Chapter 22. Pacific to Atlantic

The ear was healing nicely ( and its ringing diminished); after a week or two of precious rest and waiting for ordered new boots that didn't come, it was time to walk across the continent. After a bus got me to San Diego, then to La Jolla by the Oceanographic Institute where I splashed sea water on my forehead, it was time to walk across the continent. With these feet then, make a beginning; dedicate your eyes to the east. Over chaparral to desert, by plain and scrub to tall pine, past a hardwood forest finally, there must be salt again. On the 14th of March in sunshine I set off. By Miramar Road I left the sea, and began a steady climb into coastal mountains.

Pacific exaltation, however, gave way to boot concern. The principals were long utterly finished and given up to the Salvation Army to recycle; now I was wearing my own cast-offs picked up in San Diego while seeking an audience with my daughter. (The audience had been denied, as soon carry a yellow rose to Portland. In my farings forth, the son was often a co-conspirator, but the daughter was more judgmental. And who's to know the right of it?)

These infernal boots have shrunk or my feet have swollen from much walking; same result, misery. I slowed down and camped early, deciding to leave the walk at Ramona to await arrival of new boots. So it happened that the reporter from Angel's Camp introduced me to her relatives in Hemet, helped fetch the boots from Los Angeles when they arrived, and then brought me back to Ramona to resume the walk—lonely task after being in such good company.

New boots, even flexible moccasins, can hurt; I camped early again, and slow-footed the first few days until we became acquainted. Then the ankle–high Indian shoe, modified by sewing on a composition sole, served me well all the way to the Atlantic.

I resupplied at Santa Ysabel in order to use the side road bypassing Julian and taking me steeply down by Banner onto the floor of Anza-Borrego Desert. It was a glorious time to be there; spring rains had relieved the aridity. In the morning dew, flower pollen muddied my boots to gold. By day, sun warmed the back. At night, off the road in draws I camped; star-clad the shepherd in his sleep.

At the eastern desert edge there was a trailer camp with water and small grocery. I staggered off under two gallons since the next sure water was Westmoreland, although I hoped for some in San Felipe Creek where the desert road joined another leading around the Salton Sea. Arriving there to meet my north-south route for the first time, I did find water.

Rain clouds threatened more water as I sought high ground and brush to rig the tarp against a downpour. It held off, however, through the night and morning until I reached the edge of Westmoreland, where a café owner let me use the vacant building next door. Good fortune, since the rain when it came was a deluge.

Next day dry, I met a black man walking in an overcoat with his head wrapped in a white towel like a turban. He had hitchhiked from Phoenix but between rides could walk if need be. I fed him from my pack and warned of the long dry stretch coming up. As he left I wondered what it was like, watching white cars pass and sleeping in an overcoat when night fell? Would California farmers recognize a king from the East?

After Brawley the route led due east by oddly familiar sand dunes to Glamis. There should be camels and fierce Bedouin, or a French charge of Legionnaires! And indeed there are in cinema season, for this Sahara-like landscape has been the setting for many Hollywood classics. But in real life, Glamis announced itself the dune buggy capitol of the world; in California, camels are smoked not watered, and beer becomes the Bedouin.

By Cibola Wildlife Refuge the road parallels Colorado River, but the river isn't seen until a bridge at Blythe. From high snow to canyon thunder to meek servant of date grove the Big Red runs, arterial vein of the southwest, sine qua non .

Over the river into Arizona I walked; it seemed far on interstate highway to the weighing station where water for camping could be gotten. Under junipers in a nearby draw my bed lay; first state from the Pacific walked through, that was a good feeling as the campfire twinkled its cheerful message of supper coming up.

At Quartzsite before resupplying I met a rock-man with his wares spread out around a van. We chatted a long time about Australia that he'd just come back from, how tough the outbackers were, how much they could drink, and how quick they fought.

Falling asleep tired I thought it might be better in Australia to chase rain clouds with aborigine. Whose possessions of a lifetime may total twenty pounds, whose wife's hair may be the best cordage he will ever have, who invented in the boomerang a bullet that returns if it misses in an economy of life and harsh justice unknown to the reaper of wheat and builder of skyscrapers. Who gets drunk on a cigarette which lasts all day chewing, who may learn six or seven different languages for the passion of storytelling, whose inner life is complicated, subtle, bloody, fearsome, secret, like yours and mine.

In Eugene Burdick's Blue of Capricorn it is even claimed that Australia's aboriginal inhabitants weren't run out of the lush river valleys by Europeans. Before our coming, they'd already chosen the desert's razor edge of existence as being somehow, harder but nobler. Less is more. I can never think of them without feeling a shudder of instinctive sympathy.

After a few miles more of interstate I could walk an old highway, with less traffic, through Salome and Wendon to Aguila and the mining town of Wickenburg. My camps were in sandy draws under cloudless skies in a spell of clear weather. One of these draws, however, was so deep and narrow it allowed the possibility of playing three-dimensional tic-tac-toe with rattlesnakes.

After leaning pack against staff I whistled off collecting a bundle of wood which on return was hurled to the ground with a flourish. Then I heard him, more a high pitched siren than the fatal buzz I'd learned to listen for. Freezing in position, my eyes searched from side to side in vain. God, where is he? Finally, in desperation I moved a little toward the pack.

