October 1 3 4 7 8

11 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

22 23 24 25 26 28 30 31

October 11

"Look at that land – empty land," the man in the seat in front of me says as we glide over the rivers and fields of Iowa. "Only 25% of the U.S. is developed. Did you know that? 75% of the U.S. is empty land."

There is a junkyard of cars – the start of another Iowa village.

The train from Buffalo to Chicago got in three hours late. Sunday morning dragged on as the train drove across Indiana. What saved the morning for me was my long talk in the lounge car with Claudia about architecture. And the trailers and fields and windmills of Indiana went by us with all its flatness, went on by as we talked of towering gothic buildings in Europe and in Chicago.

Once in Chicago I said my goodbyes to my friends from Saxony. I walked down to State Street to catch the bus to my sister's place down in Hyde Park. I walked under the elevated trains of the Chicago loop, and walked thru the crowds at the end of the Chicago Marathon. So many people had silver capes. These are the ones who had finished the course. But I also saw other people, who were looking a little more sad. They had the numbers on their bodies but no silver cape. They had run in the marathon but had not met the finish line.

The #6 bus took me down to Hyde Park for $1.75. The speaker on the bus called out the stops for us mechanically, so there was no guess work, only listening and looking. But the clock in the display was way off and had shifted us back to 1988. I thought about that time, about my life before I was sure I was settled in Minneapolis. I could go anyplace back then, but I was poor and just stayed in that city, my home now far away.

The people on the bus brought me back to now. I watched all the faces, the faces on the full bus. Some faces had come from the Marathon, some had come from somewhere else. Some faces were nodding, some were sleeping, and some ignoring. I got off at 59th Street, and walked the short sidewalk down to the building where my sister and brother-in-law and niece live.

That evening was my niece Cora's second birthday party and my cousin came down with her family, too. I was surrounded by family and friends for the miniature birthday party and I took some pictures, and I had some home-cooked food and cake. When almost everybody had left, Cora wanted to do the birthday all over again, so Anthony's cousin David lit the candle on her cake so everybody left could help her blow it back out.

On Monday morning I rode the bus up to the loop with my sister and Cora, and met a friend of my sister's at Millenium Park, which has faces for fountains that look at you in big video blocks and then pucker their lips to spit out streams of water. Then we listened to a sound sculpture, then we went to a playground that was surrounded by tall buildings, that was in a new development near the lake, everything was so shiny and newborn.

That afternoon I went to an outdoor book sale in Hyde Park and found some treasures, but kept only one to buy for a quarter. Then I took a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, which is near my sister's place. The Robie House, built in 1908, was the first house built with an attached garage. Wright saw that the car would change everything about the way Americans lived, and he built those changes into the house. He thought that the car would turn their lives private, would make the sidewalk and the front porch obsolete, so he built those things into this futuristic house.

He turned the house away from its neighbors. He hid its front door and hid the windows from down below. He put in steel beams to make the house absurdly horizontal, like the prairie, like the roads would that soon cross the prairie and kick the train out of competition. He started the whole thing with this house, the beginning of isolation, cutting the house off from its neighbors, cutting the people inside off from the people outside.

He saw that people were turning into islands, were moving away from community, were moving this way in their cars, in their boxes, in their racing anonymity. He thought that the tall, open and fronchporched Victorian houses of the day were not adequate to serve this new human, this human despising his humanity from the front seat of a new car.

This morning I rode the Metra commuter train from Hyde Park up to the loop with my sister. It was a full train and there were no open seats we could find so I stood up with my big pack as the train glid the 60 blocks up to downtown. I then went to Union Station and picked up some of the tickets for the rest of my trip from a friendly ticketmaster and stashed my backpack in a locker. In Chicago's Union Station they do have lockers, and you can pay for them with a credit card. Then I walked around the loop to look for things to draw, to look for things to see. I had just the morning. I had to catch my train to Denver in the early afternoon.

As I walked up Michigan Avenue to visit the Chicago Cultural Center in the old public library building, I ran into my sister's friend, the one we had met downtown yesterday, in front of the same building where we all had lunch yesterday. She was parking her bike and heading into that same building to go to work.

I visited the bicycle station built into Millenium Park. Along with the video fountains and gardens and Frank Gehry bandshell there is a bike station with parking for up to 300 bicycles, and showers and bike rentals on a Randolph Street corner of the park. I looked at the bike station and walked thru the Millenium Park Gardens, then I looked at some art in the Chicago Cultural Center, and tried to draw some prints that I found there.

