Homo Viator (The Westward Expanse): The Rash, Part 1

'Tis healthy to be sick sometimes. -- Henry David Thoreau

A thick skin is a gift from God. -- Konrad Adenauer

Traveling can teach you to be calm, how to handle things, and what you can and can't handle. At the onset, it's not unusual to feel hearty; to feel, on some level, like you can handle most anything. You feel some kinship to the settlers, sojourners, pilgrims, and travelers of old. You realize that there are some things you can't plan for; but you also know... you know, like you know what your belly button lint smells like, that you can handle anything.

There's also quite a bit about traveling that feast or famine. When you have money, you let yourself live a bit more comfortably. Plan it out, be thrifty, be cheap, whatever...  it's important to make what nickles and dimes you have stretch a bit more, last a little longer. This means ferreting out the cheapest accommodations possible. It may mean, depending on your background, adjusting what you consider to be your minimum requirements. But it's also important to allow yourself a the comfort of a bed when you can.

 (Note: if room service is something you require, you are not a traveler. You're a tourist. If, on the other hand, you consider having not to share a communal shower a luxury -- hell, if you consider having any shower at all a luxury -- you're a bit closer to what it means to be Out and About.)

By the time I reached Butte, I was past thinking about the Lewis and Clark Inn (with NEWLY RENOVATED ROOMS... and if you believe that I have some water front properties on Mars for sale) and focused on what was ahead of me... Butte. I wasn't sure where I was going to sleep, but I had faith in my ability to find affordable accommodations.

After arriving in Butte, and finding shelter -- which cost me more than I wanted to pay, and more than I really could have afforded -- I had to rush and settle in for Grindbone Narrowcast 52. After the narrow cast, I stripped out of my road clothes, turned on the television, and tried to relax a bit before trying to do some writing and go to sleep.

I was stretched out on the bed in my boxers, flipping through channels and trying to find The Weather Channel, when I noticed my that my legs. Specifically my knees. They were red. Rash red. And the rash -- or whatever it was had spread up the inside of my legs.

Now, keep in mind. I don't get rashes. I had bad allergies when I was a kid... or, at least, an asthma doctor convinced my parents that everything from pollen and dust to X my stuffed owl and the carpet in my bedroom could kill me. But I've never had odd reactions to any food, to scents, shampoos, deodorants, fabrics, cleansers, or anything. Ever. My eventually-to-be ex's step-mother is hypersensitive to chemicals and dyes in everything from perfume to deodorant, and handled it by learning to make her own using plants from her garden.

(That shit, works, by the way. The problem is that we're a culture that so afraid of germs, so inoculated from what people smell like -- the dizzying impact of pheromones, the musky sweaty odors that are as much a proof of our humanity as the opposable thumb and enlarged pre-frontal lobe -- that we mistake something sensual for something sick, and something necessary to our existence... because gradual exposure to germs does actually help build resistance to those germs... as food and shelter.)

But I'm not someone who HAS that sort of toxic sensitivity. I couldn't think of where I got rash. The first thing I did was go and take a shower, making sure to clean the area of the rash. That seemed to help.

That didn't tell me where the rash came from though. I began by thinking about what changes have occurred in my life.

My residential status is a given. But that, in and of itself, means nothing.

I thought about my diet.  Traveling as I've been doing has impacted my diet. Although I try and make sure to get at least one  solid meal a day when I'm in one place for more than a day, when I'm in between I limit myself to liquids, crackers, and trail mix.

Trail mix. Trail mix.


FUCK!


I'm not sure how the idea of a peanut allergy occurred to me. Like I said, I'm not allergic to food. I don't like beets, and I suspect that eating them might kill me in some existential sense. But I'm not ALLERGIC to them.

What the fuck am I going to eat if I can't eat trail mix? 


A peanut allergy could unhinge a lot of things. A LOT. It would mean having to pay more to find something to eat... especially since nearly everything either has peanuts in it or is made with some derivative of peanuts. Even a lot of potato chips are made using peanut oil.

I was also worried about maybe some contact infection. Maybe the detergent the motel used to wash the sheets. This made me paranoid to lay down, even though I was exhausted. All I could do was sit in a chair, which, thankfully, had arms on it, and try and relax. I've slept sitting up on buses, after all, right? This should be easy, right?

I forced myself to stay awake and make sure that I was still breathing, that some come from behind respiratory problem wasn't going to kill me.

How would that play out?

