Rain

Posting from Clio, Michigan, a little town outside Flint. We spent the week in Dexter, just outside Ann Arbor, but sleeping in the same bed for 6 or 7 nights was starting to wear on me - so we moved on.

Here in Clio, Patrick's high school friend Tom and his wife Mikki put us up in a camper they have in their driveway - a perfect guest house, complete with air conditioning. Today they will follow us on their motorcycle as we head over to the west coast of the Michigan mitten. Tonight we'll stay in Manistee National Forest and tomorrow will head to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. After we conquer that, we'll head to the Upper Peninsula and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Everyone has asked if we'll be going to Isle Royale National Park. The truth is that I'd love to go, but the ferry to get over there is pretty expensive. Seeing as we're doing this trip as cheaply as possible, anything pricey is a no-go.

We've been lucky thus far that awesome friends have put us up for a night or two along the way - Pat's uncle in Burlington Flats, NY; a friend-of-a-friend (Amanda and Daniel) in Rochester, NY; my brother in Pittsburgh; Amanda in Columbus; Marcia and her empty house in Dexter, Michigan; and now Tom and Mikki in Clio. When we haven't stayed with friends, we have either found free camping in state and national forests (not many people know that, as long as you're 150 feet off the road, you can camp for free in most national and state forests; no amenities, of course, but it's a place to sleep), paid for camping (we don't like that), or one night we slept in the car outside Akron.

We pulled some gear out of the car and I layed down in the trunk (I have a station wagon), and Pat attempted to sleep in the front seat - however, due to all the stuff behind that seat, he couldn't put it back, so he didn't get much of a night's sleep sitting upright. I was fine, though. My feet were near the back of the front seat and my head near the trunk, and I popped the trunk so right near my head I got fresh air and could listen to the rain. I was a little cramped, sure, but overall I didn't have a problem with it.

So here were are, about to get on the road again. I have a friend in Minneapolis who we'll hopefully catch at home before she leaves on vacation on Aug. 2 (I'd hoped to spend my birthday, Aug. 3, hanging out in Minneapolis, but it looks like I'll spend it in the car somewhere in South Dakota - whatever, could be worse), but after that, we're unlikely to encounter any more friends until Missoula, Montana. Emilie, one of my best friends, has been living in Great Falls, Montana for the last few years, but of course she is moving away from there mid-August, and I think we'll be getting there just a few days too late to see her.

Patrick and I have been eager to get West. I'm eager to get where I don't know where I am - to somewhere I've never been, or at least haven't been in a long time - a landscape that keeps reinventing itself. Anywhere I know feels too close to home to be an adventure. Today I will be glad to get to the shores of Lake Michigan, and when we head into the Upper Peninsula I will be even more excited. My mom told me stories of paper mills and fog horns and pea-soup clouds on the northern shore of Lake Superior in the '70s - I could do without the paper mills (have you ever smelled one? truly horrid), but the fog horns I'd like to hear.

I never imagined I would be more comfortable West of the Mississippi than East, but I think it's coming down to that. I need to move slower and see more. I need to have a line of sight that isn't punctuated by so many buildings and trees. Green has been lovely to see and smell and feel again, but I need to get back to the plans - and eventually the desert.

I got thinking about the concept of wanting to be somewhere new, and why it was that I was simultaneously craving being back at my little casita in Madrid, New Mexico. The hill out back of my casita is always new. There are always new birds and new plants and new rocks and old rusty metal and tumbleweeds blowing across it. The old broken-down building just behind the neighbor's house is still new to me. There are so many mountains I haven't crawled under and through. And even places I have always been - downtown, the mountains, the arroyos - keep being new, keep reinventing themselves, keep turning over people and faces.

Somehow I don't feel that constant newness anywhere else.

There have been torrential rains in the Northeast and Midwest these last few days. The other night a lightning storm actually prompted a tornado warning in New York City. Indeed, it's raining here in Clio, and parts of Chicago are under four feet of water and being evacuated. The same rain is moving across the peninsula of Michigan now, and we're about to drive into it.

Bring it on.