Costa Rica, Rivas

I suddenly became homesick for Russia this morning. I was laying in bed in Costa Rica reading a novel set in New York City, listening to a weedwhacker running outside and feeling the tin roof slowly heat up with the sun and thinking of getting up in a few minutes and picking some oranges off the trees in the yard and squeezing some orange juice. Then I missed Russia. I thought, it's November, and I've seen Russia in all of the other months, but never November. I thought of the frozen rivers, and the dark skies, walking the cities of Russia, all the concrete, the people wearing fur, the ice cream, the electric trolleybuses. Blue eyes framed by darkened eyelashes. Frozen breath clouding faces when they speak, in that language, lilting along. I'll send some email later today to Russia, to California, to France, to other corners, I decided.

Guatemala, Guatemala City

Through Mexico in a week. Mexico is a big country. From the desert to the mountains to the farmland to the largest city in the world and finally into the jungle.

Now in Guatemala City. It's an hour and a half from the Pacific and a mile high in elevation. It has been two years since I last saw Brent in Tennessee. He has been here for those last two years, running a dig for his archaeology doctorate. His site is in and around a cave complex, in conjunction with one of the principle excavations currently being dug in the ancient Mayan world. Some of the material being recovered is gorgeous. I was in the lab yesterday, surrounded by some very photogenic bas-reliefs and stuccoes that Brent quietly described as "priceless." In fact, their black market value is in the hundreds of thousands or millions of U.S. dollars. Robbery is a big, big problem and a constant threat. Brent passionately loves the archaeology, the danger, the country, the food, and the people. He's planning to marry Mirza, an exceptional Guatemalan archaeology student.

U.S.A., Washington, Seattle

E----- woke me up when she left for work. I listened to the rain tapping onto the balcony outside. Microsoft is putting her up in a corporate high-rise, downtown, on the waterfront. I rolled out of bed and stood at the window. I looked at the ships chugging past the docks, the wet rooftops of the buildings lining the wet streets, the people far below walking with their coffee and their rainjackets. I came here to say good-bye, not to E-----, for her I’ll see again in Asia one day, but to this, my favorite American city.

Last night at dinner with some of her new Microsoft cohorts, I answered a question with, “I’m on my way back to Mongolia.” Sandeep responded that he had just returned from spending the summer traveling in East Asia. “Mongolia was the last country I visited,” he said, “and the most amazing.”

U.S.A., North Dakota

Uncle J ramrodded a trail ride on his ranch. The ride camped near Poison Lake.

Poison Lake, as the story goes, got its name in the Dakota Territory days. A cattle drive passed through in the sweltering heat of summer. When they arrived at the lake, the spare horses ran out into it. Poison Lake is a spring-fed lake, and is very cold year-round. Before they could get the horses out, many of them had already drunk themselves to death. The cowboys had to get on to the railhead, and so left the corpses of the horses in the lake. Local settlers later saw the corpses and named the lake "Poison Lake."

First picture - Uncle J.
Second - J's girlfriend Teri. Teri was a professional rodeo rider when she was younger. She completely lost her eyesight ten years ago, but has never stopped riding; her horses still see very well.
Third - C'est moi.

U.S.A., North Dakota

Sheared sheep last Friday in North Dakota.

U.S.A., Louisiana, Eunice

Tomorrow I go out into the bayou. For this, like all of my adventures, I have a dull hope that I never return.

U.S.A., Louisiana, Eunice

It is raining; it is raining! I love the gentle sound, the fresh smell. I have something which I have always wanted: an upstairs room in a rain-soaked country.

U.S.A., Louisiana, Eunice

I just got back from Ciudad de Mexico. That's a big damn city. The biggest, in fact.

U.S.A., Texas, Dallas

through the windshield of 1989 Saab 900 Turbo

U.S.A., California

1989 Saab 900 Turbo

U.S.A., Arizona, Phoenix

I'm in Phoenix. On the way to Cali.

U.S.A., Louisiana, Eunice

Je reste en Louisiane.

