TRAVEL JOURNAL - 2/14

We had only the loosest of plans, but so far we'd gone through Chicago, up through Minnesota, and cut over to the Dakotas. We'd camped for awhile on the fringe of the Badlands, and when it got too hot we ran south into the plains. It wasn't any cooler in Kansas, but at least it rained occasionally.

There was no real point to this trip other than the pointlessness of it. It was like an extended meditation - if we hung ourselves out in space long enough our brains could start working outside the box.

That thought brought me back to Andrew's tool-using ability and the task at hand. "You, sir," I said to him as I dropped into a crouch in front of our bird, "are a better monkey than I."

He just grinned, and slid his bandana a bit further up on his head to keep the hair out of his eyes.

It was actually short - though disgusting - work to take our new truck-grill crowbar and use it to pry loose the other half of the grill tine, the half that had impaled the bird. From there I slid the bird off the tine. It felt like a boulder made of flesh - cold flesh - and it slid off the tine with a sucking sound that was a little drier than I'd imagined it would be.

With the bird carcass loose and on the ground, we broke the rest of the offending tine off completely using a combination of Andrew's rock and my crowbar, then we popped the trunk and checked for any more damage. Fortunately, there didn't seem to be any.

There was dusty-brown blood splattered on the windshield and on the hood, and some little feather-covered somethings that I wasn't too keen to clean off by hand. The front of the truck, with its mashed-up grill, seemed to be grinning at the road ahead with a tremulant smile. But we were largely getting off easy. Thunder rumbled again, closer this time.