It is not 5:15. It is not suppertime. It is not even half suppertime. It is not even time to think about it being suppertime. No, it is not 5:15. It is 2:15. It is not almost evening. It's not even mid-afternoon.

I am in Washington State. I am not in Georgia. There are many hours of daylight left in the sky, and the sun is far from the horizon. But sunset is approaching. I feel it in my aboriginal bones.

I cannot make my mind believe the things it witnesses. It is 5:15, despite what the clock displays. I am not in Georgia. I am in Washington state where all crazy timepieces insist it is 2:15, and the sun refuses to set when it should.

It is hot and bright outside. I step out into cold and clouds beyond the misshapen pines erroneously labelled Douglas fir. Their long needles have broken at an inch's length, the color darkened. The bark is strangely patterned, sung into new arrangement by absent beetles. A robin chants a complex mimicry. A Steller's jay flashes red as it alights on the feeder.

Thunder mounts the flat, far distance and lightning streaks a bare sky. The grey earth shimmers in mica-flecked terra cotta.

Confusion. Something is grievously wrong in this world.

My thrill of the week came today when I found a signature item belonging to another distant member of our geocaching forum in a local cache. I nearly missed it. It was in a bag with several other unrelated signature pieces, but the owner's name is quite distinctive and a mere few letters at its beginning caught my eye.

Signature items are not rarities in and of themselves. In fact, I have several that I use: Badge-a-Minit buttons in variations or a wooden egg inked with my geocaching moniker and a serial number. None of these items are trackable anywhere, and it's customary for people to pick them up as collectibles. The general rule is to gather as many as possible and hoard them, so how this one travelled halfway across the country without being added to someone's stash is somewhat of a mystery.

Aside from its being from another state, what made a blue and white poker chip painted with a dog's pawprint special to me is that it came from a member of a relatively small group of people who have been called the "More Inner Circle Of Cachers," a nickname attached derogatorily by one who felt excluded from the group. There are only about thirty of us who are vigorously active with another thirty or so hanging on the periphery and dropping in from time to time to say hello. Many of us have exchanged signature items through the mail (myself included), but it is not often that you find another member's trademark "in the wild."

This particular cache container was a plastic ice cream bucket painted with camouflage and further disguised by artificial leaves covering its lid. A plate of moss was laid across its position in a log dump, obviously out of place, and therefore quite easy to find. The drawback was that the rain was pouring down, and although I was in a rain jacket, my legs were unprotected and my cotton trousers became soaked quite quickly. I ducked under cover of a tree to open the canister, but despite my best efforts, I replaced a logbook that had gotten more than just a little damp.

Tonight, I visited the forums, hoping to find the woman who created this small token, and maybe discover a clue to the conundrum it poses. She was not present, so the mystery will have to hold until another day.

Improve your health through silliness! It costs nothing. It is a prescription you can share freely with anyone of any age. It can be found in pharmacies or growing wild in the outdoors. Large or small doses are equally beneficial, and you may take it as often as you wish.

The best remedy for any condition known to Man, mental or physical, is silliness. Abject or otherwise, a laugh a day keeps the doctor away, and even if you bust a gut or crack a rib, you'll be better off for it. If you don't think you have ready access to a supply of chuckles, you have only to look around you. Has your pet done something goofy? Did you read something funny on the internet? Did a skit on TV crack you up? Ah, but those are obvious.

"You've gotta laugh," is a phrase I use frequently when I make a mess that could have been avoided if I'd been a bit less clumsy. If you drop a glass of water, don't cuss. Step outside yourself instead and enjoy the banana-peel routine as an observer would. Defeat the irritation with a guffaw, deflate its seriousness with amusement. Take the power of the moment and turn it to good purpose rather than wasting it in futile fury.

I got up this morning, blue and lonely. I let my mood spill over onto the single most important person in my life, a person carrying a burden much greater than my own. The day might have gone into a downward spiral, but his profound sense of the ridiculous brought me back to my own philosophy, turned my mood, re-ordered my priorities, made me aware of the sunshine falling on my shoulders and restored the magic. Ain't silliness grand?

Trout are cussed little things, sometimes reluctant to come to the hook, but at other moments too easy to be fun. Such it was today. In the space of a few hours, I brought seventeen to land, fooled by nothing more than a pair of PowerBait eggs or a fragment of shrimp, and hatchery fish, the lot of them.

