The Twenty Fifth Day in America.

Then high on the steep sides of the hills we saw an old town called Jerome where the mining had died but the town lived again when the Hippies moved in. We followed a black-haired James Dean kid, tee-shirt and no helmet, as stripped down to less than essentials as his bike was, up the twisted road and drank in a bar with an older tattered biker, very drunk and doped and not making much sense at all. And what did make sense was scary. Maybe it was the concussion. His hair was stiff with blood, his elbows and legs and jaw all gashed and torn. He had come off his Harley and it now stood outside the bar, more broken even than he was. Disabled. He didn't know for how long. But he said he had friends coming and looked at us suddenly and suspiciously as if we might carry some blame for his injuries so we wandered off and looked in the Hippy shops, at the jewelry and paintings and pots and cow skulls and crafted skeletons dancing.

I bought some things there, I said to myself as presents but I still have them.

We went down the hill then, still heading North because we'd decided, more or less for sure, if we weren't waylaid by curiosity, that we would go to the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley.