Now I'm Back Billy And I Want YOU

thought you'd lost me? i'm still walking, my babies. just not very much for christmas. the weston wagon is plowing through mormon territory at an alarming rate.

and so, among my new years resolutions:

1. remove life-size tattoo of pikachu from my stomach i had done when i was on PCP
2. update my walking website more often
3. cut down on lying

but i think number two is more prevalent anyway. pikachu can stay. he looks like a level 13 at least, so thats street cred right there.


New Additions : 44.32 miles

Total Distance Crossed: 543.47 miles

Aragonite, Utah

And I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles

Two Days Distance: 17.65 miles

Total Distance Crossed: 499.15 miles

Leaving West Wendover, Utah


When i wake up, well, i know i'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who wakes up next to you
When i go out, yeah, i know i'm gonna be
I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you

Gateway to the Chilterns!

I remember approaching West Wendover by a speeding slick black automobile piloted by a chain smoking maniac a few years back. Wendover and West Wendover are literally two towns separated by a single mile split by the Nevada/Utah border, and you come down a slight grade from the desert so that the towns appear like tiny cement stains on a dirt-brown shirt, and you want to guess how far away it is just to see how wrong you are. You haven't seen a city in hours, gas stations if you're lucky, pizza huts for certain, and Wendover is almost a real town. Whatever that means.

Two Day's Distance: 13.35 miles

Total Distance Crossed: 481.5 miles

Approaching West Wendover, Nevada

Also, management is in a stir at Lucky Jeans since the new manager, a certain tall pineapple-loving gentlemen, lost the store keys within a week of being given them. Odds are it was this little 9 year-old prick on the muni i saw drinking a forty with both hands and reaching into people's pants pockets who took them. Or i just plain old lost them and made this up. Either way, its going on my record. And we all know Jesus reads THAT.

Footprints?

The race to the border is on.. utah is approximately 25 miles away, which i think i can easily cover in the next 4 days. This means i'll be breaking into open mormon territory for the ushering in of the new year, and quite frankly there's no better place for me to be. who wants fireworks in the middle of a journey, anyway?

I'll be glad to shed Nevada like a sweaty bath towel and bask in the plateaus and arches of gods slightly greener earth. Utah has potential for natural beauty that Nevada's cacti lack.


Three Days Distance: 15.60 miles

Total Distance Covered: 468.15 miles

Approaching Shafter, Nevada

However i have to admit that this photograph i uncovered searching for the small town really gives shafter some balls.

Fo'dy Fo Dot Fo O

six days away me hearties, shame on me. for it be finals week in grad-land and call me a one-eyed jack but i be late on me papers again.

six days sailing treacherous parrot-shouldered seas: 44.40 miles

total seafaring covered: 452.55 miles

almost out of nevada, nevada

back soon to recapture your hearts and gold.

Cowboy Poetry in Elko, Nevada

Three Day's Distance: 28.07 miles

Total Distance Covered: 408.15 miles

Approaching Elko, Nevada

Passing the four hundreth mile, i've moved into the new apartment on Hyde Street, and life is four hundred thousand times more secure. This should mean more frequent posts, fitting how we're almost out of the Nevada desert in time to pay attention to the landscape- by landmark mile #500 we will be out of the state entirely, and into sexy, mormon Utah! Nevertheless, there is much to learn about the voyage. November took three pedometers alone, and i intend to perfect my ways going into the new year. I wonder if we'll hit Colorado by the new year? Unlikely. But we'll hit something, i promise.

Searching through sites for Elko, Nevada i came across this page on Cowboy Poetry. For those of you who have not yet been exposed to Cowboy Poetry as a genre, it generally attempts to harness the free spirit and simplistic lifestyle of a free-wheeling cattle-roper. These poems deal with basic ranchy subject matter, frequently in rhyming quatrains, though the rhyme itself is perhaps the single most important ingredient. Cowgirls can, undoubtedly, write cowboy poetry too. These poems are about simple, manly, cig-smoking single men, riding over grassy knolls at sunset, and attempting to cope with true beauty through an artform scarely regarded as manly. It will never make an anthology and some of it is truly god-awful, but it's more of the principle that counts. Here's one by a cowboy named Brad Smith.

Earl's Back From Elko
(Of Poetry and Beans)

Giddy-up ol' timer -
Get back in the saddle.
Get back to work now,
It's time to skedaddle.

Poetry's fine if you
Know what it means,
But it don't make no money
And it don't buy no beans.

If you're out ridin' fence line,
Or helpin' brand cattle,
Or jus' lookin' busy so's the
Foreman won't tattle,

You can rhyme all you want
'Bout them cows bein' smelly,
But them fancy-pants words
Won't put beans in your belly.

So you sit by the far'
At the end of the day,
And you're eatin' them beans
After earnin' your pay,

And them cattle, like you,
(So you're finally thinkin'),
Are out there lowin' poetic
While you're sittin' 'round stinkin'.

© Brad Smith