I had some food at a falafel stand under the L tracks, and then I went to the James Thompson building to look at Illinois abstract art (another free downtown gallery with many interesting works) and listened to some music in the round rotunda of that pink building. Then I walked fast back to my backpack and my trip, back to Union Station, saying quickly goodbye to the city and walked across the river.

On the other side of the river I looked up to see the big Boeing sign. So this was the new world headquarters of the airplane making company. I would have to tell my friends in Seattle about this black glass moment.

As the train pulled out of the station I drew some animations to tell the story of my journey so far. I filmed them into the afternoon, and then relaxed with a book and reading as the shadows played across the pages, as they turned the flat city into the flatlands of Illinois farms. I made reservations for dinner and sat with three retired persons from the sleeper cars as I ate. One gentleman was taking a long round tour of the country on the train too. His trip was a little like mine but not as long. The couple sitting across from us were taking their first train trip ever, and really enjoying it.

We crossed the bridge into Burlington, Iowa. I did not have my video camera to take some images of this beautiful old brick city and the sunset and the trees.

Now I am listening to the strange conversation between the two people sitting in front of me. On the left is the low voiced metropolitan man who also speaks French and translates the lyrics of Arabic songs. He is speaking to a much less cultured man who is much more lumpy and is wearing a powder blue sweatsuit and listening to those Arabic songs much too loudly on his headphone radio. They look at the fields and streams and they see emptiness. I look out there and think that I am looking at everything.

"Do you know the words you are listening to, or do you only hear the music? 'I love you so much, I love you for my life, I love you to the ends of the earth, I love you so deeply.'" The metropolitan man is translating from the tinny loud sound flowering out of his lumpy friend's ears.

We passed the Mississippi some time ago now. I am now passing somewhere almost directly beneath my home. Today I have been traveling for two weeks. I am not even half way thru my journey, and the Mississippi made me think of home. I am not exactly homesick yet.

Tonight I have strange animated dreams. Everyone is in a powder blue sweat suit, everyone in my dreams is a little big lumpy. They are all pillow people, and they sing their creature national anthem, these pillow people with bulbous noses and then the young ones gather on the green to tell the tales to their king and their queen.

One young one sings: "I am a spreading oak, spreading to the sky."

Another sings: "I am a bubbling brook that knows the reason why."

Some of the pillow people are locked up to the end of the world fence. They make a line there where they sing their songs of woe. One sings:

"Sometimes I make a stench and it has too much of a stench. That is when I have gone too far, and wind up on the fence."

Some pillow people welcome other, smaller pillow people into the genital holes, the ones directly underneath their mouths that look like even bigger mouths. This may be for mating purposes or it may just have its grooming reasons. And that is all I know about the massive waddling pillow people for the sun wakes me up, and now I am in morning.

October 13

As the train pulled into Denver, the sunrise turned into mountains.

The train into Denver was early. I was there at 7:00 a.m. I walked thru the corridors of Denver's Union Station, now being turned into a multi-modal terminal for its growing network of light rail trains and long-distance buses.

In the basement loading corridor of Denver's Union Station there is a kind of graveyard of trains that once served this city. On all the empty gate doors you will find a sign with the name of the train that used to go directly from Denver to Portland, or to Los Angeles, or to Kansas City, and the years in which that train ran its route. Most of those lines died in the mid-sixties. Some survived as long as the early seventies. They were victims of the interstate highway system, with which they could not compete.

In Denver I visited friends who I had not seen for nineteen years, friends from college, old friends who I connected back with immediately. They gave me a great bedroom in their beautiful home in a grand old Denver neighborhood not far from downtown. Their neighborhood was fit for walking, and there were people walking on the sidewalks and taking the bus all around me.

I took a morning walk that took me to a slightly newer and car-dominated part of the city. I immediately felt as small as an ant, the only pedestrian in a sea of car domination. I was able to catch a bus that took me to the light rail line, and this took me downtown.

The Denver light rail trains have high floors that you have to step up into. They do not seem to run much more often that every fifteen minutes, but the car I was on was full of people and I had to stand until the last couple stops.

In downtown Denver there are free shuttle buses that run down a bus and pedestrian-only street, the 16th Street Mall. These buses pull up every couple minutes or so, they run almost one per block, and they ring their trolley bells when they close their doors for the green light, and then they pull across the intersection and up to the next block. They are free so the loading is instant. The doors open and the people walk on. They are hybrid-electric, so they make a kinder sound than diesel buses.

