8 September - Malta, MT

I continue to progress across the vast inland plain of this continent. The road is following the Milk River. Though small, this river has completely changed the landscape: the rolling hills of the prairie are gone and a gentle river valley, full of strands of trees and green grasses runs beside me. Green more or less—nothing quite like Portland or the hills of San Francisco. I stopped at an abandoned church that stood on a hill overlooking the valley and took some pictures; otherwise I merely rolled along, the flattest day I have had so far. Tomorrow I should hit the Missouri River, which seems a significant accomplishment, though I’m not even halfway to the Mississippi. The inhabitants seem to be getting increasingly civilized, though I’m not sure what means. Budweiser is still holding its own. Perhaps it’s that these farming communities are actually communities and not hodgepodges of millennium paranoids, loggers, and survivalist freaks. Altogether, though, this land outside the city makes and breaks people differently. Thoreau’s ideal of self-reliance, of a life out here in an infinite Walden, is flawed in that—well, to be honest, I am not sure, but—for most people it is not worth the time and effort of self-examination to have a self-reliant mind. And I understand in some respects why people occupy their time out here in the innumerable casinos, in drinking cheap beer, in driving trucks and shooting things. I understand because I know that same ache to fill the time, that shrinking back from hours without stimulation. But I cannot accept what other people accept, because I can sit on my bicycle for hours on end, entertained by nothing but the majesty of the land and the thoughts in my head. To be sure, they are borrowed thoughts—borrowed from Gene Wolfe and Frank Herbert and Placebo, who have in turn borrowed their thoughts from others—but they are thoughts I make my own by following them with my own imagination. And I suppose I do this along with millions of other folks. But I think I do it more, because I long to see behind this chain of borrowers what it is that my own imagination touches, what infinite thing, what sort of infinite God it is who creates the truly real. And creates the truly creative. For that, I think, is the final level of existence, creation. And creation in turn is delimited by what level of existence it creates at, whether it is merely existant, real, living, or creative itself. So that the highest level of existence is to create that which in turn creates, for in doing so we most nearly imitate God, who created man in his own image, to be creative in turn. Yet all existence springs from God; we do not create anything that does not derive from his own being.

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