Jonathan Neufeld Outdoor adventure photography and mountain life

On a long and lonesome highway, east of omaha.
You can listen to the engine moaning out it’s one lone song
You can think about woman, or the girl you knew the night before,
But your thoughts will soon be wandering, the way they always do.
When your riding sixteen hours and there’s nothing much to do
And you don’t feel much like riding, you just wish the trip was through.

Say, here I am, on the road again.
there I am, up on the stage.
Here I go, playing star again.
There I go, turn the page.

Well you walk into a restaurant, strung out from the road,
You can feel the eyes upon you as your shaking off the cold
You pretend it doesn’t bother you, but you just want to explode.
Most times you can’t hear em talk, other times you can.
Oh the same old cliche, as that woman on her a man
You always see my number, you don’t dare make a stand.

Here I am, on the road again. there I am, up on the stage.
Here I go, playing star again.
There I go, turn the page.

Out there in the spotlight your a million miles away,
Every ounce of energy, you try and give away,
As the sweat pours out your body like the music that you play.
Later in the evening as you lie awake in bed,
With the echo from the amplifiers ringing in your head,
You smoke the days last cigarette, remembering what she said.

Now here I am, on the road again.
there I am, up on the stage.
Here I go, playing star again.
There I go, turn the page.
Here I am, on the road again.
there I am, up on the stage.

Ah here I go, playing star again.
There I go, there I go.

Wednesday September 29, 2004 – Odessa Texas
Alright, time for a long winded update full of… words. Here are some words to expect: “shoe”, “megaphone”, “grunties.”

The other day I went off to see the local meteor crater. Seems anytime some space junk come crashing to earth and creates a huge hole they want to put up a shrine to it. Anyway, I was bored the other day and went out to see this crater, honestly it was a little disappointing. I guess 50,000 years of erosion had to place dirt somewhere but I was expecting a smoking crater of destruction with still smouldering mystery space metals sitting in the middle and a few dead dinosaurs lying around the edges. Is that too much to ask?

After the excursion to the crater I figured I’d hit the local tourist information center and see if there were any other interesting things in town. It was located in the Bank of America building along with the Chamber of Commerce. So I pulled in and started wandering around a little. The main entrance had a sign proclaiming the Chamber of Commerce on the second floor, and not being able to find the stairs I hit the button for the elevator. As an aside just let me say that I generally detest it when people take the elevator one floor, especially when they are going DOWN! But when the stairs are hidden it is sometimes inevitable. Anyway, while I was waiting for the elevator to return to the ground so I could take up the measly one floor I couldn’t help seeing another sign painted on top of the wall adjacent to the elevator bank. It was a yellow radiation symbol with the words F llo t Shelt r written in yellow below it and a small black arrow pointing down a small hallway. My first thought was “Cool! Fallout Shelter!” followed by “I wonder if I can get to it?” So I abandoned my now waiting elevator and ventured down the hallway to see three doors, one was a janitor closet, the other was locked and the third was the Ladies room. I somehow can’t believe that the fall out shelter would be converted into the ladies room or the janitor closet, and who would keep such an essential emergency resource locked!? So I ventured to the basement in search of the shelter, I mean who doesn’t love a fall out shelter right? All I found there was the bank vault and very aseptic concrete hallway. It then occurred to me that perhaps I ought not skulk around the basement of the biggest bank building in town lest that glint of youthful optimism in my eye be mistaken for pure evil. What!? It’s happened before!

Alright, item number three on my list: pants. Don’t you hate pants!

I can’t wait to get out of this stinking town. I know I have mentioned the water here and how it is rather vile but I can’t stand it anymore! I personally hate buying water, it seems ridiculous that I have to go to the store and pay them money to take home something that flows from my tap anyway. I can almost understand it in a town like this, where the water is nasty, but in a good town where the water is clean and clear and tasty and pure? Do we still have to pay money to buy water at the store? What is wrong with normal tap water? I have a rather strong suspicion that the this filtered-at-the-source-pure-glacier-spring-mountain-stream-water is basically just tap water anyway! What is the shelf life of water? Can we reasonably expect that fresh glacier water bottled in Canada with no chemicals or additives would still taste fresh and clean when it gets down to Texas? Somehow I think not. And in that vein, since I have to buy water anyway, or get rusty teeth, I have been getting the Canadian Glacier Water at 79¢ per 1.5L; and since I have acres of time on my hands I’ve been reading the labels on the bottle. On the front it proclaims “Natural Canadian Spring Water. Bottled at the source” then around the side it informs the careful consumer that “Source: Osprey Twp, Ontario Canada”. Ok, cool; it would seem to be Canadian. But if you look at the bottom, under the “Nutrition Facts” (yes, they all read 0), it says “Bottled with pride and care for H-E-B in San Antonio, TX.” So on one hand, it is bottled “at the source”, but on the other hand it is also bottled in San Antonio. Do they bottle it twice? Do they just run a hose down from Ontario to Texas and call it a bottle then bottle it when it gets here? Who knows, but I can’t wait to get to a town where I can drink the water again.

