The Road Giveth, and The Road Taketh

We approached the cow cautiously,  half expecting it to stand up with a moo or two and charge one of us.  As we neared,  the vultures relinquished their prize and joined a dozen or so others circling a few hundred yards above.  The thousands of flies however,  kept up their work,  buzzing around the carcass.

"What do you think happened?" I asked,  holding my t-shirt over my nose like bandana.

"Holly shit,  see that calf?!?"

"Is that what that is poking out of its ass err I mean vagina..?"

Walking around towards the cow's back, I noticed the hoofs and nose of a baby calf sticking part of the way out of cow's vagina.  My stomach contracted as I caught a small whiff of the what would surely be the first battle of a war of stench.

"Fuck.. it must have died giving birth."

"I wonder how long it's been here?"

Looking up at the sun, I squinted my eyes, "Ehh maybe a day, maybe less.  It hasn't been ripped apart yet."

"No way to really know I guess.  Can we go now?  This is creeping me out."

"Yah, this shit is weird."

We walked back towards the idling van in silence, still analyzing the cow and her still-born calf behind us.

"That's something you see in a movie.  Remember when they killed that cow in Apocalypse Now? Well that's how fucked up that cow is.  Same level."

"I've never seen anything like that in my life.  It's trapped in suspended agony. Could you imagine being there when it died?"

"I'd rather not. Let's get the fuck out of here.  This shit's bad juju."

Nodding in agreement,  I opened the door and climbed back into the Syncro.  Releasing the emergency break, we rolled forward.

"That's something you'll never forget."

"Definitely."

Revving up to the top end of first gear, I shifted to second and we headed south towards I-40 on the Forest Service road.

Seeing that cow marked a turning point in our trip to the Four Corners region.  Later that day in a wind storm on I-40, the strap of my Thule surf rack gave and we lost a surfboard.  Tim and I heard nothing and didn't realize the board was missing until we stopped to get gas a few hours later.  Futily,  we backtracked an hour hoping to see the board laying on the shoulder. No luck. In a separate but related incident a pair of jeans that I had drying in the cargo rack blew off.  Hopefully a Navajo found both the surfboard and the jeans on the side of the road and is enjoying them.

Annoyed with the losses but happy that it was just a pair of jeans and a beat up surfboard, Tim and I continued our travels west, back towards southern California, where both could be easily replaced.

Campfires.

I downshifted from fourth to third on a two lane highway out of a valley in northeastern Arizona.  Cutting through open range,  the occasional cow dotted the otherwise unremarkable landscape. The van shook subtly twice in the low RPM's and then continued its whining acceleration up the hill.

"Did you feel that?"

"No, what do you mean?"

"I think she misfired or, we ran over a snake the size of four by four..."

"Ohh yah, I thought we ran over something in the road."

"Nope we didn't hit a thing...She's never done that before.  Thats not good.."

"Maybe it's the altitude.." Tim suggested in earnest.

Matching Tim's optimism with a healthy portion of my own wishful thinking,  I accepted this answer as a plausible cause and continued west.  The knocks disappeared.

Hanging at the watering hole.

You Shall Not Pass.

Tim has a photo blog called Cairn Culture.

'

Wild Horses in New Mexico.

Craftsmanship in Chaco Canyon.

Unmapped.

By the Nevada Arizona border,  the knocks and misfires had grown from the occasional sputter on a steep hill to a voilent convulsion every time I accelerated.  In low RPM's, the shakes were hair raising. To avoid this, I kept revs high.  As the knocks continued, my hopes of limping the Syncro back to Los Angeles evaporated. In vain,  I tried a fuel injection cleaner at a gas station.  For half an hour,  the convulsions disappeared,  only to return with vengeance.

"We aren't going to make it to LA," I said to Tim with a solemn face following a particularly long series of misfires.

"I know we aren't..." He said as if he'd known for longer than I had. "What do we do?"

"Well,  you have AAA dont you?  Lets get off the interstate and take side roads back as close as we can.  The other option is that we call it quits here and try to find a shop in Bullhead City or Havasu City to work on the van on Monday."

"Fuck that.  Those towns are hell holes."

"My thoughts exactly.  Let's push for LA."

Turning off the music,  we continued towards the setting sun, reviving high in third gear.

On a linear progression,  the knocks continued until the van stalled, contributing her last bit of forward motion.  Turning on the hazard lights I rolled to the side of Route 66 a stone's throw from the California border.

"Well, that's that."

"At least we are in a pretty place,"  Tim said glancing towards the setting sun.

I sheepishly smiled in agreement.

"Do you want to make the call or should I?  We're 284 miles from LA.  We're going to have to use both of our AAA accounts," I said to Tim as I checked Google Maps on my iPhone.  Wrestled my wallet from my back right pocket, I flipped through expired New York Transit cards, reciepts and other old reminders of yesteryear.  Eventually, I found my AAA card.

"We are so fucking lucky we have cell reception here."

"What's the deal,  I'll make the first call,  then we wait an hour and then we get towed 100 miles and then you make another call and get towed another 100 miles."

"Yup, thats about right."

"Shit.  It's going to be a long night.  What I would do for a beer," Tim laughed.

"The Road Giveth and The Road Taketh,"  I agreed.

Here are some more links,

Warren Zevon, Desperados Under the Eaves (Youtube),

The Road Giveth and The Road Taketh (Facebook).