Now it came again even shriller than before, the high keening that spelled terror, terror! But at this second call I spotted him, fat and awful, three feet up the bank mercifully scrabbling to put distance between us. My mind had fled already; it saw me start violently back and heard me cry out in primeval fear.

Long after he'd reached the top my ears still rang to the tune of rattler siren; I was afraid to approach the pack. It seemed I could still see the dark rings above the rattles that gave him his local name of coontail rattler. I knew with some clarity the evolutionary message of those rings: see, see my rattles and avoid, for I am bad news. I sincerely believed it. When the feet would obey I stole my pack and walked a quarter mile away to a wide place in the draw. There camped I in quietude.

(I am the son of my father who was only afraid of three kinds of snakes: big 'uns, little 'uns, and dead 'uns.)

Also before Wickenburg I met another hazard to foot travel in Arizona, the policeman. He neither rattled nor struck but busied himself with pencil compiling the vital statistics that would help apprehend me if I knocked over a bank or burglarized from the rich.

With bitterness I recalled a similar incident in Flagstaff the other time walking through Arizona, but I kept relatively cool until, after explaining to him the plan of my hike and that I accepted no rides, I saw him put down hitchhiker . "What is a hitchhiker, sir?" "Anyone who doesn't drive a car", he answered. Then there had to be some speaking out.

I asked him to consider the notion that among free men, everyone, even the hippie he mistook me for, is presumed innocent until proven guilty, that preparing dossiers on unpopular persons is a tactic of totalitarian governments, and that routine police questioning in the absence of reasonable suspicion of a crime committed is actually illegal in most states.

Finally I recalled for him what my trooper brother had once told me of our native state, that a millionaire walking through it could be arrested for vagrancy, and asked him if he wanted that reputation for beautiful and hospitable Arizona? When I had done, he seemed to share some of my unhappiness; the conversation turned to farmers who overirrigate, lowering the water table and damaging an arid environment.

After Wickenburg I walked by Morristown onto the eastern road to Lake Pleasant where another policeman was encountered. But this one must have lost his pencil; all he had for me was a cheerful grin and gallon jug of fresh water that saved a long side trip to the reservoir.

Where east road joined interstate I was met by an Atlanta friend's mathematics student, now attending a university in Flagstaff for a year. He hospitably drove me to his dorm where I rested a day, buying clothes from a thrift shop and reading part of Peter Farb's Humankind , which rehabilitates hunter-gatherers.

They lived a good life, with a short work week and average longevity only recently exceeded by industrial societies, according to modern anthropological research. This was consistent with my previous reading of the fascinating lives of rock-painting Bushmen, before they were oppressed by white and black in South Africa.

Resuming back at the interstate and walking across to the town of Carefree, I supplied myself for several days cross-country and luckily was able to obtain good Forest Service maps of a canyon that, if negotiable, would make a more direct route than the winding highway.

From Carefree, a dusty dirt road led down to Bartlett Reservoir where a look could be had at the Verde River to be forded. High and muddy, it scared me. I camped; when in the morning the river was still there, I tramped up to the caretaker's house to ask permission to walk over the dam. This wasn't a walking dam, but they let me.

After a boulder-strewn slope on the far side there was an old road to the start of the canyon that led, hopefully, to a crossing of the Mazatzal ridge. Lunching in this remote place I was surprised by the arrival of a motorcyclist. Equally surprised he stopped a spell to chat, then roared off to find another canyon back many miles to pavement.

Now I climbed steadily up the draw, easy going on sand and hardpan, until it gave way to another old road that led over the pass. Down the other side night caught me; I camped as soon as there was water.

Next morning the canyon descent became wilder as the brook widened to a creek. After some confusion at the bottom I waded the creek and found a way out to the Payson road. From a resort and later a café minimal supplies could be bought, enough to reach Payson for a hotel rest and talk with old-timers of how it used to be before the government got proud.

From Payson there is an obvious, perfect route through the rest of Arizona into the highlands of New Mexico, namely the Mogollon Rim, famous to some as the setting for Zane Grey western novels. Not only should it be delightfully cool in spring (although a predicted ten degrees failed to occur), but it also had a dirt road through pine forest most of the way.

It was a mistake to lug groceries up the rim since there was a store on top, but that was nothing compared to the zest of breathing pine air again. Hardly anyone else was up there. Only one pickup passed the whole time; the season for hunting must be fall.

Day shaded into day broken by nights crisp for sleeping. I had to be extremely careful with campfires since the Sitgreaves National Forest already had one blaze to fight. The dirt road ended before Show Low, but there was still cool walking along the highway edge through Springerville into New Mexico.

At Red Hill no store, but a good meal and conversation could be had at the café. In Quemado I bought supplies, musing over the significance of a little town ahead with the odd name of Omega. For when the full-time pilgrimage began in 1968 at the Ohio community of Alpha, the jest to my brother had been that if ever I arrived at an Omega it would be time to quit.

Now, ten years later, Omega was just ahead. When I got there no bolt from heaven fell; my legs and feet seemed sound and wanted to continue. I decided to go on awhile since there were only 4,000 some odd miles to the walk's end anyway.