They run back and forth like a ballet. You could get in one on one block and out the next, or ride several blocks if you so desire. At either end of the mall is a transit station where you catch the buses that go to further regions.

I walked in downtown Denver to see the history that is left. I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art and the people there were so nice and welcoming. I watched some video art, some naked people playing jumping games and playing human being bowling. I walked some more and drew some older buildings. I looked off at the mountains, on the horizon, rising over the new condo buildings under construction near the railroad station. I watched the blue sky go by, and big clouds, and felt the delightful cool fall air.

October 14

Yesterday morning I rode the city bus to the Denver Art Museum and spent some time with their native American and Pre-Columbian art collections. The original peoples of the great lakes and plains had a conception of the year that set aside the summer and fall and spring for hunting and growing and working to feed themselves, and then their winters they spent inside making beautiful objects to adorn their lives. Everything they used had a carving or a pattern or a picture of a design that brought them closer to the spiritual, that made their lives transcend the ground. That notion of spending so much of the year making art, and that everybody made art for that part of the year, this moved me.

When I drew Denver's city hall I left too much space for the sky. I had to fill it in with the homeless people sleeping on the grass in front of it.

I had some lunch at a crepe stand on the 16th Street Mall and then I rode the express bus from Denver to Boulder. I caught the bus in the Market Street station, which is an underground bus depot with bays for you to wait at. I went to Boulder to meet wonderful L.A. friends who moved to Colorado last year.

Boulder is like an island paradise, with colorfully painted buses and a vibrant pedestrian mall at its core. It was a town painted in mountain colors and intelligence. It seemed like an ideal place to live just by the shape of its sky.

I rented a bicycle and biked with my friend Mike up and down the bicycle paths along the Boulder River, and on the bike friendly streets of Boulder, almost all of which seemed to have painted bike lanes.

In the evening, I walked with my friends and their daughter to a nearby commercial area for dinner. Along the way they ran into several people they knew, and they have only lived here for a year. We talked about community, and how our lives are built around technology and design that seems to prevent that more than nurture it. We talked about how necessary that sense of community is, the importance of sharing our lives with other people, and how we in our lives have tried to build community around these obstacles with groups, with walking, by linking up people we think should really know each other, the community matchmaking that my friends seem to know how to do so well. We talked about the necessity of the social, how we need other people, how we need those connections even more than food, even more than air. How we go crazy if we do not connect, how our chemistry can change and our minds can malform if we do not have the social connections that we need to live.

We walked under the stars and the gorgeous darn mountains that sit above Boulder. We talked about how such an ideal place as this is priced too high for middle class people, about the struggle of existence, about the beauty and the sweetness that we are sharing here and now.

October 15

The train passes thru the mountains of northeast Utah. Almost 24 hours from now I will be in my next place of solid ground, and that will be San Francisco.

This morning, I was in Denver. I rode the express bus back from Boulder after walking in the mountains with my friend Mike, and more talking, and more biking. Back in Denver I did my laundry and walked a long walk for Japanese food with my Denver friends and we talked about everything too, all the time that has gone by in our lives, how as much time has passed since we last saw each other as we were old when we met. This morning I woke up and said goodbye to Zeke and his son Jonah. I rode the #6 Denver city bus downtown until I got to Union Station. As I waited for the bus, the Saturday morning traffic passed me closely on that street. The cars drove up right next to the curb, and I sat next to the curb, on the steel bus stop bench with my pack on my back.

The train was a little late coming into Denver. While I waited I made the acquaintance of a couple people who would be riding the train with me. I connected again with L, a young woman from Sao Paolo, Brazil, once the train started up.

We talked of our travels as we sat in the Sightseer car. She also had been in New York, Chicago and Denver, and we to spend a couple days in Salt Lake City before catching the train and off to San Francisco. We talked about our adventures in these places and we talked about the rhythm of the train, its windows and its sounds. We talked about movies, especially silent movies, for she was a fan. We talked about Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and the westerns that might have been made on this brown ground, or other land just like it further west. We talked about how special it was to ride the train, and how it connected us to history. She told me that passenger train service in Brazil had been all but eliminated, and I felt sad about that, and I hoped that this would not happen in this country, but it might very well.

The train did not take its usual route out of Denver that morning. It did not go over the Colorado Rockies and give us such a beautiful show like it usually does that morning. A landslide in the mountains meant a delay, and instead of the ride up the tunnel and the Colorado mountains we rode north up toward Wyoming, on a route that passenger trains do not run these days.

