Why I Committed Suicide (7 page)

I talked to Jenifer and she’s still going with Kristoff and some other girl whose name is Deanna. They are driving in a dookie-brown-colored mini pickup truck so I don’t envy their travel arrangements. Sitting on somebody’s lap is fun for about an hour at the most and can make for an awfully long journey. We’ve talked a lot about how she feels for me lately so I’m lot more at ease about her going with
him.
Lord help me, I love this girl so much that I don’t want to be apart from her even for a day, but I think a little mini-vacation will do us both some good. Merely a short breath between passionate kisses I’m hoping. Enough about Jen though.

I’ve saved about 300 bones, 100 of which I’ve budgeted for a sheet of acid. Another hundred is to buy tickets (I don’t have ANY) to the shows, so I don’t waste my whole vacation sitting out in the parking lot toking up and listening to wisps of far off music that float outside. John Browning has an extra ticket to every show, so I feel confident we’ll be able to work something out. My last hundred bucks is allotted for gas money, food and any miscellaneous items I just have to have. There is a mini-loft in the back of John’s van with a futon mattress on top of it so that two people can sleep or lie down while two people sit up front and drive. Underneath the loft is where we’ll stash our gear and John scored a lot of wholesale muffins, pastries and granola-type things to snack on from the Kafe. He knows there are going to be some severe munchie sessions.

Minimalism is definitely going to be the way to go. I’m bringing my French Army pack from school. It should be big enough for a few weeks. Anything that won’t fit in there, I probably won’t need anyway, so fuck it. I’m also bringing my skateboard for good luck, plus if we run out of gas it might just come in handy. I can just skate down the shoulder of the freeway and get gas or something. Plus, you never know where you will find a perfectly awesome raging place to skate in the wilds of America. You never really know with the way things are raging in Cali right now.

Jenifer left two days ago. We finally left yesterday and
had
to smoke many bowls almost immediately to christen the van with positive energy. I’m very high. We all seem to have massive amounts of marijuana with us, each person packing for four or more. I’m ashamed to say that my pot, which is pretty good stuff, seems to be the lowest quality weed in the car. John Spiece (found out his last name finally,
rhymes with crease)
brought nothing but hydroponic kind bud with him. It’s taken my body about a day to happily adjust to the quality.

Fortunately with the enthusiasm of travel still being fresh I haven’t had to drive much yet.

We had an uneventful first day due to merely heading North through dreary old Texas. I imagine that seeing a van full of long haired hippy freaks sent a few rednecks running for their gun racks, but despite a few second glances we haven’t had any trouble. I’ve recognized some of the same washed up dust-covered cities from travels to Colorado with the Patterson family in my youth.

We finally camped about 2AM in Colorado last night. At a turn off down some deserted road out in the middle of nowhere. I could feel the presence of the mountains, with their comforting earthen rocky feel all around me despite the darkness. The moon was so bright and my eyes were so bloodshot that I was thankful to stop rolling down the road for a bit. It was
so
fucking cold. If I hadn’t brought my mummy bag I would have frozen to death by the side of the van. Despite the sub-zero temp, nobody really wanted to sleep inside the van, although this morning when I woke up John Browning and Viking Mike were in there snoring.

The stars are just so incredibly bright up here. I lay on my bed of gravel and pine needles last night, staring up into the sea of stars. They really do twinkle and shine. Bright pinpricks and bullet holes of pure light that hover merely a few inches from my face. This may sound pathetic, but as I gazed I couldn’t help but wonder where Jenifer was on her journey. I fell asleep thinking maybe she was looking up at the same stars thinking of me.
I am a moony bastard sometimes.

I’m glad I remembered to bring my camera along. I got a picture of me skating on this weird shaped thing outside a rest area today. More of the same driving today but the scenery is incredible, maybe just because it’s different. We are taking pot smoking to a whole new level and I am definitely enjoying this meandering trek we are taking towards Yellowstone National Park. All my wanderings have yet to take me this far into the Northwest. Having a great [sic] time. I brought along my copy of Kerouac to read, but smoking a fat bowl once, sometimes twice, an hour all day has kept me too stoned to read. I’m definitely not complaining. Instead of tuning out the monotonous journey by dulling my brain with the mind numbing solace of a good book, I am riding along quite contently thanks to herbal medicine.