Somewhere along here too I saw another meaning to the shape of this last long walk in North America. The horseshoe was a crescent moon big enough to hold all the good fortune I confidently expected to fall into it. As if to provide a downpayment, hear what happened at one camp under the junipers while a mulligan pot bubbled.

Walking usually leaves me too tired for concentrated reasoning effort. Poems come—manna from heaven—somehow, anywhere anytime, but mathematics seems, for me, to require more sheltered skies. However, this evening was the exception as counters spun and quadratic stars danced in my head.

Beginning as a simple-minded tracing of the effect of restricting to one dimension some multidimensional objects found many years before, in ten golden minutes a more general form of Newton's Second Law, for a variable mass, was derived. Now from reading Hadamard's Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field , this is what the savant Poincaré expected every morning before breakfast but to a peasant it comes with the shock and force of miracle, making him want to believe in God. There was no confirmation to be had from physicists that it was right, but the modified law was so simple and beautiful that I knew it was, and wouldn't have cared if it weren't. Moreover, the stew was hardly overdone.

A few miles on is Pie Town, named for no Greek subtlety, but because someone made pastry so good that travelers couldn't pass it by. Nor could I. The Continental Divide was coming up soon; in the café, a motorist handed me the usual lies about downhill all the way to the Rio Grande. I thought about him as I climbed one hill after the other; there's nothing like horsepower to smooth a road. Maybe he was a statistician; on the average it was down.

Somewhere on this stretch there was a terrific thunderstorm, the term of which I luckily spent inside another café, watching wind and rain knock signposts down and turn the highway into a temporary river. Afterwards, the owner offered a cot in his storeroom to save me camping on the soaked earth. Thank you, sir.

At Magdalena I left the highway, striking straight across toward San Acacia on the Rio Grande. There were dirt roads to follow, then a lonely descent down a wild canyon. As it started, by a waterfall that had me wondering just how steep the going might become, another hiker appeared. He said the first steepness was also the last, and we got to talking.

Would you care to guess the chances of there being in New Mexico two hikers who'd both completed the Pacific Crest Trail? Now what is the probability of their meeting in a given canyon on a given day? The richness of coincidence sometimes overwhelms. He told me how to find the road from canyon's end and that there'd be no store in San Acacia, before striding off to reach his motorcycle by dark.

Supper was done, the last glowing coals on the sand fading when, to my astonishment, the hiker returned by moonlight. He'd brought enough supplies to tide me over the missing store. No coincidence the last; human beings themselves create part of their joy.

Along the Rio Grande bottoms there were swarms of mosquitoes as I set up camp in a nearly fallen down adobe shed. The threatened rain didn't come; dousing myself with repellent and wearing a headnet to bed allowed sleep despite tormentors.

The next day I resupplied at a highway junction, then climbed east by Blue Springs and Abo. Before reaching Mountainair's hotel there was at least one camp, and I had begun to walk part of the way along the Santa Fe railroad. In early June it was already quite hot; service roads along the Santa Fe were welcome relief from highway. Even when these gave out, there could usually be found a bulldozed firebreak strip between the right of way and adjacent rangeland.

Toward Willard and Vaughn I walked railroad most of the way, after talking to trainmen at the stations who encouraged me to do so. The timetables thay gave were helpful in planning where next to buy supplies. Train crews usually waved, and sometimes threw me down cartons of their cool pure water (most water for camping had to come from windmills or stock tanks). They must have thought me a retarded hobo for never trying to climb on, but I cheerfully concluded that it was nobler to be mistaken for a hobo along the railroad than for a hippie on the highway, as well as cooler on the feet.

The right of way was also wilder; the crows would talk to me, especially when I camped too close to a nest. There were more rattlers, often curled in close to the tracks. I knew they were sensitive to vibration; back in Arizona that big one must have been terrified by my throwing down the load of wood. Now local people told me they would stay under the tracks while a train roared over, rock concert for rattlers. If my wood could drum one, how a rumbling train must blow their minds!

Once in good sight of the tracks there was a large bird in a pine-tree nest. It flew off, huge with a light breast, as I walked by. Climbing up I saw in the nest eggs big as a hen's; when I described this to ranchers they claimed I'd seen a Mexican eagle. Birdwatchers have since told me there's no such thing as a Mexican eagle, but I saw one anyway in the "land of enchantment" (New Mexico is a place where I could work in good conscience for the Chamber of Commerce).

The charm began to abate as I neared the border; a convenience store near Cannon Air Force Base refused me water, and at the Base itself it seemed that I might have to reenlist to get a canteen filled. But in a Clovis hotel I soaked my bones while firecrackers popped for July 4th, and the next day a newspaper interview gave a chance to thank New Mexicans generally and the Santa Fe Company especially for their hospitality.

In Texas I walked northeast in order to stay along the Santa Fe to Amarillo, out of which the Rock Island Line could be my foot-saving route east. For it had gotten very hot, already some 100-degree days. There were camps in the brush and nights in cheap hotels where men went shirtless, beads of sweat standing on everyone's face.

People often seemed too miserable for friendliness, but one thirsty morning near Hereford, Chicano children swooped about me, offering ice water and asking eager questions about the long walk. Postcard, will you send us a postcard when you get there? Yes, little sparrows, thank you—with a picture on it.

