April 29, 2009 Bloomington. It is almost a week since I arrived home. I have had time to reflect a little and I realize that maybe no one is still paying attention but I have a few more things to say.
It is hard adjusting to a “normal” life. I am really missing being on the go every day, reacquainting with old friends and meeting new ones. The drive towards adventure is still strong and will become a part of my life again. Someone asked me how I thought it would be to come back home. I kind of knew what to expect, I told them that having “hours” again in my business would be kind of like being in prison. It’s not quite that bad, I love being in the moment of photographing people but I become very restless when not in the moment.
Seeing my family was wonderful. I saw Noah the evening I got home and was very emotional, he has grown so much. Waiting several more days to see everyone else was hard. I look forward to being with them in the “normal” course of things but I feel a little different than when I left and I don’t want to give that up. For the first six months after Sue’s passing my home was my refuge, I was glad to live and work here and often didn’t leave for days on end. I still like the feel of home, I’ve always been a homebody, but I don’t need it to be a refuge as much as I once did. The healing that has occurred is unmistakable. Where once I could rarely talk about Sue without crying, it is now about 50/50. I can actually think into the future without feeling as much of the overwhelming sadness that a future without Sue once held. Getting away was crucial and the adventure of my experiences created some new pathways within my brain as I got used to being on my own outside of my little environment. Also crucial was honoring Sue with the things I did and allowing her thoughts and behaviors to become mine. I may need to find ways to do both of these things within the structure of everyday life. Old habits are very easily reassumed.
One additional thought is a bookend to my second entry about men and women. I now realize the tremendous amount of time, effort and energy it takes to nurture and maintain relationships within the social fabric. I think some men are better at this than most but most of us have relied on women to do the weaving. This whole trip was about the heavy lifting of relationship building and maintenance. It is hard work and stretches your mind and emotional capabilities but is enormously rewarding. I have always been about my little family and that will not change but stretching my relationship boundaries is now VERY important to me. The endless hours Sue spent on the phone sometimes seemed wasted to me in the past, but no more. She was a relationship maintaining genius and when she lost the hearing in one ear this past summer, I would kid her that she just wore it out on the phone. It was a worthy sacrifice.
Over a year ago I wrote a prayer that has proved prescient. I am not in the habit of writing prayers but wrote this one that kind of foretold of my journey since last summer:

“God grant me the courage to face what I must face in an honest and true manner. Let me be loving and generous to my family and friends, kind and fair to my customers and help me show due respect to all others I encounter on my journey”.

It is a lot to live up to and not that I always do but it is a good goal to have.

One final thing and then I think I am done, at least for now. I conducted a survey/contest, during my long ride through Montana and North Dakota, about music and I would like to share my results. As usual this occurred strictly within my nefarious mind. As I passed towns I would tune into a radio station and see how long I could listen to the kind of music it played, so I have created a hierarchy of music based on how many songs I could listen to from a particular genre. Starting from the bottom: As I listened to country music I determined the themes of the first three songs I listened to were: “I loved her but she was messing with me, playing with my emotions”, “guys want to go drinking and have a good time”, and “I’m gonna wear a short skirt, lots of makeup and go out and have a good time”. After these three, the subjects started repeating themselves. At three songs country was the genre I could listen to the least. At first there was a three way tie for second to last, the genres being: Christian, Rap and Irish music. But after thinking it over I decided that without all of the stomping (as in riverdance) I could only listen to about four Irish songs, so they slid down to second to last. I also thought it would be appropriate for Christian and Rap to be tied. Christian music has really only one theme but has such a wide array of talented singers and styles that it is possible to listen to five or six songs before the one theme seems too repetitive. Rap has many themes but only one style so it depends on how long your body can withstand heavy bass and lots of swearing. Again about five of six songs. The next up my list is the official genre of “Sue’s style of easy listening”. Now for the last ten or fifteen years I have been forced to listen to more than 5 or 6 songs at a time and came to either love or hate certain artists. If my 7 or 8 songs were Enya or Eva Cassidy I would be OK but I don’t think I can ever listen to Nora Jones again. Next up is classical, which when I am in the right mood I can listen to for 10 or more songs. For the next two it was tough to choose but I think the next one up is Jazz. If it was too mellow it would be in Sue’s easy listening category so this is, you know, Jazzy jazz. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Weather Report and Herbie Hancock. I can listen to quite a bit of these guys. The second from the top is 50’s and early 60’s pop/rock. There is such an endless array of great music from this era that you could go on for a very long time without getting tired of it (Buddy Holly being one of my favorites). The only caveat being that you probably couldn’t do it every day. You can only take so much nostalgia. That leaves only one genre, yeah baby, Rock and Roll. It covers so much ground and I listen to music from many era’s, from Beatles and Jimi to Depeche Mode and Metallica. During the trip, though, I got turned on to Coldplay and John Mayer who are more current and good rockers but easier on my 60 year old ears. Sometimes the hardest stuff is just too hard. Have I ever told you about Spooky Tooth. . . . . . . . .? Jon
Disclaimer: if I have offended anyone with my list, too bad, it’s my list. Make your own list and see who cares. There is some music I have purposely left off and it stinks, it may not even be music. If you don’t like rock and roll what are you doing reading this blog, you should be in bed sleeping.

