chase scenes serial #6
take a room at the non-Travelodge, even if the Travelodge had a pool and the others didn’t, for I do not care so much about pools now. Even though that is all I can write about. In Bismarck you, or I, it was I after all, who could see out the window of the Radisson, the edge of the city in all directions from the ninth floor. The gridded streets petered off into scrubby prairie or fell into the Missouri River. I could also see an old Spanish colonial train depot and the ‘Provident Building’ which in the dark had a barrel on top of a post on its roof which lit up red like a, well like something red. I am very tired and my similies aren’t flowing, I can’t even spell simile. We hiked quite a ways today, twelve (12) miles and change in the north unit of Teddy Roosevelt National Park. It was a bizarre hike. We were bumped from the trail, or discouraged from the trail by a grazing bison who lurched toward us‡. The trail and the environs were very muddy. It was a very deceptive mud, very thick. At times a dry crust would form over it and when I would step into it I would break through and begin sliding on the goo beneath. It was like hiking on cream cheese. That is a simile that I thought up on the fly. At the time on the hike I was more concerned with intellectual pursuits like how
‡ To avoid the bison, who was standing atop a flat plateau area across which the trail passed, we were forced to climb down to a broad, muddy creek bed. When we clapped to alert the bison to our presence he had taken two steps toward us and watched us with his bloodshot eye as we scrambled back down the side of the plateau. At the lower plain we could not see the top of the plateau; it was about fifteen feet (15′) above us up a steep incline. Into the creek two (2) beavers scrambled and we skirted the plateau between its sheer wall and the creek headed for the opposite slope which we hoped to ascend on the other side of the beast. I was afraid the entire time that I would see the bison’s woolly head appear over the ledge, or that I would hear its hoofbeats advancing in a gallop that consumed the steep incline just before it ran me through with its horn. My father suggested that we move our backpacks to the fronts of our bodies to protect our chests, but I fully intended to leap into the deep creek with the beavers at the first shadow that was cast from the top of the flat plateau.