Journeys Afoot in North America
Part I, Early Walks
The eastern sun first finds the U.S. on Maine's Mount Katahdin, northern end of the Appalachian Trail. Katahdin is a beautiful peak even by western standards. Its timberline is low, it is very rocky, and the views from Thoreau Springs on up are awesome. On the way down I passed some kids, which was a mistake. I should have kept them just ahead of me; next morning when they hadn't appeared, the ranger and I had to go looking for them.
On the mountain a squall came up that the ranger wasn't dressed for, which left me to go on to the top, still not finding them. Considering the weather, the back side was easier down; another ranger station could be reached by dark. In the morning they took me around to the main camp where of course the kids were safe and sound. The ranger had checked all the shelters but some imp of fate had prompted their camping behind a shelter where he could miss them.
The woods of Maine are different. For one thing there is the arboreal Raggedy Ann called paper birch.
I hereby make
An citizen's arrest
Of every birch tree
In the forest.
That will be
Fifty dollars each
For littering, God.
And there are many lakes, where fishermen go.
The fishing camp
A long way from Wadleigh
Had a crude framework of poles
A great rock fireplace
Wood neatly stacked
For the next ones
And in plain view
A part bottle of Jim Beam
On which a hiker had written:
Fishermen, generally,
Are slobs.
Which I drank.
But there are no stores before Monson; my food gave out. I had left the trail and started out on a road when Canadian loggers found me, taking me to their camp, Jo-Mary Operation. They set such an outstanding table that if my French had been good enough I'd have asked for a job. For example, supper dessert included a choice of seven (7) different kinds of pie. It was a well fed hiker they bunked that night. Breakfast seemed expensive until I saw the lunch that came with it, which supplied me the rest of the way to Monson.
The fall rains began. Some of them caught me since at the time I didn't believe in a poncho.
Blue
Welcome, stranger.
Bet that pack's heavy,
Sopping wet, too.
They're beans in the oven,
Coffee on the stove.
My daughter'll be on
In a spell with brandy
And cake she made,
I expect she's lonesome.
Wait I got a smart dog---
One of them blue hounds.
The whole thing depends
On if he likes you.
Sic' him, Blue.
At some point it became clear that a mountain climber's roast wiener cuisine was inadequate for long walks; I should graduate to one-pot hobo mulligans. But where was the pot, to put right in the fire? About five miles on in an abandoned truck, along with an ancient rusty knife I could do without. At the next store I bought rice, onion, margarine, and a can of Vienna sausage for a hearty mulligan, some form of which has been my trail supper ever since.
You may well ask what are the bona fide differences between stone soup, mulligan, and gypsy fare? Hold on while I tell you. Stone soup is a joke but mulligan will sustain you when a dirty wind blows out of the north. What mulligan approaches in the limit is zoumine, gypsy soup, about which Jean-Paul Clèbert says, "The gypsies use little spicing and very little salt. The only condiment they appreciate is wild garlic. Among some groups, however, the knowledge of medicinal herbs has made it possible for them to improve the flavor of their soups. Generally the meal consists of a single dish: a thick soup with many ingredients and as fatty as possible."
At one of the lean-tos I met a couple who told of the wild Gulf Hagus, not maritime but a land gorge. They then shared their nightcap with me, a thick piece of chocolate between two shots of whiskey, called a Maine sandwich. Near Bigelow Mountain in early November the snow fell heavy; I turned my slick-bottomed Canadian shoes off steep paths to safer roads. Too late to finish the Appalachian Trail that fall.
Near Carrabasset there was refuge for a few days at the Red Ram Inn. The ski villagers drink a bit, especially on auction nights, finishing off theft sprees with ice cream. I was ready to quit drinking but I enjoyed the finales. Listening to bar music, I mentioned to the next stool that I had some stuff to type. Its dweller invited me to use his vacant room and machine in Cambridge at an experimental school for high school dropouts called Trout Fishing in America Inc. I gladly accepted and set out for Boston, after divorcing a friend, the bird I'd found too dazed at the corner of Walk and Don't Walk to fly. A veterinarian took him.
On the road a boarded-up diner looked like a good place for lunch. But as I rested a man came over to apologetically tell me that the lady next door objected to my being there and threatened to call the owners. I left with wet eyes, never having been run off any place before.
Near Boston a faint side road led to a pine with soft needles beneath and a dead oak nearby for firewood. Now if there's water around, that setting sun will see me camped. There was, in a swamp that needed a tree branch put down to get to the water; it was a wild camp surprisingly close to the big city.
In Cambridge I was graciously received in the apartment of the couple who ran Trout Fishing in America, Inc. (named for Richard Brautigan's book because they thought of it as a non-school and trout don't run in schools.) They baked their own bread; I sometimes got to grind the wheat, opting for the kitchen over astrology class. When the collection of poems was typed I read to them, enjoying the attention.
While I was there, Brautigan himself visited from California. I approved of his playing over and over the record, Lay, lady, lay! Lay across my big brass bed, but we disagreed on the heavenly stars. He admired their collectivity, but seemed to think it too scientific to know individuals.
