So I took the money I saved for graduate school and got a different education. So at the age of 26 my dog Maynard and I hopped into my Honda civic. I strapped my cross country skis on top and headed out for Maine in late October.

I spent nine months and 24,000 miles driving around the United States. We would average about 150 miles a day. We did a lot of the blue highways. We didn’t want to pay for toll roads; we just wanted to see the country.

Once, in Illinois, I pulled up to a four-way stop. I had decided that whichever way Maynard looked would be the way that I would go. I go in that direction for a while then pull out a map and decide where to camp.

I headed up into main where I met a man named Tom Donnelly. I was walking up the mountain trail, and so was he. He was a New York man and he asked me what I was doing for Thanksgiving. I told him I didn’t know. He suggested that I come and see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and I told him I thought that was a great idea.

I spent thanksgiving with he and his family in Long Island. He was a nice man; we sent Christmas cards back-and-forth for many years.

When I was getting ready to leave on this trip I asked my mother what she had always wanted to see in the United States, but had been unable. She told me that she had always wanted to see Washington, DC.

So around thanksgiving I was in New York and I talked my mom into joining me in Washington for Christmas. She flew into DC and we did the whole thing. It was fun; we visited the Smithsonian. A friend of my brother was there so we spent three days with him and watched Nancy Reagan bring in the white house Christmas tree.

Then mom traveled with me to Florida. She wanted to be back in North Dakota for Christmas so I put her on the plane on December 24.


I Work Orange Juice During the Big Florida Freeze of 83-84

I traveled during 1983 and 1984. Well, this was the time of the big freeze and Florida. The weather was just too cold for me to head over to Louisiana.

So when the oranges freeze, they open up all the juice plants and juice them as fast as they can. So I got a job in an orange juice plant in the middle of Florida and worked there for a couple of weeks. I was a sorter. My job was to take out the bad oranges before they went to the juicer. The oranges trouble across big rollers. The ones that are bad have flat bottoms because they are mushy. I was there working with people who also worked as packers.

One time we had a hellacious thunder and lightning storm. The lightning was sizzling around me. I was trying to analyze how much rubber was in the rubber mattress that I slept on. I looked at my dog and his hair was standing up, and so was mine.

The next today when I went into the orange juice plant there was a woman named Beulah who had been awake all night. She was pacing the floor, worried about me. Her husband said: “you bring that young ‘un on home with you,” and that’s what she did. I stayed with them for ten days and had just a blast. He was a Baptist minister. At first I wasn’t too sure about being with them, but we would just laugh every single night until we cried. We had so much fun.

I waited for the weather system to warm up a little bit and then headed out words the Grand Canyon. Another one of my friends may be there and we did a backpacking trip through the Grand Canyon. When he left I headed up to California. I basically traveled the entire coastal United States.


Everyone Thought I Had a Sculpture
Tied to the Roof of my Honda

When I crossed the Cascade Range in Washington my car was having trouble coming up and over the mountains. Eyed boy is probably running on three pistons at that point. I had already lost my muffler on a toll road back in New Jersey, so it was tied on to the top of the car. I had just bought the muffler In North Dakota, but they didn’t put on the section of pipe that comes before the muffler.

I was so frugal. Any penny I spent was a penny that was taken away from my road trip. So I had the muffler tied on the roof with towels. Everybody thought it was a sculpture.

Many times I would come into a campground late in the evening. I was set up my tent and it was obvious that was just me and my dog. I would have people invite me over for coffee because I don’t think I was intimidating. People open up their doors to me probably because they saw that I had so little compared to what they had in their big motor homes.

There were a lot of people who were very, very generous to me even though I was never begging and never hungry. I was writing solo and I think many people were just curious about the North Dakota license plates and the dog and everything piled into the car.

I sold the card as soon as I got back to North Dakota and bought a little truck; probably the only brand new car I’ll ever have in my life.

Was I ever scared? There was one time in Illinois in a state park next to a little lake. There was some kind of weird phenomenon happening there. About a week or ten days later I realized that someone had been killed in that park the week before I got there. It was an eerie place; one of those places that make the hair stand up on the back of your back. My dog wasn’t sleeping either and the raccoons were washing their food down in the creek. I just didn’t sleep well at night. My concern was not for the four-legged creatures, it was for the two-legged creatures.

I used to do a lot of shooting with my brother when we lived in North Dakota. I’ve never killed anything, but I used to like to make soda pop cans dance. My brother had sent me out with a handgun, which is why I never got up into Canada.

I would apply for jobs around the country as a nurse. I took good notes and used the trip as a tax write-off because I was looking for employment.

I never worked as a nurse on the trip, because I knew I wanted to keep traveling. As it traveled back across the country I knew that I would wind up living in Seattle, Spokane, or Missoula. Whichever one came in first was where the Great Spirit wanted me to be.

I thought I might be in Missoula for a year and a half, max. I thought it was just too small of a town.

I came across highway twelve coming into Missoula, which is where the Locksaw River runs. I was heading back. One of my girlfriends was getting married but I had told her that I wasn’t going to be there.

When I saw the beautiful crystal water of that river I knew I had to be there. I was attracted by the mountains, and it was a university town. So now I’ve been there for a quarter-century, and its home.