July 6. Phoenicia, NY to Mansfield, PA . I woke up first. Kate and I were on opposite sides of the bed facing away from each other. I rolled over and stared at her back, which was uncovered. She has dark-toned skin with yellow in it, almost no body hair. Her skin shines. It's my favorite kind, some strange Northern European accident, the result of Huns sacking Krakow or something. I didn't feel awkward about the night before. In fact I wanted to slide over and onto her and wake her up by fucking her. I used to do that to Jamie, one of my exes. She said it was her favorite way to wake up. But I didn't want to push anything with Kate. She was in charge. She had a boyfriend and I was just the motorcycle boy taking her away from it all for the time being. I started to get up.

After breakfast we went back up to our room and packed up. Kate took charge and rolled everything up tight. She kept the green kerchief around her neck and every time I looked at her I could see her wet in the shower, her white tank top see-through from water and the green kerchief tied tight around her neck like a collar. As we walked out of the room Kate tucked the stuffed red crab she’d given me into the covers.

I met Gretchen while we were working on an organic farm together. It was one of my ideological experiments. Back to the land. Gretchen was very tall and German looking. She and her boyfriend, Steve, were from Detroit. They had moved to the farm together from Oregon where they’d been living in a yurt and farming high on a mountainside near Grant’s Pass.

We finally got up from the curb and got back on the bike. We turned south, following the Susquehanna into Pennsylvania on PA 220 through towns called Athens, Milan, Ulster. You never know with towns like that how they got their names. Sometimes it’s that the people who moved there named them after the old country. But other times it’s that some land grant company back in the 1700s decided it could entice immigrants to its new towns if it made them feel like they were coming an unspoiled version of the old country instead of some uncleared piece of forest in the heart of Iroquois country.

We rode for another hour or so before we were both ready to stop. Neither one of us said anything about what we were doing for lodging but we both wanted to be in a hotel again. I know I did and it was the first day she didn’t mention anything about camping the whole day. The sky was still bright blue when we road into Mansfield, PA. The town had a cute intersection and I stopped the bike there. Instead of parking meters they had iron posts painted black on which were mounted iron horse heads holding metal buckets in their mouths.

I got into my underwear and wrote in my Captain’s log. It was my solace. I wrote Kate another letter that I wasn’t going to send her. It said I felt like I was falling for her. I don’t know if I was. I was definitely under her spell and I wanted to fuck her so bad she probably could’ve made me do anything for her. But I was just enjoying the whole thing and to say I was falling for her was probably part of my own little romantic game with myself.