The cast is thrown to the far side of the river where the water is shallow and clear as gin (a phrase I borrow from common usage by the more eminent and boozing writers of Tales Piscatorial). The retrieve follows fairly quickly to stay clear of the pit-like snares between rounded, fist-sized cobbles, then slows as the bait drifts into the deeper, darker crease where the prey lies in wait. If a skillful hand guides the line, the hook will fall behind the shadow of a larger boulder, and inevitably...I say that word loudly and clearly: inevitably, some thick-skulled numbwit of a fish will grab it in its maw and be beached within mere seconds, and the angler will be ready for another round. Cast, retrieve, hookset, land, unhook, release, re-bait, cast.

After twelve, the young man beside me inquires, "How many's that?" On the other side, the friend I'm coaching asks if I charge by the minute as I offer suggestions to the two teenagers sitting behind her. The first young man has one fish on his stringer, the teens none. Cast, retrieve, hookset, land, unhook, release, re-bait, cast. For a while, I sit it out, talk Daniele into two fish. She's a neophyte, and in Piscator's heaven. Cast, retrieve, hookset, land, unhook, release, re-bait, cast. I start to miss strikes, my mind gone far across the country. I don't bother to put a second rubber egg on the hook. Why use two when one will do, even though half the shank is bare? Cast, retrieve, hookset, land, unhook, release, re-bait, cast. A thirteen-incher goes on the stringer, "one over twelve" being the rule on this water. Cast, retrieve, hookset, land, unhook, release, re-bait, cast. I'm getting tired, getting tired of fishing. My eyes are heavily lidded, fished out. I just want to go home.

Radishes or poppies could be planted on the top of my piano, so thickly lies two weeks' accumulation of dust. Fourteen days ago, in a fit of last-minute housekeeping, I completed this chore with the unreasonable expectation that it would not gather in measurable amount in my absence. What was to stir the air except the occasional twitch of the cat's tail or the pad of her feet across the vacuumed carpet? Ideally, with closed windows and a ceiling to protect it, the house should have been guarded against such intrusion, but there it is, begging for a broadcast sowing of some small-seeded vegetable or flower. I want to know where it comes from, this pervasive grey layer which so far has not inspired my weary body toward its removal, and to unravel the mystery of how it travels across horizontal distance, for apparently that is how it gained entry to my home.

The vandalism of dust pales when considering the larger object I found when I returned from my journey: a dessicated bat lying in the middle of the kitchen floor in such a position that it could not have been overlooked by my house-minder when he visited two days previously. It was quite dead, and a long time so...dried and mummified beyond what even the record temperatures could account for. Nevertheless, I took it for living (better safe than sorry) and approached it with broom and dustpan cautiously. It had not a mark on it, and the cat shows no sign of having been attacked. I am left with an odd sensation: the security of my home seems somehow incomplete in an obliquely amusing way.

Am I so changed? The land I look upon does not feel like home, but for the Mountain beyond the pasture and the forested hills, rising steeply and covered with snow's mantle. I see my Mountain, but my heart and soul lie 2300 miles away, cast in the red Georgia clay, tangled in kudzu and trumpet vine. The mockingbird and cardinal call my spirit away from here, and the afternoons of shower and thunder beg me to return to their living water. Above a vision of pines, I hear accented crow speech in pitch and timbre much like the lilt and drawl of my man's words, but my eyes look out on fir and hemlock, and my ears hear the deeper tones of our native corvids cawing in the cool northwestern air. I am not come home; I have left home far behind. I am a stranger in my own country now.

Bewildered, my sense of time and place gone errant, I wake with the sun's rise over a distant horizon, only to find the bed empty beside me and the room in darkness, the fragrance of my lover captured in a piece of cloth which betrays the dream of his enfolding arms. His voice is fractured through waves and wires, the touch of his eyes denied me, the thicket of his salt-black hair a refuge I cannot reach. I know too that across the vast miles, he longs for me as he lies sleepless without my hand upon his shoulder and my breath caressing him. I feel his empty ache, desiring me in body and in soul.

