16. Coming to America

I WENT TO STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY."

"And what is it you said you do for work?"

"I'm in advertising."

"At what company?"

"Well...you see. I'm sort of between companies."

"You were fired or laid off?"

"Not exactly."

"Well which one was it?"

"I quit so I could drive to Alaska."

Outside, a thousand pitter-patts crashed against the south-facing window. A custom official escorted a father and his son into the main lobby. "He's got bears," he announced to the room. "Two of them."

My own personal customs official--I don't know his name--he didn't share--even the state trooper who pulled me over in Anchorage gave me his name--let's call him Short, Fat, and Bald, or ShoFaBa, asks me to empty the contents of my pockets.

On the counter I place my wallet, a receipt from a motel on the AlCan Highway, three pens of varying colors, an iPhone with its rubber sleeve ripped at the receiver, and my car keys.

"Turn your pockets inside out, sir," he asks me.

I do.

"They call that a Hoover wallet," I inform him. "From the Great Depression. When no one had money. They blamed it on Hoover."

"Turn the waistband of your pants inside out for me."

He examines and finds nothing.

"I can see where this is going, sir."

"Lift up your pant legs for me."

He sees wicker socks I've worn for the last three days.

"And I just want to put it on the table, that I neither consume nor transport any illegal drugs, nor firearms."

"Your cap sir."

I hand it over.

"There is some alcohol in my trunk, but this will probably be a waste of time for both of us."

He pulls out my license from my wallet.

"The address on your wallet doesn't match the address you gave me."

"The address on my wallet is my summer house," I inform him. It is unclear whether I should tell him that I keep the remote Suffolk Country address so I can save money on my car insurance. This might be fraud. Or something. I don't know if customs is concerned with fraud. But he might have friends he can call. "Lived out there when I went to college. Never bothered to change that address."

"So do you live in Riverhead or in Queens?"

"Queens, sir."

"And you work in Queens."

"No, I don't work."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you said you were in advertising."

"I'm between companies."

"Which ones?"

"PantherBrain to Ogilvy & Mather."

"Never heard of them."

We are sitting in a customs office in International Falls, and a man who rifles through tourist's underwear bags for a living is telling me he's never heard of the most famous ad agency in existence. This does not surprise me.

"They're kind of a big deal."

"And that's where you'll be working soon?"

I am now officially lying to a U.S. Customs Official. "Yes, sir."

He nods his head, up and down, like an inverted grandfather clock, counting a second like any other second. "Is your car unlocked?"

I tap my keys sitting on the counter.

"This will only take a minute and I can get you on your way?"

"Is that like a metaphorical minute?"

"Have a seat, please."

Behind us are a line-up of office chairs manufactured at the pasty gray office chair depot in the sky. I take the one closest to the door. Sitting three chairs down for me is another young scruffy male traveling alone.

"What are you in for?" I ask him.

"Excuse me?"

"What are you in for?" Did he not get the joke or just not understand my mumbling? Could have been both.

"They just stopped me," he said.

"Where you coming from?"

"Nova Scotia."

"No shit. I didn't know you could drive off of Nova Scotia."

"It's the long way. The ferry is shorter."

"I'm coming from Alaska." In my head there is a map. There is string pulled taut from Alaska to International Falls, Minnesota, and another line pulled taut from Nova Scotia, Canada to International Falls, Minnesota. "We kind of traveled from the exact opposite sides of the continent," I said to him. "And ended up in the same place."

He takes a second to do the geometry himself. A car is leaving Nova Scotia traveling at 60 miles per hour..."Yeah."

"Where's your final destination?" I'm hoping he says Los Angeles. Then I would say New York. And we would live in a bizarro world of wayward travelers. But he disappoints. He tells me "North Dakota."

"On purpose?"

"Um, yeah."

"That's cool. That's like the one place I haven't been." That, and Los Angeles. Which would have been cooler. He disappoints me. He makes me want to settle for Oakland.

I take my throne.

I have a vague recollection of my friend, Pascal, who is almost a lawyer, arguing that the customs process is a violation of 4th Amendment principles. I do not remember drawing my own opinion on the matter. This is not serving me well.

It is four PM, I think Central Time. I lost count somewhere in Canada. I think Manitoba. I like the name Minnedosa. Minnedosa, Manitoba. That's even better than Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And that's a hard name to beat.