Anonymous Homeless Man [REDUNDANT] Found Dead in Motel Room, Clutching a Book of Rumi and Holding a Bag of Peanuts.


I dismissed that thought almost as soon as it entered my head. Silly vagabond. Headlines are for important people.

Homo Viator (Westward Expanse) Look for me in Butte

Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore, get wisdom. And in all your getting, get understanding. - Proverbs 4:7


Tell me, O Swami of the water, what is the essence of life? BORROWED, saith he.  - William Least Heat-Moon

Street corner in Livingston, MT

It's snowing in Butte this morning. Most of my winter experience has been thankfully mild; some biting winds in D.C., Norfolk, and New York, a slight dusting in Ashland, KY. Lots of rain and threats of rain, this weather chasing me all over the country.  Every once in a while it catches up to me, and here, it seems, the weather has. But it's also going to be all of 40 degrees today... so warm enough for the snow not to stick. But annoying enough that I'll notice when I walk to the bus station in a few hours.

I'm here, waiting until the last minute to check out, under the watchful gaze of Our Lady of the Rockies, in the foothills of the Continental Divide. The further west you go -- regardless of whether you're in the northern part of the continent or in the southwest -- the landscapes become incredibly stark, lovely, and potentially unforgiving. One of the differences, though, is that people generally move to the desert ... especially southern Arizona ... with the intention -- whether they know it or not -- of erasing it. Erasing it with irrigation keeping grass that has no business in the East Valley alive. Erasing it with cement, with strip malls, with neon lights. Erasing what they think is nothing and replacing it with what truly is nothing.

In the northern part -- South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana in particular -- there's a pervading sense that if anything is going to get erased, it is people. The landscape between the towns and cities stretch into an illusory infinity, running out to greet a horizon that seems so close, yet so far away. Close enough to touch, but just far enough away to keep you moving forward.

Erasure -- or attempts at it -- comes in many forms. In this part of the country its come in the form of mining, of logging, and commercialization. The view from my hotel window demonstrates this as clear as anything. The highway (that brought me here and that will take me hence); gas stations, over-priced hotels (like this one), store front casinos, quickie marts. Beyond that commercialization coalescing around interstate exits and by-passes, on the left, is an old strip mine that's now a quarry. To the left: the mountains, reaching up through the low lying condensation that is evaporating into low lying clouds that will  keep the temperature cool and threaten rain for the rest of the day.

Sometimes erasure happens quickly. Most of the time, it doesn't. That human beings have more or less perfected the process (Biological and nuclear weapons, for example. Clear cutting forests, taking the top off mountains, and pollution are others.) doesn't change the fact that erasure is, in some ways a natural process. Erosion is a form of erasure. Ice ages. Volcanic eruptions. The slight tiling of the Earth's axis. The slow burning out of the sun. The big bang. The expanding and contracting universe. 

There's a real sense of gradual change in the west that's more obvious than in the east. The east coast is littered with towns and cities that worship their history -- a history washed with sentimentalism and driven by commercialism. Classic architecture butting up against cold modern and post modern design, architecture destroyed for the sake of preservation. The west has this mix of stubbornness in the face of inevitable change, historical revision in the name of commercial greed and tourism, and an underlying apathy about engaging with the world at all. That's not uncommon in rural areas. Farmers are, for the most part, stoic people who do what they do because it's what they've always done... and they will only change when it's clear what they do no longer works. Or when they're not given a choice. 

The Socialist Hall on Harrison Ave in Butte, built in 1916.

Butte is a city full of history... early mining and foresting, a history of unionism and radicalism... that is being erased as part of the drive to make it a tourist destination. The Socialist Hall on Harrison Avenue is one such example. I'd be willing to bet the building is listed on some historical register, otherwise some All Too Patriotic American would have lobbied to have it torn down. And since it couldn't be torn down, and the VFW wouldn't move into, someone did the next best thing. 

In T.S. Eliot at 101, Cynthia Ozick says that "knowledge -- saturated in historical memory -- is displaced by information, of memory without history: data." She wrote that in 1989; and if it was true then (I believe it was) it's more than true now. We're losing history to data, memory to information. 

The worst part of this kind of erasure -- the tragedy of it all -- is that while it is avoidable... we can choose to pay attention, we can choose to see, we can choose memory over information and history over data... it seems we're too busy trying to figure out how to be copy other people's lives and call that happiness.  We forget the important lessons and remember the transitory ones.

I have had to remember this myself. It's a wonderfully soulful realization.

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