April 23rd, the last day of my journey.
I stop in beautiful Beach, No. Dak., not an ounce of water within 50 miles. I have a very nice visit with my second cousin Gene Skoglund, the county treasurer for Golden Valley County. We had never met before but had found each other on the internet doing family research. He has a lovely wife and eight children and he says he should have had more. I think he has been out to repopulate North Dakota, the western part which is vast and desolate in a grand and semi beautiful way. As I leave Beach with the intention of going to Turtle Mountain, I am seized with the sudden and intense desire to get home. I feel like I am physically and emotionally exhausted, that my quest is finished and I need to see my family. So I 86 Turtle Mountain and head for Fargo, where I am now.
So the question is: did I find myself? If not what did I find? I will partially answer the question, with the caveat that in a few days I may have a slightly different perspective.
I found parts of myself that have been partially hidden. I found out how important is my intense need to love and for love. I found out how important is my need for artistic expression, and beginning to develop an outlet for that was huge. I found that I love telling stories, even if some of them occur only in my imagination. I want to learn how to write. Sometimes I like driving fast. I have a wondrous extended family, which I will continue to reach out to. But mostly I found out how much it meant to me to pay tribute to Sue’s memory in ways I had and hadn’t planned. Through these I found a little certainty in an uncertain world.
I didn’t ask for this life, I wanted to grow old with Sue. This life was thrust upon me and I feel compelled to do something with it. Something to nurture her within me, to nurture myself and my family and to honor the life of a great woman. I have faith, Jon.

Forsyth, Montana. I’ve already driven through the beautiful part of Montana, I guess this is what’s left. I want to make it to Beach N.D. this morning to see if Gene Skoglund, a shirttail relative I met on the internet, will meet with me. These last two days are more about heritage and just getting home. I will also stop at Turtle Mountain.
I met a couple of sort of interesting people. There is a large coal fired power plant in Forsyth and boilermakers from all over the country come here for a couple of months to clean it while it is in “shutdown”. I almost didn’t get a room because of this. The boiler is 10 stories high and they have to erect scaffolding on the inside to effect the cleaning. My neighbor Anatoli is a Russian living in Portland, Oregon, of all places, who is here to work on the boiler. Someone said there were many Navajos here also.
After breakfast I meet a young man coming off the night shift working security at the power plant. We discuss Socrates, Plato, Greek and Roman history, The Illiad and the Odyssey and his time in the 1st Gulf war. He says he was discharged due to being in a war trauma induced psychosis and having Gulf war syndrome. He is well now and wants to rejoin the military as an MP. I, of course, tell him of my days as an MP guarding rusty tanks and old paint in Kaiserslautern, but I decide not to tell him about SIDIPO. He might be carrying a gun.
On the road to Beach I begin to think about a movie I saw called “The Beach”. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a young man who stumbles upon paradise in the guise of a commune of young free spirits who live on a remote island off of Thailand. The other star is the chick who plays the Ice Queen in “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe”. She is the queen of the commune and instills an iron discipline to keep their paradise secret. They share (uneasily) the island with some violent illegal Marijuana growers. As with most human utopian dreams, this one ends badly as paradise lost.
I want to write the sequel to “The Beach”, only I will have to rename the original “A Beach”. That is so the sequel can be titled “Son of A Beach”. It will be the story of Leonardo’s son. He grows up and eventually hears the story of his father’s flirtation with paradise and is smitten with the idea of finding out what happened. He travels to Thailand and discovers that the ice queen has made a pact with the devil and now lures rich tourists to “paradise” and then enslaves them in cultivating and processing marijuana for the illegal drug trade. In their down time, the tourists are kept in a drug induced stupor to keep them compliant. He goes home and remembers an uncle’s tale about PUA superheroes who did wondrous deeds when the uncle worked with them on 7a at St Mary’s in Minneapolis. He calls the retired head PUA and entices him to perform one last deed. So the head PUA comes out of retirement and recruits his former sidekicks, Anne and Don, to join him in one last quest. They take a leave from their jobs as: psychiatric nurse/teacher and head of corrections to become again doers of deeds. The son leads them to the island and the superheroes swoop in and smite the evil drug lords and capture the ice queen. The rich tourists are released and return to their former lives living in a money induced stupor. The ice queen is thrown into the locked unit where she is injected with Thorazine and lives in a legal, drug induced stupor. The superheroes return to their former lives, retired once again. Anne and Don will play themselves. I can’t tell you who the head PUA is/was but I can tell you he is a wise looking man with white hair who thinks he’s an Indian and looks ridiculous in a “Billy Jack” style hat. Maybe if I add a religious theme Adam will make the movie. Almost home, Jon.

