I slept in the car at an I-35 rest area until Saturday's sunrise awoke me and then I made the final two hundred mile run to the Iowa Great Lakes region. I was going to ride on to Minneapolis with Steve Gruhn, the guy who's group just got a USDA value added producer grant that I helped write, but now his wife is going so my ever morphing plans have morphed once again.
I had a couple of options for lodging but by 2:00 PM I'd pretty much had my fill of the human species. I've photographed many of the abandoned farms in this four county area and I've paddled most of the thirty eight named bodies of water, so it didn't take me too long to pick out a place I like that is very lightly trafficked ...
I'm sick enough of people today that I'm not even going to call this place out by name just in case some Iowa Kossack gets the mad urge to drop in on me. I'm in a state park on a letter/number county road with a quarter square mile glacial pothole lake and a looonnnnnnggggg access road that allows me to see and hear visitors well before they know I'm here.
I have thirty six hours to finish thirty six slides for my presentation at the Ammonia Fuel Network conference and it's going along fairly well. I had about a third of it solid when I got here and I spent the afternoon sitting on the dock, reading Kerouac's On The Road and outlining the rest of the material. I started gathering twigs from a large deadfall to supplement the split, dried hardwood I bought a few days ago in Massachusetts and it's working out fairly well. I may come back here for a bit after the conference, so long as the weather holds – fuel and silence are available in abundance.. It's harvest time in Iowa now – crisp, breezy days, then the air grows still and the chill moves in as the sun sets – it's perfect camping weather.
Eight hundred miles back I ran across a Gander Mountain store and found a single person back packer style tent on sale for $40, a quarter of what I'd been expecting to pay. It's pitched behind me now with its rain fly in place for insulating effect rather than any precipitation worries. The car is a quick and easy bivouac but it's about 6" too narrow for me to really get comfortable. I must say that I'm GOD DAMN THRILLED with finally getting the right prescription for Lyme disease. A week ago I was sleeping under a down comforter with a memory foam pillow and awakening with movement restricting pain in every joint major joint. This morning after my second car camp in three days I felt just a tiny bit of stiffness in my neck, and I'm guessing that is an old car crash injury that nags me rather than Lyme. I've got eighty some more days of treatment but already it's a night/day change, both physically and mentally.
So, this presentation, it's about the renewable ammonia project in the Niagara Falls area. I get to talk about the Stranded Wind Initiative, just a little bit about the USDA value added producer since Steve will be covering that in detail the day after mine, and I hope we're going to have some things worked out to the point where I can talk a bit about what is happening in Indiana District 6, where Kossack Barry Welsh is running against professional sniveler Mike Pence, and getting very interested in doing renewable ammonia there.
Ha! I've been writing on this for about half an hour now, in between scrounging more twigs for the fire, and I've just heard the first vehicle passing on the county road. And this is a weekend night – I come back here during the week and I'm pretty much going to have my own private suite. Today all I've seen since I made camp was a guy with three bird dogs getting their retrieval workout and two teenage girls who got up to something at the opposite end of the park from me.
Today has been a total emotional rollercoaster. Euphoria when I stopped to watch the wind turbines at Pomeroy, crushing sadness as I watched humans, well, behaving human, and I don't mean that in the positive sense of the word, and now this curious unwinding that feels wonderful and painful all at the same time. I've been listening to the sound track from Into The Wild, but I'm listening Deadhead style – I've heard it all end to end several times and there are a couple of songs that are always going to evoke this trip for me. Hard Sun I am obviously deeply in love with, and Guaranteed grows on me a little bit more each time I hear it.
Well, this is a rather rambling dispatch and I'll apologize for that. It isn't that I haven't got anything to say, it's that between Kerouac, Vetter, dramatically improved health, and isolation I'm overflowing and having trouble organizing it all.