26 August - 2 miles west of Wenatchee, WA

What do you know, river? You never had to go uphill…

My legs hurt but my soul is weary, too, as if fulfillment was connected to my muscles. On the other hand I have had a shower and I feel safely clean. My first campsite at this county park was infested with flies. I think my neighbors on either side live here. The country music—cheap homilies of prepackaged emotion—was blaring, distorted, from a car radio. The flies were everywhere but they were used to them, an old guy with stringy black hair and two kids, a girl and a guy. The kids cling to each other on and off with the sort of desperation you don’t usually see in anybody. Their dog barks almost incessantly as the three of them take turns telling it to shut up. Father, have mercy on us. We don’t want to die just yet.

Earlier today I talked to a man in Leavenworth who was tuning a zither he said he got from George Lucas. While I was trying to nap his girlfriend presented him with some fancy horoscopes that she seemed to accept as divine writ. Another man in the same city kept advertising the weather, the town, the surrounding terrain, the lack of insects, and the local tavern as if I was thinking about stopping.

The man at the campsite next to my new location is from British Columbia. He gave me some tracts. I’m no sure I could ever make myself do likewise, but I know that’s what love he’s been given and has received. There is not much else available to us.

The imagination of a single person is perhaps enough to live on. It is perhaps enough for a few of us, for Aristotle’s beasts and gods, for those with imaginations too cruel to remain in contact with other humans, or too fully developed to be able to communicate with the rest of the world. For the rest of us there is a shared imagination, just as there is a shared language.

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