I was going to blather on about these Money Mart places that “give you cash until payday” that seem to be thick as hair on a dog around here but it is kind of depressing that enough people need this service to keep all these places in business so I’ll make like an ostrich about it and be glad that I have a job and make enough money to survive. Wow, one sentance… cool (c:

Well its official, I can actually look forward to coming home now since I have my plane ticket in hand. Just a quick stopover in Dallas and then direct to Calgary (c: So 9:32pm on Oct 5 I should be home!!

———————————————
Call you up in the middle of the night
Like a firefly without a light
You were there like a slow torch burning
I was a key that could use a little turning

So tired that I couldn’t even sleep
So many secrets I couldn’t keep
Promised myself I wouldn’t weep
One more promise I couldn’t keep

It seems no one can help me now
I’m in too deep
There’s no way out
This time I have really led myself astray

CHORUS
Runaway train never going back
Wrong way on a one way track
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I’m neither here no there

Can you help me remember how to smile
Make it somehow all seem worthwhile
How on earth did I get so jaded
Life’s mystery seems so faded

I can go where no one else can go
I know what no one else knows
Here I am just drownin’ in the rain
With a ticket for a runaway train

Everything is cut and dry
Day and night, earth and sky
Somehow I just don’t believe it

CHORUS

Bought a ticket for a runaway train
Like a madman laughin’ at the rain
Little out of touch, little insane
Just easier than dealing with the pain

Runaway train never comin’ back
Runaway train tearin’ up the track
Runaway train burnin’ in my veins
Runaway but it always seems the same
———————————————

On the bright side I did find out that the lady at the FedEx office has a 19yr old daughter that has made her a grandmother twice over already. Lovely.

Also, the people here seem to favour using cinderblocks for fences and constructing 7ft walls, occasionally with chainlink fence at the top of that. They must have scary neighbours.

Which wouldn’t surprise me since two hookers knocked on my door last night at 1am! They wanted to use my phone and my bathroom, I told them no and nearly chewed them out for knocking on someones door at 1AM!! Then I stayed up reading until 5am anyway, my schedule keeps getting more and more out of wack.

I am trying hard to not think too much about going home yet but it is getting harder and harder. I think tomorrow I should have a plane ticket and then I can allow some daydreaming and thoughts of home.

Saturday September 25, 2004 – Midland Texas
Well today will be a slow day, I guarantee that right now. The skies have let forth and are raining down upon us, quite torrentially I might add. I laid in bed for a while this morning after waking up and just listened to it, it was really quite peaceful even though the thunder was shaking the whole room. It reminded me of when we still had the cabin out at Gull Lake and sitting on the deck under the huge A-frame roof watching storms and being perfectly dry while rain pummelled the ground.

On a completely different note, why is it that you never see women eating alone in restaurants? I was in IHOP the other day and there were probably five or six tables of guys eating alone, including myself. I had a quick and none-to-surreptitious look around the place and saw that it was only men eating alone, the women were either in pairs or with families. So does anyone have any ideas about this? Doe guys more regularly go away from home and then require sustenance? Are women afraid of eating alone in restaurants, even one as innocuous as IHOP? Perhaps females don’t require breakfast, though I have seen these same phenomena at other times of the day as well. Hmmm very odd indeed.

We are most likely moving towns on Monday, we’ll probably head to San Angelo and try our luck there. We have finished all the work right overhead of Midland so it is time to move on. That’s fine with me, we have been here about three weeks so somewhere new would be cool, though I am getting rather settled in at the motel here, and we are getting a killer rate too. We have however, exhausted the restaurant supply again and are forced to scrounge for nuts and berries (c:

Thursday September 23, 2004 – Midland Texas
Ok its official, my sleep schedule is all messed up. The other night I was up till 4am (watching a bad movie on HBO) and then didn’t wake up until 11:30 or so. Last night I actually got to bed at 11ish but still didn’t wake up until almost noon. And as an added bonus I had the longest and weirdest dream I have had do date. It included (in no particular order) a concert in burned out Toronto, ditching a friends Landcruiser there and hoping onto a fright train to get home, watching a new bride in her dress run along behind the train and not able to make it on, a party at a house with an evil spirit and lots of people I didn’t know. Very strange indeed.