U.S.A., Louisiana, Eunice

I see her shoulders, her hips, her legs. Though walking away, obscured by the rain and dimly lit, her femininity is radiant. She fills the night with her beauty. The Liberty Theatre, the brick wall of the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center, City Hall, the parking lot, the giant Baptist church all echo her beauty back into the night as if it were a bell chime. I turn and walk home in the beautiful rain.

U.S.A., Minnesota, New Brighton

I would already be eastbound, but I ran the machine two quarts low on oil and then it felt like it was on three cylinders, so I took it into a shop.

Chicago, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Boston, DC, Nashville, Louisiana, Texas, Phoenix, LA. It almost feels like a chore... but this should be the last time I see these people in this hemisphere, and perhaps ever.

And I'd like to meander through Appalachia, Cajun country, West Texas. I'd like to learn French in a bayou in Louisiana. What if I stayed there? Could I?

U.S.A., North Dakota

Rode through a thunderstorm in Wyoming. Thought there was supposed to be a drought out here.

U.S.A., California, San Jose

Radigan Neuhalfen
1982 Honda Nighthawk 650cc

U.S.A., California, Redwood City

I’ve been charting my life. I see it running into the far distance. There is love in it, and cruelty, and vast spans of ocean water. And horses, and stars, and loneliness.

U.S.A., Minnesota, Minneapolis

Traffic was stacked out of SF down to Redwood City. I got to whiteline for almost half of the way. It was very excellent.

In the airports and planes today, I could still smell your lust on the skin of my face.

U.S.A., California, Redwood City

I want never to be married. I want to remain free. I want to stand always in the wind on the deck of a ship, unfettered to anything in my past and to anything in the world. I want to live alone and die alone. But, there exist women. And women like you make me forget the wind. I love the chill and the rain, the sting and harshness of dissolute life. But women are warm and soft and joyful -- women are beauty -- and I love them as well.

But the thought of marrying killed me -- because, if married, every day I would love and it would be a happy life, but I would never be a man alone in the night facing the wind, and that is who I want to be tonight and every night until I die and after I’ve died, forever roaming hilltops, moving between the trees, my knuckles icy, my feet bleeding, hungry, always hungry, and alone, and free.

Last night I rode my motorcycle to a small bar called Henfling’s in a small mountain town called Ben Lomond in the California mountains just south of Silicon Valley to listen to a bluegrass band called Railroad Earth from New Jersey. It amazed me that genuine small mountain towns like that exist so close to Silicon Valley; it was like being back in Colorado. Riding up from the valley into the mountains, the air got steadily colder. There were a lot of motorcycles on the road, as there have been for many days because the weather has been warm and sunny. I listened to the band with a friend from work and some other guys. I recalled that I got into bluegrass music in 1999 in Moscow, listening to a friend’s cassette tape and realizing that the music was making me homesick for Appalachia, a place I’d never been. While riding the metro (subway) under the Russian snow and sitting wrapped in blankets in an eleventh-floor apartment in Moscow, I developed a plan to someday buy a small house in Missouri and spend an autumn sitting on the front porch by day and driving around to small mountain bars by night to listen to bluegrass bands. But yesterday, I was in a small mountain bar in California listening to a bluegrass band from New Jersey. I never could have expected that.

When I left the bar, it was late and dark and very cold. There was still traffic, but there were no other motorcycles on the winding two-lane mountain roads. It was serious motorcycling. The moon was bright to the south, but the tall trees along the roads blackened the roads. I put trust in my headlight and powered through the curves. But often enough I would look at the shallow, rocky ditches of the highway and imagine how cold I would become if I were forced to lie bleeding in one of those ditches for an amount of time. In an instant, I could go from being independent and alone and free, to hurt and helpless and dependent on the kindness of other humans for my life. And so then I would slow for the curves... because I did not want to be forced to ask my fellow humans for anything.

The total ride was over an hour one-way. Back in the valley, riding the freeway, I opened up the machine and passed the cars. I leaned over far, and the bike drifted across lanes. But as I moved over the raised reflectors in the paint between the lanes, the front wheel jerked the handlebars in my hands. I was tired, and my hands were weak with pain from the cold and from holding on for so long. So I stopped to rest and eat.

