Off Track, The Audiobook John Michael Manship

On the final evening of my journey, from a placid camping spot in the heart of California wine country, I plan desperately for my return trip to Chicago and draw conclusions about my nemesis, the BFE.

It is my belief that every human being has a natural rhythm, a pace at which he prefers to move. For me, that natural rhythm is the chorus of the 1989 Cher song, If I Could Turn Back Time.

On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, I gain an extra hour crossing from the Mountain to Pacific time zone. As I do so, I struggle against the synthesized internal drum beat that tells me to “just keep moving," and I take requests for the soundtrack of my life from the people I've met on my trip.

Four days of isolation take their toll on my determination. Between Yellowstone National Park and the Oregon border, the emptiness and brutality of the remaining terrain nearly turn me against the values guiding my trip. My car begins to experience significant mechanical problems, and I go days at a time without finding anything I’m allowed to eat. Without a source of clean vegetable oil, I begin filtering used KFC deep fryer oil using filter bags I hang from my car’s trunk. As I filter the last of this oil on the Oregon border, a goat leaps a fence and frightens me into my car, summarizing in the process the combative relationship between Man and Nature I’ve uncovered during my time since Chicago.

Vegetable oil attracts bears. I’m well aware of this fact as I lie in a cold tent at Yellowstone National Park, smelling like my unconventional fuel, reflecting on the trip so far and owning up to a myriad of failures. I revisit three broken rules, including time spent on I-90. I ask myself whether I’ve failed or the country has failed me. The question seems facetious at first, but by the time two strangers help me jumpstart my car in the morning, I’m seriously wondering if traveling by the six rules I’ve chosen is possible at all in 2011.

Stands-And-Looks-Back, whose Wasicu name is Jim, finds me in Wood, SD, and talks to me through his car window for over an hour. The subject matter feels eerily familiar and prophetic at once as he espouses on alcohol abuse, isolation, greed, and the connections among the three. I don’t ask him about the long scar running down his left arm from elbow to pinkie.

That night, I camp at an idyllic oasis in northeastern Wyoming, where I witness the destruction of family.

From its thoughtless lack of bathrooms to its unrestrained wildlife, South Dakota does everything it can to kill me—and then it actually comes close. Trapped in a brutal midwestern storm on the side of rural Highway 44, I’m confronted with my dispensability in the great ambivalent cycle of life and death. I survive, but with a newfound sense of vulnerability in my little metal Jetta.