Before Canyon I met a sheriff whose commission from Santa Fe dispatchers in Amarillo was to run me off the railroad right of way. This was amazing, since I'd come so far apparently welcome; we agreed that I'd go in with him to call the manager's office. But it was closed; while I waited to be taken back, a television reporter—there to cover a murderer's transfer—became interested in my walk and asked for an interview.

The reporter met me on the road after another sheriff had put me back where I'd left off walking; we had a good talk between whirs of his camera. It was late to seek a campsite as I walked into the outskirts of Canyon. Several householders refused permission, and some wouldn't even speak; since there'd been a flash flood in spring with looting, any stranger was mistrusted. Altogether it was a depressed pilgrim who finally found a campground that night where money could be exchanged for an earth to sleep on.

But the dependable sun rose again; early I reached the sheriff's office, afoot this time, to call Santa Fe's manager. No use, he stood by his dispatchers; I must leave the railroad to walk highway the last miles to Amarillo. There I rested a full day in the relative cool of a hotel room, obtained permission from Rock Island Line to walk their right of way, and tried to gird myself for more Texas heat.

Out of there through Conway and Groom the devil sun really laid it on me. A series of 106-degree days had even the natives groaning. As if the heat weren't enough, I got into chiggers somehow. The bites covered my lower body, merging into one another as blisters. In torment and fear I waited at a doctor's office. He was expensive, the prescribed cortisone salve even more so, but it helped, along with a weekend of rest.

I went on then, sometimes making sixteen or seventeen miles a day in that heat, but I don't know how. Even without head-splitting heat, the landscape here would be intimidating. Everything is outsized, huge barns, gigantic grain elevators, and many feedlots with their overpowering stench. Add some industrial smokestacks to make a Mordor worse than Tolkien could imagine. Written on a postcard to friends: I must have sinned on earth to be in Texas now.

But even here there was kindness; the daughter in a poor family who let me camp in their shed offered cake, and earnestly promised to buy my book when it was finished. (For I had begun again what I couldn't continue in the California rain, to write down a little each morning of recollections of all the walks). At the Oklahoma border a hard rain fell that cooled the earth, for a few hours at least.

Over the line at once it seemed that the sky and buildings assumed a more human scale. Such is the power of mind over substance. Think how hot the imaginary equator must be! By Sayre it was clear I had to quit the railroad; Rock Island couldn't afford to give its right of way the same care as had Santa Fe. Time after time, overgrowth forced me onto the railroad ties themselves, which are always poor walking.

Taking to the state road toward Cordell had another advantage; it was now the most direct way to the cooler Ouachita (Wichita) Mountains where Oklahoma gives way to Arkansas. Through friendly villages then I hotfooted toward the university town of Norman, a route that would avoid Oklahoma City's heavy traffic. After supper with a farmer's family I beat through brush to an easy ford of the Canadian River, which summer had reduced to a trickle. Tired on the streets of Norman, I took the first cheap motel.

Next morning a Chamber of Commerce receptionist, after giving maps, called the University of Oklahoma's Mathematics Department asking permission for me to use their library over the weekend. To my surprise, the departmental secretary graciously offered as well an air-conditioned apartment usually reserved for visiting scholars.

I gladly accepted, sinking into its blessed coolness for a week's wide reading in journals and books to determine if my research clue (not Newton's Law but the general problem) had already been considered. It seemed not; I had that and a wonderful rest to thank them for as I strode eastward to the town of Noble, on the edge of Seminole lands.

Farther on at Maud, the sheriff leaned back in his chair and calmly asserted I'd be rolled and robbed that evening and he could tell me which of three malcontents would do the job. Not that many Indians made trouble, but these three were mean. Having already heard similar warnings, this got to me; I took a cot he offered next to the town's firetruck, and in the morning walked extra miles around by Bowlegs on a better traveled road.

There's no escaping fate; I was attacked anyway by a killer bee. He wanted my head. When I'd whacked him out of the hair he kamikaze-dived straight for the forehead, zapping me in the middle just above the eyes. After the hurting stopped I forgot it, just glad he wasn't twins, but by evening when I camped the swelling had begun. Scared at the sight of misshapen eyes in the little mirror as I shaved off several day's stubble, I was glad to be not far from the dirt road in case it was necessary to feel my way out to it in the morning.

But a white-shirted man came over the field from a pickup to tell me it was his land I'd stopped on. He didn't care, after talking to me, but there were some so mad at the recent molesting of an old woman by a city pervert that they had sworn to shoot any camper in the woods on sight. Since he'd seen me, others could; I ought to go deeper in the wood to be safe. There was no arguing with that so I wearily moved.

It was a fitful night with several awakenings to peer by flashlight and mirror at narrowing eyes and blister pouches forming under them by the nose. Once a scampering woke me; the flashlight showed (thank God I could still see) a weird little white pig darting here and there. That bee stung my brain, I thought. Then I knew him; possums don't play possum in the night when you aren't supposed to be looking.

Morning finally came; I had only slits for eyes but could see, and walk. The thought of more cortisone shots depressed me so I toughed this one out, wearing sunglasses to hide behind. Interesting job being a spy, where's my trenchcoat?

