7:35am: That seventh day has rolled back ’round again. Coffee pots from coast to coast are bubbling to life. Your brain’s still calm before the caffeine. I was going through my photos of the week and this one just seemed restful.

It’s a photo I took last week when I came across a wind mill when I really needed one. That story coming up this week.

I like this photo because it… Continue reading →

“I’m tired of standing there by the beet piler watching the beets fall,” he said. “I want to be a truck driver.”

He wasn’t piling beets when I met him. He was mowing grass and his mower had overheated. While he waited for it to cool he told me about working sugar beets.

“The beet season starts mid-September and runs until the first frost. They grow the beets east of here, pick them then… Continue reading →

I walk across deserts with mules. I drink beer in saloons. Last night I ended up sitting across from a bottled alien talking mules and Wyoming with Carl and Diane Strode. They own the White Wolf Saloon.

I don’t carry beer on saddle trips.… Continue reading →

Question: what do you want to read or see more about on my current mule voyage across America? I ask this because today it dawned on me that my journey from North Carolina to Hailey, Idaho is about 3/4 complete.

Yikes.

I Write for Me

I’ve always written the RiverEarth.com blog for my readers and me. I don’t get… Continue reading →

Maybe the mules and I have been alone too long. Maybe I’m childish. Who cares. Fist-pumping the Nebraska sky to get a coal train to blow its whistle at the mules and me amuses the hell out of me.

That ol’ train whistle sure makes me smile. I hope it does you, too.

Whistle Post Script

The whistle blowing caper happened in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The mules and I have since traveled to eastern Wyoming.

Greetings from area code 307, aka Wyoming. The state has so few people (less than 600k), it only needs one area code. This week, the state of “Equal Rights” made room for one traveling man and 2 mules.

Mules Cracker and Brick and I are taking a few days off in Douglas to catch our breathes. In the past two weeks, they’ve walked 225 miles from Hyannis, Nebraska… Continue reading →

Surely as we walk toward the setting sun, the land is drying out.

The mid-West flooded this spring but now the rain has stopped. The mud is drying and cracking. Cracking like alligator skin under our hoofs and boots.

It’s drying out in Nebraska.… Continue reading →

Summer in western Nebraska. The mules are sweating and I’m sweating and we’re all craving salt. If I drank coffee in the morning I’d pour it in to that but I don’t so I douse my lentils and rice with the white stuff.

“You never saw so many cowboys drinking so much beer in a hurry.” So writes my wife Julia to a friend of ours about attending a ranch rodeo in the Sand Hills of Nebraska.

Read Julia’s “Email From the Sand Hills” about the ranch rodeo, Sand Hills cowboying and how we almost got flattened by a… Continue reading →