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Stories from Bernie's current trip - a mule voyage from Canada to Mexico

November 19, 2008

While sailing alone around the world from 1998 to 2003, I tossed countless message-laden bottles off my steel cutter Sea Bird.


Bottle launch 1998
200 miles off Beaufort, North Carolina

I’m still waiting for the first message to be returned by Neptune or someone combing his beaches.

So, traveling across the Great Plains by mule wagon researching mid-America marine fossils, I’m giving messages another go. No, I’m not stuffing business cards into my empty wine bottles and tossing them into the buffalo grass, hoping some rancher finds them and returns them before his prize Angus bull crushes them under foot.

Nope,I’m launching notes tied to something else.

Tumbleweeds.

Yep, call it the shorter days of November getting to me. Call it the loneliness brought on by watching the last Sandhills cranes whirling south on those northern busters. Call it loneliness by any name but that’s what it boils down to.

I’m giving in to the call of the man alone at sea.

So today mule Polly and I chased down a tumbleweed.


To catch a tumbleweed
Keyes, Oklahoma

The prairie I’m prairie schooning into, the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, are covered in millions of tumble weeds that bounce north in mass migrations one day, only to pass me headed south with the next front.

Then they pile up. They pile up so high on fences they rip the barbed wire off. They pile up so high in the road ditches they have to be bull dozed off. They pile up so high in ranchers’ corrals they have to be shoveld out before stock can be worked


Corral tumble jumble
Keyes, Oklahoma

That’s the problem. They’re just too many of them out here for one with a dirty note tied to it to be noticed.

This is where the fluorescent orange spray paint comes in. After I caught my prize tumbleweed, I gave it an orange belt brighter than a prairie sunrise.

Then I wrote a note on one of my business cards. Polly inspected my handiwork.


Mule spell check



Then using gaffer’s tape from my movie camera, I tied it to my tumbleweed. For good measure, I added a piece of pink marking tape. Polly had another look.

This afternoon, I led Polly onto the prairie, tumbleweed in hand, and turned our tumbler free.


The launch

Good bye tumbleweed

So tonight, as Polly and I rest peacefully on the Plain, far, far away from the wagon, a tumble weed carrying a note and a postage stamp will hurl across the range.

If you find my note, please write back. I even included a stamp.

Cheers from these Great Plains!

Posted Wednesday November 19, 2008 by Bernie

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