Lochse River experience. I left Orofino fairly early this morning, I wanted to get as far into Montana as possible. The early drive was pleasant but my thoughts, as usual, went to Sue as they do so often in the morning. As I moved down the road, something that pleased me very much began to take shape. I have had in my mind for a long time the germ of an idea. I have wanted to write a short story about my thoughts, feelings and experiences in the months following Sue’s passing. I have had the title since shortly after acquiring the germ, it is to be called “100 Days of Tears” and the outline and structure began to take shape in my mind. Pleasing thoughts alternated with tears as the ideas moved forward. But the terrain began to change and my thoughts were brought to another place.
The environment around me was becoming increasingly more spectacular as I moved into the gorge of the Lochse river. This is in a remote part of the Bitterroot wilderness and something had drawn me here despite having absolutely no knowledge of the area. I could have taken a slightly longer route that was all freeway but didn’t. The river follows a tortured route as it carves it’s way through the mountains. The scenery is becoming more spectacular by the moment, the water glinting with the light of the early morning sun. The road has more curves than an army of belly dancers, one curve blending into the next. Pretty soon I am taking on two personas. One part John Muir as I am absorbed into the stunning beauty around me. Other part Mario Andretti as I begin to tightly hug the inside of every curve. Soon I am taking the 35mph curves at 50 and the 45mph curves at 60, gradually becoming more Mario than John. I am pushing myself toward my 60 year old limit as the road continues its long path uphill. Beside me the river has rapids almost all of the time and I become mesmerized by the process of driving, very quickly, through a small piece of heaven (with no guardrails). I feel all of my senses becoming increasingly more alive and concentrated on the task at hand. My attention is heightened and my visual, tactile and spatial powers are brought into acute focus. After 60 or 70 miles I am feeling euphoric in a way brought on by intense and prolonged sensual stimulation. I feel more alive than I have in a long time. This continues for mile after mile and I knew I had been led here for a purpose, which in that moment was not entirely clear to me.
Eventually the road leads off of the river and crosses the Lolo pass at about 6,000 feet. Before I cross though, I have an interesting moment. I am driving along a creek and I feel like I am going downhill. As I look at the creek it is also flowing downhill but in the other direction. This is a moment where up seems like down, which I think can happen when in a euphoric state and experiencing lots of ups and downs. I also see a little white cross on the side of the road and decide that on the way down I will be Jon Bushard and not Mario Andretti.
On the way down I do have an intense moment of absolute clarity. This experience has brought me to the realization that I want to write. Not just someone who writes for fun as I have on this trip, but someone who will take this germ inside of him (like the one of Sue and Skip that has grown inside of me) and actually learn HOW to write. It is a very emotional realization. Where this will lead me I have no idea but combined with another need I have realized (the need to push myself toward my limits) it could prove to be an interesting path.
I covered more miles today than any other day of the trip, about 650. Lots of time to think, and I realized that I have way too many thoughts. If I tried to write everything down you’d really think I was crazy.
Item: The Yellowstone river is the longest undammed river in the US. How we missed that one is beyond me. I think it might be related to the amount of people along its course. I think it is also because the people are undead.
Observation: Outside of Billings are buttes that are called mountains, outside of Butte are mountains but no buttes. No sense to be made from that one. More tomorrow, Jon.