Outside, my customs official is walking away from my opened trunk back into the building.

"Is everything in that car yours?"

"Everything, everything?"

"Everything."

"Not the quilt in the back seat. That is definitely not mine."

"Who does it belong to?"

"A friend of mine."

"Where is your friend?"

"Yonkers."

"And he gave it to you?"

"I am transporting it back from Alaska on his behalf."

"Is there anything special about this quilt I should know about?"

"It might smell like drool." I think this over a second. "It might also smell like I slept with it in my car in a Manitoba rest stop."

He fixes his stare on me a second too long and then returns to the trunk. The seconds on the wall clock keep ticking along, but nothing is moving. I pull my phone out of my pocket. I open it to Paper Toss and set it to Easy.

A tiny, digital crump of paper is moved, left to right, by the gentle hum of an office fan. The paper hits the left rim of the waste-basket, bounces straight up in the air and falls in.

"Sir, you can't use that here." Another customs official has taken time away from important paperwork to inform me of this.

"Use what?"

"Your phone."

"I'm not using my phone."

"What's that in your hand?"

"It's a video game system."

"It's a phone sir."

"It's a computer, that has a phone as one of its functions. A function, I am not currently using."

"In any case, it's not allowed."

"Is that the law?"

"It's our rules, sir."

It doesn't seem fair that they can make up whatever rules they want in their little customs office and I am expected to comply by this. My congressional representative is Carolyn Maloney. I make a note of this. There's also Schumer and Gillenbrand in the Senate. Maybe I'll write them.

If I ever get back to New York.

I put the phone away.

"So you must see a lot of weird stuff come through here."

If he won't let me distract myself, then I'm going to distract him.

"Excuse me?"

"You must see a lot of weird things around here."

"Sure."

"What do people try to smuggle?"

"All sorts of things."

"What's the craziest thing you ever saw?"

He puts his papers down and takes off his glasses. "It's not that we see weird things," he tells me, "It's that we meet weird people."

I don't appreciate the tone of his voice. "Guess it takes one to know one."

He rolls his eyes and goes back to his keyboard.

I turn around to watch the customs official go back through my car. The poor guy is now hanging out my driver's door, his ass against wet asphalt. There have to be better jobs in the world.

Like writing advertisements for big pharmaceutical companies.

Or driving to Alaska on a whim.

"Do you find that interesting?"

"Excuse me." I turn and it's my old friend the video-game fascist pestering me again.

"You seem to be pretty interested in the affairs of our office."

"I'm sort of a captive audience."

"Be that as it may, is there something you want to tell me?"

"What would I want to tell you?"

"Anything that would make this afternoon go more smoothly."

"Oh, I see."

He gives me one of those looks you see on the cop shows on TV when the cop wants to pretend that he's your friend.

"There is this one thing."

The face gets friendlier. We are now golf buddies. Our wives exchange pot roast recipes.

"Well..." I look back at the car. The customs official is going through my glove compartment. He is finding Radiohead CDs and a speeding ticket from Alaska. "How long does it take to get to Duluth from here?"

"Duluth?"

"Yeah, that's a city around here right."

"About three hours."

"Three real hours or three Google hours, because Google directions say they take longer than they actually do."

"Three hours sir."

"Is that driving like a girl, three hours, or driving like--"

"That's driving with a healthy respect for the safety and well being of oneself and others."

So, like two, two and a half hours. It's been a long road trip. I can't respect speed limits anymore. It's just me and the road out there. Me and God.

And points don't transfer over between states. I think. My friend, The Great Sha Rhu Khan, told me that. He's almost a doctor. I didn't double check myself.

And then I sit down again. And I am out of clever things to say and cool games to play. At the pace I am traveling, zero inches per hour, I will never make it to Duluth or Mackinac Island or Ann Arbor or DC or home, and I will die, right here, in my chair, in Minnesota.

Minnesota. At least that's a cool name. Not as good as Minnidosa. Not as good as Manitoba. But much better than Queens.

"We'll have you on your way shortly," the customs official promises. And two hours later, after they've checked through my laundry bag, camera bag, laptop bag, through my suitcase full of clothes, through my camping gear and sleeping bag, through my glove department and fuse box, under my floor guards and in my engine, with that mirror that goes under the bumper, takes out my spare and checks the rims, I am finally, mercifully, free to go.

