In Chapter IX Giles rides out from the safety of Kate, of his family, of the East. He battles the sadness of being alone, and of life's echo patterns. He crosses the Mighty River in search of his destiny, battles the prairie wind, and rendezvous with his friend and brother in arms Lyle Noisy Hawk.

Tuesday-Wednesday, July 13th-14th, Orfordville, WI, to Fort Thompson, SD. It is not a natural thing to go away from someone when everything inside you tells you to go back to them. But it's not impossible to do. For me it was a question of learning from my experiences and knowing that I had to make a clear decision one way or another. If I had stayed in Chicago with Kate, then I was making my final stand against her life with Blake, and I was doing it on unfavorable ground.�

Gutshot. So sad. What could she have done? What could I have said? It didn't matter. It was just a phone call. I shouldn't have called probably. Just needed to hear her voice. I sat there on the steps a while longer, watching important people trundle by in bad suits. Watching a school field trip happen, the photos, the hand wrestling, the laughter.

I was feeling heavy and sleepy on the bike. I couldn't tell if I was coming down with something or it was just the sadness taking me like quicksand. My butt and back were hurting and I'd only ridden two hours and change. Across the big river into Minnesota and the road followed a smaller river, the Root River along a fertile bottomland. The sun was out and the day was good and warm again. I needed gas and I could hardly get myself to stop but I finally just pulled off because I saw a big BP station glowing green and gold off to my left.

If I've been somewhere once, I can always get there again. I sometimes wonder if that is why it is so hard for me to make myself go places. You might think that my wanderlust is natural to me. It may be, but not in the way that writing is. I have to make myself move because otherwise I feel stuck. Like the helmet I painted, I have big eyes, and want to see everything before I experience. I don't like surprises. But there is nothing to the road without surprise. I force myself to travel because I know that when I am still, I am closing up, fortifying, shoring up for siege. For me, traveling is religious, because it is something I undertake that forces me into the paradox of faith. I set out in the morning suspicious, reluctant, scared, and I come home in the evening proud, exhilarated, humbled. And each time I move I etch a new route into my brain, one I can come back to, and my world grows ever outward.

The next morning, there was no evidence at all of the sinister world I'd inhabited when I got in bed. The hotel parking lot was empty and the morning sun bright and innocent. I showered, packed my bag up, and took it out to the bike. There was something ridiculous about how easy to use the hitches were. I still didn't haven't it down perfectly but it took me two seconds to get the �s' hooks anchored and crank the straps down so the bag was secure. What I didn't like was how the bag tilted back away from the backrest. With the climbing rope I'd been able to wrap around the tubing of the backrest and really crank the bag forward.