If solace may be found in words, I will write them for him to read, spilling my tears in semantic structure and scheme, speaking the pain of separation which now controls us. Our Five Days On The Route To Forever have come and gone, but with their passing comes the light of the future, born from the union of our two souls. On this we dream, and we walk in tjukurrpa.

Ignition sequence has been initiated: my fishing buddy has left his home and is en route to pick me up. Within 45 minutes, my journey will begin with the proverbial single step from my front door. I will kiss the cat and close the door behind me, raise my eyes to the Magnificence in the east and set forth.

I am Georgia bound!

Major Milepost
Five Days On The Route To Forever
3 days to touchdown
3 hours 5 minutes to launch

"You're already on the climb, aren't you?" Bob asks, knowing my answer regarding how I have managed to maintain my fevered energy on three to five hours of sleep a night for several weeks. His question chimes in an introspective double-take as I am momentarily ambushed by his acumen. The query has come from left field. The only vaguely related word in our discussion had been "adrenaline."

"Well, yeah, I guess I am," I say, my usual mastery of words gone out the window. "We're up 'bout Camp Five, ain't we? Summit push starts tomorrow." I don't mind stealing a perfectly good metaphor in a pinch.

There is contemplation on the Georgia end of the phone line, a silence of searching data followed by a golden accent confessing, "I don't have anything to compare that with in my life."

My hills boy has a gift for opening my eyes, he does. As one side of my brain admires his perspicacious assessment of both my state of mind and of my physical condition, the other boggles that he knows not whereof he speaks and yet is able to make the comparison with pinpoint accuracy.

If I could give you the range of emotions demanded by a Mountain, my love, it would not be a tenth of the way you inspire me. If I could deliver, part and parcel, the strength required to push one's self beyond normal endurance, it would not match the strength I draw from you. If I could hide from you the pain of body and let you witness only the exhilarating gladness of seeing from altitude the sun rise beyond the dark blue hills, it would not approach the glory of your love. You are my greatest summit. No Everest could reward as well the final footstep before the placing of the flag.

Milestone:
Five Days On The Route To Forever
3 days 20 hours 55 minutes to touchdown
24 hours to launch

Five Days On The Route To Forever
3 days 23 hours 59 minutes to touchdown
1 day 3 hours 4 minutes to launch

The mileposts are shrinking, disappearing at our backs. We draw closer together in time and in love.

Words have been spoken on this day, substance and soul of Forever.

My Bob, my Rainbow, I love you always.

Packing for a journey is so much simpler when your worldly goods need only to be stuffed in a backpack. Your change of shirts can be jammed in the gap left between the legs of the Gaz stove and the food bag, your underwear (a single pair) crammed inside a cup, your longjohns roll nicely to fit inside the billy with your spoon and potlifter...a bit of dextrous manipulation and voila! You have two weeks' worth of living jammed into 7700 cubic inches and filling every niche. You have shelter (tent), a bed (sleeping bag), all the clothing needed for any weather conditions, your food, water, toiletries as well as a variety of amusements handy in a container which you throw upon your back, never mind that it weighs between 50 and 60 pounds. It's portable, convenient and best of all, it's almost guaranteed to make an improvement to your health.

A road trip is another story. Clothing must be folded, dreadful waste of space, and apparel must be kept isolated from such things as greasy boots and potential spills of shampoo or hand lotion. The luggage is destined to be stored in a compartment not easily or readily accessible, so foodstuffs and pastimes need removal to a separate carryall to have in close proximity, along with electronics (GPS, cell phone, CD player and camera, and their incumbent batteries and chargers). Your entertainment budget includes not only the customary journal, but disks, hand-held games and a hefty chunk of literature instead of a harmonica and conveniently tiny deck of cards. Your hours will not be spent in hiking to camp in the restorative freshness of the great outdoors, no, and although the scenery will change with much greater speed, you will not have time to take in the beauties of the environment as you sit idly, watch them race past your window because this is an expedition mounted for a lazy Everest. The porter's name is Greyhound, and your guide is printed on some 18 pages.

But expedition it is, and one of significant magnitude, with all the careful planning, route-finding and mapping attached thereto. It is not entered into lightly and while the heart flutters with anticipation of the summit, it also thumps the drum of being equal to the task. In the adrenaline dichotomy which snares a climber, anxiety wages against challenge, nor is defeat considered. The focus is the goal, and only that.