The train inched along the dry grass prairie, past prairie dog towns with watching dogs looking out for the train. We could not hear but we could imagine their squeaky prairie dog sounds. We passed herds of antelope grazing on plowed over fields. We sat in the lounge car eating brown Gardenburgers as we watched the waving brown ground go past us slowly but surely.

The car attendant of our car was a history buff, and was really into his job and the life on the train. He told me that he was going to try to make lemons out of lemonade, no, he corrected himself, lemonade out of lemons. He said on the loudspeaker that we would not be taking the scenic route, but we would be taking the historic route. We would be riding on the route of the first transcontinental railroad, and there were many stories about that route.

As we passed the brown gentle rising flatness of southern Wyoming, the car attendant told us stories of the railroad's construction in the 1860's, of the robber barons that built it with money, and the immigrants and workers who built it with their hands. He told us about how the young railroad was tormented by train robbers who preyed on the lines. He told us that the train robbers were mostly shell shocked Civil War veterans, and not necessarily romantic figure but mentally disabled into their reckless ways. He talked about the Hole in the Wall gang as we did indeed pass by the hole in the wall. He talked about Butch Cassidy and his graceful ineptness, and how he was portrayed in the popular media.

We passed thru the Great Divide Basin, where the water does not flow either east or west because there is practically no water at all. We saw herds of domesticated buffalo, and then we took afternoon naps in our coach seats.

In the evening, L and I stepped out of the train briefly in Green River, Wyoming, and breathed the dry air, and then when we got back on we watched Herbie Goes Wild in the lounge car before saying our goodbyes. She got off the train in Salt Lake City near midnight. I said goodbye to another intense day-long friendship, and met many other people on that train.

I had dinner with Fred, who was from North Carolina and riding the train to Davis, California. He liked to talk, and also told me to be careful on my travels.

On Friday morning, I woke up and sat in the front yard of my friend Mike's house in Boulder. As I drew a picture of the mountain up the street and the house across the street, I saw his neighbor get into her car. I had actually met Mike's neighbor briefly at my conference way back in Philadelphia, but she was in her car before I could run or startle her with a greeting.

Mike and I rode our bikes thru Boulder and hiked up the foothills. We walked past signs that said that we were in a Mountain Lion's home. We rode our bikes past signs that said that bikes had priority in this lane. We had some lunch at an incredibly ornate tea house. We said our goodbyes and I hung out for a while on the Pearl Street pedestrian mall to draw its community and the old buildings that frame the action.

The express bus took me back to Denver. That evening I sat in Zeke and Erin's front yard with them and their son for some time. We talked with a neighbor, who was walking by with her son, slightly younger than Jonah.

At the Japanese restaurant where we ate our dinner, a young man proposed marriage to a young women as they sat up at the counter and the table of older people next to them cheered them all and toasted them. On the walk home we stopped for coffee at a coffee shop that had all moved outside to the sidewalk, chairs on the grass boulevard, as everyone listened to a woman singing folk songs, introducing each one with a short pat story, and we listened for a minute and we melted into the lovely night.

October 16

I see the hills of red sunrise as the train slowly makes its way past forests of sagebrush and tremendous miles of pink sky. There is word that we are running late, and certainly we are going slow at the moment.

A dirt road doodles along the edge of the rails and I think about the friendly ticket-taker, Babs, at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. I asked her about the museum and she asked me about me, and I walked thru those curtained roomsnow many days ago.

The restrooms on the Superliner trains are tiny. It is a little closed off world when you are inside it with a toilet and a sink and paper towels and a soap dispenser. I try my best to make my morning appearance there, rubbing my face with a paper towel, brushing my teeth with one of the last squeezes of my tiny travel toothpaste tube.

Land like this is made for fantasy. You want to put your dreams here, and if you do, they most likely will stick to the sagebrush. A little bit of barbed wire will separate you from their greatest Nevada horrors. And the distant cliffs like a naked body on the horizon will keep them from wandering too far, will keep them in the language of faces and streets and buildings and flesh.

Last night as we flowed into Salt Lake City, I saw a refinery right next to the tracks. It was a glowing city of tubes and burn off fires dancing at the tips of two towers. As we pulled out of the Salt Lake City station, I saw the hostel, it was right next to the railroad tracks, where my friend of yesterday, L, would be staying.

There are rocks of faces, there are rocks of hands. There is the nearly round moon that paints the clouds like clumsy lace. There is the orange light that expresses itself with a clear brown line of shadow. There are the little bits of sound in my train world, just the tips of conversation, just the baby cry in the middle of the night, for a family with a couple babies is sitting just a little behind me.

