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syrup-minded barristas at Coffee Break. The people were not unpleasant. It was more that they were used to a series of people who knew the ropes, and, especially at this early date, were slightly bemused by clueless greenhorns like ourselves. I have gotten distracted here. Perhaps it is the aimlessness of the project or that I have forgotten which episodes I have slipped into the streaming mess thus far. We are on our descent into the Atlanta airport and I believe, for my own benefit, I will terminate the text there. The last thing I need is to inject another ill-conceived time burglar into my daily life. I have enough projects that I am already not putting the respect and depth of thought toward. This one, although it could clearly have a manageable extent, that being the satisfactory address of all materials, thoughts, and locales that filled the seventytwo (72) hours I was out of sorts. Yet, now the, no, now our altitude has gotten low enough that I had to put away my headphones, I have to listen to babies blubber and their parents bicker and talk about their friends, and their friends televisions.‡

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passed by Chicago several moments ago and I have a wealth of supplementary episodes to implant in the frenzy of indelible ink. I have not determined yet whether I shall terminate composition at the end of the trip, when I reach Atlanta. Although it would give gravity to the project of writing this it would also sacrifice some episodes to memory, where they will disintegrate.‡ Medora was a ghost town. Apart from the Americinn and the Badlands Motel across the street, which appeared to be hosting the ‘Women’s Retreat’ at the community center, and the sole eating establishment, The Iron Horse Saloon, the town was empty and closed until the season began. We were dreadfully off-season. When we walked into the saloon, through a screened in patio on which were stacked tables and chairs, slid to the sides, the beerlights were covered with dust and the plank floor was uneven, the two women behind the bar looked rather put out and surprised, like when Dustin Hoffman first enters the pub in ‘Straw Dogs’ or when the Three Amigos first enter the pub in ‘The Three Amigos.’ Although, looking back now the whole state seemed to have a sort of cold “you should know how things work ’round here’ posture to it. From the young lady cashier at the Copper, no, no, the Trapper’s Kettle to the

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chase scenes serial #21

delight of having an experience that you were not expectant of touch you and awaken within you a pleasure that you felt was lost as you grunted up the muddy slope.‡ I notice that I am transferring again. Of course the preceding musing should be in the first person. Did I revert to that comfortable didacticism out of an intense will to connect and to share? Or was it just sloppy and lazy. I am having my fourth tonic water of the trip, one for each flight. I also just ate a peanut butter granola bar left over from the hike. I had to take the peanut flavoured one which we did not eat because my father and mother’s household is peanut free in order to welcome their grandson, my nephew, who is allergic to peanuts. The association is causing me to wonder whether someday it might be fitting to invite my nephew along on one of these expeditions, it has been a wonderful way to share a bond with my father but also to explore the nation’s tucked away spots. Perhaps as a vegetarian he will also appreciate the dinner of the backwoods martyr, the iceberg lettuce salad. I fear that we are probably halfway through the flight at this point. We

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chase scenes serial #20

to be thoroughly exploited or even explored. One would have to construct a very savvy definition of ‘wilderness’ to even describe what the terrestrial characteristics needed to be. He also mentioned that the day was ‘Earth Day.’ It was the day of our long hike which I found pleasing, for, although I have a sense of appreciation for conserved lands and ‘wilderness’ all year round, it is not ever so concrete to me as when I am exploring a national park. Breaking through the treeline as we climbed the north slope of some badland formations and emerging into a broad, high, grassy prairie that spread rolling out all around us filled me with a profound sense of humble awe. To the east a group of bison grazed. I could see a few reddish calves romping while the dark adults were head down to the grasslands. To the southeast the continuous golden green was pocked by white spots and patches, the telltale signs of a prairie dog town‡. Looking back down the grassy slope to the treeline and the badlands below I thought about how oblivious I was to this landscape I now trod. We had walked all around the bases of the sedimentary formations without a thought as to what was above them, or atop them, or even whether we would find out. It was the

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chase scenes serial #19

composition of the ground below. Again I can not see the horizon. I attempt to recall whether it is possible to see the horizon from an airplane. I think this is what they call ‘atmospheric perspective’‡ in art history courses. As you will note in the photograph I just took, the blue sky above the clouds meets the somewhat blue ground in a blurred band of white, the collapse of the clouds in perspective coupled with the haze of distance. When that ranger pulled us aside on the road of the north unit, he, after bringing, no, asking my father his profession, mine seemed to interest him less, posed the question as to whether the seas were wilderness. He lamented the paucity of true wilderness in North Dakota, most of it, he claimed, lay in the two units of Teddy Roosevelt National Park. Although my father said that people travel all over the oceans, I proposed that it is not a suitable comparison. On the land, the occupiable space is only a surface. As I look out the plane window there is not a point which looks untouched by human intervention, save for the stands of trees along a meandering river. The seas also have an occupiable surface which is traversed and sometimes cultivated for utility and pleasure. However, they also consist of a volumetric component which, although accessible, could hardly be said

