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Show RIVER Appomattox Courthouse and Washington D.C. and Gettysburg. We stayed with some friends in New England for a while, ate clams, and spent a day on the Kennebec River in Maine. We drove for a week across Canada looking for rivers, but we were overwhelmed by the St. Lawrence and underwhelmed by most everything else. At the end of July we re-entered the U.S. at Detroit and went to Ann Arbor to look up some of Rosie's friends. We couldn't find them, but we found an empty lot near the university and camped out there. We were exhausted and hot, and we left the doors to the van open while we slept. During the night I thought I heard someone laughing close by. When we awoke we found somebody had stolen Rosie's purse, my wallet, all of our identification and money, my typewriter, even my damn boots, hat, and jacket. We were flat broke and two thousand miles from home. Stranded and fed up with driving, we sold the van at a Mitch Ryder concert, bought two ten-speed bicycles, and started peddling west. We had a lot of good reasons for doing this, none of which are worth remembering. I blame most of it on my romantic attachment to the nineteenth century: I wanted to experience and understand what life was like before machinery grained mastery of the world. I'd always been fascinated by the wagon train migrations across the Great Plains (many of my ancestors had gone to Utah that way, and my great-great-great grandfather had pushed a handcart from Great Salt Lake City to the Missouri River), and I thought that taking a bicycle across the prairie would give me a pretty good idea of what the pioneer experience was like. That it was miserable I'd always heard, but soon I found out exactly how miserable it truly was, firsthand. -113- |