Leaving the students' warmth on December 3rd, first camp was in Sudbury Wood. I'd had a second sleeping bag sent me, and found in the apartment that I couldn't get into them doubled. But as the zero night fell I wriggled in easily.
Rides came quicker on the east than west coast; I was soon through New Jersey, missing the Pine Barrens. In Maryland a householder greeted me by a mailbox lettered with the unusual name, Munchausen. He was indeed a descendent of the famous nobleman who, in The Travels of Baron Munchausen, encountered cold in Russia so deep that bugle notes froze in midair. The heir in Maryland gave shelter and a free phone call to my kin in Alabama (his wife was a retired telephone employee who had the privilege.) Then a trucker offered a long ride to Pompano Beach, Florida, which got me out of the cold before it became fabulous.
I walked around Miami on the bypass, sleeping one night under a concrete bridge. Near Homestead the whites stopped offering lifts but the blacks started. One dear old man took me onto the Keys up to a notorious Seven-Mile Bridge, gave me the last of his whiskey for a nightcap, and sternly told me not to walk onto that narrow bridge next morning, but to wait for a ride over it. Yes, sir!
Behind a coral john was a level enough place for sleeping. He had also told me not to worry about coral snakes, that I could live there fifty years and not see one. But the coconut palm swaying overhead in the warm wind made one think of cannonballs. There was no war, only a moon; in the morning a hopeful face was enough to gain a ride over the long bridge. In Key West, end of the line, I asked at the Southern Cross Hotel if the constellation could really be seen from there, but they didn't know what I was talking about.
In the middle Keys on the way back, arriving hungry and thirsty at a coconut grove, I helped myself, husking them on a sharpened stick just like a diagram in a survival book. Back on the mainland very tired, I was considering paying for shelter when two hard cases offered a lift. I almost didn't go with them for fear, but it was all right.
The big black guy wasn't driving around his white boss, he was the boss, overseer of a mixed camp of farm workers. He asked if I wasn't afraid outdoors. Did he mean snakes? No, they didn't scare him at all or the occasional bear. It was the big cat that held his fear. He said their screams in the dark could shiver a man. One of the farm's vacant shanties was my shelter this late evening.
Before dawn around a campfire I shared their breakfast for a quarter. A dog howled, they argued about who should shut him up. "He's caught in that trap," one muttered, "I'll have to kill him." But it was the give-and-take scoffing that amazed me.
This was the deep rural South but their sometimes very rough remarks showed absolutely no color line. Picking vegetables is cruel, stooping labor; the winos and derelicts who could be recruited for it were too hard up for racial prejudice. I went part way with them in their battered old field-bus; we talked of far-off Seattle and the freedom of riding the rails.
With a few short rides helping I walked into orange country. One early morning after sleeping under another bridge, a white-haired man hailed me, "Will you pick my oranges, boy?"
"No, sir, due at my sister's for Christmas, not much time."
"I got a tax bill to pay, if I can't get these oranges picked won't be any Christmas for my family."
"All right, then."
He left me in the grove while he sought more help nearby. All he could get was the village idiot, and then I quit for hunger. He guessed it and served up a breakfast of pancakes and sausage which put heart in me. In a few days the three of us got his oranges picked. They were called pineapple oranges for a faint flavor of that fruit, with not yet ready Valencias adjacent.
The idiot was a pleasant man who couldn't read but insisted I send him a postcard. Of course I did, but why should it have to me assumed more importance than a letter to Samuel Johnson? Where do we get off, supposing that Dick and Jane or War and Peace are portals to humanity?
Maybe these others could just as well inherit the earth. Did an anthropologist claim that literate peoples shoot straighter because linear reading trains the eye? What a rationale for going to school! Burn a book for peace! Then in the vale of time forgettable books will be forgotten, and gentle dummies who can't shoot will pass on Shakespeare by memory to their gentle children.
The family I worked for came from Georgia, country people. Their daughter said she knew I wasn't a hippie, that my beard was an artist's or a professor's. At supper they laughingly asked if I knew what was on my dish with the lima beans? It was a semi-crisp two-toned flat noodle, lighter on one side than the other; I couldn't guess. They laughed some more, "Pig ears, youāre eating pig ears."
When they left for Georgia, they took me part way. I was sorry to leave them, but arrived at my Christian sisterās near Tallahassee with wages in pocket and thorns in hand. She must have spent an hour extracting thorns. "You never heard of gloves?" Next morning we left for Birmingham: one of fortune's soldiers made it home for Christmas.
This finished my circuit around the U.S. (I'd already once made a walk from San Diego to Montgomery about which I don't recall much except that the motorists in Louisiana apologized for not taking me farther, that I turned north at Florala and De Funiak Springs, and that the deer in south Alabama were small, almost dwarfs. But there was the lift offered in Arizona by an old bronc rider who'd spent time in hospitals. Once, watching a ski jump, he was dared to put them things on. Of course he did, jumped, and wound up in the hospital again. The cold nights brought little cracks in my nose. One early morning a woman stopped to offer a ride but said in dismay when she saw me, "Oh, you're a grown man, I thought you were a Boy Scout. My husband would never let me pick up a grown man." (It's all right, lady, it's all right.)