Laden with ten days' supplies, I am soon to launch.

Five Days On The Route To Forever
4 days 23 hours 59 minutes to touchdown
2 days 3 hours 4 minutes to lauch

It does not seem possible.

Less than five days from this moment, I will step off a bus in Georgia and into the arms of the Love of my Life.

There is a chuckling among the spirits today as I turn about and begin the homeward drive from town. I am unsuspecting, and about to fall into a gleeful prank. In full measure, my heart is light with the buoyancy of love and the smile which I have worn for some time now is only broader, a rainbow's arc dancing happy colors in the crowsfeet 'round my eyes. These are the halcyon days, preface to the miracle of forever, and the waves are gentle in this sea, blissful to ride in their swell and ebb of langorous ecstasy. Yet the spirits look out for my mental health: even as I drift and doze in pure content, lazy in its sunbeam, I am being set up for a grand guffaw to right me on the human path.

As a compulsive reader, my eyes scan billboards and eidetic memory (failing with the years) records the trivia of sales and bargains strung like plastic pearls about the neck of the highway. I am immune to sales pitch; my work here is done and I am hastening home, neither burdened nor tempted with anything not on my list. The brilliantly printed advertising media flaunt their wares without effect until a flash of yellow trips the toe of my eye. "Dex," it says, the phone book folk, and seated at the right of the panel is a man, nondescript to me, unremarkable, but the text standing at attention gives me crisp salute.

In hindsight, I am still confused by its relevance to yellow pages and it seems to have no grist of context regardless of the times I run it through the mental mill. However, at the moment of its reading all is clarity. No doubt! The words read, "He's a keeper!"

Well, DUH, you silly signboard! I knew that already!

Five Days On The Route To Forever
5 days 23 hours 59 minute to touchdown
3 days 3 hours 4 minutes to launch

Milepost/Transition
6 days 23 hours 59 minutes to touchdown
Less than one week, and at journey's end,
Crow flies to her Branch with great joy,
Now to live the Five Days On The Route To Forever.
...
4 days 3 hours 4 minutes to launch

Destiny's web is strung across many paths these days, and I find myself trailing strands of it as I pass through the deepening forest, filaments which carry import at their gossamer ends, threads which tangle my companions in this journey. Thrown into the dawn of kismet, we have no course to follow but through its ephemeral weavings, chance and happenstance laid out before us as milestones ordered by divine hand.

A bond of disparate faiths has brought two souls together, each drawing from the other a greater spirituality, each to learn and to grow beyond the confines of their evident truths. It is an awakening unexpected, most certainly for myself. I find that I can address a new God without breaching my own beliefs as my Bear walks his Woods and sees its trees in the light of a shaman's perceptions. My voice raises in a joyful noise, a joyful noise across the wide reach of land.

A dear confidant shares with me her secret Medicine Dream, not knowing its significance. The goosebumps rise on my arms and tears well in my eyes. I understand why we are drawn together, why she too is part of the greater plan.

It all ties together, filaments of the web.

Morning has broken, and my Mountain stands wreathed in the fire of cloud and mist which the sun bears forward from the direction of the east, rising at the backs of the evergreen hills, reaching toward the mystery of heaven. Against the fall of dark woodland, the pasture waits upon the warmth of day, its grasses not but half-awake, its thistles and daisies lazy in their beds. In the open, cool dawn, I am in silent awe of the Gift.

Five Days On The Route To Forever
7 days 8 hours 5 minutes to touchdown
4 days 11 hours 10 minutes to launch

It is a bold adventure, these days which approach more quickly than expected. I had thought they would crawl, held back by the drag of anticipation: the Christmas gift placed on the closet shelf midsummer, the 12th birthday pony for the 6-year old, a voyage across the vastness of infinity. Yet here I sit, and another hour has ticked beyond the clock's face and into lost eternity, and I am sixty minutes closer to the man who is more dear to me than the breath I draw.

