One thing occurred to me this morning about how this "vacation" feels versus how camping vacations typically feel. To most vacations there is an inevitable and usually quite near terminus. On a one or two week vacation, the end is so close you can't not think about from time to time. But on this artistic journey, this road trip with art and travel as a way of life, with every new day creating the means to another and yet another day of art, well, death where is thy sting? Wherefore art thou scheisse Endung? Just try and catch me. Catch me if you can!

Jerry Johnson...

Uh... duh.

Lochsa River, Idaho. Somewhere off Route 12. I'm smoked, toast, French-fired, dusted by several hours of intense wrangling with Mother Nature.

The question "what were we thinking?" occurs to me now as I look back at the day's events. It is an irrelevant question. What we were thinking we did. Mission accomplished. Without much forethought or doubt, Tex, Seven, Baby and I tackled the feat of getting Seven and his wheelchair over 2 miles of rugged forest trail to Jerry Johnson Hot Springs.

So what if Seven's chair is now due for the scrap heap. So what if we severely abused the good Samaritan ethic of a couple of Missoula Christian boys? We got him in. We got him out. We soaked, we swam, we stomped on the terra as Lord Buckley would say.

I once quoted Hunter Thompson as saying that, or HST quoting Lord Buckley. But now I feel justified in going right to the source, having attended the Lord Buckley reunion party in Portland earlier this year and been knighted Duke of Duke by one of Lord Buckley's last known disciples.

Anyway, back to story. We're moving west again along Route 12 across the neck of Idaho, leaving behind a magnificent day full of heave-ho's, hot pools and cold river dips, boulder tossing, the Alabama girl in the bionic woman swim suit..

Whoa! Fell asleep there. Wind in my face, cool forest afternoon, post-swim and all that pushing and pulling, lugging Seven's chair over the rocks and tree roots, and those two beautiful cold Olympia beers at trail's end. Enough to put anyone to sleep.

Waking up from these naps, however, is a bitch. Like I just told Seven over the CB, "Every time I wake up from a nap, we're getting pulled over by the cops!"

Impeding Traffic

Indeed, Idaho Officer G.S. Swearingen was right there like Tex said he was when, after a few deep breaths and a moment to collect my head, I stepped from Duke to survey the scene. There was Seven, arguing policy with one big potato-bred cop who was trying to tell him that art or no art, you couldn't paint extra letters on your license plate. Call me a traitor, but I can see the cop's point on that one. It had to do with one little red "i" that Seven had painted on his plate to make the IFSM somewhat more readable at IFiSM. There was that and Seven's "tail," his foil-covered rear wind shield wiper that, when bent out, wags and apparently obscures the license plate.

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Last update April 1, 2004