My official hands me back my keys.

"Sorry about the mess," I tell him.

"That's alright. Have a nice day sir."

Yeah, what's left of it. "Thanks," I tell him.

Out at my car, the customs official has strangely moved the trash from my front seat and set it down on the floor. My map is stacked nicely. So are my tissues. In the back seat, my quilt is folded and my boxes of mac & cheese lined up in a row. He zipped up my suitcase.

Of all things, this custom official spent more time cleaning up after me than I spent cleaning up after myself.

Exactly two more hours.

15. Seven Things I Always Wanted To Know About Alaska

BEFORE EMBARKING ON THIS TRIP TO ALASKA, I cracked open my journal and wrote down seven questions, about Alaska, that I wanted to answer in Alaska.

As I sit in a clean motel right outside downtown Anchorage, it's about time to get to the bottom of these epic mysteries.

1. What does "Alaska" mean and in what language does it mean it?
"The great land" in the Aleut language.

Learned this as the border on the AlCan highway. You can tell it was the border because they blazed out a path through the forest to mark the border. God forbid we planted a few trees and Americans and Canadians confused who owned them.

2. When and how did Alaska become a state?
Turns out that Alaska become the 49th state exactly 50 years ago.

I know this because they have hung banners all over this state to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Alaska becoming a state.

Alaskans had been petitioning for statehood for years, at least from 1916, but hadn't gained traction. Many were resentful of the US Congress, who ruled over their fate but wouldn't grant Alaskans their own representatives.

That changed when in 1958, Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a petition to accept Alaska as the 49th state of the union, supposedly in honor for their role in World War II.

3. What were the Japanese doing in the Aleuts during World War II?
They were waging war with America, that's what they were doing. Besides Pearl Harbor, the Aleutian Islands were the only American land to see combat during World War II.

The Japanese forces, led by the great Admiral Yamamoto, were supposedly protecting Japan's northern flank from American counterattack. The invasion was of no great consequence, but due to the difficulty of the islands' terrains, it took America over a year to evict the Japanese from this perch.

4. Can you see Russia from Alaska?
You can. Head to the west coast and you can peek over the Bering Straight and catch a glimpse of Siberia. You cannot, however, see Russia from Wasilla. You cannot see Russia from Wasilla for two geological reasons: 1. there's a mountain range in the way; and, 2. the Earth is round.

This is now a linguistic argument. When Sarah Palin say she could see Russia from her backyard, did she mean her backyard in Wasilla, or the royal, collective, her backyard, which, as governor of Alaska, included, or was pertaining to the Western coast?

The world will never know.

5. Does Alaska have Native American reservations?
Actually, no. Alaska is the only state in the union without Native American reservations--and the Native Americans are much better off for it.

As it turns out, the Native Americans had sued Congress for land rights. Congress ignored them for years--until oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay and they needed to build a pipeline through indigenous territory.

The indigenous people of Alaska settled for land rights in exchange for giving America a 10-mile swath of land in which they could build said pipeline and Dalton's highway to accompany it.

The natives then formed corporations, of which each member of the community was a shareholder, and in which only members of the community and their descendants could own shares.

If I married in, I couldn't become a shareholder, but my children would be. I learned this from the tour guide after I signed up to take a United States Postal Service plane into the arctic circle.

6. Why is Juneau the capital of Alaska when you can't even drive there?
The city limit of Juneau are larger than either Rhode Island or Delaware, and almost as big as both states combined. That should just give you an idea of just how big Alaska is.

It's the largest state in the union, and they love showing maps up here of Alaska's political boundaries superimposed on a map of the "lower 48" which makes the 49th state look like that birthmark on Gorbachev's head.

Alaska makes Texas look small.

Juneau was actually the first city established after Seward's purchase. There were gold in them there hills, and Joe Juneau, of which the town is named after, went out to find it.

The Alaskans have tried to move the capital a more convenient location, but a couple of public referendums didn't pass--supposedly because Alaskans were concerned about Anchorage assuming too much importance in the state.

Over half the population of Alaska lives in the greater Anchorage municipality. Most of the interior is either pristine, or populated by tiny villages. There are no roads to connect the villages in the interior.

Juneau is the only state capital to border Canada or Mexico. Obviously, it borders Canada.