Five Days On The Route To Forever...such a small span of time when time passes with such haste. Our hours of them shall be abbreviated by obligation, stolen away from us by necessity, hidden from us beneath the detritus of employment; each second apart lamented, each temporary goodbye a wound, each broken touch a homesickness in the heart. I wish to take my rest in daylight that I may lie beside him of nights, listening to the sound of his sleeping, drawing the scent of him within myself in every waking moment, taking my sight's pleasure of his shadowed face on the pillow beside me as my soul pines for love of him, knowing that this precious time too races to an end. Five Days On The Route To Forever! It is all we have for now, five days, but forever lies around its corner.

Five Days On The Route To Forever
a waypoint
7 days 23 hours 59 minutes to touchdown
5 days 3 hours 4 minutes to launch

The last time we visited the fishing bridge, a family of four ravens were romping up the river's course in a sportive game of wing-tag. This game is a favorite among corvids, the idea being that you fly just close enough to your companions that tips of wings occasionally meet, throwing the unsuspecting partner into a brief adjusting lurch. I had speculated then that the four were a mated pair and their two offspring, a supposition I still hold, and a common enough occurrence among these most intelligent of birds.

Today, only three of the group were apparent when we arrived, and they were raucously carrying on about something important to ravens. They weren't easy to spot in the dense margin of the woods as it debauched into the river channel, echoes and deflections of sound bending all hope of accurate range-finding into impossible curves and niches. But I am a corvid-spotter of no limited skill. I am, after all, a Crow myself. Soon after we arrived, I had pegged my three relatives in the boughs of a huge maple a quarter mile down the bank. Two were sticking close together, the third sometimes flying off to another nearby tree and then returning when he could not draw his mates out of their hiding place.

As I often do, I listened for a while to the conversation to get the gist, and then added my two cents' worth with a "quork" of similar nature. I can speak a few words of Crow in knowledge of what they mean, but of Raven, I know only sounds, not definitions. The best I can do is parrot (no pun intended, but it's a good one so I'll let it stand), and in my mimicry, hope that I do not give offense or cause alarm. My friends paused only a second to listen to the new voice in their midst. One gave a slightly different call, almost as if to say casually, "Oh, it's her again." When the conversation resumed its normal tenor, I was able to participate without causing a hitch in the flow.

Now what the twenty people on the bridge may have thought of the strange lady in the disreputable hat who sounded so very much like an actual raven, I can't hope to guess. Nor do I care. I was in the company of kindred and part of their discussion. They moved closer to me, the two taking position in a short red elderberry bush and the third in the cedar left of it. As we exchanged words, I believe I may have inadvertently asked for assistance with the kokanee in the water beneath my feet, for shortly after I had spoken my small contribution, I felt a strike and landed a fine 16" speckled beauty. In English, I thanked my benefactors aloud. Beside me, I felt Sande wince. I'm sure he knew how the day was destined to progress. As I unhooked my catch and secured it in the ice bucket, my corvid companions swept their wings, mounted the updrafts and headed upriver, quorking and gambolling in the air. Predictably (by myself, at any rate), a dry spell ensued in Fishville.

The Bite was slow, in any event. Sande and his daughter drew no more than eight taps between them. Farther down the bridge, one other fisherman brought a nice kokanee to land. I leaned my rod in one of the knife-carved grooves in the wooden railing, sat back lazily along its parallel ten feet away and idly watched my line, expecting and receiving no indication of fish investigating my bait. Why should I? My helpers had gone to lunch, so I followed suit.

Half an hour later, three ravens headed west crossed the bridge and settled, two in an elderberry bush and one in the cedar left of it. I stood up and took my rod in hand. My eyes went to my black patrons and I listened to silence. It was my turn to introduce the subject.

"Take care of him," I ask simply, the code of my request transmitting through the mulgawire. I am in light trance, oblivious to bridge or fish or human. I speak to all crows, all corvids, through the vehicle of these three ravens on their perches. "Take care of Bob. Carry my love to him." In a distant place, crows muster in twos and threes, observed. The time of silence scatters in a sudden flurry of quorks, I am called to ordinary reality by a sudden tug on my line. As I retrieve a second kokanee, 17", I hear the fourth raven, the deep-voiced male, far to the east and south.

Four fish were caught on the bridge today, two by an ordinary fisherman, two by a shaman who speaks to ravens. I say to Sande, "Do you want me to teach you how to caw?"

Sande has ridden this rail before. He says, "I don't even want to talk about it."

