It hasn't taken long to discover Highway 247 is no fun to walk on. The shoulders are soft and sloped for run-off and I am constantly forced onto it by the psychonauts driving out here. Nearly all of the vehicles on the road are huge-tired trucks and RV's with long clanking trailers of ATV vehicles. Everyone else is extremely eager to get around them and I am glancing over my shoulder like it's a nervous tic to make sure they aren't trying to pass between me and the slower vehicle; this has happened numerous times. Once it was even another trailer hauling semi veering into the other lane to get around an RV.
I wouldn't be so irritated with the idiotic scary driving if there was anything to look at but every mile of desert mirrors the next. No plants are taller than myself and the view they yield is deadpan, silent except for the cars roaring past my right ear. Something in me is rebelling against my innate curiosity and I don't want to make any observations. All my efforts to search for what is interesting here has been rebuffed and are not finding footholds. I wonder why I didn't just start in the South, why I insisted on venturing down here. The land reflects the nothingness I already know I am capable of; why should I have to revisit this in myself. Searching for people more interesting than I am, filling myself with stories not my own, these are the reason I'm doing all this damn walking in the first place. I huddled for an entire year in my own narrowness, memorized its lesson repeatedly. I have already been here and there is nothing more to learn about myself in this place.
I've resorted to counting my steps to enter some semblance of rhythm while i walk ....8,9,10,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,1,2,3... The only things that saved the day were gummy worms and the audiobooks of James Herriot. I think I am largely invincible as long as I have gummy worms. And it is so relieving to listen to Herriot's life.
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