Day 48
   
   6/14/01
   Mile 4464
   South of Delta Junction, AK
   
   Camping next to a giant RV is not the quietest place to be.  All sorts
   of motors are on those things - water pumps, air compressors,
   levelers, generators, etc.
   
   This morning, coming down the road at me was an odd shape, and I had
   trouble accepting what my eyes were seeing. A Japanese man was walking
   down the road, dressed in ordinary street clothes and shoes, pulling a
   cart. This was no cart like you'd see a jogging mother pushing her
   baby in; it was a foldaway cart like you'd use at an airport. The wheels
   were wobbling badly, as if they'd fall off any second.
   
   This bore closer inspection. He was a long way from nowhere. He spoke
   very little English, but answered me when I asked where he was going.
   
   "Seattle".
   
   Surely there was something wrong here; there was little hope his
   flimsy carrier would hold up for thousands of miles. Even then, he'd done
   nothing to maximize his efficiency like attach a rope around his
   waist.  He just pulled it, with one arm. Even more eyecatching were the
   leather office-environment shoes he was wearing.
   
   Perhaps he was just taking the ferry. I pulled out a map, and pointed
   out a route going out to sea towards Seattle. "No" he said, and
   pointed out the roads he was going to take.
   
   He had very little gear, to the point where I wondered how he would
   cope with hypothermia if the weather turned bad.  It could snow just
   about any time here. On a bike, I could comfortably cover the distances to
   the next town in a day; for him it would be several days, and I saw no
   way that he could have both enough food and clothing. But the language
   barrier prevented much conversation. I could only wish him good luck.
   
   Mere minutes later, I ran into the noted Italian cyclist Tillmann. In
   the cycling community, he's one of those one-named people like Cher or
   Madonna. He's spent much of the past two decades on a bike, going
   through more countries than can be easily counted. This trip, he was
   headed to Brazil, albeit at a very slow pace - two years.  He said he had
   worked for a few months in Antarctica, filling salt and pepper shakers
   in the cafeteria. I asked him if he would like to use my pocketmail unit
   to send an email, and he replied yes.
   
   *To his wife.*
   
   I almost fainted dead away when he said that. You mean she lets you do
   this?  Wow. Have you had her chromosomes checked?
   
   We talked for about half an hour, and it became obvious things weren't
   quite like they seemed. Yes, he was going to bike to south america -
   but he was going to fly back to Europe in just 2 months for a trade
   show, and various other interruptions, so it's not like he would be on the
   road continuously for years.
   
   I went on into Tok, ate breakfast, did an hour's worth (!) of email,
   got groceries, and emerged just in time for...the rain to start. A
   soaking rain, with no end in sight. The sky was a great grey hemivoid
   of blankness, anisotropic, achiral, homogeneous, and any other big word
   that means featureless - luckily, I didn't pack a thesaurus, or I'd be
   tempted to use it.
   
   There was no choice but to plow through it. I wondered whether it
   would be better to take on the patience of Job, the determination of
   Shackleton, or the madness of Captain Ahab.
   
   I decided on madness, since it sounded like the most fun and least
   constraining of the three. Besides, later, back in polite society, I could
   round it off into a mere charming idiosyncrasy.
   
   So thus you have the answer to yesterday's question. There's plenty of
   opportunity to excercise incoherent babbling or any other form of
   madness out here without anyone noticing. Much of traffic drains away
   on the Tok Cutoff, which leads to Anchorage, leaving little here.
   
   The Wrangell Range starts abruptly and steeply here, with hardly a
   foothill before it. You have lakes, muskeg, and boom, the mountains.
   
   It continued raining the rest of the day and on into evening.
   
   I will not stop... I will not stop...

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