Five Days On The Route To Forever
8 days 20 hours 45 minutes to touchdown
5 days 23 hours 50 minutes to launch

I am wakeful, caught in a midnight I do not wish to acquaint, waiting ahead some two weeks like a cruel caltrop on the path my feet have chosen to follow. It is a snare I cannot sidestep, unavoidable, a jabberwock with jaws that bite and claws that catch. My fear of it is glacial and my destiny absolute, yet I stride toward it with a purpose which cannot be contradicted. I will face my fear for the final goal compels me; the first summit stands 'twixt there and back again.

But as I lie wakeful in the dark night, alone and shivering with that midnight's breath chilling me and the savagery of its fangs bared and glittering at the throat of my mind, I see too clearly its intent upon another victim who follows me in innocence. My heart weeps, for I know that I can neither deflect the beast nor sacrifice myself to it to spare him its ferocity, not now, not when we are both so far along the route. Our path is laid, we walk it together to the summit and down the other side.

I say to you, my Bear: we will meet the enemy and drown it in our tears, stronger for vanquishing it despite our wounds and greater for its mastery. It cannot stand against us, no. When we face it, I will give you my bravery to sustain you, give you my smile to nourish you, give you the words of my eyes to follow into safe haven, there to heal each other with words of love across the future's miles.

Five Days On The Route To Forever
10 days 14 hours 50 minutes to touchdown
7 days 17 hours 55 minutes to launch

Life is giving me wrinkles! And with that phrase, my eyes sparkle again at the cause, joy of him welling in my spirit like the fountainhead of an alpine stream, its laughter chuckling down the mountainside. In mind, this man is the living water of my birthplace, there where the Mountain peers into the meadow, there beside a small white pine, among the wild white-plumed grasses, the gentians, the crowberry and the scattered stones. He brings the morning sun across the ridge to warm the meadow, he rises in the mist skipping down the creek's channel and in the mayflies' dance. The tarns mirror him wandering their fractal edges, framed by scree and talus which mounts the bold arête. I walk the songline, tallying his being with my soul's footfalls; I climb the bosom of the earth to find him waiting among the trees.

This is my renewal. I am born again in peace and hope, seeker in the Vision Quest, daughter of the Dreaming. Morning star and Evening star cross their horizons, joined in heart.

Five Days On The Route To Forever
10 days 23 hours 59 minutes to touchdown
8 days 3 hours 4 minutes to launch

Lightning's hard, sudden jab waked me and no sooner than my eyes had read the footnote of absolute darkness, a murderous rolling took my bed in its grip and shook it as yet another flash ripped the pages of the night. The baleful red eye of the clock testified to the recent passage from one day to the next, scattering my concentration on the task of sleep. The pounding of the meteorological drum took a jackhammer note, so staccato that its definition left me questioning some other agent. Surely no woodpecker marked a line in Thunderbird's noble pedigree? A prolonged and distant rat-tat answered my question as it beat the ridgetops in strict tempo, goosestepping down into the defenceless valleys.

On the heels of one crash follows another to imprint the trail for the ancient gods whose torchlights carve shadowed echoes in cleft of rock and evergreen sacristy, penetrating each recess into its utmost depths. Tumble after tumble of thunderous revelry cascades in wild abandon until in a momentarily solemn mood, the feral Being glowers, its anger abating, the peak of its fury past. The creature's carouse among the lusty deities of storm and power, magnificent in its magnitude, finds subsidence in pleats of silken rain cast off and thrown haphazard on the hills. Then, sweet in her exhaustion, the night's celestial virgin falls back upon her cushions and her tears of surrender are wept into the bosom of the Earth.

Darkened, the sky sings its last notes, and its refrain is my lullaby as I ponder a greater mystery.

Five Days On The Route To Forever
12 days 6 hours 30 minutes to touchdown
9 days 9 hours 35 minutes to launch

I have always had an eye to the weather, be it the gathering of a storm on the horizon or the simple fall of rain, and my record-keeping dates back to March of 1975 with sporadic interruptions for such events as the demise of the anemometer or the complete collapse of the Heathkit station. The latter left a gap of four years, demonstrating that the daily log of precipitation, wind speed and temperature was not an ultra-critical portion of my daily routine, but rather it served as a small and enjoyable diversion to be taken shortly after rising in the light of dawn.