By McAlester several days on, the eyes were better; I wasn't ashamed to be interviewed by the local paper. Indeed, I was cheerful enough to make friends, one of whom fetched me back in her car several days to shelter as I walked on. Besides the welcome company, this lightened my pack since for those days only lunch need be carried.

At Talahina I was on my own into the cool Ouachita Mountains. Well, relatively cool, and pine air after plains was refreshing. There was a footpath here that could be followed part way but, considering the fall and winter rains approaching, I chose to stay on the more direct dirt roads (and some pavement) through Ouachita National Forest.

In Arkansas my usual stateline victory dance was hampered by thirst. Asking of an elderly man who lived in a trailer below a big house, I was annoyed that a woman peered suspiciously from the house as if I might do him harm. But when he'd brought the water and it came out that this able and clear-headed gentleman was ninety-eight years old, I forgave her suspicion; great-grandfathers should be treasured.

Of course I asked him the usual dumb questions about his route through time's minefield. Mark Twain said if you can't get to eighty by a comfortable road, don't go. This man's answers implied the same. He worked hard but didn't grind himself into the dirt, ate what he pleased but plenty of vegetables, farm fare, and drank homebrew the right way, from a fruit jar under the bed. I thanked him for the water and example, taking my leave happier.

In Mena I was flattered by another newspaper interview, a long one with good questions asked, and the friend from McAlester joined me. At her urging I finally called my kin again about the loan made in Portland's heat, to learn that the debt would indeed be repaid. Thus the healing could begin of a breach that had oppressed me even after California's rain.

In Mena's bookstore there was conversation with a retired schoolteacher, of cabbages and kings, Herodotus and Thucydides, but no copy of Herodotus could be had. A frail man, the teacher spoke mysteriously of a hiker who had died nearby in unexplained circumstances. I wondered if he was trying to warn me.

If so, there seemed nothing to be done about it. The hiker, especially along roads, is always a stranger in a strange land. His comparative immobility makes him quite vulnerable to an ill-wisher. But who could live without bread and roses, or smiles? We trust because we have to, and luckily the trust is rarely misplaced.

Summer is gone, a cool day came with October. Dirt roads gave out, it was pavement on to Hot Springs. At one of the camps or rests I must have hung my shirt on a poisonous plant. The rash then stung my chest so sharply that I took a rest day to see a doctor. Afternoon allowed a park stroll to read how thousands came to this shrine of hot water in order that their sins might be washed away to reveal the health within. There was no confirmation in the eyes I saw; even the many hotels seemed to breathe disappointment.

Of course we live on hope, but a modicum of effect is never amiss to nourish it. Next morning I had mine; with a prescribed elixir that eased the sting, I fared forth again toward a crossing of the Arkansas River. I knew this stream as a cold clear rivulet in mountainous Colorado. Then its flow was south; now the wide muddy coursed east to join the Mississippi. The bridge was sufficient as I flowed east afoot.

However, near Wabbaseka there was a bridge that gave me pause. As I contemplated its narrow width and reflected bitterly on the bats out of hell called trucks in this part of the country, a black man came up with his shotgun. An average man and complete hunter I suppose, except he was in a wheelchair. "Been having any luck?" "Naw, know there's squirrels in there, got six last week, but nothing now." "Doesn't that bridge scare you?" "Naw, do it every day." So he did it again, wheeling himself along with powerful strokes, and I followed as best I could.

At the service station in Wabbaseka we talked; he'd been over his knees in swamp water when the tree got him, a twisting devil felled by his own hand. The logging buddy who found him went for help. Heaven it must have seemed to get out of that water, but they carried him wrong for a broken back. The cord was hurt, and he never walked again. He bore no rancor, and still hunted the squirrels in there. If the day dawns forever new, do we need any other constancy?

(This dream-song came to me later, but I admit it could have been rather as easily he was elected mayor:

Now the rain came, hard. Waiting at the station for it to slacken, I inquired about shelter. A nearby storeowner offered to take me in the evening to the next town's motel and fetch me back early morning with his mail run.

Done; in the morning, I walked from Wabbaseka under dark skies promising more rain. On delivery I got wet even under a poncho, but the gear, sleeping bag and so on, stayed relatively dry as I sloshed through to the same motel where I'd slept the night before.

Before Stuttgart there was a choice of ways to cross the White River: Clarendon bridge or free ferry at St. Charles, both of them roundabout. Days later it was clear I'd chosen wrong; the Clarendon bridge was a horror, long and narrow. I ran over it, but met a truck anyway. Luckily there was no one coming; he could move over, so hugging the girders wasn't necessary as it had been once, when crossing the Mississippi at Cape Girardeau.

Somewhere along here a man who had offered a lift returned a few hours later with a remarkable story to tell. He claimed that only twenty-five or thirty miles from where I'd turned down his lift he'd seen another hiker, also in a blue, hooded jacket (there was a brisk wind), and also using an ice axe as walking stick!

That's all I needed, a doppelgänger shadowing me in Arkansas. And a double-goer would make company, of a sort. I pretended to believe, not wanting to hurt his feelings, and walked on musing about how tangled our minds can get.