I cheated to find out this answer by looking it up in Google. Won't get to Juneau for another five days.

7. Is there archaeology in Alaska?
Not only is there archaeology in Alaska, there's in archaeology in Antarctica! They dig in the effing snow.

I learned this at the Museum of the North, at the University of Alaska, in Fairbanks. There they have the official state fossil, the Mammoth.

Back when I was in anthropology school, the cultural anthropologists, of whom I broke bread with, used to make fun of the archaeologists for digging in dirt for three long summer months a year.

If we only knew some of them had fun by digging in ice for three long summer months a year!

Let's not get started on what we said about the primatologists, who had to trek through the jungle for three long summer months, just to catch falling monkey poop in buckets.

It was all in good fun.

14. On The Alaska-Canada Highway

MORNING GREETS US WITH FRESH BUGS SPLATTERED against our windshield. A rock, kicked out from under a hulking semi leaves a crack in the passenger's vantage.

Loose gravel sent us into fishtails on curved mountain roads without guardrails. Bison chomping on grass. A caribou's carcass against the side of the road. Blood pooled in the right lane. The early effects of rigor mortis.

We hurled forward. Because we had the day to chase. Because we had another town to make. Because we could not stop for death.


A LOG TRUCK, TWO CARGOES DEEP, ASSUMES THE RIGHT LANE, lollygagging at forty kilometers on a downward slope where we could be doing one-hundred or better. The ravines run deep. A car, we find, turned upside down, shards of glass strewn against an untamed lawn.

The sun bursts into our cabin. Dust seeps through the air vents.

No room to pass him on the winding roads through the Canadian Rockies. Finally, with a turnout appearing on the road, and an opportunity to let us pass, he kindly stopped for us.


FINALLY IN WATSON LAKE, WHERE WE WILL make camp for the night. Pitching the tent is our new virtuosity, completed with perfect coordination and tame silence. Stakes go in the ground, one by one, and then they are six.

Head out again for food. On the corner sits a young man. Beard either tamed or impotent. A pipe in his mouth. A dog by his side. He wears a green, wool sweater. The kind you where at holiday Christmas parties.

He holds his thumb in the air. No room in back for the hitchhiker, his pipe, or his dog. We rolled on dinner. The carriage held but ourselves.


WE ARE HERE RACING AGAINST TIME. Against the days getting shorter and colder. Against the winter. Against the limits of our bodies and our wills. Against the Yukon.

Against Alaska. It is almost freezing in Fairbanks. It will be freezing in Denali. Already the ferries are returning from Anchorage. Where is Juneau, but lost within the glaciers.

We are out here, with nothing but ourselves. A few sandwiches. A map. And a compass. And the road. And immortality.

13. The Thing About Canada...

...is even when you make it all the way up to Edmonton, which is about as far North as anyone you know ever really goes, you're still about 20349850398503928058934 miles away from Alaska.

And this is not just a regular 5024809238402840218041 mile ride. It's 201402175093128503289 mile ride through the Rockies on roads that are getting colder by the day.

That are one-lane highways for ten or twelve hour stretches, and you hope you can make camp in time to break out your tent and sleeping bag and thermarest and comforter so you don't have to tuck your hands into your shorts just to stave off frost-bite.

I am at the stage right now where I would sell organs for a helicopter.

Spend many nights now having random flashbacks, some of them dreams, some of them nightmares, some of them just memories.

I'm in Spain again, and it's raining in Burgos.

I'm in Stony Brook again, setting up my slides for my first anthropology lecture. I am holding a baseball in my hand. I am saying to 200 undergraduates that there is only one definition for an atom.

My life is full of promise.

I'm in elementary school, memorizing the order of the presidents on a poster where we are lined up everyday. I am tall and I line up in the back. There are four girls who are taller than me. Girls mature faster.

I am on my way to Hunter and stop on the 96th Street sidewalk, to write in chalk, "sometimes, when I'm alone at night, I believe I can fly."

I am parodying the Harlem poet, de Silva, or de Vasco, I forget his name. Some people think I'm being original. I am not. Some people think profound. There is nothinig profound about parody.

I am in elementary school, pulling a folded sheet of paper out of my inside jacket pocket to deliver the valedictorian speech at my graduation. I do not remember what I said.