And morning is my finest hour. I often sing before the robins or watch day's encroach upon the morning star, seasonally altering the schedule with the sun's progress. So too I fall into bed with Sol as is the wont of all Aboriginal peoples in their natural state. In my life, I have heard the sound of an alarm clock less than two dozen times, and then only when distant fish or a mountain's summit could be heard calling my name.

Lately, however, my weather records have been experiencing certain arrhythmias of skipped beats and sudden flutters as I try to adjust myself between two modes of thinking, jet-lagged (so to speak ) into observation of two daybreaks. I wake to the rooster's crowing, only to find the sparrows silent, and the mockingbird's trill laughs into the darkness beyond my headboard. Small wonder that my charts and graphs are sketchy! Even staring at the clock, the numbers will not compute.

Yes, my eye is to the weather and its phenomena, some of which are eminently more spectacular than others. It is there that my eye is drawn, forgetful of the punctual chronicle of data, letting the paper records tumble into disarray.

Five Days On The Route To Forever
13 days 0 hours 40 minutes to touchdown
10 days 3 hours 45 minutes to launch

Both my parents are surprisingly present on the Route To Forever, walking beside the daughter as neither was able to do in life, shepherding me toward the actuality of that which I most sought yet expected not to find. They announce themselves in quiet ways, my father and my mother, stepping out of shadow to direct me on the forward path, calling me on with patterns and portents which address my shaman's soul.

My mother's piano, my mother's things scattered now to the Four Directions, my mother's ashes and a sacred site of her Frog Dreaming; memories and a final reconciliation, revelations, understanding, acceptance; my mother's birthday, today 85 had she lived. My mother in my mind until I acknowledge her.

My father, newly discovered and dead some 50 years..."WWII Victory Medal: The ribbon is 1 3/8 inches wide and consists of the following stripes: 3/8 inch double rainbow in juxtaposition (blues, greens, yellows, reds (center), yellows greens and blues); 1/32 inch White 67101; center 9/16 inch Old Glory Red 67156; 1/32 inch White; and 3/8 inch double rainbow in juxtaposition. The rainbow on each side of the ribbon is a miniature of the pattern used in the WWI Victory Medal."

Five Days On The Route To Forever
13 days 7 hours 50 minutes to touchdown
10 days 10 hours 55 minutes to launch

Lingering in my garage are a number of boxed items, several pieces of furniture and a small piano which were once my mother's, all too good to be discarded at a thrift shop, and too few to draw a respectable clientele for a yard sale even if I weren't feeling lazy.

It has been my custom to take advantage of holiday weekends to divest myself of what I term "stuff," those bits of bric-a-brac which enjoy dust as if it were a new-found hobby. "Stuff" is the bane of any self-respecting Aborigine's existence, a burden on the body as well as on the spirit and, despite my many efforts over the scope of years, it seems to generate and beget at a rate somewhat higher than can be readily shed. As quickly as I sell last season's influx of cute ceramics, artwork and basketry, I find myself gifted with a new crop of cloth fish, jigsaw puzzles and flowerpots to occupy the void.

My own collection of fripperies and furbelows had been substantially diminished only shortly before I was constrained to fill the garage from floor to ceiling with my mother's belongings. Although I never used the building for such a purpose, by September 2004, I was able to pride myself on having created a space within it large enough to park a car. I had no time to shift the remaining obstacle to entry (two garbage cans, in which stand rakes, hoes, shovels and such) when my mother's health conditions voiced their urgent demand. Carload after carload, a central island of boxes, dressers and bookcases grew to be a peaked continent until at last there was but a narrow passage circling it through which I might pass sideways if I held my breath. Looking in upon the catastrophic scene from the doorway, I have never felt so defeated as I did at the end of my final run.

A year it stood, this mountain of accumulation, before my mother passed away and I could in clean conscience chip away at its fundament. And such a monumental task! There was no item not covered in twenty-nine years' caked filth and grime. To say that my mother was no housekeeper would be telling less than a tenth of the true tale. Each piece of trivia required resurrection from a growth of cobwebbed, oily dust, literally as tall as three-quarters of an inch on some book tops, a condition certainly not inviting a rapid sale. Laboriously, I cleaned each glass frog, each seashell, each bauble, and then marked them with a pricetag in general range 25 to 50 cents. Paid by the hour, I could well have starved.

