Around 6am I rose from the couch and quietly packed up leaving a note of thanks on the kitchen table. I hesitated for another Milkyway but resisted figuring I’d done enough damage to my intestines for one weekend. I scooted out into the chilled grey morning air and headed for Addie’s.
I got in around 8 to discover Heidi, my waitress last time, wasn’t working but would be in at 9. This time I opted for a sandwich then sat over my budget to work out how much I’d spent in the city. By 8:40 my meal was finished pretty much but my budget was not working out properly and for the next hour and a half I must have resembled the guy from Pi scribbling equation after equation over any piece of paper within reach. Of course it wasn’t calculus or logarithms, but simply addition and subtraction, but the numbers were not coming together and it was driving me mad. There was a dollar missing between the checks and balances, and as anyone who’s seen me do my budget before, even if it’s just a penny off I’ll not rest until it balances.
Heidi came in to work as I was mulling this over and chatted with me for a bit. It was this break in the process that made me realize I’d spent entirely too much time on the issue and should head off soon. By 10 I was on the road and slowly made my way out of the stripmall drifts that linger outside every decent sized American city for miles on end. It didn’t help that I kept making stops at dollar stores and grocery marts to pick things up. I finally got a disposable camera to replace the unfortunate Bess. Eventually I made my way out and back into a semblance of country.
Once the desolation began to set in again I stopped in for lunch at a gas station café. I didn’t linger long, but stayed long enough for a burger and fries and a gut wrenching Mountain Dew that doubled me over for a good mile after. I’m not sure, but I think it was something about how awfully I was eating this day and the previous one, but my brain was absolutely not coming into focus that day. I was in no way grasping the concept of distance or time for the miles I walked and it made life seem like a painful eternity the whole day until nearly the end.
Hitting the county highway 16 I turned northward and on it a guy pulled to the side and gave me a frozen bottle of Gatorade. When I stopped for my break I sliced it open with old Leath the Leatherman and tried to eat it like a sno-cone. This was foolish, but at least I could still drink the melted bits and chew on the ice to cool me down. The heat had climbed to around 100, so that with a Clif bar did me right and finally my brain began to come back into focus.
Setting off again I passed a race track where throngs had gathered to watch cars go really fast in a straight line then stop, then going over a hill I saw a woman struggling down the road away from a beached van with all the doors open. I promptly offered my assistance and the use of my phone which she happily accepted. In thanks she gave me a soda so we chatted a bit. It was a nice ten minute break as they waited for her boyfriend to come with a tow then I set off and called Angie for a bit.
In the last mile the side of the road rose up twenty feet or so on either side of me and at the last moment spilled me out on to a gorgeous ledge with a monument to 9/11 that over looked the valley below. It was right at my final mile marker so I set up shop there.
Two girls, Maggie and Emily, pulled in as I was pitching my tent, and as they were aiming to leave I got them talking. It was a good time, we chatted a while about all sorts of things and I ended up getting invited to church the next day in town. This sounded delightful and memories of Craig and Vikki flashed through me so I took them up on it. That night I left my rain cover down under that beautiful sky and opened up the roof to sleep under the stars. They’d given me some graham crackers before they left so I ate those over my maps then went to sleep.