October 17

Yesterday, the train inched over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It followed the rails of the first transcontinental railroad. It followed a trail that took years to build thru the mountains, that inched along day by day, four inches, two feet, a mile or less. It raced so slowly to meet the golden spike in Utah.

Before it got to the mountains, we passed thru a Reno, and a family with five kids and a father who had to talk to everybody on the train and tell them about everything, got out there. As they were unloading on the platform I saw him showing one of the other train passengers something about a tall building down the street in Reno.

From the homeless villages of the west edge of Reno we rose into the mountains. The flat turned tall and here we were. There were gorgeous vistas of lakes and trees. I spent a great part of the journey in the sightseerer lounge car talking to other riders who were enjoying the view. I listened to the intense economic theories of Ray, an elderly gentleman, who told me that if he were president, he would just print more money to solve the world's problems. He would give the money to people and tell them to solve something. That is how he would rule the world. I talked to a woman from Cleveland who was enjoying the show, and a woman from Indianapolis who was hard at work on her laptap computer but looked up to see the tunnels and the mountains.

We had to wait for a freight train at the top of Donner Pass as a history guide gave us the story of the party trapped there one long ago winter. We wound thru tunnels and snow bridges, we made it up and over the mountain.

As we descended the mountains and sped up toward San Francisco, I talked to Pablo, who was from Colombia. He had been in Omaha for two months studying English, and this was his field practice, riding the train and meeting people. As we got closer to San Francisco, he called his Omaha host family to let him know that he had made it soundly.

On one side of the train, the sun set over great water. On the other side of the train, the full moon rose red over the city cliffs of Emmeryville. By the time we got to the end of the line, I felt I had met almost half the people on that transcontinental train.

Emmeryville is where the train stops, and we got out and transferred to a bus that would take us into the city. As we crossed the bay bridge, I saw Pablo's eyes and digital camera light up as we rode over the big bridge into the tower lights of the city. The city looked so intimidating, the black rectangles of tiny lights all huddled together on the hillside beside the glowing waters. I was so excited to visit San Francisco, but I had never come in this way before, and I was a little surprised at how big it all seemed to be.

I got off the bus at Powell and Market and walked up three blocks in the crowded Sunday night streets of walkers. I went up to Geary to catch a bus. Soon I was at my hostel, which is at the edge of the Tenderloin district. I had stayed here two years ago, but the neighborhood felt darker and more dangerous this time.

There were people walking, and restaurants still lit up, but there were also people sleeping on the sidewalks. I walked to a fast food restaurant to get some dinner and at one point I felt a cold wind and had to look up. A man with long dark Jesus beard was staring at me with eyes like coals, with eyes that could have been turning around. He was like a cardboard cutout sent by angels, he was a presence doing nothing but staring at me, staring my mind out, staring my soul out with his eyes. I turned away and still felt him and looked up and he was still there, still staring at me as if he did not have to blink his eyes. When I looked back down I did not even have to look up again to feel that he was still there. Eventually I looked up again and he had vanished. He hadn't walked away, I was certain that he had just vanished, or that he had never been there in flesh and blood. He was so gone that he had turned into a haunting spirit. I walked as fast as I could back to the light of the hostel.

October 18

Tonight as I was waiting for the Amtrak bus that would take me to the Emmeryville station a man asking for money sat down next to me in the bus shelter. He talked in a low Popeye voice, almost mechanical. He said his eyes were very bad and his legs were bad and he told me he was a regular user of heroin. He said his life would be cleaned up by the end of the week and he needed a quarter to call his daughter. I told him I did not have one.

San Francisco was intense. The homeless people, the panhandlers of the street. My roommate at the hostel, Bob from Sydney, talking in his sleep, giving himself, old boy, good middle of the night advice. He had to call his eleven day hop across the U.S. a four day short campaign because his knee was acting up.

Yesterday morning I rode a cable car to Fisherman's Wharf. The driver pulled the big lever back and forth to engage the car with the cable to pull it forward, and then to let it go to keep it in one place. When I got to the ocean, I had to visit the sea lions who live there, and the Musee Mechanique, which has all kinds of ancient coin operated attractions and player pianos for you to fill with quarters and see what they will do.

