July 20. Part 2. Lolo, MT to Lochsa, MT. My face had turned red. I don't know why. I was embarrassed at what I was doing. That's the whole thing. I always have this urge to live some kind of wild life but when I get right close to it the urge melts away and it's replaced by the urge to be in love. I start to feel the distance between me and the love I want and it feels bad and so I get embarrassed bringing the woman I've just decided to talk to into that conversation.

As I rode along, I lost hope of finding Jerry Johnson. I figured I must have passed it in my trance or something. I found myself riding through a part of the valley that narrowed and there was a turnoff with a bunch of trailers stopped. I needed to piss so I pulled over. Once the buzz of the bike cut and I'd gotten my helmet off I noticed the heavy quiet and it was only then that I had the chance to look up and see the trees. They were cedar trees, reddish and straight with a smooth volcanic look to their bark except where the hairy peelings disrupted the line. 

I continued on down the driveway feeling guilty. It ran through the close woods around two bends and then it opened up into a clearing. There was a big lodge in the back and a row of small cabins. In the middle were two gas pumps and then a little general store with a porch. It was great, a little world in the middle of the woods. I rode a circle around the gravel lot and parked next to a couple of touring bikes at the high end of the lot. In front of one of the cabins a huge Indian motorcycle was parked, its chrome gleaming. It must have weighed a ton and it had wide low handle bars. On the porch of the cabin in a chair sat a gigantic man in a leather jacket with a red ponytail and a stern face. He was watching me the way a silver back gorilla watches a juvenile through camp.

I rode down that stretch of highway with a feeling of new anticipation. The day had been long and taken me through all kinds of highs and lows. It's outcome felt important. I was either someone who couldn't appreciate the beauty of Glacier, who couldn't keep from wanting to fuck every pretty counter girl in the American West, who let eight year-old girls stay imprisoned by their molesting captors because I was too high to figure out what to do, who let a petty Idaho hotel owner tell me she didn't have space when she did. Or I was someone who yearned for true freedom, who appreciated the blue highways for what they were, who lived each moment with the same abandon, who chased a whisper all the way until it got loud, and who eventually found perfection.

I told Clyde I would very much like to go to Jerry Johnson, since it was my intended destination and he said he'd meet me at his place in a few minutes. I walked back upstream to the log bridge and back across and I got my swimsuit and camp towel and rode the bike back around to his spot. He was ready to go with his kit bungied onto the rack behind his seat, and so he kick-started his bike and we buzzed out of there. It was a new feeling to follow someone and his bike was a lot smaller so it was like following a donkey on a fast horse.