Sometimes A Great Notion

One chapter of Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion bled into another  as we hummed north out of Los Angeles.  The Syncro revved up towards the redline in first gear, obscuring the narrator's voice.  Fresh off the plane from a three month stint in New Zealand,  Tim was adjusting to the pace of traffic in the San Fernando Valley from the passenger seat. Periodic grunts and his constant gaze at the seemingly endless lines of suburban landscape conveyed his feelings.

"Pretty different from New Zealand huh?"

"I haven't seen this many people in three months," Tim explained. "The cars here are totally different too. Pretty much everything that's 4wd has a snorkel on it.  They use 4wd drive down there.  Not like that."  Tim motioned to Cadillac Escalade weaving through traffic.

"They are different animal," I agreed nodding towards the vanishing Escalade.  "Want to listen to some tunes or stay with the book?"

"Leave it here.  I'm getting into it."

Kesey's novel about the brotherly corrals of a logging family in Coastal Oregon continued as we left LA's smog behind us.  A few days earlier, I had dropped off Tucker in Northern California and bee-lined it down to pick up Tim at LAX.  For three months, Tim backpacked, sailed and sea kayaked on New Zealand's South Island. Save for a few two line emails and ten minute Skype call, I hadn't heard from him since I headed south towards Baja in January.

Two years and two months separate us in age. Growing up, we spent all of our time together.  If one of us was into something,  the other soon would be too.  Our relationship was less of brothers, with a clear hierarchy and boundaries, and more an impervious friendship.

For a few days, we wondered LA catching up.  For a short while,  our conversations focused on his experiences in New Zealand,  but they soon gave way to familiar conversations and idiosyncrasies of two very close people.  After a night or two and few hours spent bumper to bumper in LA's signature traffic,  we decided to head north and explore the southern Sierras.

A year ago, sitting in my Manhattan office building, the importance of maintaining and contributing to this relationship with my brother was slowly giving way to a storm of professional aspirations, grown up responsibilities and the desire to build a new life.  Following in parallel with Leland Stampard's (a character in Sometimes a Great Notion) return to the Northwest,  I too left New York, and headed back towards my routes in the Northwest last August.  Unlike Leland's desire for revenge on his older brother,  a burning wanderlust and desire to spend more time with people important to me drove me home.

For 27 hours, Sometimes A Great Notion provided the backdrop for our travels.

Painted.

Yours to keep.

Cairn Culture.

Wet roads.

Sage.

Hammocks.

Dark and Stormy.

Toppings and Salsa.

For longest time, I called Tim my little brother.  He's 6'8. Now he's just my brother.

Green hills.

"We never fought like this did we?  I mean we argued some when we were little, but nothing this deep-seated," I said turning down the stereo, after the climax fight between the two brothers in the book.

"Yea, never like this," Tim said as he grabbed the binoculars and peered out the window towards the distant hills.

"I think the last time we got in a fight was, maybe 7 years ago when you threw that stool at me."

"Yup." Tim adjusted the focus. "I don't think we ever will."

"Me too."

Here are some more links,

Sometimes A Great Notion (Facebook),

Sometimes a Great Notion (Amazon).

The Burning House Revisited

A year ago I started asking my friends what they would take with them if their house was burning.  As an example of what I envisioned the photos looking like I sent around a post I did here.  A few weeks later,  I launched Theburninghouse.com as a home for these images and hopefully others submitted by friends and people I didn't know.

Within a week the site had grown larger than I ever could have imagined.  Submissions were coming in from around the world.  It was wild to see people responding to an idea and question that I thought had merit.

Despite appearing to be about objects, The Burning House is a project about people told through their most cherished possessions.  When I first thought about what I would take,  I included all sorts of stuff that at the time I felt was important.  Jeans,  A Rolex watch,  my iPhone.  Now after leaving New York, hearing answers to the question from thousands of people and living in a van for the last nine months, my material priorities have changed a lot.

I hope that Burning House has prompted other people to consider what is important materially to them.

Name: Foster Huntington

Age: 24

Location: Mexican Hat, Utah

Occupation: still working on that

List:

• A few rolls of undeveloped film from the last week of my travels including the half-shot one in my Contax t2
• The keys to my VW Syncro

For more photos from people around the world and info about the upcoming book that comes out July 10, head over to theburninghouse.com

Here are some more links,

The Burning House Book,

The Burning House (Facebook).

Siesta

Out of delayed frustration, I rolled over and brushed  a gallon of sand out off the cot with a flick of my forearm.   Enjoying the newfound smoothness of the unfitted white sheets, I adjusting my head on the pillow and studied the knots on the plywood ceiling.

Slowly my eye lids drooped and I dozed off.

My watch beeped, indicating a change of the hour.  2:00 PM.  Still three hours until low tide and it was hot as fuck outside, too hot, I thought to myself.  Through the screen window,  top 40 hits from yesteryear blared on an over worked set of outdoor speakers.  Investigating, I leaned up and peered out at group of European and Australian travels smoking cigarettes and engaging in some heated conversation.  The thick accents,  distance, and Lupe Fiasco thumping in the background made it hard to deduct the subject. That Dutch chick sure was steamed.   Perhaps they're debating their favorite Dubstep DJ I chuckled to myself.  They love that shit.

Rolling over on my stomach I put the pillow over my head.  Still more time to Siesta.

Here are some more links,

Gigante (Facebook),

Changing Tide (ART).