Orofino, Idaho. I left Annie’s this morning after we had called our old friend Don Ilse. He of the famous Criminal defense attorney story. Anne pretended she was from the Oregonian newspaper but he saw through it right away, he is the head of corrections for Anoka County and isn’t easily fooled. We visited and then agreed that he and I would go to a Twins game when I return. I was hoping to get to Missoula, Montana today but it was overly ambitious. The drive through eastern Oregon and Washington was brand new for me and very beautiful as an austere rolling landscape of alternating dirt and green fields. This eventually gave way to higher hills with a few trees and led me into the spectacular Snake river valley.
I am sitting on the patio of a wonderful Best Western in Orofino, Idaho. I am listening to the sound of rushing water because I am at the confluence of a small and large river. They have plaques saying that they are the BEST Best Western and I believe them, especially Sissie at the front desk. I just got back from a drive into the hills surrounding Orofino. I went with some trepidation as I passed two guns and ammo stores as I drove out of town. There is also Idaho’s reputation as a haven for survivalists and Neo-Nazi, skinhead, Aryan brotherhood, steel booted, kick your ass if you look at me, guns and ammo toting, dog kicking and baby hating, you know. . . . .people. I drove up and up until I was on a very narrow road and my feet started tingling. A sure sign that I was a little nervous. I took some shots (with my camera) and started to head back down when I noticed I was being followed by a very large pickup truck. All I could make out were two figures with baseball caps pulled low and something hanging in the back window. We were kicking up a large amount of dust, which was glowing in the late afternoon sun. I pass a farm with good looking cows and I am taken back to the time in Switzerland when we watched a cow being rescued by helicopter as we waited for the tram to leave Walter’s mountain. Someone yelled “hey look at the flying cow”, so we all ducked. All of the cows in Switzerland are a beautiful brown with shiny coats and large attractive eyes with a come hither look. If I ever come back as a bull let it be in Switzerland. Oh yea the two guys in the pickup, they passed me as I was daydreaming and waved as they went by. Not necessarily a good ending to this story but I have to tell the truth sometimes. On to Montana. Jon

Protland-2. Anne took me to an upscale, hip, young part of town, just the sort of place a couple of ageing hipsters could fit into. We walked the streets and eventually made our way into a cool looking house that had been turned into a shop housing Polish pottery. Don’t ask what led us there but we met a very interesting young lady who told me her story. She grew up in Bielsko-Biala, Poland and her name is Ania Kocourek-Williams. Her great grandgather joined the anti-Nazi crusade in Romania after the fall of Poland. He was captured and spent the rest of the war in slave labor camps in Germany. Although married and not having seen his wife in years, something about the terror of his experiences caused him to find his way to America. He called his wife and asked her to come but she refused. He was in Portland and was working in a monastery. After many years she finally said she would come to America but arrived just in time to see him die. She returned to Poland and much later when Ania heard his story she felt compelled to come to America. She was told it could never happen. But she believed in never saying never, in fact to say never was to inspire her to do things. She was poor and needed to get a drivers license and learn English in order to travel. For a while this was out of reach for her until her grandmother won a small lottery and helped her finance her learnings and trip.
She found a host family in Portland and came. She works at a school for Iconography at the monastery where her great grandfather is buried, one of the few non monks buried there. I don’t know much about iconography but would like to. She said the images are mysterious and are made to draw us into the mystery. As my journey would have it, she is married to a Native American but I sensed from her that I shouldn’t go there. Although she was very ebullient throughout our discussion, when it came to talking about her husband and potential family (she has no children) there seemed to be a little sadness to her. Most of the Slavic old world people I have met seem to have moments of this world weary resignation. These thoughts and the irony of her working where her great grandfather is buried kind of haunts me. It is a mystery I won’t solve in reality or my imagination.
The next day Anne and I go to the Saturday market, despite the fact that it is Sunday. We see a lot of stuff, including more tattoos than I’ve ever seen in one spot. I also saw Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley hanging out with pirates and other performers. Later we have ice cream at a Ben and Jerry’s. While there we strike up a friendship with three children and a mom, one child is hers and two belong to her boyfriend. She is a teacher and is holding a weeks old miniature Pug. After having fun acting stupid with the kids (I sure miss my little ones) we promise to send the photos we took to her facebook site. I taught them one of my very best ugly faces and they were impressed. In the evening I cook dinner for Anne and we talk more of our days as superheroes. In the morning it is time for the beginning of the long trek home. I am a little weary, I miss my family more than I can say. I have learned and experienced so much that I am sure most of my time driving will be spent synthesizing.
Anne: We were young once and operated in a unique place in the time-space continuum. There were fun times, hard times, crazy times and you have helped me face a hard truth from those times. To see you again was to feel I had just seen you last week and I am so pleased I came. You are still the Anne we knew (a little more aged like me) and your zest for life is undiminished. Our moments together of pure immature silliness are going to become a priceless memory to me. We will see each other again because we are forever friends. Jon

