The Carry Home Read Online Free

look around the inside of the van, opening a box or two. Clearly relieved, he waves us on, arm outstretched, a lone finger pointing toward the empty fields of North Dakota.
    From here nearly to home the roads are mapped precisely to the cardinal points of a compass. Strung first with little wheat towns, then, as we move farther west, with little Hereford and Angus towns. In every community flags are waving, proud even as plywood boards are being screwed across the windows of the downtown storefronts. Over the past decade, the region has lost thousands of residents, some areas now claiming fewer people than 175 years ago, in the glory days of the Sioux. Beyond the open windows we catch fluty snippets of meadowlark from random fence posts—and from wet ditches, the whir and twitter of red-winged blackbirds, hanging sideways from cattails and swaying in the wind.
    My doctors in Thunder Bay were troubled when I said I was going home by road, worried I might develop blood clots. With that in mind I mostly ride shotgun, perched in a captain’s chair with my broken leg propped up and pointed down the highway. Still, every few hours, I tell Martha I want to trade off, yank theleg down and hobble around to the other side, crawl in, and drive for a hundred miles or so with my left foot. Friends who hear I’ve been behind the wheel will cast dubious looks at Martha, as if as a guardian she leaves something to be desired.
    â€œI never got the sense it was up for discussion,” she’ll tell them.
    In truth this westward journey is the only obsession left for me. A forlorn mission to carry home that box on the dashboard, at a pace no faster than a ’79 Chevy van can manage against a prairie wind.

    E VER SINCE THE HIGHWAY OPENED UP , I CAN’T STOP FIDDLING with the tape deck—fast-forward and then rewind, a little more then a little less, playing one song and then yanking the tape to find another. Intentionally picking music that stabs me in the heart. First it’s Bonnie Raitt, in a sort of aw-shucks version of “Your Sweet and Shiny Eyes,” a song that recalls two old friends down on the Mexican border clanking glasses to one of their birthdays, drinking salty margaritas with a stranger named Fernando. For twenty years Jane and I played that song to each other on every birthday—including two weeks ago, on her fiftieth, rolling down U.S. 2 through the jack pines of northern Michigan. “Young and wild,” croons Bonnie as the blue flax rolls by, “we drove 900 miles of Texas highway, to the Mexican border, as the day was comin’ on.”
    Another tank of gas in Carlyle, then Kate Wolf: “I’ve beenwalkin’ in my sleep, countin’ troubles ’stead of countin’ sheep.” And on Highway 12, within a stone’s throw of the Montana line, Jackson Browne, “Running on Empty.”
    Now and then I turn to stare over my left shoulder, above a small counter in the center of the van, to a cork bulletin board crowded with faded photographs: The two of us clutching a bottle of champagne on the Lochsa River in northern Idaho at the end of two thousand miles of trail. Thanksgiving in the Chisos Mountains of West Texas. Three shots of Abby the traveling cat. Another of us in late August on the rounded shoulders of the Berkshires, all soft and green and sweating in the summer sun.
    Beside the photos is a wire basket holding one of the journals Jane kept filled with notes from our research trips: Trail descriptions. Perfect campsites. Random thoughts from late in the evening, parked out in the woods somewhere, halfway through our second beer. Notes from the redwoods and Point Reyes in California, from Padre Island in southern Texas, the dark hills of North Carolina, the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona. From the Dakota Badlands and Florida’s Juniper River. Notes from the Utah desert, when the big blue van gained air during a heroic, ill-fated attempt to