I do remember the fifth grade. Being Willy Wonka in our play. I remember making a joke about everlasting gobstobbers.

I am in Mt. Glacier national park. I am 27 years-old. It is terribly cold outside. I am alone, and it is getting dark, and I am scared. So I do not sit in my tent. I sit in my car and read the fading pages of "Don't Think of an Elephant!"

I am being punched in the face on the way to swimming class.

I am falling to the ground. Lying to the ground, there are people who step over me to reach the subway. Among those people are my classmates.

They must not be late for swimming.

I am at Stony Brook again and I am raising my hand in class. "My sister," I say aloud, "I'd save my sister and get a new wife." The class laughs.

I am still lying in the ground. The homeless man who I sometimes give spare change to does not help me. My classmates step over me. I am helped to my feet by a nurse.

"Where are you going?" she asks me.

I am crying on the street. "I was on my way to swimming class."

It is raining on my car in Mt. Glacier. It is dark and I hear the distant laughter of a campsite. There are no stars in the sky.

"Anthropologists always say you need your own definition of culture in order to become an anthropologist," I say to the class. They are all listening to me. I have their attention. "That is stupid," I say.

I am in EMT class and the professor puts up a picture of a horse. Then he puts up a picture of a bigger horse and says, "Broncho-dilator." Nobody laughts.

I remember Javier Bardem's cock and Penelope Cruz's tits from "Jamon, Jamon." It is Spain. It is raining in Spain. It's always raining.

The nurse is walking me back to school. She brings me to the school's nurse and she sees me, a welt where my eye used to be. She's seen it before, but it never gets old. She cries with me.

We hold hands and she lets me let it out.

I cannot remember Chester A. Arthur. Or Franklin Pierce. What did they ever do anyway? I know Grover Cleveland was a bachelor when elected. The only one of his kind.

I am driving from Mt. Glacier to Calgary and I don't want to go anymore. I pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car.

When you put on the ambulance siren it goes "wail, wail, wail."

I remember the man whose life I helped save. I do not know his name. I will never know his name. He was not conscious when this happened. He will never know who I am.

I lie down on the grass.

It is cold in Mt. Glacier.

It is cold in Canada.

It will be colder in Alaska.

12. A Bison Pancake

IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE I would face mortal danger on this trip. My first, and hopefully, last, near-death experience of this trip came at the horns of the great American bison, a 2,000-lb. beast that is proudly the largest land animal on the continent.

The bison, many claim, is normally a fairly docile creature. But most animals are. Spend a week watching a pride of lions and they will spend ninety-percent of their time yawning at flies.

And the other ten percent of their time killing things.

For a bison, it quietly munches on grass for most of the day, when it is not, itself, lying down, yawning at flies.

But for every ten group of eager wildlife photographers, there will be the odd charge of the bison, and one times out of that ten, there will be a gorging.

Happens every year at the park. Human cars kill about a hundred animals on the road, and bison horns kill a human or two in return.

I knew the danger, and took it as a calculated risk, as I spent much of the afternoon, driving around Yellowstone National Park photographing these bison. I found them on the road in once instance, and tracked my car slowly along its flank to get a few good shots in.

Pulling into a picnic area a few miles down that road I found an entire herd of them quietly nursing their young and looking around, nonplussed by the brilliant colors a fading sun shot across the valley.

I trekked my Hyundai into their midst, an idea that was not exactly motivated by self-preservation to get a couple of good shots of a mother and her calf. The bison looked at my silver carriage without much amusement.

I left their midst without harassment and continued onto the Hayden Valley turnouts.

EVERYTHING THE LIGHT TOUCHES belongs to the bison. You can sit at the turnout and try to count their numbers. I estimated two or three hundred, though I had a hard time keeping count of the dots of beasts across the Yellowstone River (of which Yellowstone Park gets its name.)

Two nurses asked me to take their picture with the bison and I obliged nicely enough. A solitary male lurked in the background, not more than twenty yards from us—less than the distance the park rangers advised us to keep.

But he was just standing there, and though we heard the stories, we figured we were close enough to our cars to make a break for it if events turned hostile.

I snapped their pictures, hauled out my journal and celebrated the freedom of animal and Greek as the valley hemorrhaged an awesome beauty—and the paradox that I could only witness this scene with roads humans had built and fences humans had maintained.