Before Helena a state trooper offered a ride; we talked some anyway, and he said he'd see me in town. There he caught up again, asking if I'd accept the loan of a pistol if he could get one from a friend on the city police force? I appreciated his concern for my safety, but when the friend said it could only be for Mississippi anyway since Alabama's gun laws were so strict, we dropped the subject.

My feelings were mixed; I didn't worry much about robbery or violence except sometimes at night. On the other hand, if enough people tell me to be scared I begin to wonder. When it turned out Helena had no inexpensive accomodations the trooper took me back to West Helena, promising a return when ready to walk. My friend from Oklahoma visited here; we drove about to see Helena's antebellum homes, some of them now fallen on evil days, and scouted the Mississippi River bridge (this one has a walkway).

Of a bright Monday I walked from western into eastern America. On the bridge it was delightful to meet Athenians! Of course it's unlikely, but there they were, dark smiling faces of Greeks who toured the new world painting bridges. Now they were sandblasting off old paint, but their flag-person took time out to teach me how to pronounce "kal'hemera " and "pathemata, mathemata ." That is to say, "good day" and "sufferings are lessons". The last is the shortest poem I know, but not the least.

Over the river into the delta I walked side roads at first, shortcuts, toward Marks. Here there joined the main road that I'd promised the patrolman and myself to follow since it was thought safer. But evening came on the way; as I scanned patches of wood for one thick enough to camp in, a ride was offered. It would be no problem bringing me back in the morning, and he'd feel better if I were in a motel rather than camped along there. He added that he and his wife had seen me on Memphis television, which was interesting since I hadn't been to Memphis.

It could have been a recast of the Texas interview, but he remembered my telling the interviewer that the next walk would be through those states that were missed this time. Since I never said that, the doppelgänger must exist; there really was another hiker out there, dressed like me even to the ice axe, headed east at nearly my pace. This seemed the strangest coincidence ever; I was sure we'd meet or I'd hear more as the Atlantic got closer but in fact, that was the end of it. The doppelgänger vanished, maybe he was me.

Next morning early my ride woke me at the motel to return, after breakfast, to where I'd left off. He talked of how much friendlier the people would be in approaching hill country, but I found most Mississippians cheerful and easy to get along with. In Oxford, I wondered if the trees remembered giving Faulkner shade but they didn't let on. At a bookstore I argued to clerks that a community with an Agapé Dry Cleaning was sophisticated enough to offer a Penguin Herodotus; they grinned.

At a fruit stand near Pontotoc a farmer's wife, her hair in many close curls, greeted me; we talked of crisp hiking weather, ripening apples, and how the town had recently welcomed back Indian families from Oklahoma to visit their ancestral home.

Then she invited me out to the dairy farm to meet her husband and sons. After a big lunch that we all talked into a lazy afternoon, she returned me to the fruit stand. From there I walked to a radio station where an interview had been arranged. After it I took water to camp in the woods nearby.

Next day or the next I made it to Tupelo. Past the post office there were still a couple of miles east to a motel, making at twenty-one miles the longest day's walk from Pacific to Atlantic. And the mail contained a reward package from Oklahoma with a copy of Herodotus. Ask often enough and ye shall receive.

(I resolutely limit myself to two stories from Herodotus. Do you know what happens if you walk far enough north in Scythia? The air is filled with feathers, impeding further progress, that's what. If the exact location of Scythia is insisted upon, I admit that there they say nyet instead of no, and that it is sometimes so cold that bugle notes freeze in midair.

In a different quarter, consider the task of reaping gold in India. This land has gold enough, in the desert at some distance from habitation; it is dug from the earth by ants. But these ants are big, ferocious, and fast. How can they be outwitted? By choosing, to bear one there, and back laden, she—camels that have recently dropped young, that's how. Their maternal anxiety to return gives just the edge necessary to outrace the gold-digging ants. Precious metal for me, and cream for the dromedary's daughter.)

On a Sunday morning in Fulton an ex-missionary asked me to dinner with his family; it was interesting to hear about the disorientation they'd experienced upon returning to the U.S. from Africa. One expects the adjustment required in moving to a foreign land, and braces for it; what is surprising and almost traumatic for returnees is the difficuly of later readjusting to one's native land.

It's as if we have invisible threads tying us to a place which once severed can never be completely reestablished. I thought of how it must have been for my sister coming home after five years in a Congo mission, and I wondered how it would be for me to return to settled life after years of long walks. Now the woods thickened and houses became less frequent as I approached Alabama. Near the border I camped after searching awhile for water. Rain fell but had cleared by morning when I walked into my home state.

Good luck, the hotel in Hamilton had a vacancy; bad luck, it was forbidden by city ordinance to rent for a single night. A motel owner must be mayor, I thought. Only a little disgruntled, I chatted with an ex-officer who rented me a room in the cheaper of two motels his brother owned.

This man had been an Air Force attaché in Afganistan and had hunted Marco Polo sheep on the first reaches of the Wakhan Corridor, that obscure finger pointing into China over the Pamir range. This region, key to a retracing of the old silk-road followed by the Polos, is so little known that a National Geographic editor once offered to set aside their prejudice against camera-less hikers to send in a staff photographer if I ever got permission to walk it. Fat chance, I thought, but it was fun to talk and dream.

