From 6/29/04, in Provo, UT:

This place, this experience, is raw, surreal, almost holy. Intensely spiritual. The past few days have been an incredible journey of self-exploration and simple outward exploration, a mesh of environment and spirit. And for me, that’s powerful stuff – this is a place that’s brought me back to really who I am and where I’ve come from.

Utah stands unique among the places I’ve visited in that it’s truly a middle ground; in between the two facets of me – Bismarck Goat and California Goat – this place lies. During my entire time here this feeling has pervaded almost all of my reflective thought, but it never really came to the surface until yesterday.

Realizing that this place serves as a balancing point in my life came to me in an awfully anticlimactic way. See, like most of metropolitan America, this region is interspersed with a dash of corporate commercialism; you have your garden-variety assortment of Best Buys, Circuit Cities, Targets, Wal-Marts, and Burger Kings. This smattering of stores isn’t alone what helped me to understand the power and allure of this place, however, but just one store in particular – Big 5. In Eureka, it was one of our largest sporting goods retailers, so it was a familiar sight to me when I glimpsed it on our way to Evergreen’s, a vegan Chinese restaurant up the road in Salt Lake.

For some strange reason, simply seeing this store – and a variety of others common in Bismarck and Fargo – made me think of both my homes at the same time. It wasn’t one right after the other, but in exact harmony, a bizarre synthesis of the two – but it felt right. That’s the way this place feels to me. In many ways, on many levels, it seems natural and easy. There’s been little adjustment needed, and this city – large as it is – feels a lot like any small town you’ve ever visited.

Perhaps that’s because both Bismarck and Eureka are truly small towns. While the outlying areas contribute some extra population and feed the regions’ collective energies, they still capture the essence of the quintessential small town, where traffic lights begin to blink before midnight and local television stations still sign off after the news, American flag waving in the last artificial light of the day.

While I’ve yet to see any flashing stop lights and haven’t watched any television (and trust me, I’ve been up late these past days!), this place still feels like it could be Bismarck, or Eureka, or fucking Mott, North Dakota, for all intensive purposes. There’s a lot of connection with nature – what I feel is the true essence of small-town Americana – and that’s added immeasurable energy and quality to this experience.

This place feels like my home. Among all the things that have made me take a step back in amazement – hell, simply hanging out with Kris and Zan – the idea that this place is so naturally mine is wild, just absolutely off the hook. In only a few days it’s opened my eyes to the fact that Bismarck may not be my final resting place, that there’s plenty of other places in this world I could call home and feel at home, be at home.

Here I can eat at the Village Inn, fill gas at Tesoro, and buy frolf discs at Big 5. But it’s unique enough that I can eat vegan Chinese food with a group of absolutely amazing people, something I just can’t do anywhere else. And right now, that means everything.