Good morning John it's Monday.

About a week ago I woke up at six o'clock in the morning. Not because I had to get on a plane or I was being dragged out of bed by some ridiculous circumstance but because I wanted to watch the sun rise because that's something I haven't seen in awhile. I brushed my teeth and then I stretched my back out for a little while because apparently I'm a little bit too old to lay on the ground all night without being a little bit stiff.

Katherine and I were at a working ranch in Centennial Valley, pretty close to Wyoming, pretty close to Idaho, but still in Montana. There's horses and there's cows and if there is a nowhere in the lower forty-eight to be in the middle of, John, we were in the middle of it. This ranch that we were on was about a forty mile drive away from a place called Monida.

Monida, as you might imagine, is the very creative name of a town that is on the border of Montana and Idaho. What you might not imagine is that Monida has a population of two people. Total.

As far as I can tell all that Monida has is this amazing sagging barn that I've seen lots of pictures of on the internet, some closed down shops, and in the distance a school bus graveyard. So yes, Monida, not a bustling metropolis, and we were about fifty miles away from it awaiting the marriage of two of my favorite people. So there's no getting away from the fact that suddenly my somewhere had become pretty close to most peoples' nowhere.

Though apparently, no matter whether you're somewhere or nowhere there are still six inch spikes of steel that will get embedded into your tire, and you will be extremely grateful to have a very good spare tire because you are in the middle of nowhere and the alternative to changing your tire is sitting there, thirsty, and hungry, hoping beyond hope that someone drives by, which they might do once every twenty-four hours or so. And everywhere we looked there was more proof that we were nowhere. These giant tanks for gasoline and diesel for example because, you know, you're not gonna drive your truck a two hundred mile round trip to get gasoline.

And yeah, the outhouses were still in use because that is just how they do things out here in nowhere. Right after I filmed that footage of those outhouses I was bounding back to my group of friends and stepped in a whistle-pig hole. Whistle-pig.

Uh, look it up. And I came crashing to the ground, writhing in agony, trying not to vomit from the pain. And Katherine runs up to me of course thinking "Oh my god, the nearest hospital is five hundred miles away." It wasn't actually five hundred miles away.

I looked it up, it's a hundred and seventy-nine miles away. I had a sprained ankle. Not even a very badly sprained ankle.

Nonetheless driving home the idea that this is kind of nowhere. But mostly I was sad because I didn't get to dance at the wedding reception. (amusing lip noise) We've laid down grids and drawn all kinds of imaginary lines and even put satellites up in space to prove that every place is a place. As if without that knowledge the cows wouldn't be screaming in the fields for their recently weaned calves that they no longer can see, making a noise that proves to you over and over again that cows can say a heck of a lot more than moo.

As if trumpeter swans and sandhill cranes aren't resting here where they can get a little bit of respite from the insanity of human creation. Just because what we see out our windows becomes what we think of as the world doesn't mean that there isn't a whole globe out there, just doing its thing, being itself, making life possible. A hundred and seventy-nine miles from the nearest hospital at least subconsciously feels like not part of my world.

And when I think about that sunrise that I woke up to that morning, I just feel like I got as close to nowhere as I could get, and found out that it was more of a place than anywhere I've been in a long time. John, I'll see you on Wednesday.