Two yard sales later, my garage was left in the condition in which it now stands. The most significant object of obstruction remains a 68-key Melody Grand (spinet) piano, almost new but slightly worse for wear from moisture. Several keys stick, but this can be remedied with a little care and possibly a small expense. Restored, the instrument should be worth close to $800, but I have no use for a third keyboard so I have been trying to rid myself of the walnut albatross, unsuccessfully to date. I cannot even convince a piano shop to take it off my hands gratis.

One looker has stopped today, drawn by a hand-lettered sign, "Small piano $50." If need be, I'll line out the amount and replace it with, "Free - you haul" as the holiday draws to a close. No Aborigine should be burdened by stuff, especially not a spare piano, but I can' t quite bring myself to use it for firewood, at least not yet.

Five Days On The Route To Forever
11 days 7 hours 40 minutes to launch
14 days 4 hours 35 minutes to touchdown

On the subject of travel bugs...some of my readers will say, "Whattiewhiches?" at this point, so permit me to define these creatures as a phenomenon of the geocaching community, typified by a metal tag bearing a number which is referenced to track their movements. A travel bug (also known as a traveller or hitchhiker) is generally an object of some sort of a size convenient to placement in a standard ammunition box, and may be easily moved from cache to cache following a stated goal. There are exceptions to this standard (I have logged a find of Cindy the cinderblock TB, for example), but by and large, your average travel bug is pocketable and portable.

There is a set process by which these items are tracked at geocaching.com allowing the owner of the TB to follow their paths, but unfortunately, not all geocachers are aware of the procedure or are incapable of following the somewhat vague instructions, and travel bugs often go missing. Some are lost forever, others resurface in almost miraculous ways.

Such was the case with one of mine. It had been placed in a cache not far from New Orleans just prior to the hurricanes of 2005. Alert to the possibility of the cache itself being destroyed, the owner disabled it, but it was unclear whether that person had removed the physical container itself. The first of the hurricanes struck while my travel bug was logged into the cache, but it was impossible to guess whether it was actually in the container or even if the container was then in situ.

The person who had placed my bug in the cache kept in contact with me, an unusual practice among geocachers who simply serve as transportation for TB's, and volunteered to check the cache to ascertain whether or not the traveller had been lost. On visiting, they determined that the bug had been picked up by another cacher only days before the hurricane, but that person had filed no on-line log to record the bug's movement. I attempted to find them through the name I had been given by the person who had placed it there, but due to an inadvertent misspelling of the name (an omitted space), I came to believe that the person who had signed the log saying that they had picked up my TB was in fact a non-registered geocacher. I wrote the bug off as lost.

In the meantime, another of my travel bugs went missing, and this one seemed hopelessly irretrievable. Its initial goal had been to cross Beartooth Highway in Montanta, but the person who had last picked it up had failed to read the detailed, clearly printed goal sheet attached with its TB dogtag. When they logged the bug into another cache, that cache was in Dublin, Ireland! The cache was situated at the Dublin Airport, an area then undergoing heavy renovation, and the cache site was subsequently bulldozed, taking my travel bug with it. No hope there! I 'repossessed' the essence of my item with a geocaching 'grab,' and deposited it in a Travel Bug graveyard in Australia, also logging my hurricane-waylaid traveller in at the same time.

This didn't set well with me. Of course, bugs may be resurrected from their graveyards if they resurface, but there was a finality about this that struck me as wrong. I had the duplicate tags in my possession, so I could clone either bug and set its surrogate free at any time. What I did not realize was that the Great Gods of Travel Bugs were about to favor me. Less than two weeks from the time I logged the hurricaned bug into the graveyard, I received notification that the person who had picked it up just prior to the storms was now resettled and ready to resume geocaching.

We exchanged emails, and my little Meow is on her way across the country again, looking for kitties to visit. Little Tree, however, only returned from purgatory today. I have cloned the bulldozer vicitm in another green wooden cut-out, attached the duplicate tag, and after I write new travel instructions, I will deliver it into safe hands to begin a new journey.

A new journey, did I say?
Five Days On The Route To Forever
12 days 9 hours 10 minutes to launch
15 days 6 hours 5 minutes to touchdown