On the way to Double Springs I began to tease the natives, asking them to guess where I was from. Of course the usual answer was New York or California, where all hippies originate. Then I'd tell them not to write their newspapers complaining of Yankee agitators marching through, since I was one of their own.

It was at crossroad stores and when turning down lifts that there was a chance to talk; on the whole my people seem to be a little richer and a little less friendly than the next door Mississippians. But it didn't matter; I was in a good humor, happy to be finally walking in Alabama with one more state before the Atlantic.

Once I was hailed from a porch, "Come and have a beer". Some of them had red hair and I suppose all could be said to have red necks. I don't much like beer, but that wasn't why I hesitated. These were indeed my people, or used to be. But I remembered that I couldn't always talk freely here, even with relatives. If the nigger jokes flow I am damned, whether I speak up or remain silent.

But mistrust is a hell of a way to live; I took the beer, vowing as I stepped up to mind my tongue. We talked of boots and blisters, hunting and drought, and finally of what was uppermost in their minds all along, a recent confrontation between protest marchers and Ku Klux Klan. They chuckled at black folly in seeking a change of venue for a murder trial from Decatur to Cullman County, which, at least until lately, even had a sundown law: no black could remain in the county after dark.

There was a curious clash of intelligence here in which I definitely came out the loser. They wanted to know where I stood, and did know before parting, despite my firm resolve to stay out of it. I kept off the soapbox, but they knew anyway. However they seemed to bear no animosity; we parted on friendly terms. What did it matter finally that I'd been bested by someone with a more agile wit, when the real contest involved a fair trial for a man who might die?

In Cullman I wandered the streets on a rest day; maybe there'd be mail tomorrow. From a disabled vendor I bought a bag of fresh roasted peanuts. Delicious, I hadn't had them that way since 63rd Street in Chicago. Now, passing a radio station, I remembered a strain in most voices lately. I'll go on the air to tell them I'm not a protester, not mad at anybody. So I asked the man, "Are you interested in long walks?" And he said, "Not in the least."

But in the fresh morning as I crossed a used-car lot to leave Cullman, the honest salesmen clustered about, asking friendly questions, making me feel at home again. Could I really have needed so much to be at home?

Two days past Cullman a crossroad grocer asked if I was ready for rain? "Not exactly," I said, "what are the chances?" "How about ninety percent tonight and tomorrow," he answered. That did it, why rush headlong toward the Atlantic to avoid fall rains if they'd already arrived? I called my brother in Birmingham; he would indeed come take me out of such a cruel wet world. In an hour or so it was done. No orphan waif am I, but the returned prodigal. Even my mother's little black pug bulldog remembered me.

That night and the next day rain fell heavy in order that the weatherman be fulfilled. Visiting my brother's restaurant supply shop, one of his employees asked if he could alert televison reporters? I said no, too much like my brother doing it, but he did anyway. I don't know if a prophet is honored in his own country, but a long-distance hiker got on TV in Birmingham. Before leaving I reminisced to my brother that a dear ex-friend wouldn't eat pancakes because she couldn't stand their roundness. So with no resources but a spatula and talent, he made the last one square, perfect to the eye. I call that a good visit.

Back at the crossroad it was hayfoot, strawfoot toward Gadsden; the motion is the same for everyone, even honored prophets. On the way I got to turn down a few more rides because of my fame. Some of these involved hospitality as well, which I could gladly accept. There were even prayers said for me and money slipped into my pocket, for a rainy day. In Gadsden mail didn't come but no matter, the Alabamians were taking good care of me.

Near Centre I stayed with a thin man and his family. They suggested a longer rest through Thanksgiving, but I pushed on, hoping for the Georgia border by Thanksgiving afternoon when I'd be met by the Oklahoma friend.

On the holiday morning I walked somewhat hungry, thinking of the turkey turned down. I needn't have; about noon the thin man drove up: "She's not at the border, I checked; come to dinner and I'll bring you back." The table was full, an old-fashioned Thanksgiving feast. Of course we did. Here, take some pecan pie with you for your friend. That's how I left my home state of Alabama.

Later in the afternoon I was met after all. Then a rest in Rome before we drove back to the meeting point for me to resume the serious business of walking across Georgia before winter rains really began. On foot I bypassed Rome, using a cutoff that led directly to Cartersville which also I missed in favor of State 20. On this road above Allatoona Lake a newspaper publisher asked me to visit his home by the lake after reaching Amicalola Falls where the Appalachian Trail begins.

The rains came, thoroughly soaking roadside forests; it was lucky for me that north Georgians were so hospitable. Time after time they yanked me off the wet road to supper and dry bed, never seeming to take amiss the chore of returning me next morning. I don't remember a single wet camp in north Georgia.

Where the way to Gainesville splits off, I took a county road straight north by Big Canoe toward Amicalola Falls, hoping to be offered a ride back over it so as not to walk the same stretch twice. So it happened; after a good sleep in the reasonably priced park lodge, a ride was offered in the morning even before getting out of the park. The woman deputy carried me to the edge of her jurisdiction where other troopers met us; they took me then nearly to where I'd turned north. It was easy to walk the rest to a community called Free Home (I swear), where the publisher could be called.