In the restaurant, I sat facing a group of people -- a couple and two young women and four children. They spoke with each other in American English and in a language unknown to me. Their dress and their appearance and their stature suggested they were connected to a nation of the South Pacific. The women were tall, thick-bodied, with strong, lovely faces and long kinked hair. I unzipped my leather and sat and put a booted foot up on a chair and rubbed heat back into my reddened hands and looked one young woman in the eyes and smiled. She smiled and then looked straight down. Then I looked at the man. He was looking at me. I smiled at him, but he didn’t smile back. His was the family, and I was the threat. His is the life of love and laughter, but I have only chaos and pain to bring into others’ lives. I can witness the familial life -- I can sit right before it -- but I cannot know it, I cannot understand it, and I do not even believe in it. I can only give daughters secret thrills, and then return to my friend, the darkness.

I fear I’d do anything -- I don’t understand why -- I’d fight God and his Devil and the deities and the spirits and the fire and our other gods and the saints and the earth, to have you. And if I had you, I fear, after time, I’d give up the wind and the night, I’d give it up for warmth and tenderness and the treasure of a woman’s heart. But I do not think it is your place to save me from the night; I do not think that you remain alive to be my savior. I know that if your life has a purpose, it has nothing to do with me. And I know that if my life has a purpose, it has nothing to do with anyone.

U.S.A., California, Redwood City

In my young mind, Moscow was so far away. Now, can it be, I’ve already lived there?

U.S.A., Nevada

U.S.A., California, San Francisco

Got on the San Francisco Muni for the first time in my life.

impeccably clean

girl with the pink and yellow sunshine flip-flops

exceedingly white people in “Giants” sweatshirts and baseball caps on their way to PacBell Park

a woman wearing a red and white floral print miniskirt with black cowboy boots reading a tattered paperback copy of “Bridge Over the River Kwai”

the ultra-hipster in long leather jacket and pin-striped trousers and double-pronged belt and big scuffed boots and twin silver earrings and orange-tinted sunglasses

a regular-looking dude in sneakers, blue jeans, green T-shirt, short haircut, with a tiny jeweled stud in his nose

a couple holding hands, talking intently, staring deeply, presumably lovers, men

a thirty-something couple of Asian and church-going appearance with an eight-year-old kid in a tan cap. He got up and I saw the stylized ovoid flag-of-Japan patch on the back of his cap

U.S.A., California, Belmont

Yeah, work’s going okay. Sometimes they let me out of my cage to walk around in the sunshine for a few minutes. You know, if it's a holiday.

U.S.A., California, Redwood City

I’ve realized that I think about Mongolia every day.

U.S.A., California, San Francisco

On one of the final days of December 2000, I was standing in the sunshine on a greened hill looking at the Golden Gate Bridge and talking to my brother, who was in his trailer house in the North Star Trailer Park in Minot, North Dakota.

U.S.A., Minnesota, Minneapolis

Last evening was warm for the trick-or-treaters. Then it thunderstormed after midnight.

It's raining beautifully outside.

U.S.A., Minnesota, Minneapolis

I finished my paper! Now I can go to Missouri.

Atlantic Ocean

Radigan Neuhalfen

U.K., Bermuda, Royal Naval Dockyards

Dove on three wrecks today in two dives. The first dive, we descended to the Constellation. According to Bermuda Shipwrecks by Daniel and Denise Berg, the Constellation was built in 1918, later refitted to be a school, and finally converted back to a freighter in 1942 for the war effort. On its first voyage from New York across the Atlantic, it wrecked on the reef at Bermuda. Its cargo consisted of cement, drugs, and whiskey. The U.S. Navy salvaged the whiskey. Upon descent, we could see the cement, stacked and scattered on the sea floor like pillows. The bags had decomposed and the cement had hardened. At the stern is a windlass and at the bow, a large metal box. Near the bow lies the wreck of the Nola, a.k.a. the Montana, a U.S. Civil War Confederate blockade runner. Its paddle wheels are easily identifiable. I took a slate down with me to write on, but the pencil didn’t work. On the Nola and Constellation, we encountered another group of divers – middle-aged, probably sport divers. They were picking among the litter of the Constellation, picking up and discarding or keeping drug ampules, broken bottles, and such. We surfaced, ate lunch, then dived on the wreck of the Lartington, an English ship wrecked in 1879. Here we could see the two large boilers amidships. I followed the propeller shaft halfway through the wreck, but could not see it clear to the boilers. I also could not see where or how the boilers were attached to anything. I surfaced once during the dive to clear my right ear. On the bow of the Lartington, we could read, “LARTIN.”

