Post Shroom Cascadia

June 23 M 9:37
I'm sitting next to a Jesuit priest who works in a native village in Alaska. I don't feel at all like writing about how yesterday's late arrival has cast a pall over the trip. I'm on my way to Seattle now on the Amtrak Cascadia. We are scheduled to arrive at 12:45. I have a four hour layover in Seattle. I won't get to Spokane until after midnight. I'm over twenty-four hours late now. I have tomorrow, tomorrow night, Wednesday day and then have to be on the fucking train going back Wednesday night. There won't be any time for fun. Out the window is cloudy and drizzly and leafy green and wet with reflections. What will I be able to do to kill time in Seattle?
Last night, the train didn't pull into Portland until after eleven PM, eight hours behind schedule. I tracked down a ticketing agent who finally admitted he knew the train was going to be this late, and he got me a room at a dumpy motel called the Cypress Inn. I was too jagged from shroomin and drinkin and sitting in cramped bus seats and waiting around the woods and the depots to bother going out and investigating the scene around the Cypress Inn. I'd been all over Ash Street a few years earlier, though, and didn't imagine it was much different. Microbrews and live music just weren't enough to overcome my dead inertia. After a night's sleep now, though, when I'm done with this I will go check out the scene in the lounge car and get a chunk of Steppenwolf out of the way. Harry Haller is pathetic. I feel like that sometimes, but Hesse tried to point to this patheticism as somehow noble, like a wolf of the steppes, independent, free of bourgeois restraint. He's just a dork, though. Frank Dennis, the Alaskan fisherman, is a far more wolf-like example of breaking bourgeois limitations, hunting for his own food, living out of town, etc.
Kelso Staton: When I come back through Portland, I will have about six hours to kill. Ug. What else? We're going through a tunnel. A lady talks about making jelly. I saw SportsCenter on the hotel tv this morning. When I went to sleep last night, I was out until I got my wake-up call. Rivers, creeks, a blue heron, people walk like drunkards down the aisle. I read through the Portland Oregonian while I watied in the station. Water lilies, lily pads. The Jesuit is reading All the Pretty Horses. They plunked down complimentary salmon and rice plate for dinner last night as payback for the delays. Wouldn't give us any pie, though. Amtrak sucks. Barn with grain silo. Sun starting to poke through. Baby squawks. I still feel tired. Ferns. Corrugated aluminum siding. Po' white folks' homes. Green river bend, downed trees crisscross, might be some bass down there. Looks like Yosemite Valley without the rocks. Moss on trees. The train's whistle blows. Cars wait at RR Xing. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I'm free of this at last!

June 22 8 AM Su Somewhere north of Redding, CA
Guess I better try to kick ass across this cuz time's short and there's a shitload going on. Where do I start? It could be fascinating if I'd take the time to explain it. Write. Start with the facts? No one knows. They say a bridge is out. So we been jacking hours away waiting to get hauled back to buses to take us to Klamath Falls. I ate my mushrooms this morning around four AM after the train stopped cuz they ran over a kid on his bike an killed him.
Did I brink this on? Did I stray into evil the other night? Is God taking me to task? I was reading about David butchering the Philistines and Edomites and Syrians so that God could prove his point about who was the All Mighty Ruler, when the train rapidly slowed to a stop. There's a man with an enormous man with enourmous bushy beard, arms like oak trunks, on the train with his family trying to get to Dutch Harbor by tomorrow so the man can meet his fishing boat. Stands to lose tens of thousands of dollars if the doesn't catch his flight from Seattle. He lives on moose in Alaska and has done all manner of shit in his life including mining and working as a roughneck, and I'll have to squiggle more about him on the bus, cuz there he is, and I want to go talk with him some more. He makes me feel like a Steppenwolf Bourgueoisie.

So I'm on the bus now, we're heading Klamath Falls. Had to lug our bags through the woods to a bus stop with one payphone. The line to use the phone was hundreds long, but I was near the front. I don't think my dad believed me when I said the train hit a kid and delayed us four hours, and then there was a bridge out and now we're going to be bused. Clint next to me is reading The Secret Sharer. We spoke of Heart of Darkness, how it's still going on today in Zaire, Rwanda and Burundi, how nature is so unovercomeable that man himself becomes an animal. I said, "We're a long way from there." That was all wrong. I said I guessed "Deliverance" was about the same storyline.
The power was off in the train. A woman said it was a blackout. We were in the bar car, and I said, "Let's loot the bar," and Mr. Lee, the bartender, pulled up a lime slicer and brandished it in my direction.
Taxi cabs are standing by.
"I told you you should have flown," my dad said.
Frank, the Alaskan fisherman, blew smoke out his nose menacingly when the conductor told him he couldn't smoke on the train. Eventually they let us off for a smoke break. The bus is moving now. Out the window I see RC's Pub, and BBQ and Cold Beer and Family Dining. Wouldn't mind being there. Evergreens. Cattle. Barbed wire. Experience the wonder of Shasta Caverns. Lot different than pulling out of LA.