expected
What's expected
is diverted
In one last gasp
last grope
last grasp
of the expected
I allowed myself to see
what could lie before me
Truly
nothing arrived
as I put forth
tried to will into being
I fell
I broke
was alone
tried to dream two horses
towards my path
but they refused
not convinced
that I
could lead
them
2009
-------------------------------
2011
Six weeks. 430 km. 1000 continuous hours with two horses. 1/3 the hoped-for distance. 1/2 the hoped-for time.
Winds so strong and sudden that they pulled the very shirt off my back. Gentle evenings of calm warm breezes simply, quietly, waiting, watching for the sun to lower itself in the west. Sun baked some dry, some humid, days in the mid 30s. Torrential rains and thunderstorms. Double rainbows over the Missouri Couteau.
Miles upon miles of annual crop land. Brief snippets of native prairie that somehow escaped the plows' incessant destructive digging. Mosquitoes as heavy as anything I've ever experienced. The joy of the day, the night when they seemed to suddenly disappear. For good. For that year anyways.
Too many gravel roads, too worn hoofs and the worry that could bring each day. The occasional purely dirt road or even open pasture with no barriers bringing brief feelings of freedom from the tyranny of fencing.
Never quite dehydrated, but days and days of never quite enough water. Water that made me think that what I was drinking was more chemical experiment than what sustains all life on earth. The relief of coming to a place with easy clean drinking water where it would gush out of a hose attached to a tap in the side of a house or even out of a tap in a house. Something that felt like unimaginable comfort.
The love of the gentleness of tent living. Gentleness upon my spirit, gentleness upon the land. Three inches of water beneath my bedroll from a massive storm that suddenly changed wind direction. Tent blown down in seconds on two occasions and almost so on numerous others.
Sore cut hands from binding sisal rope to repair my picket ropes that had unwound themselves. A week to heal. Cracking soreness every time my fingers would bend.
Looking for horses that had pulled their pickets in the middle of the night during a new moon, plough wind screaming by, where the only chance of finding them were the two tiny red blinking lights of their eyes glowing from the light of my headlamp in the distance. The truly wonderful feeling of becoming a team; of building trust; of becoming confident enough to feel worthy of the faith of other loved beings.
The stunning number of people willing to help and the occasional one that would zoom by in their trucks with no regard for the travelers on the side of the road, the very occasional one that would raise the hair on the back of my neck warning me to keep my distance.
I do not believe that it is possible to engage in a long ride and not believe or come to believe in some sort of a power beyond one’s own sphere of being. A higher power, it could be said I suppose in today's modern words, though I myself would hesitate to put any sort of hierarchy upon this aspect of the experience. I see myself as what you might call an animist, where all those living (and to industrial human eyes non-living) upon the earth are sacred, with a need to be here, a direct and vital connection with each other. A view that extends to all aspects of the living earth. From the smallest, so vital bacteria (perhaps the true mother of us all) to the deepest roots of the oldest mountains. As I travel, I often find a connection with those that have a devout religious heart. If I am with people that pray before a meal, I am happy to be a part of that even though our world and spiritual views may be quite divergent. Though when off on my own I do not say a prayer before every meal, I do so often enough and at other times as the thought, perhaps need to do so springs up to me.
I find true atheism to be a most hard nosed, arrogant and 'fundamental' of beliefs seeming to carry over puritan ethics to a new home. Who was it who wrote that atheism is Protestantism taken to it’s extreme end? Gray, Grey, his name was I think. It has been said before me and perhaps more eloquently, that the current religion of this modern world is a blind belief in exponential industrial growth, a fetish pulling along with it an often ignorant and uninformed belief in the power of science and scientific principal and the many aspects of our world that spin around with it. Not simply as a powerful tool to add to our understanding of place if used wisely. This ranges from the medical to the economic to the very idea that all things are machines, slaves here only to do for the human, and the modern civilized human particularly. How easy it is for this world view to push us to see even our own human selves as machines. How ugly and sad, tragic and diminished it makes us all.
It is a powerful and humbling act. To allow yourself each and every day to start the morning walking, three beings struggling to find trust with each other, with no real idea of where or how that day will end. To trust that the angels of whatever form that guard and protect will help to keep an eye out, will help you to recognise that deep feeling in your soul and in your gut. To know that every minute decision can effect a massive movement; can affect one's very life and living upon the earth. That each breath has its moment, its importance. That when it is time to die, it will come, I can only hope, with the acceptance and grace to go where fate wills it.
