Update from Denver

Lovin' the bus this time, smooth goin', and miles and miles of this country rolling by... Pike's Peak, that sentinel inspiration for the line "purple mountain majesties," and I've seen lots of the "rolling waves of grain," too - along with those well-lit not so clean and so visually jarring gas stations and truck stops - and some pretty scuzzy people whose IQs seem to keep them lost forever muddling in the fog between real world mishaps and their next drag on a cigarette - all of which keeps them mystified, edgy and on the verge of angry, paranoid little tirades - in your face if you give 'em the eye.

But all in all, I've got those road gears rolling inside, a certain American kind of feeling, that nomadic, moving, at once satirical and sacarin "On the Road" sort of sentiment, al Jack the Man Himself, Mr. Kerouac, a misty-eyed boy and cynical guy wrapped into one.

Got that literary, urban-tinged Beat meets bumbling hick America thing goin' on, watching the country in all it's seedy and bountiful glory rollin' past.

Another night and day to go, and I'll be in the Bozone and the tilting, hot and frosty wildish island known to some nature geeks (and ok, sometimes to me, too) as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. It really does stand for something, you know, a crowning achievement of the plant's innards but also of American's outwardness toward the wild world - keeping something wondrous and alive and rather big and raw handy for all to see and slip into, at least a bit, to touch the ground in some of the old-fashioned ways and to touch something in themselves as well. So, you see/ The Walt thing is coming out in me, too, and I don't mean Disney. I mean that most sensuous of American laureates, Mr. Whitman, who could also wax both cynical and saccharin about this tumult of life and the beady-eyed bastardizations of his fellow (and oh so courser man). Yellowstone, a little heaven on Earth, as close as it gets, grizzlies, wolves and ALL....

A weathered old hand-painted billboard I saw overlooking Route 66 westbound in Amarillo at dawn this morning, simply: "The Road Does Not End."