Taken from the journals of ZK- June the 11th, 2005

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Location: “Budget Motel”- Wenzville, Missouri

Day three of being on the road traveling to Jasper, Indiana. So many thoughts in my head. I'm not sure how to weave them together so they make any sense. Perhaps I'll just start with today and work backwards, and put down all the revelations as I remember them.

How can a minute last a lifetime,
And a day forever,
But two weeks pass in a blink of an eye?
Any concepts I held in my head of the relationship between time and distance have been thrown for a loop.
Three days ago we left Montana- across the Country
Currently we are near the borders of Missouri and Illinois.
40 miles west of St. Luis
In a “Budget Inn- run by an Indian man, his wife and two children
A boy of 10 and girl in a black velvet dress
With a blue toy laptop.
Quoted $39.00- “We take AAA, AA, all discount- that’s your price”
The man hinting that Megan and I really didn’t need two beds…
Doors open into the Motel, like a seedy Radison.
Pool down below in the center- easily viewed from the inner balcony.
Two queens, with their heads removed and nailed to the walls.
Slightly exciting.
Cheap Motels.
Back to the point:
Time and distance are no longer one and the same.
CD’s start and end, running through their songs while time slows down or stops all together. Scenery blends together.

What if it is the outside that is moving? The road instead of the car. The country moving under our feet while we stay stagnant? Slightly disorienting thinking that way. No need to make myself carsick.

Half miles marked with dead animals in varying states of decay. Many now unrecognizable, just lumps of fur and rotten flesh on the sides of the road. It’s past shape, form and life forgotten, save to mates and children waiting at the den or burrow.

I hit a bird yesterday. It swooped down beneath my truck- so perhaps it was the bird who hit me. But then again, I’m the one in a Ford Ranger. Peering through the rear view mirror I see it hoping helplessly in the center of the road. Hit and run. It becomes just a dot in my mirror as I drive off, and soon it will become the same on the road. A dot, a speck, a mound of torn feathers. Not even a remembrance of a bird. If it’s lucky. I think of it’s children back at the nest. Will they starve? Have I set off some catastrophic chain of events because I killed- or wounded a bird? True I did not give the fatal blow. But I set it up. Millions of bugs are dead because of our windshield. And that doesn’t faze me. Guilt seems to increase with size. I don’t know what I will do if I hit a dear. I can’t imagine.

Randomly on the road, Megan or I will suddenly have a broad grin spread across our face and we’ll exclaim suddenly how incredible this is. Disbelief, anxiety, excitement, all welling up inside. Bursting out at timely intervals.

Indiana tomorrow, only about 5 more hours to go. We left training and Missoula just in time. Anxiety aside, people were starting to settle in. True colors starting to show. Some negative energies finding their way in. I guess the “group dynamic” only last so long.

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