Random notes from the road

October 14, 2014

Got started from Tulsa this morning and drove a humane 300 miles East to St. Robert,  Mo, where now. Traveled the path of old 66, locally now a superhighway called the Will Rogers Memorial Highway. A center span of this highway is a toll road—possibly because it enters the Kickapoo nation territory—but near Tulsa in the west and Springfield in the east, passage is free.

Signboards, many of which lay mangled after the recent winds, advertise things like “Visit the Catholic Superstore!” and “When you die you will meet God,” appealing to some audience you also might meet when you are dead, and identify. For God only knows who it is now. There is great admonishment around here to repent and be ready, a nice accompanying message to the harangue of death I was listening to while driving. Bryson, of course. Whose base narrative line I am coming to believe is a random Google search. Put it like this: The thread upon which he hangs his prose looks more and more like a desultory sequence of diverted interests, of the sort you naturally fall into when you aimlessly look stuff up on the Internet.

Certainly it’s the sort of trap I fall into when on the Internet, where last night I started by looking up pictures of the clothing worn by Otzi the Iceman, and proceeded thence by incomprehensible steps to an account of Charlotte Bronte’s life, followed by pictures of Charlotte Bronte, followed by the writing of Charlotte Bronte, followed by exhaustion.

This search cascade did yield the interesting photographs I sought of Otzi the Iceman and his marvelous equippage. The tools and clothing found with him—indeed, the food in his stomach and the once-glowing ember in a birch bark cannister—spoke much about his life, his sustanance, his background, his mode of survival. And it occurred to me to wonder how much he and I, both sole practitioners of our own highly personal and self-invented technic, might have in common. Specifically I wondered if his impulse to fashion a coat out of animal skins or a backpack out of reeds or a carrying pouch out of birch bark, was somehow similar to my desire for the cash-independent resourcefulness of my do-it-yourself camp stove and my self-powered travel and my permanent auto-repairs with seine twine.

Otzi lived in a time before economy. Sometimes I wish I did too.