I’m also getting exposed to lots of excellent music. As I predicted, my travel mates overstocked on the mellow guitar music so they were surprised when I showed them all I brought was hip-hop and Police albums, (well CD’s and tapes anyway, bring back the vinyl love man!) but it’s proving to have been a good choice. I get giggly when I think about the image of us as four hippies driving across the country jamming Dr. Dre’s new CD. So far, we seem to alternate between “The Chronic” and The Grateful Dead most of the time.

I’ve got a good feeling; God has definitely blessed this journey.

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

—Plato

Wow. I don’t know if my infantile writing skills can properly describe how incredible Yellowstone National Park (YNP) is. I’m not talking about the tourist attractions that everyone has heard of, although I saw those too. We arrived up in Wyoming about two days ago and drove straight into Yellowstone. The park takes up damn near a quarter of the state and I am VERY thankful to whichever forefather had the foresight to preserve this wonderland.

At first I have to admit I was disappointed because we drove and parked in the area around Old Faithful. There were so many fucking tourists around everywhere it might as well been a fire hydrant in the middle of a city with a big sign saying “Geyser Here”. By
fucking tourists,
I mean all the old RV people and yuppies in their neon jackets and luxury cars out seeing the sights. The people that they built the souvenir shops and the bathrooms and the motels and the power lines and all the fucking parking lots for! The same people and reasons that Mr. All-knowing Forefather Man set aside the land in the first fucking place to protect it from.

We took our own obligatory pictures of course. Sure enough, the damn thing erupted right on time. Go figure. Some skinny park ranger in a snappy green uniform gave a little speech before Old F. went off, shooting it’s spit and steam into the air quite impressively I might add. Thankfully, John S. had a tentative notion of what we should do and before I knew it we were visiting the ranger station and had a remote campsite appointed to us somewhere out in the wilderness. We got out camping gear together and started following a sidewalk that led to a creaky wooden system of docks spanning an incredible field of colorful hot springs. From the slippery planks we could see deep down into perfectly clear pools of water lined with colors in burnt red and sulphuric yellows. There were areas that bubbled clean white mud and areas that looked like they might be fun to sit around in and drink frozen-drinks with scantily clad women. The air was crisp and cool but the ground felt warm, moist, reassuring and alive as if an area of the Earth was talking to us spiritually. Or maybe passing gas.

When we reached the end of the dock there was a path on solid ground leading away in to the forest. Then the most amazing thing happened. We had walked less than a quarter mile and suddenly all the tourists and throngs of people were just…gone. There was nobody around but us. I learned and discovered that most people who visit YNP don’t venture past the roadside attractions to see where the beauty really lives. A lot of things in life are set up to be shallow like that. Seems I had no right to be angry with the tourists after all—they stay where they are designed to stay—preserving the soul of the land. The map says there are five main areas of attraction, by emphasizing and exposing certain places in the park the rest of it can be preserved. What a beautiful fucking paradigm. Cutting off the foot to save the body.

Ansel Adams got rich capturing the raw spiritual energy of places like this. He was paid well by people who never knew they were hypocrites working toward destruction while hanging their black and white scenery in office buildings in a desperate subconscious last line of spiritual self-defense. He captured spectacular images that need no gimmicks or enhancements to be appreciated.

There was a forest fire here about 4 years ago, I remember seeing it burn on the news and hearing about how it was a tragedy, blah blah blah. Most people don’t know that deep forest needs to burn every so often to get rid of the excess dead wood, open the pine cone seeds and let the ecosystem experience a rebirth. The trail we were on led straight through a vast area of trees that now only resemble charred matchsticks poking out of the ground. The area we went though was severely burned and seemed to encompass everything as far as we could see, yet I knew I was only seeing a small fraction of the overall damage. Having the dead birch trees all around us was very surreal and spooky, so we stopped for a minute to smoke a bowl. I noticed then that the floor of the forest was a canvas of new plush green grass and flowers. The contrasts were so interesting that I took a lot of pictures here, including one with John B. and I pretending to eat a HUGE mushroom we found growing out of a burnt stump near where we were resting.

