In 1985, when I was 23 years old, I rode my battered but dependable rice rocket (Suzuki GS 1000) from California to New York and back again -- this picture was taken in Grand Junction, Colorado, at a small campsite just off the Interstate. You can see my tiny orange pup tent in the lower left corner of the photo.
Later in this day (the day the photo was taken) I would pull into Denver to meet my lifetime artist friend, Eric Pichot and his then fiancee Teri -- I'd stay about a week in Denver, and then my next stop was in Kansas, where at a little cafe I pawed through the paperbacks and just happened upon The Color of Light by William Goldman, which would change my life in many ways.
Picture taken by me with that little mechanical timer doodad, please excuse the big hair, but I had just risen and it was just after first light and I hadn't even had coffee yet, let alone figured out what a brush is for (what am I talking about, I still have big hair, I just can't seem to do anything with it)! In this photo my weight is about 160 pounds (at the start of the trip it was 165) and by the time I concluded my writer's journey I weighed about 145 pounds (at 6'2" I could have gotten a job at Halloween playing the part of a skeleton).
