that idea. There was The Wild One, with Marlon Brando, in 1953. Then came Easy Rider, with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson. The 1969 movie, released at a troubled time, surveyed the landscape of drugs, dangerous behavior, and redneck violence. The movie pitched drug dealers as rebels, the rednecks were killers. The themes were disturbing, but memorable.

Some bikers—not all—cultivate and advertise the Easy Rider shtick: the hair, the clothes, the unconventional behavior. But something happened in recent years to the biker mystique, if that’s what it was, or is. Some bikers—not all—went off the rebel reservation and became walking, er, riding advertisements for loutish, lowbrow America.

At Sturgis, booze, drugs, and asinine behavior get the same attention as the motorcycle design and ridership competitions. Then in August 2020, as the covid pandemic killed thousands, the rally went on as planned in the face of calls for it to be canceled. The studies conflict, some say the impact was minimal, others say it spread the virus to hundreds of thousands.

Sturgis also now is a friendly place for that strain of public policy analysis that holds that Trump is the fearless defender of the real America; Biden isn’t really President because the 2020 election was stolen; an AR-15 is a man’s best friend; the only good liberal is a dead one. At Hot Leathers, on Main at Junction Avenue you can buy a $300 leather jacket emblazoned with a giant skull. Across the street you can get a banner with a silhouette of an automatic weapon and the slogan, “Come and Get It”; a poster of Trump wearing aviator glasses and waving an AR; flags showing Trump with the legend, “Finally, a Guy with Balls.” Main Street is, in a big way, Trump Street.

Anyway, some folks come for the motorcycle contests and the beer.

From Sturgis we crossed the state line into Wyoming, heading into the vast horizon of green, empty range and brilliant blue sky of the smallest U.S. state in population with about 577,000 souls, fewer than Vermont, which has one-tenth the square mileage. We headed to Sheridan in the northeast corner, still the heart of Trump country, but also Cowboy Country.

As we settled in the hotel room we heard a knock on the door: our youngest daughter, Kathleen, appeared. She had driven the 500 miles up from Colorado Springs as a Father’s Day surprise. Truly lovely.

Sheridan shows the class of cowboy land, aware of its huge place in the history of the West. King’s Saddlery, Sheridan’s “tack” store, says it offers everything the cowboy or cowgirl needs: saddles, ropes, bridles, bits, reins, halters, saddlebags, and items I never heard of, and you can get it all online. Don King’s Museum, behind the store, captures the story of the West, which is the tough spirit of the Polish and Italian settlers who became the ranchers, miners, cowboys, and businessmen. It captures eloquently the rodeo culture, the cattle business, the life of Native Americans, but also the bloody tragedy of the U.S. Cavalry-Indian Wars.

At the museum we talked to a mild-mannered guy who said he’s pushing 80, slim and handsome in cowboy gear, and it wasn’t fake. He told us how 40 years ago he fell from his horse chasing cattle and nearly bled out. The museum gave him a job, he’s been there these last 40 years.

I saw one, exactly one “Cheney for Congress” yard sign, and a sprinkling of signs for Harriet Hageman, her opponent in the Republican Congressional primary. Liz Cheney is the most prominent of the miniscule number of Republicans who supported impeaching Trump. Hageman is the Trump-endorsed challenger. She’s favored to win. Cowboys, like bikers, are Trump people, they like the aviator glasses look.

We were here for the Bighorn Trail Runs, four events starting in the awesome altitudes of the Bighorn National Forest west of town. On Friday we drove 25 miles out to a spot on a gravel road past Dayton along the fast-moving Tongue River for the start of the 100-miler, the mountains towering on all sides. We met old Virginia friends, took pictures, wished the runners luck. They took off in a hot cloud of dust, the mercury forecast to reach 95F.

Saturday I started the 32-miler. On the hour-long bus ride to the start we ascended into the rugged and spectacular Bighorn Mountains. The driver pointed out clusters of moose grazing in meadows. The race began in a blustery breeze. We slogged up mountainsides and through snow and mud. The sun rose higher. In early afternoon I started to fall apart on a six-mile stretch across open prairie in mid-eighties heat. I missed the time cutoff at the 20-mile point, and didn’t complain.

An aid-station volunteer, a local guy, drove me to the finish. Because of a snowdrift across an access road we took a teeth-rattling ATV trail back to a gravel road, a two-hour ride. He talked about life in Wyoming, family, and politics, usually taboo among strangers. “I can’t talk to my friends about some things,” he said. They’re worried about Democrats taking their guns away, he said. I said that sounds like South Carolina.

When she got a cell signal a volunteer called Sandy to let her know I was alive. At the finish we watched the successful runners cross the line, congratulated the finishers, and cooled down by wading into the frigid Tongue River. We said so long to everybody and I limped back to the van.  Sandy and I headed back to Sheridan. We’re looking, again, at 2,000 miles on the road.