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Show RIVER like hell. Between screaming at her boyfriend because of his driving ("You are, after all, nearly thirty years younger than I, and if you can't respect my sex, at least you could respect my age!") and long draughts of Scotch, she asked us what we were doing in the middle of Minnesota with bicycles. I tried to explain, and she said, "Why on earth would you want to do something like that?" "I'm a writer," I said, hoping that would satisfy her. It seemed to work, and she said, "I'm a poet myself." Miss Seaton-Jones told us about the volume of poetry and prose she had published in England. I was quite taken with Miss Seaton-Jones. She turned to Rosie and told her what a brave young lady she was to embark on such an adventure. "Ooohhh," she cooed. "If I were young again, I'd get myself a bicycle and peddle my ass all over town!" It took me a while to figure that one out, during which time I drank and watched the prairie whiz by. It was a lot more interesting after a couple of drinks. They let us out at a shopping mall (yes, we'd gone looking for America and the farther we plunged into the flatness of the Midwest the more it looked as if we'd found it at last: there are forty thousand shopping centers in America and I was starting to feel as if I'd seen everyone) and we started riding our bikes on down the road. I felt like I was bound upon a spoked wheel. Rosie felt even worse. Sometimes in the flatlands of Minnesota and Iowa she got so frustrated, tired, and discouraged that she broke down and cried. Sometimes, lost in the vast cornfields, night would come down on us with no better place to sleep than out in the fields: always we slept on the ground. We tried to catch another freight train, but we couldn't make a connection, and hitchhiking with our load was hopelessly slow. -115- |