But what an anguish it had been to leave the broad trail seen next to the ranger station at Amicalola! It led to Springer Mountain, start of the Appalachian Trail, and I was heartily sick of roadwalking with its exhaust fumes and fear of being hit by traffic. Despite my appreciation of citizen hospitality, I longed for the cheerful fire that blazes before a lean-to at the end of day. However, there was no help for it; if ever I was to finish the march to the sea, this was the time.

As if to underline the weariness, my back was wrenched helping move some tree limbs on the publisher's estate. Nonetheless it was enjoyable to share their memories of the newspaper business and relax in a heated pool. Now retired, he had been a fundraiser for the Georgian who became president. Once on a visit, out in the lake at night, the candidate had astonished them all with his intimate knowledge of the stars. I liked that.

Back at Free Home I walked on with a worsening back. Not that it was so bad with the pack on; it only hurt when I laughed or sat down. In Cumming the Chamber of Commerce lady's husband made it his job to find a place for me to spend the night; he managed to do so finally in the apartment of a friend.

In a morning of rain and backache I loafed at a restaurant, meeting the friendly townspeople, having my picture taken and a story written complete with map drawn by an artist, before calling my friend in Atlanta at a time when, hopefully, he'd be home from the university.

He came for me and I let the back hurt a couple days on his time, so to speak. I had been much with him and his family in Missoula where we'd met on his sabbatical leave; how good it was to see them again! I hated not to tarry for Christmas as they asked, but knew I had to get on with it, or give up.

Back at Cumming I walked across the Chattahoochee that drains Lake Sidney Lanier, to Sugar Hill where the map-drawing artist met me for dinner. It was a disaster, perhaps because she couldn't understand my going on. Maybe it is unforgivable to go on, the gypsy by the fact a moral criminal. But form, the finishing of a design, must count for something. Chaos would be too cruel a god.

A long way to go still it was in winter days, and, unfortunately, I made another mistake. For extra cushioning I'd been folding over long socks to cover twice my heels; now one of these folds pressed too hard into the instep. Our faithful ally, pain, should have warned me but it dozed from the aspirin taken for backache. By the time of noticing, my right foot hurt a lot. Minor thing, it should be better in a few days. But it was to be a long time I carried that foot, a long time in the aspirin bottle. Luckily not knowing so I limped on, reaching the university town of Athens on a weekend.

Declaring a rest day I Christmas-shopped, just making the deadline for mailing packages. Monday morning, leaving, I stopped by an equipment store to enjoy the distraction of talking about packs and hiking routes out west. We could even continue the discussion; the proprietors lived on my way out of town and invited me for supper. That was especially pleasant, to forget the pain for a time and to be around the clear happiness of newlyweds.

At Crawford I chose an older road along the railway rather than a steeper route through an intriguing place name, Philomath (a lover of lessons, i.e., a scholar). Sometimes I camped and sometimes found old deserted shacks to stay in. There were no motels before Warrenton, which I made by Christmas.

A genteel place called, of all things, Firecracker Motel, this shelter was a big improvement over my last, California-in-the-rain, Christmas roof. Nonetheless it took some resolve not to hop the bus back to Atlanta. Partly it was feeling that Christmas is for family that restrained me, but mostly the fear that I wouldn't return to finish.

Going on, somehow the days and miles were gotten through. In Waynesboro, surprisingly, a doctor could be seen on short notice; he prescribed antispasm pills for the back after x-raying it, but said nothing could be done for the foot except stay off it—which I couldn't do just yet.

Farther on, there was a camp in the rain which half wet my sleeping bag. Glad to find a laundromat at Sardis in which to dry it out but apprehensive about the subfreezing temperatures expected that evening, I began to ask everyone met if they knew of a place, shed, barn, anything, that could be rented to get me out of the wind. No was my universal answer.

But as night fell in the bitter cold, there was no time to be depressed. Often before, a well-placed camp had been for me the difference between comfort and shivering a bit. Now it was grimly clear that if I couldn't get out of the wind I might die. At last, just at dark, there were cedars and pines by a little rise that would do.

Rigging the tarp down low, back to the wind, and piling up pinestraw to seal the bottom and sides, I cried with relief to be shielded of that merciless knife. Now in a snug bag the derelict slept, nor was it at a rich man's door. At thirteen degrees in thirty-mile wind, it was the coldest camp of the whole walk.

There were more camps and more miles, a motel rest, and a dead bobcat on the swamp edge: Hilltonia and Sylvania, Newington and Springfield. In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shines. Then by Hannah, the vamp of Savannah—it was done. I talked to a reporter, swung my foot over the sill of a room cheap because it was being worked on, hiked the cobblestones to a steak dinner, and rested. It was done, 5,000 miles, and rested.

Except it wasn't; tidal water up the river wouldn't do; I hadn't seen the surge or tasted the salt sea. That meant nineteen miles more to Savannah Beach. I had sneered at the thought of needing those purist miles, but I lied.

When a friend came to be support party, I moved out. In the rain and wind I moved. With more clothes on wool that too soaked I moved. Then I could move no more and sat in her stopped car head down. But not for long, from where I left off I moved. And moved. Then finally in the headlights of her car I saw the Atlantic. I stumbled across the sand to a stop by the sea, and it moved. Now my second transcontinental hike was finished.

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