This MUST Be What They Meant When They Said, "Adventure"! Another Greyhound Horror Story! Part 2 of 2

Ok, so I left off where I was walking the highway out into the desert. My feet were blistered and bleeding and I couldn't walk more than a mile without having to stop and rest. I had no tent, home, bedroll or most of my clothes. I was wearing a pair of shorts and a short sleeved shirt. I'd spent nearly all of my cash trying to find out where my bag was and when I could get it with no luck.

Since I left Cortez so late in the day, night came on fairly quickly. It was only then that I discovered that all my flashlights were in my backpack as well, which had decided to take it's own separate vacation. As the sun was going down I was walking through a low lying area, it had sort of a swampish feel to it, hills and high plants kept the breeze from reaching me and some kind of bug began to swarm... and bite. I couldn't see them but the weight of them on my arms and legs told me they were much larger than mosquitoes and their bites were certainly larger. Because of the condition of my feet, I couldn't move fast enough to keep them off me and flailing my arms around had almost no effect. I started to panic, then spirit suggested I meditate. I stopped, I put my hands over my mouth and nose so I could take a couple of deep breaths without sucking up a pound of bugs, and I imagined that I was light, in the vague shape of a person floating of the shoulder of the road, then I began to walk. I didn't even try to keep the bugs out of my eyes or nose, I just walked and imagined.

I could still feel the bugs biting me, but it no longer bothered me. I had chosen another realm to walk in. I was amazed that I was not getting angry or feeling pitiful. I was exhilarated, I laughed out long and loud. But then when I breathed in again I sucked up and swallowed, like, four bugs so I spent the next pretty good distance hacking, coughing and spitting. But, after about another fifteen minutes began climbing out of the lowland and out of the bugs.

I can't tell you how many miles I walked, cars were passing me by but I didn't bother to try to hitchhike. I mean, I was me, but if I had seen me in the middle of the desert on a moonless night, I wouldn't have stopped... even if I new I was me... that would just be too scary. Sagebrush, juniper and pinion pine on both sides of the road were so thick that I could not see anything in them so I didn't try to get off the road to find a place to bed down. I could not have seen if there was a fence, snake or bear in any of those clumps. So I just kept trudging forward. The number of cars that passed me dwindled to almost nothing, it seemed like I walked for hours.

Every time I stopped to rest, which was often, I faced a brilliant Cassiopeia and a monstrously huge Big Dipper hung low over the distant town of Cortez, off to my left. After awhile, I noticed the sky getting lighter, I realized the moon was beginning to rise and even though I couldn't yet see it, I was beginning to be able to see the surrounding landscape better. After what seemed like a few more miles, the moon was over the mountains enough that I spotted a clearing that I could get to away from the road, so I limped, stumbled and staggered into the brush. I had my coats tied to the outside of one of my bags and I lay two of them on the ground then covered up with the third and was asleep almost immediately.

I awoke sometime later, shivering uncontrollably, a cold wind was blowing. I dug into my one bag with clothes in it and dug out the two bath towels and covered myself with them as best as I could. My biggest fear was that I would camp someplace where rattle snakes hunted and fed, but by the time I'd bedded down it was too cold for snakes. I worried for only a minute before I was out.

I awoke just as day was breaking, I gathered my towels and clothes and shook them all out and packed them away again. When I walked back to the highway, I noticed that I had camped in an old prairie dog town. The dried bodies of prairie dogs lay all around where I had slept. I suspect they had been poisoned.

I returned to the road and limped another three or four miles, then I gave up and stuck out my thumb. I was picked up by three Indians in a pickup. Two of them had been drinking pretty heavily and one was testing me with insults to see if he could get me riled. I was too tired to get riled so we ended up laughing a lot. They took me all the way to Durango.

I was let out near the visitors center where I limped in and gathered information on where to go and what to do in Durango. The Greyhound bus station was still a couple of miles away, too far to hobble, so I found a park bench in the shade by the Animas River and began looking over the maps and literature that I had gotten from the visitors center. After a couple of hours another traveler came by and we sat and talked for a while. He told me about a shelter in town. I've never stayed in a shelter, all of them I'd seen were too dirty and filled with a lot of really drunk people, I preferred to camp in the woods. But here I was without any of my camping gear and very few clothes and the traveler had told me that the staff at the shelter give breath tests every night... so I began hobbling toward the shelter.

It turned out that the shelter was at the top of a very steep, long, tall hill. I stashed my bags in what looked like a safe area, I didn't want to carry them up there in case they wouldn't let me stay, then I went up the hill to the shelter. As I hobbled across the parking lot of the shelter, I was looking down at my feet, and there lay another pearl... I picked it up and hobbled up the stairs to the office.

...To be continued...