Grant-Kohrs Ranch, 10 a.m.
The smell of the place is the heat of livestock. It and the way the earth bears the animals reminds me of the fields and the barnyard and corral of the farm I used to live on. I can't remember living that way very well, like it didn't happen or happened to someone else, but the body remembers, remembers like all those years are stored in the mitochondria. These memories are only accessible by sensation, by old movement patterns through wooden gates or the way you have to step over earth that was chopped up by hooves and left to dry sutureless. Or the way a crick can gurgle lazily through the front yard out barnyard side.
It was 90 on 90 all the way here. I love that I can set the cruise control to 90 and leave it there for over an hour. I love how other vehicles see me coming and pull over before I'm on their bumper and watching those same vehicles file back in behind me. It's a kind of etiquette, an independence from each other. They've no misguided righteousness about claiming lanes.
Fast like that for that long feels like the promise of video games finally manifest. At this speed nothing fails to approach unnoticeably and lane lines blur. Music is so loud it's like being in the game. Out here, for hours and no quarters, you're driving for real, just like you've always thought it should be. Every time you get in the car you hope it's like this and it has never been.
I realize I'm not so interested in seeing the sites or taking the small roads. I realize this trip is about getting far the fuck out as fast as possible. I am not at all disappointed.
The man at the visitor's center tells me it's four hours to Yellowstone from here. Tells me camping there will be easy, that no one goes and the park is empty; camp spots fill up at sundown. He says he's heard that Washington and California camping spots are starting to require reservations, but, he asserts, there's just nobody out here.
This I'm not used to. I'm seeing no one on the freeways and unadulterated ranges extending around the bending earth and part of me keeps thinking I'm going to have to slow down when I reach the crowds but the crowds don't come.
I told the man at the visitor's center that it's my birthday and when I told this to him I was thirty by about 10 minutes. And he said on his 30th birthday he also took a road trip. As I was leaving he said, "Have a great trip birthday girl!"
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