Texas has been mega cloudy for the last week or so and as a result we haven’t been doing much. There was talk of moving towns again soon and that would be kind of neat but again, nothing has materialized. On the bright side I now have an approximate date for coming home, no I won’t share it because then people try and hold me to it, which we all know can’t be guaranteed. Just suffice to say that I have a date and am fairly confident that it will come through.

Had lunch with the Old Guys yesterday, we went to a buffet at a nearby hotel. The food was really good, it was all this Italian stuff with lots of sauces and everything to go with it. The Pilot kept saying “ah go back for one more plate, have some more desert, I’m just gonna have salad, c’mon do it, have some more.” It got rather tiresome after awhile and at one point he actually admitted that he only did it so that he could feel good about not splurging as bad as us on lunch. This from the guy who calls any actual mean a “blowout” some of you probably know who I am talking about. Anyway, it got rather frustrating and I had two deserts just to make him jealous (c:

In other news I think I will spend today reading “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert A. Heinlein, I started it yesterday while waiting for the crew to get in from Palestine (Texas dummy) and it seems pretty good so far. On a random tangent here, Texas seems to have a lot of international cities, Palestine, Paris, Utopia, Castroville… very odd. I never actually went to Utopia, but somehow I doubt it was. If I ever do I’ll let you know.

PS We are right by some train tracks so that could account for the train part of the dream…

PPS from a dream site “The train could also be symbolic of your need to move on and to do things in an orderly and sequential manner.”

There were two thoughts I was going to leave you with in the last post and then forgot, so here ya go.

1. From the Shawshank Redemption, Red says to Andy after he gets to prison “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’ ”

2. From Jerry Seinfeld about doctors ” ‘I speak to no one wearing pants!’ A little pyscological leverage for him, any difference of opinoin pants always beats no-pants”

Tuesday September 14, 2004 – Midland Texas
I have been on a really strange sleep schedule lately, I seem to work until around 2 or 3am and then grab some sleep until roughly 7am when I get up and take the guys to the airport. Usually at this point I come back to the hotel and crash for a few more hours, until 11am or so. It is during this time that I have been having the strangest dreams, which even in itself is odd for me since I almost never dream. Now I know you are going to say ‘But Jon, we all dream. REM is an essential part of sleep’ to which I am going to respond ‘Yes I know, but what I mean is that I almost never remember my dreams, so therefore how can I know that I in fact dreamt at all?’ Well at any rate, I have been remembering the strangest dreams these last few mornings. The most vivid one I actually wrote down in sleepy scribbles before it faded from my mind like fog on a spring morning. I was walking home along a dark dirt road in the night carrying my sandals and I can vividly remember the feeling of dirt under my feet. I saw two red tailed foxes run across the road in opposite directions and then I looked to the side and there was an emaciated grey wolf off in the distance, almost silhouetted on the horizon. I started to run at this point (still carrying my sandals) and then there was a wolf running beside me. We ran together for a while and then I encountered another wolf standing in the middle of the road facing out, and somehow I got between him and the trees in the ditch. The wolf attacked me. I managed to get away and the continued running home beside the original wolf. Very odd. This morning I had about four different odd dreams, in one I was being forced to transfer universities against my will because of something I knew that would damage the place I was at and I had to run and avoid them. Then there was one that seemed like a drug dealer shoot out in the front lawns of a few houses in what seemed to be a nice neighborhood, and in the midst of this violent shootout there was a man walking around picking up brightly coloured plastic kid’s toys. Very odd indeed, though I find I kind of enjoy it in a weird way. In the university dream I was blocking a large steel door by pressing my back into and I woke up to find that I was pressing against the bed with as much force as I could muster. I think it is that strange world between waking and sleep that I almost never inhabit that feels so alien to me. Most days at home I get up and go to work or get started on the weekend or what have you, I almost never get to lie in bed and drift in and out of semi-consciousness; I think I’ll have to do it more often.

