I am thinking maybe i am tired. My senses a little dulled, my brain a little slow, my giggles a little low. But i am thinking it is the kind of tired that comes from extra being, maybe? Intense living. So much to recall and process. So much to archive.
7 months on the road.
Quieter. A sporadic social life, hours on the road, stranger in many stops, even the longer ones, somewhat in that sense a mellower life in general. But the truth of it, the reality is, it is a huge trip. Seen and felt and touched and tasted a span of a continent. This last trip alone, from the stop in New Mexico to the stop in California, drove through the Navajo Nation, stopped at the Grand Canyon and slept in Joshua Tree. In the waters of the Pacific a few meters off the soft sands of Santa Claus Lane, swam with sharks and dolphins, the creatures that made an appearance.
Some of the road fellows are:
Rabbits large and small brown and grey cold and hot
Desert rabbits or a miniscule deer
Baby owls flying
Manatee drinking rain water
Magpies graced every morning
Dogs
Chicken
Dolphins
Squirrels
Chipmunks they squeak
Mice
Rat a rat walked the tightrope wire above our heads and almost slipped
Skunks dead and alive
One blackwidow all with a red shaped thing on its big round body
Cows grazing dozing gazing in the shade by the tree
Horses close and far
Sheep
Crocodiles drop jaw
Alligators
Snakes have a special way of moving
Flamencos
Frogs
Humans strangers and friends
Opossum mostly dead
An animal with really pink legs like a big rat or a small opossum walking calmly by the road
Scorpion dead
Foxes crossing the street
Weasels funny things
Gophers
Many roadkill
Female elk a group at dusk in the field and one that crossed the road right in front of us
Llama
Elpaca
Coyotes heard a band and half saw one cross the sakia
Donkey funny enough not that many
Vultures
Hawks
Many birds of all sorts of sizes
Cardinals
Eagles
Ravens
Woodpeckers
Blue herons
White herons
Pelicans
Tortoises water ones and land ones small and very large
Roadrunners
Hummingbirds
Fish – trout
Pigs
Ducks
Cats
Goats + goat just born babies
Turkeys
Lizards
Tobias’s special lizard
Bobcat maybe
Deer they sometimes responded to my calling
White shark swam with it once before we knew and once after we knew
Sea lions a really dead one with the color draining until it was almost green-white
Seals
Mosquitoes
Flies
Grasshoppers
Bees