Fall...early Winter...

Eddied out for a bit in a swirl of oak leaves and dirt, helping some friends pack tires for their earthship home in the foothills of the West Slope of the Sierra Nevada. A rather blissed stretch of time that began with a four day music festival at Evergreen Lodge called Las Tortugas Dance of the Dead, with music that went practically all night. Then from there I drifted on to my friend's property and we began packing the last round of tires for the walls of his earthship. We needed 67 more when I arrived. After a week, and a good work party of ten folks or so over the weekend, there were four tires remaining.

I drove back over Tioga Pass, which remains open to this day, feeling high off the joint we rolled that morning, and the residual high of nothing but music, work, weed, alcohol, and friends for two weeks in the cooling lowland forests of falling leaves. I seemed to be floating as my car sailed through empty Tuolumne Meadows, sunshine warming only the southern aspects, skiffs of snow clinging desperately to the shadows, barely a car on the road. Also I was beginning to feel new excitement as my time in the Eastern Sierra winds down, and the upcoming 4 month winter trip to Baja gets closer. The granite domes looked like waves in my dreamy eyes, my feet turning on the pedals as if steering a board down a fast clean backlit green wall....ahh yes soon....Baja, the beach, endless pointbreak waves....warm sun...Tequila....

Now, a couple weeks have passed. I turned 28 years old drunk around a campfire at Benton Hot Springs, then drove out to Saline Valley for 9 days of the desert bohemian dirtbag existence of beer, bacon, and eggs, and steaks cooked over a wood fire. Drank 42 beers in about four days...and now I'm eddied out in Bishop, trying to dig up some work for the week to help pad the account a bit for this coming winter.

Life out of a truck. It's a sweet thing. Some say it gets old, and it does. But the hardy get old with it, and embrace the dustiness, the occasional loneliness, cramped quarters and messiness, in trade for the immense amount of freedom. I can just pick up and go. Work enough to fill the cooler with ice, beer, veggies and meat, and dump some gasoline in the guzzler and off I go to the next adventure, the next insane experience, the next total laughter.