This is what I think of now. Now that my long ride appears to be in suspension for this year (2011). Indeed it is what I felt and thought throughout the entire journey. Indeed it is how I have felt for many years. Each year and each new adventure brings these thoughts more and more to the fore.
Over these past 5 or 6 days at the end of July that I have been in stasis in southern Saskatchewan, (close to the southern border of Canada; the northern border of the USA; the state of Montana) I have attempted to bring the thought of continuing on with the ride, of not actually stopping, to myself. Each time I tried this mental experiment, I felt as though a so very solid wall would come up before me. I felt this in my stomach. I felt it in the core of my very being. I listened though the listening felt crushing, despairing. I asked myself, ' how could I stop having come so far?'
Yet, how can I not pay attention to this feeling, this spirit, after it has guarded and guided me through all these long days? There is a reason for me to stop and though it was triggered first by a minor leg injury on one of my horses and then by the realisation that I had myself become physically exhausted, stroked with heat and humidity and dehydration, there seems to be more to it than simply that. I will not speculate on what it may be, but rather only trust in what I am hearing. To not do so would be to ignore that which had kept me going and alive in the first place.
I miss being in motion. I miss living outside all the time. I miss tent living, though I know that I will soon be back in a tent still among my horses in a more settled situation for a time. I miss pissing and shitting out in the open. I miss the smell that the plants, the earth, the air give off at different times of the day. I miss the sounds that the birds, the wind, the water speak at different times of the day as well. I can hear and feel all these things now sitting here writing under the shelter a rare grove of high plains trees planted years ago on an old, still lived in homestead. The birds still sing, the air still shifts, the water falls and moves. And yet, I am not in that state of absolute exposure to everything around me and I can feel that my listening is becoming hampered; blocked.
I miss being with the horses day and night. I know that I will miss the special kind of people-meeting that can come with traveling with a couple of horses. The way so many are able to open themselves up. To open to a kind of romantic thought that seems out of fashion today. It is encouraging to see that this expression is not lost, but rather, more, buried under the weight of modern living. I was afraid that this was completely lost to us. That I would not see it. I did see it. Often. Still, it is rare. For now, for the short term, the rules of the modern hold us in a tight grip, though I would also say that it is a grip that is not for too much longer. For better or for worse (and we will see both, I believe) this 100 plus years of petrol slavery that has defined the modern industrial world is coming to a quick and hard end.
I don't miss drinking out of questionable sloughs both for me and the horses. I filtered the water for myself, but there was always the unknown aspect of agro chemicals that your average camping water filter cannot deal with to niggle away at you. I don't miss the feeling of having to picket (single picket pin hammered into the ground attached to a front leg with a 30 foot, 5/8 of an inch thick soft cotton rope) my horses so often, wishing that I could let them run more freely more often. I don't miss the very intense mosquitoes we had this wet year during the first 2/3rds of the trip. I don't miss the gravel roads and I don't miss the miles and miles and miles and miles of annual mono crops and the technology that goes with it that define much of the prairies in this time and day.
I am ambivalent to the fair amount of 'extreme weather' that I encountered. Most of which I simply attempted to find cover to weather over. I generally did manage to find adequate cover. Ambivalent because with the hard and difficult goes also the feeling of deeply experiencing the power of the great Mother. It was interesting to hear spoken of the word ‘extreme’ attached to the word ‘weather’. People are noticing.
During my morning walk today filling in the urge to move when I must now wait, I felt as though aspects of my journey had left my spirit crushed. So many times, as I rode or walked, I felt as though I were traveling through a devastated landscape. At times it felt apocalyptic. That my line of story that follows Aoife’s journey felt vividly current. In this sense, at this moment of writing, I feel that this despair is also a part of what has left me unable to continue on.
Of course I was completely aware of this fact of the non-wild plains before I left. I knew that it would hit me hard. That it would bring that despair. I know that it is in the doing that things are made real and this feeling of devastation has gone deeper than I could ever have expected.
My deepest hope, my dearest fantasy was that I would be able to immerse myself in a slower, more fine way of being. Of being pulled away, maybe even forever, from what I was seeing as the insanity of modern industrial culture. This never fully happened. Though I did get there close and tight many times, I would always find myself wrenched out of it. I was still in the modern industrial world, rain soaked, green and lush lands, birds still singing notwithstanding. I was so much in the modern world. This is a place that, in its current form, can only exist in the modern.