Day 58, Monday July 19: Musings from Chris

I think I belong on the road for now.

Kansas is expansive, as is travel.

I feel a bit like Major Tom,

on a three month space walk. I am at times merely the task and place before me. We’re camped remotely tonight, snuggled into a neat spot along Kansas’s

Little Vermillion River. We are actually on the Oregon Trail. I’m told 300,000 people in wagons pulled by Oxen or mules made their way west along this trail. Leaving everything that wouldn’t fit in or on the cart behind. Tough choices needed to be made. It was a life and death journey. Out of necessity and good luck, partnerships and life long friends were sometimes forged and sometimes people lost touch with one another forever.

This crossing has a small memorial cholera cemetery, slightly north of the still dusty Oregon Trail.

The cemetery is on the old world side of this river.

I’ve walked across the little bridge twice today and driven once west and back east again. For these people there was no going back and forth, there was no return policy. David and I visited the cholera cemetery last night after the dinner dishes were done. The memorial sight was mercifully shaded from the sun. The travelers had to wait to cross this creek here, people piled up bottlenecked, frustrated eager to move on

in poor weather, chaos and often very unsanitary conditions.

Little Vermillion is not much more than an ambitious creek, but an obstacle nonetheless. It was scorching hot yesterday. Looking down from the bridge,

I was trying without luck

to find a path for myself down the steep sheer slope. I saw a couple of snapping turtles, sunning themselves on a rock below me, they were the size of decent watermelons.

We are headed west, as a plague again tightens its grip on this region. A plague of stupidity and a pledge of loyalty to the absurd. Thank God we’ve passed through our two weeks in Missouri, pretty and kind as it is.

Though we’re traveling in comfort. I’m still more aware of my vulnerability than I’m used to. There is no visible threat but there are psychic goblins and there

is a risk. We camp like Gypsies. We have been shown touching kindness here and there. But no one knows us and we know no one. We keep moving. So far not unwelcome but also more than welcome to me

leave.

We’re strangers in a strange land.

The days of the week matter less here,

where-ever that is. I have only the vaguest idea where I actually am. Even with GPS and the thick atlas I asked Dave to acquire. We are dead center on one page of a map that has four pages dedicated to all that fall within the borders of the state of Kansas.

The road we’re on, Hell the “town” we’re in can not be found in or on the road atlas.

Headstones and Milestones.

It’s getting toward the end of July, my Mom’s birthday had she survived the pandemic would have been 07/25

she’d have been 81.

In New York, at the beginning of this year,

the Plague released me from a responsibility I’d taken on a decade ago.

An organizing principle, a notion of family,

a priority, I had made a version of peace with.

My commitment provided me with some earthly purpose and meaning. I’m thinking about the westbound settlers who had to leave a loved one or two buried in the ground on this side of the river. Lost loves that once and forever defined them. One day they were fine and the next they were gone, that was not the plan, not my plan, not their plan, not at all.

Son, “plans change”

Flat on my back. I look up at the stars, there are many stars within sight tonight. I think to myself, they have looked down on this spot forever. They yawn at a few centuries of human drama, the stars don’t change,

and we are stardust. I must sleep.