You think too much. Just sit back and enjoy.

After half an hour at the ridge, I turned back on the road to make a campsite by nightfall.

On that road, a caravan had stopped to photograph a group of bison on the North side of the road. Let me explain: take an ice cream cone and flip it upside down. Now, imagine a road that circled the cone, halfway up.

To the left of the road would be the thinner part of the cone, and to the right of the road the flatter part of the cone.

Now, imagine a Hyundai on that road. And a small group of bison on the taller part to the left, separated from the larger group of bison on the fatter part to the right.

These are the ingredients to mortal injury.

I LOWERED MY WINDOW AND STUCK out my camera to get a good shot of the three male bison as, out of nowhere, their docility morphed into territoriality.

The bison, all three of them, started clawing at the ground, like a bull does before it charges.

An RV stood right in front of me. I couldn’t roll forward. But there were no cars behind me.

The bison to my left started grunting.

A car pulled in to block my view. That car, with their passenger taking pictures, stood before me and the bison.

So, it was in order: Bison, Car, Me, Cliff. A cliff that fell down a good ten yards, before, surely, my car would roll over and explode.

The bison’s tension accelerated. In a matter of seconds the two charged at the one, and the one, realizing his imminent defeat, decided against the fight.

The car in front of me hurtled forward and, when, at the last second, the lone bison turned, and with the momentum of a 2,000-lb animal on a slope, barreled towards me.

The bison’s eyes met mine.

A shot of wild panic ran through my balls and yanked the back of my neck.

The bison charged on a collision course into my driver’s side window.

I was sitting in the driver’s seat!

The window was down!

Without another thought, I took my foot off the break and hit the gas.

The bison surged forward.

The car surged forward.

The rear driver’s window was in his sights.

He pulled his head to the right, and the gas lid was in his sights, and stumbled to his right, the rear bumper was in his sights, and tumbled down the southern slope, kicking up dirt in a triangular plume.

Without me knowing, the RV ahead of me had pulled on, giving me just enough space to pass it to the right, and pull into a turnout, and shrieked on the brakes.

Looked into the passenger seat. Just a mess of maps and souvenirs. Nobody saw this with me. Nobody to share it with.

I threw the car in park, and fell out of the driver’s seat, and gripped the floor. My heart was up in my chest. I looked down at the cliff.

If the bison hadn’t succeeded in gorging me, surely the impact would have knocked my car off the cliff. He barely missed me with me shooting forward.

What if I had put the car in park? What if the RV hadn’t pulled up? What if I hesitated for a second?

I looked up. A crowd of onlookers, photographing the bison had just seen what happened.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

A salt-and-pepper grandpa screamed out, “Hell yeah.”

“That bison had it out for me. It was either going to impale me, or knock my car into the ravine.”

“You were going to be a bison pancake!” the old man hollered.

“A bison patty, served rare,” I quipped back.

He laughed with the experience that suggested, in his youth, he had driven a landing boat at D-Day, or fought back the Chinese army on the Korean peninsula: “I thought you were a goner!”

I LOST CONTROL OF MY BREATHING FOR A MOMENT and sat slumped on the pavement, still in my bathing suit from my afternoon’s dip in Jenny Lake.

I lied down on the pavement and looked up into the air. The setting sun was pushing the sky from blue to purple to red.

“What a way to go,” I said to the old man.

“Where you from son?” he asked.

“Queens,” I told him.

“That’s a long way to come to get knocked off a cliff by a bison.”

”Wasn’t exactly in my itinerary,” I confessed.

He helped me off the ground.

“You going to be alright, son? You need some water or something.”

I looked back and the lone bison had made its way back up to his feet and back to the edge of the road. He grunted at his two nemeses playing king of the hill.

“I'm good,” I said to him. “I’ll be fine.”

He patted me on the back and made my way back into the driver’s seat. I grabbed my balls to make sure they were still there. One, two. Had them. My dick, too. All ten fingers.

Ten toes. Two ears. Everything seemed to be in order.

The window was still lowered. And as I pulled out, the old man offered one last bit of advice. “Drive safe, young man!”

“Thanks,” I waved, and pulled out the turnout passed another herd of bison and drove off, carefully and slowly and deliberately before they proved, again, that there is no such thing, as a harmless 2,000-lb animal.