Speaking of drifting in and out of things, I remember joking with a friend of mine in first year university that the upcoming reading week was going to be nice since we really needed the break. I suggested though that it probably wouldn’t be as restful as we suspected and that a coma was the only thing likely to provide the brain-break we needed. He countered with the fact that usually one doesn’t know that one is in a coma and we would be getting all this great rest and not knowing it. The solution we figured was to be slipping in and out of a coma, which would serve all our needs perfectly. Anyway a nice random story there for you. Tyler if you are reading this drop me a line sometime.

In other random news I am curious how many people actually come here and read this, so if you do and have never sent me an email or anything drop me a line and let me know. Cheers.

Thursday September 9, 2004 – Midland Texas
It’s been a while since my last post so I’ll try and get you up to speed.

First off, I talked to Tim in New Zealand tonight. It was nice to finally connect with him after roughly a week of playing phone and email tag. We chatted about the company and about the job and about moving to NZ, for some reason he seemed really nervous talking to me. The job itself would be scanning film, doing triangulation and then extracting DTM information. They have 5 planes but only one pilot and one camera operator, they do jobs with between 12 and 20 frames and maybe get one or two jobs that have 600 frames. Right now where I am a small job starts at 600 frames and considering we are doing all of Texas and Idaho we do some pretty big jobs. He also said that he had a wide response to the ad so I don’t know that I would even get the job, and even if I did I am not sure I would take it. I think it would be a step in the wrong direction for me, going to NZ would be a lot of fun but to go for a job that is about 15 years behind where I am now seems rather absurd. We shall see, he asked for some references so I’ll round those up and see what happens.

Ok next, rockets (c: I was cruising around town the other day and came across this place called the Hobby Lobby, no word of a lie. Since I had time to kill I figured I’d hop in and see what sort of hobby goodness they had to offer. Mostly it was filled with artsy fartsy girl crap but tucked away in the back was the section with Rocket Engines! Now, I used to launch a lot of rockets in my youth (he says like someone who is 90 and lecturing kids under a lemon tree… “I had an onion tied to my belt, as was the style at the time.”) So when I saw the engines hanging there on wall I knew I had to something with them! I raced back to the hotel and called Edwin the aircraft engineer who is roughly my age exclaimed “Heymanhaveyoueverlaunchedmodelrockets?Doyouwanttogodosomerightnowitwouldbewickedamountsoffunandwehavetodosomethingright?” There was a short silence on the phone and he replied “Yes, yes I do.” So we hoped in our styling blue Caravan and cruised down to Ye Olde Hobby Lobby to spend some hard earned money and blow stuff up like fourteen year olds. We browsed the section and each got a rocket, some engines and some other stuff to make them go BOOM! After an hour of assembly we once again hoped into our stylin blue Caravan and went in search of a good field to launch, the nearest of which happened to be at the University. So since it was uhm, Monday I think and there was no one around it was perfect. We set up the launch pad and prepared the first rocket. With a whoosh it screamed skyward careening into the sky. With a trail of smoke it puffed out the parachute in a colourful display of engineering and physics. Sadly the parachute was not as functional as was grand, the lines twisted and the rocket plummeted back to earth. We canvassed the area searching high and low for it but alas it had burned up on reentry. Fortunately we still had the other rocket. We prepped that one and launched it with a whoosh! Like it’s brother before it the rocket screamed skyward and puffed out the dual parachutes. This one glided gracefully back to earth, though I should mention that there was about a 20mph wind and it ended up about a half mile away. Now normally this wouldn’t be a problem but when we were field-searching we were too excited by the field to notice the sign reading “Caution: Mutant Thorn Field”. The field was littered with mutant death thorns that were an inch long and so sharp they punctured right through my sandals. I tell you I have never had such sore feet before in my life! It was all worth it though cause we had an awesome time shooting cardboard projectiles into the sky. So much fun in fact that we went back another day for more rocket goodness, since my rocket had achieved orbit and subsequently burned up on re-entry I had to buy a new one, and since doing things big is always better I got the biggest rocket they had. IT was 21” tall and uses E engines. For anyone who doesn’t know, those are freakin huge and guaranteed to launch the rocket to 1400 feet! Edwin also got another rocket, a small torpedo of a thing that was super slick! So we went back to the field on a day less windy and tried again. This time the rocket soared so high we actually lost track of it. The chute puffed out and it drifted towards the sun and away closer to the road. WE both lost track of it even though we searched the sky for fifteen minutes. It was amazing though! I have never seen a rocket go so high before! I can’t wait to get home and build some huge-ass multi engine one and see if I can get it over 2000 feet (c: Edwin’s new rocket was launched next and with about as much success. The fins were balsa wood and simply aligned by eye, so when it shot off it zoomed back behind us into where the new dorms were being built. This one didn’t have a ‘chute, just a streamer and when it came down it going FAST! We grabbed our stuff and got the hell outta there! It was an awesome day.