I rode the F line streetcars, a working museum of streetcar history. I rode the great streamlined PCC cars from all over the U.S., from Boston, and L.A. and Philadelphia and Chicago. They used to run in those cities until those cities abandoned them, but the cars are still sound, they were built to run forever, and now they are still running on the F line in San Francisco. They run as smooth as steel up and down the street, and I loved every minute I could ride in their 1940's gorgeousness.

Yesterday evening I got together for beer and dinner with my old friend Klee, and tonight I met my old friend Harry for tea and then dinner. San Francisco was a sea of moving people, and mass transit, and walks in the air of sea and sun with clouds and shimmer.

This morning I walked into the San Francisco Art Institute to see the giant mural by Diego Rivera, and had to sit in silence beneath it. It did not draw it, I did not photograph it, I just looked at it. I had to. Then I walked on, up Russian Hill and down, to North Beach, where I sipped a Cappucino and ate a scone at a little Italian street cafe. I drew some scenes, including a dog parked outside the café.

This evening I took one last streetcar ride in a Milan, Italy wooden interior car. Everyone sits on benches in the perimeter of the inside, and the step pulls down when the doors open for a stop. I rode the light rail train out to the Sunset neighborhood and took a walk thru Golden Gate Park. I had to walk thru an intimidating tunnel under the road. Guarding the tunnel was a drug seller and three zoned out zombies, like the guard dogs of hell that I had to grit up my gut to get by. I walked a short crazy walk down Haight Street and then took a bus so I would not be late for my meeting this evening.

It was sad to leave the hostel after such a short stay, and now I wait in the Emmeryville train station for the late night train to take me to Portland. The train is running a little late, but that gives me time to address and send off some postcards, and to write these words about San Francisco human intensity.

October 19

The train passes thru a beautiful sunrise landscape of Northern California pine trees and streams and mountains. We go in and out of tunnels in this land where the sun does not quite make it. It should be morning but the black has only gotten to gray. There are many degrees of gray in the clouds. That is what keeps the sun from doing anything but blazing a light box.

The train is going steady but slow. It has a sound of diligence. It makes its way so necessary and workmanlike.

I love to wake up on the train. The rhythm of the movement, the rocking like a cradle. The dining car attendant is whispering on the speaker system. He is saying, "Pancakes. French toast," like subliminal suggestions to our sleepy heads now waking, but I go to the café car to get my usual, a bagel with cream cheese and a hot tea.

The mountain is hidden by the gray mist, and the other mountains are hiding too, some in the cloak of distance. This landscape leaves me speechless. It makes me wonder if I am still asleep and dreaming. It is too beautiful for light. Maybe it should only be seen in the dark. It is a land of rock and mystery, it is the place where sunrise cannot even find its way.

I surrender to the subliminal and do go for breakfast in the dining car and sit with a young man with tattoos all over his body. He takes this train often, and knows that we are late. I also sit with a couple from Portland who live up on the hill and are so happy that they took the train for this trip. We pass by a town. It is barely here in this valley.

The train passes under and around Mount Shasta. In the Sightseer Lounge car I have plenty of time to draw it as we move past. I draw the mountain from multiple perspectives with my pen and my sketchbook. I see it out of the side window. I see it out of the ceiling window. The train goes back to valley. It heads into Oregon and the morning is still morning.

I cannot describe this silent movie out my window. I could say tree tree, I could say river river, but that would be as much as meaningless. From the yellow ferns on the forest floor to the glowing yellow leaves of the autumn trees to the fog that burns the hills, that hug them, that brush the trees their comb. This is a place of fall and beauty, this is the inside heart of Oregon surrendering its secrets to us.

The train winds in and out of tunnels again so we can hold the orange leaf glow on our photographic film just long enough to feel it. The gray sky down to the yellow leaves. I cannot even begin to describe that color, I could never photograph or draw it. Here are the blazing lungs of mind of my journey into autumn. Here is where the deep roots dig their hardest thru the soil to make the color to give it up to the ground for winter. Here is where the fir trees lean down to pray to the valleys of cloud and rain, and our silver train makes slow progress, so we have time to be the kings of vision.

The train squeals its steel on steel around the bend and around this one. We could be going in circles, we could be lacing shoes. We need some real convenience in such a paradise valley, we need to get to town very late if this is the freight train that we are on.

Green yellow red brown. These words cannot say it. The leaves are blinding bright against the clouds. The lava rock looks back in faces. We watch but we are watched. We dig deep in a valley, then the black of a tunnel, and we could be racing thru the middle of the earth. All that rock around is cozy as luminous fall yellow leaves. I am profaning it even turning on my camera.

October 22

Sloppy Books

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