After the trail brought us out of the burnt trees we hiked through an endless area of old growth which seemed all the more beautiful because of the devastation we left behind. I don’t think I can describe to someone who has never seen anything like this, how overwhelming it all is. I got the impression we could walk for years and never find anybody else. It gave me a twinge of a notion about how desperate or hardcore the early pioneers and explorers must have been to try and conquer a whole continent of this land. At one point we were walking by a pond and there was a huge moose standing there nonchalantly, just watching us hike by. It was straight out of National fucking Geographic. In my mind when I think moose I think Bullwinkle or a large cow creature, but this was a giant beast so large it had
limbs
from trees taking up residence and growing moss in its antlers. Awesome.

After hiking around all day we finally found our site in a valley and set up camp. We drank our water out of a stream nearby then cooked and hungrily devoured some vegetarian chili—pretty good actually—and smoked the biggest fucking hydro hooter I’ve ever smoked. Between that, the hike and the pint of cheap whiskey I brought along, we slept like the dead. That moose could have walked into our camp dancing and singing and I wouldn’t have noticed.

The next day I got up early, drank deeply from the mountain runoff, breathed the fresh clean air, and just like the Pope I took a shit in the woods. It had been a few days thanks to the road food, time constraints and lack of facilities so it felt good to get the rocks out of my belly, be back in touch with my primitive side, get back to nature and all that business. John S. brought this cool soap, Dr. Bron-ner’s 13 in 1, you can use it for soap or toothpaste or laundry detergent, among other things, and it’s all natural so it was ok to use in the (really) cold water to bathe some of the smoke and travel dirt from our bodies.

Eventually we headed back down the trail leading to civilization after we cleaned up all the trash and mess we created. Real campers pack out what they pack in, it would just be a desecration to leave trash or alter the campsite in any way. I was really sore from yesterdays trek and I thought Mike the Viking was going to pass out he was breathing so hard. We really did hike a long ways out in the wilderness. I felt like a conquering hero returning home when we finally were out of the woods and back at the van, all haggard and beat up from some battle. I don’t know, I suppose it’s the way I feel after a long day of manual labor, like I’ve accomplished something. Not necessarily something significant to anyone else in the world, but something.

We were all smellier and gamier than ever, I needed a breath mint for my armpit, if you know what I mean. On the way out of the park there was a back up on the road thanks to a line of cars that had stopped to take pictures of some wildlife, another roadside attraction but this time it just made me smile. I imagined a lonely animal with an insecure ego stepping out of the woods at a certain time everyday and letting people fawn over it. We stopped and had a late breakfast in a great roadside diner with a giant cow skin couch that we had a lady take our picture on. After a quick poor mans shower in the bathroom sink I felt closer to human again.

I’ll miss Yellowstone, but after a super-sized bowl to commemorate the good memories we got underway again with the wind at our backs and good tunes to spin the wheels. Someday I want to go back to YNP and see even more of the park. I would like to bring Jenifer here. God I miss her so much already. I’m really looking forward to maybe seeing her in Oregon.

Hey Boo-boo, Idaho’s coming up next.

Passed through the spud state yesterday. Dan and Jerry are supposed to be somewhere in Idaho visiting their Grandparents around this time but I didn’t see them anywhere on the highways we navigated. Found a gas station that of all things had pay showers! The shower I used resembled something similar to a urinal from the Mos Eisley Cantina, but it afforded me the chance to wash off a few pounds of dirt and change out flannel shirts. I didn’t expect much for a dollar shower and somewhere out on the open road there is a trucker missing a large portion of his body hair. BLECHHHH. Bigfoot is loose and incognito with a dull safety razor in Idaho. Alert the masses! Call out the National Guard!