on rambling

better than expected stories from the time stranded in batesville (see next post), but first...parsing the frustration of this temporary stuck-ness. I don't think that I'm an inveterate rambler, but when I'm on the road I want to go. in this case the uncertainty was the annoying part -- not sure whether the trip would continue, how long repairs would take if the bike wasn't totaled, unsettling motel-on-the-concrete-outskirts-living. lots of alternative plans...hiking in the ouachita NF for a couple weeks, exploring little rock, switching to amtrak, but no reason to commit as long as I was still waiting on the IN-surance adjuster to assess the bike (I saw a scraped gas tank, snapped-off clutch pedal, and bent forks). without all that I imagine I could have settled in a bit more. despite that itchy urge to move, I did well to shift into stationary observation. well, more like pedestrian observation...I was the only person in batesville who walks anywhere, as far as I can tell. but on rambling...

for two years now I've crawled through PrairyErth (William Least-Heat Moon), 800+ pages of musings on just one county in Kansas at the geographical center of the country, a literal slow walk across every square mile. I bought it four years ago at kaldi's along with blue highways after reading Kathleen Norris' references to it in dakota. I read his 'blue highways' and 'river horse' first. I liked blue highways and the people in it, but not so much the author's relationship angst and general bitter old hippie passive-aggressive anger. but it was more that I knew prairyerth was great, and I wanted to put it off as long as possible. I do this often...putting off sublime reading so as to delay the experience and save it for another time. other books in this category are various unfinished faulkners and let us now praise famous men (evans/agee). for the latter I could read a page a day and still it would pass too fast. just achingly perfect. so it has hidden half-read for most of this decade, and prairyerth is destined for the same place, I think.

I know I don't have trogdon's patience, but his passion for thick description resonates. when I'm on the road I get wrapped up in speculating on people at their kitchen tables, what it would be like to spend an evening with each of them, daunted by the sheer impossibility of the number of those implausible encounters. wanting to stop and just set out diagonally across a field walking forever in no particular direction through landscape distinguished only by its lack of distinguishing features. and on and on. trying to do something like that now, though I've already cluttered the drive around in no particular direction with a handful of destinations. the genius of prairyerth is in its random accounts history and people, moments that he can't force but has to wait for. I'm working on that a bit now, but struggling a little to suppress the countervailing urge to regret all the landscape that I wasn't seeing while walking batesville.