Many Travels and a Berry Pilgrimage

My travels have been long and eventful, as the real world is. It is impossible to cover it all on a blog. So I will settle for a quick synopsis and a story about Port Royal, Kentucky.

Synopsis: I drove a 1997 Subaru Legacy from Homestead, Florida, to Plymouth Michigan. The first week I spent seeing sights in Florida: The Clyde Butcher Gallery, Big Cypress, Fakahatchee Strand, Highland Hammock State Park, Kennedy Space Center, Ocala National Forest, and St. Augustine. I met an older gentleman named Frank who told me stories of his explorations of the Ocala area and gave me a shark's tooth. I met a man named Dean, canoeing with his parents, who thought he would like his 20-year old daughter to meet me and be inspired for adventure and self-exploration. I told him to be careful what he wished for, as my mother could remind him that adventuring children tend to go long distances from home. I spent a week in Tallahassee seeing some great things and spending valuable time with people important to me. Then, a drive to Kentucky, where I spent three nights with an inspiring and hospitable couple and visited some sights in the countryside of my birth state. Then a drive to Michigan, where I delivered the car to Jane, my friend from the Bee Heaven Farm experience. We had a good evening and morning of catching up and visiting Ann Arbor before I boarded the bus for Sioux Falls, SD. Two nights in Sioux Falls and a little time with a few friends, and on the bus again to Wyoming. I am home with my family now, making preparations for my summer in Alaska, where I fly to on Saturday.

Much has been seen, and much has happened. I think I'm ready for some quiet time working on the arctic tundra.

In Kentucky I made a pilgrimage to the hometown and inspiration of my favorite book and author, "Jayber Crow" by Wendell Berry. It was a blessing, as the novel came even more alive for me. The first thing I did when arriving in Port Royal was pull into the cemetary and hobble (I wounded my foot the day before playing Huckleberry Finn along a creek in Jessemine County) around looking at names on tombstones. Morbid, maybe, but certainly interesting. There were many, many, Berrys in the cemetary. Then I drove north-east of town where I speculated, with the help of my Berry fan friends, Wendell Berry's farm is located. I found a promising one-lane road and drove into a beautiful Kentucky draw. I found myself on a two-track dirt and gravel road dipping in and out of the recent flood plane, and got nervous about getting too far in with no way of turning the little Subaru around, so I stopped the car beside a lovely old barn in a beautiful pasture. I had to pee quite badly so made boldly through a gate (there were no "No Tresspassing" signs anywhere, so I made myself welcome) and up a lushly pastured hill. The land and the day was so lovely, and I allowed myself to enjoy the hill, even went up to the woods after urinating in a spot with a beautiful view. In the woods I met two enournmous and friendly draft horses, one black and one white. I petted and talked to them for some time, then said "Say 'Hey' to Wendell for me," and walked back down to my car and drove on out of there. Whoever's place it was, I am grateful for the little retreat and special moments. I'll never know in this life whose the place was, but I had a great fear of running into my heroe back in there and having to explain myself.