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I suppose clinical psychologists could go on endlessly about why I became so attached to Zeke—increasing inability to form meaningful relationships with people, etc.—and they’re probably right. I was desperate for something good in my life, but Zeke answered my desperation in a way I doubt that just any dog could have. I could relate endless tales about how smart he was, how graceful he was, how strong, noble, beautiful, and loving he was, and how everyone who ever met him, even dyed-in-the-wool dog haters, loved him too, but it’s probably best to just say he was a true prince and leave it at that.

As for the clinical view, Zeke did mean a lot more to me than most of the people in this book. The utter trust, simplicity, and spontaneity of being with Zeke made most human relationships seem hollow, clumsy, and hardly worth it.

THE PRAIRIES. I was amazed. I had never seen anything like it. I was ripe for amazement.

More blue roofs and land that looked like no place I had ever been.

Big sky, seeing forever, no hills, no trees. Incredibly clean air. So dry. Little puddles of water every hundred miles or so, but mostly dry brownness forever. Lots of people were born, lived, and died here. New England would be big news to them. Gas station attendants were proud about never having been off the prairies, but I never talked long enough to any of the people there to really get a grip on it.

I didn’t know it was prairie at first. I thought we had stumbled into a unique little area. I loved it. Something to write home about. Five hours of driving later I was a little less amazed. Apparently this wasn’t very rare.

There was no place to camp, no streams or trees, nothing to attach the tarps to, no shade. Nowhere to hide. Our original idea of driving three hours a day and camping and fishing our way across Canada became hysterically funny.

When it’s all so much the same there’s nothing that’s any different from anywhere else. Why stop one place rather than another? So on and on and on. It was a treadmill. I had driven ten hours to get exactly where I started.

We drove straight through, just stopping for gas and food.

The tension between Virge and me over whether or not to stop in Helena, plus the surreal effect of no water or green or change and being able to see forever, going forever, bore down on me. I hated the prairies. I became obsessed with getting to the Canadian Rockies.

When we finally saw them we were still a day’s drive away, but at least then we were moving toward something we could see.

The first camp site we stopped at in the Rockies was loaded with freaks. Most of them had taken off from Amerika and all the things we had taken off from. Most of them were headed for Vancouver. Most of them were looking for land. There was a roof over some half-walls with smoky fireplaces in the center of the camp site, where we congregated and talked about what we had come from and what we thought we were headed toward. It was all very pleasant. Lots of talk about Vancouver being a cosmic magnet drawing us all there. Lots of expectations that something pretty funky was going to go down there if only because of the incredible influx. I began to worry about having so much competition looking for land.

We camped at a couple more places in the Rockies. Fished, hiked around and moved on, did more of the same through the rest of B.C., making only about 150 miles a day.

“It’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive.” We could have made it to Vancouver easily. It was a little after three. We had at least five hours of daylight left and Vancouver was only forty more miles west on a six-lane highway. But we turned off and went to Cultus Lake Provincial Park. “Easy striking distance,” we said. It was one of the loveliest places we had stayed, with incredible mosses and huge mother trees. “That’s got to be the biggest—no, that one over there. Look at the size of this one.”

The next morning we dismantled our tarp house, packed up, and headed for Vancouver. We got into town about eleven.

VANCOUVER, JULY 1970. All we had was the