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The rest of the baggage I would carry away with me that morning had less bulk, but more weight — the invisible burdens that had driven me to depart into what already seemed like a kind of exile.
The modes of behavior, dress, and habits of “The Other” that we find strange and exotic, or sometimes con-temptible, are cultural patterns developed over hundreds of generations in a specific locale, under local influences of weather, livelihood, diet, and daily customs.
John Steinbeck once wrote that sometimes the nicest thing you can do for someone is to allow them to do something for you, and I learned the truth of that insight too.
Once I went speeding past an old couple, and smiled as I imagined their conversation: him grumbling about me, and her telling him not to be such an old grouch. Then suddenly I was in tears, thinking, “I’ll never get to be a grumpy old grandpa!”
Grief is cyclic, not linear.
A quote was posted on the wall, attributed to someone named Reggie Leach: “Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion; you must set yourself on fire.” Nice one, Reggie, whoever you are. (A hockey player back in the ’70s, apparently.)
So, in the spirit of Thoreau’s tradition of civil disobedience, when I pulled into Oregon gas stations I tended to take matters into my own hands: unhook the nozzle, turn on the pump, and do it myself. (You’ve got to resist oppression!)
Mark Twain had written a prescient observation about the place of water in the West, “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.”
(For me, the corollary to the Scooter Trash rule about not drinking until I’m parked, is that as soon as I’m parked, I start drinking!)
Mike’s Sky Rancho! Mecca for dirt-bikers and Baja racers, but Salvadori warns “it can be a rough 22 miles,” and indeed it was. Dirt, sand, rocks, stones, streams, ruts, and all that. But, he assures you, “a well-ridden Gold Wing [heavy luxury-touring bike] can make it, much to the disgust of the dirt riders,”
Then I had to stop for at least four roadblocks today, mostly army, but one with the notoriously corrupt “Judiciales.” I don’t remember any last time, do you? Result of Zapatistas, or rising crime from failed economy? Pressure from the U.S. to appear to combat illegal immigration and drugs? Or make-work project for the military, to keep them out of the “coup” business? Could be.