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a given day, like the spell in college during a large project push when I would stare at the X-acto knife blades that were wrapped and packaged in foil like sticks of gum and pictured taking them out and chewing on them. Even when they weren’t in sight I pictured them in this way. It made my teeth numb. “Ha une camera?” means “Do you have a room?”‡ For some time on this flight, or at least during the ascent, I believed I might not write any more on the trip, as it was my thought to only write while out of my home environment, the safe world where I compose empty, detached texts. I wanted this writing to be a vehicle of flux and whim. I almost just wrote “I wanted this writing to be about…” I caught myself. It is easy to slip into such lazy traps, especially when I now, having skirted that phrase, take note of the fact that this text is necessarily not ‘about’ anything, it exists somewhere, it seeks to be within a certain sphere of origin, that being the underlay narrative of my trip to North Dakota. But I almost stopped the composition because of my concern about flying. We are bouncing about again here at thirtythree thousand feet (33,000′). The wings waver like a diving board. I listen to ‘Trans-Europe Express.’ There is a patchwork cloud cover allowing me to make out the scale and
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realized that I had left my camera on the plane. I had lost all of the supplementary materials from the trip. Many photos of iceberg lettuce salads lost. What just now entered my mind was that whoever ‘claimed’ my lost camera must have waded through all of these photos. My impressions of the Black Hills and the Badlands. Did they take some time to reconstruct my journey, form character sketches of my father and myself? How accurate were they? How comprehensive and personal were they? The text I wrote to accompany those photos would have added very little to their experience other than to corroborate the chronology of the trip, yet it would not have grounded that trip in any other continuum of character than the one forged on that trip. I am here for only a short time longer in between writings as the journey nears its end, I have been weighing what I hope this text will accomplish as of yet I recall only detailing one tableau in the trip. Does the actual composition need to cease when I touch down in Atlanta?‡ The man next to me is rehearsing Italian phrases from his guidebook. I remember one from my voyage. “Ha une camera?” Sometimes it repeats in my head uncontrollably. It is a thought that rides next to everything else as I go through
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associations to continue to stand in for this new iceberg lettuce meal. As we descend into the Twin Cities I am still of the mind that they are almost exactly the same as Portland, OR. I have no sense of why I would form this association. In fact it is more than an association because I picture getting out of the airport and taking the street car into the city, strolling the alphabet district, and going to Powell’s. Is it because it is a medium-sized city? It is north of some line in the nation? Because I want all cities to be like Portland? And surely it will remain a Portland clone, at least in my interior compositions and scenarios for it, until I see it for myself. My father described it to me rather clearly and, no, qualitatively, and I still persist in my delusion. You see, this shows the folly of my rich description of Trapper’s Kettle for you will certainly flesh it out with all the Cracker Barrels and Stuckeyses that you have fallen upon. Perhaps watching closely as we descend‡ into the Twin Cities shall shake me. I am in the World Perks Club in the Twin Cities airport. It is not the same one I was in last year when on the way back from Rapid City I

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‘Blue Collar Comedy and Cross Burning’ specials. Yet my pleasure at entering into such a ripe environment was not complete for upon ordering a plain bagel, two of which were stored in a Tupperware sandwich package, I asked if they did not have any peanut butter. They did not. But as if snapping out of her real world fog and reentering the sweet walls of Coffee Break; the girl behind the counter offered that they did have “peanut butter syrup.” I feel that nothing more needs to be said about that scenario, and we are beginning to descend into Min/St. Paul. The Twin Cities is what I shall call them because I cannot spell the name of the one that starts with ‘M.’ I do not mock these places lightly. In a sense I am confronting my own stereotypes and I am generally thrilled to encounter locations and establishments outside my norm. They provide more cause for me to note them than would a place that sold Black Metal records or French novels. For certain I could find something to say about these places but it seems, on trips such as these, that I relish more the chance to eat an iceberg lettuce salad in Trapper’s Kettle, Belford, ND‡. And merely describing it as this is not sufficient because it allows those past

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a sprite, one soy latte‡, for which I coyly asked if Coffee Break had soy milk. Although in Bismarck, Rapid City’s ‘simple’ cousin, and we had not even seen a grocery store from which one might buy soy milk, the man behind the counter, probably in his early to mid forties (40s), was pierced beyond the capacity one might have to recognize his human form. One would think that such a man would carry this elixir, or at the very least, some soy milk syrup. When I ordered the drink at last he asked me in mild shock if I did not want some flavour. I said no. But immediately a textual theme was cemented for this description. I was ably prepared to remark, perhaps in passing, about the hundreds of syrups bedecking the shop. Perhaps I would have even tied it into the man’s obsessive, no, apparent obsessive behaviours foregrounded on his half-metal visage. But now I am free to discuss the intrusion of syrup into this man’s world view. It was in fact the lynchpin of fine coffee beverage drinking. Every person that then came in proceeded to order bizarre concoctions which have been more eruditely satirized in other avenues by intellectuals such as Steve Martin and probably someone on the

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