U.K., Bermuda, Royal Naval Dockyards

Went out on the boat to view three wrecks. Snorkelled on the first one, the Pollockshields. Wreckage spread over a large area – boilers, shells. A German-built ship captured by the British in WW I and used to haul supplies. Then went to two other wrecks, the Minie Breslauer and the Mari Celeste. Another intern arrived yesterday, Sam from Sydney, Australia. (When I first arrived at the hostel, I had concluded that it was not a real hostel, because it was missing the obligatory Aussie. But then he showed up the next day.) Sunburned my face and hands on the boat. At night, I went up to the front of the Commissioner’s House here in the keep. A ship’s mast there perpetually flies tattered Bermudian, Canadian, U.S., and British flags between two well-painted cannons pointing at the sea. A large cruise ship, the Nordic Princess, is docked at the Dockyards. This is Bermuda, the Royal Navy, the Atlantic Trade, the history – but it doesn’t feel like it in the streets. Coke is sold in cans measured to “12 US fl oz.”

U.K., Bermuda, Royal Naval Dockyards

Arrived in Bermuda today. Arrived at eight p.m. Took a taxi to the Maritime Museum, clear on the other side of the island. The museum is inside the keep of an old British fort. The gate of the keep was locked. I hid my bags in an alcove in the fort wall, took off my shoes and socks, and climbed the gate. The hostel was empty. Found Brian, the old caretaker, sitting outside in his underwear, smelling of liquor. He said he was watching the stars. He apologized for being in his underwear. He opened the gate for me and I retrieved my bags.

U.S.A., South Dakota

It’s nearly the Fourth of July weekend. Americans love their flags. They’re everywhere. Saw a pick-up on the Interstate with min-American flags duct-taped to it, flapping in the 75-mph breeze. I even have an American flag sticker in the corner of the windshield of my Buick. It was there when I bought the car. Which is a good thing; otherwise I would have had to find a flag sticker myself.

I rolled through Kansas City at twilight in the last hours of June, 2000. I listened to a KC radio station deejaying and broadcasting live from a club in the city. They were also being simultaneously web-cast. So people watching the web-cast would e-mail in stuff like, “Who’s that girl in the pink dress?” And I blasted on through those bright Kansas City lights into the plain, listened to the club scene till I lost it, flipped the radio and on it was Elvis Presley.

A Greyhound bus passed me and I was glad not to be in it and instead in my own little futuristic highway module. A mile later the bus was pulled over on the side of the Interstate; someone must have been raising a ruckus.

Riding through the wheat here, I can clearly see the stars of the Northern Hemisphere.

U.S.A., Colorado, Avon

Drove down from North Dakota today. To Colorado.

Russia, Chukotka, Egvekinot

Got drunk three nights in a row. First with the sailors, then with the first mate.

Pacific Ocean

Russia, Kamchatka, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky

Sea of Okhotsk

Sea of Japan

Sea of Japan

Russia, Vladivostok

view from the Hotel Moryak

Russia, Vladivostok

Russia, Vladivostok

Monument to the Fighters for Soviet Power in the Far East

Monument to the Fighters for Soviet Power in the Far East

Russia, Siberia

I saw the end of a raduga [rainbow] today, in a clearing in the autumn forest in Siberia, from the train.

Russia, Ulan-Ude

Lenin's head

Russia, Naushki

In Naushki right now, on the train, in Russia on the Mongolian border.

I kissed her on the cheek. She kissed me back, on the cheek, and then wiped her lipstick from my cheek with her palm.

Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar

"Bingo"

Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar

I am teaching English. A whole generation of Mongolians is learning how to form contractions from five words at a time.

Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar

I am still in Mongolia.

Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar

Mongolia

Mongolia, Kharkhorin

Erdene Zuu Monastery

Erdene Zuu Monastery

phallic rock and vaginal hill

Mongolia

Radigan Neuhalfen
self-portrait