Portland, Oregon. A final thought from Donna’s. We discuss Sue a lot. She felt “Suzie” was special, that there was something about her that most children don’t have, particularly children with her specific experiences. Sue was a bright, lively, active and talkative child whose youthful innocence was stolen from her. Donna knows. Sue had hopes and dreams and only through the tremendous efforts of her absolute determination was she able to begin to rise above her childhood. She rose above it to create the circumstances for our little family to thrive. Donna is one of the few who know what a truly great woman Sue was. Without her sacrifice, I could not be me.

I take the shortest jaunt between two stops of my entire trip. It takes me about 20 minutes to make my way to Annie’s in Portland, ably assisted by Garmin. This is Anne McNeely, an old friend of ours from the days at St. Mary’s Hospital. Sue worked maternity and I worked on the Psych unit with Annie and an unbelievable cast of characters that we talk about throughout the day, which goes by in a flash. The names and experiences cascade from us in a rush of memories. This had been a truly unique time and place to be in. I started there in 1972, Annie in 1971,it was still wartime and the intensity that comes with that. I was 1 and 1/2 years removed from the Army and had finished one year at the U and decided I wanted to study psychology and work in “psych” as we called it. The psych unit was undergoing a pilot program to introduce “group therapy” to the unit, which at that time was a novel idea. They decided we should actually talk to people to see if we could help them. In these days of Oprah it seems like an “of course” idea but back then it was revolutionary. People didn’t talk about their problems to strangers.
We were PUA’s, Psychiatric Unit Assistants. We were superheroes, who were out to change the world and we led groups and cured people without any idea of what we were doing. The psychiatrists were on the periphery and “directed” us in our efforts. But we were in the trenches in the new war against mental illness and could and did do anything we wanted to without any real credentials at all. It was a brief moment when a group of actually highly educated young people who believed in possibilities worked in a menial job, were given outsized responsibility and made a difference, assisted by many hours at the Tempo peanut bar on Franklin Avenue. This could never happen today, I don’t think there are any peanut bars left.There are so many stories, but one we both vividly remember is the one about the manic-depressive criminal defense attorney. At the change of shifts one afternoon we got word from admitting that a real crazy guy was on his way up to 7a, and he was starting to take his clothes off. The elevator doors open and the admitting nurse runs off the elevator, charging down the hall toward the locked unit. She was being chased by a guy with no clothes on, in a very “excited” state. He had half a beard on one side of his face and half a moustache on the other. Our head nurse, who was about 8 and ½ months pregnant, was chasing after him holding up a hospital gown to protect other patients from this unusual sight. He chased her all the way into the locked unit where I happened to be working that day. What do you say to a naked, excited and crazed man looking to tackle a nurse? HELP! Don Ilse and I eventually replaced the nurse and a broken piece of pottery replaced his excited state as he chased us around the locked unit until reinforcements arrived (medical orderlies) and we could tackle him and inject him with massive amounts of Thorazine. Some solutions to problems could not be handled with mere talk. Enough for now, more stories from that day to follow. Jon