Alright next, work. Yeah you knew I was getting around to that at some point didn’t you? Well I know that it’s not exciting so I’ll just say that we have been flying our asses off lately! They got 650Gb in the last three days and I haven’t had any sleep in the last few days.

Lastly, I was going to talk about this town and how it is rather run down and has undrinkable water; but that is rather depressing so I think I’ll avoid it and think about hmm puppies instead.

Sunday September 5, 2004 – Odessa Texas
So on Friday morning we were unceremoniously kicked out of our “beautiful” lodgings in Uvalde. The whole town was booked for the whole weekend and we had to find somewhere else to call home. We decided on Odessa/Midland kind of a twin city thing with an airport smack in the middle. The Pilot and Navigator flew up in the airplane and myself and the mechanic drove up in the rental car. We had a look at the map and with some creative extrapolation determined that the travel time would be roughly 3hrs, how wrong we were, by a factor of 2. We loaded up the van with our suitcases and gigantic computer and set off for Midland. The plan was to drive northwest through Del Rio to Dryden and then turn and go due north to Midland. We drove the hour to Del Rio through the dry dusty desert and somehow missed our turn to stay on the right highway. This was communicated to us by a few subtle signals and a few not so subtle signals. The first was a sign saying “Mexican Consulate =>“, the second was a sign saying “US Border Office =>” the last subtle sign was rather large and proclaimed “It is illegal under Mexican Law to carry firearms across the border.” Needless to say we were rather intrigued by these signs and confused as to why they would on the road to Dryden, which is well within the US. Finally we received the big hint, the one that put everything together, the armed guards, the flashing lights, the wooden arms, you probably guessed it, the U.S.-Mexican Border. We had missed our turn and nearly drove across the border to Mexico, only some quick thinking and a beautifully executed U-turn took us back on to US soil.

We found the right turn and were back on the road. The thing about South Texas, in my vast experience, is that is filled with desert, scrub brush and fleeing Mexicans. I figure the Border Patrol is the single biggest employer in this part of the state. While we were driving every fifth vehicle we saw was a Border Patrol vehicle, it was very interesting since that sort of thing is rarely seen (by me at least) around the Canada-U.S. border.

The other thing I notice on the way from Uvalde to Midland (or Nowhere to Nowhere) was that all the land along the road was fenced off, and if you had a look at the map there would be roads everywhere across the whole state. I remember talking to the guy at the shooting range in Corpus Christie and he told me that 97% of Texas was fenced, I also remember reading at the Alamo that most of the open range was owned before 1900. I guess I am really used to the large national parks and forest reserve areas that we have in Alberta and I find it kind of sad that people here don’t have that option. It must make camping or 4x4ing or cross-country skiing (ok, bad example) or any sort of outdoor activities a lot trickier. Personally I am glad to live where I do.

The last thing I am going to mention is a few movies. Yesterday I watched Pleasantville with Toby McGuire and Reese Witherspoon. It was a charming little movie about two teens from the 90’s that get sucked into a 50’s sitcom. It is a wonderful movie, and not nearly as predictable as one would assume; though it did have a few good cinematic references to “Shawshank Redemption” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” that I caught with the help of the good folks at imdb.com. Today I was surfing through he 80gabillion channels we get here and stumbled upon Masterminds with Patrick Stewart. Now that was a bad movie, think Home Alone crossed with Die Hard with a kid as the hero. Really quite bad but when there is nothing on one is willing to overlook all sorts of plot holes (c: Speaking of plot holes I watched “Paycheck” on DVD the other day while I was working on some data. It was also fairly good, a nice futuristic movie with some interesting twists and reasonably believable characters. I read some reviews about it afterward and most of the agreed that it wasn’t a good movie since the technology was rather unbelievable. However I find that as a fan of sci-fi I can suspend disbelief for a lot of crazy situations as long as it is done well, and I thought this was done rather well.

Still no word from NZ, but that is to be expected really it is the weekend there just as it is here. I’ll let you know when I hear though. Have a good Labour Day!