First week of school

Ah, the first week of classes! There is adventure, hope, romance (electricity!) in the air.

Frisbees float above freshly groomed campus lawns. The gym is packed with people trying to keep summer muscles hard. Males are clean-shaven and dressed neatly in ironed polos and plaid shorts. Frustratingly pretty females are quick to give friendly smiles in delightful sundresses and skirts.

I remember my first day of college back in August of 2001. My best friend Josh and I were going to be roommates at Alfred University—a pricy private school in southern New York. When our parents dropped us off and said goodbye, we turned the stereo all the way up in our dorm and celebrated our newfound freedom with chest poundings and maniacal dancing.

It was our first taste of freedom, and it was wonderful. We envisioned ourselves partaking in passionate, but fleeting romances, leading the club hockey team to glory, and—to a lesser degree—excelling in school.

Things didn’t go exactly as planned. The hockey team performed pitifully and I struggle to remember if we even won a game that year. My female pursuits—an embarrassing series of rejections and misadventures—all ended disastrously. And my grades were mediocre at best since I was just starting to shed my high school slacker skin.

I had my first beer in college, and between the pleasures of the “sauce” and the dining hall fare that gave me more digestive issues than I care to mention and you care to hear—I added a good thirteen pounds of flab onto what had been a trim physique.

Despite our unmet expectations, my experience at Alfred was great. As are my experiences at Duke. But I suppose I’m far different than the excited eighteen-year-old who wandered doe-eyed onto campus nine years ago.

I know that by the time December rolls around, the excitement in the air will have dissipated. The males will have slender, pale muscles, and two week’s worth of stubble sprouting on their chins. The women—carrying around an extra seven or eight pounds—will stagger into libraries with zombie eyes and a caffeinated gait, carrying a piping-hot cup of coffee in one hand and a greasy bag of Chick-fil-A in the other.

I’m afraid I don’t share the same excitement as my fellow students. This is my eighth year of school, so I guess I know what to expect. Don’t get me wrong—I’m happy to be here. It’s just that I’ve learned that university life can be an unnatural, unhealthy way to live.

The intellectual journey is little different than a physical journey. The serious student is like a lonely ascetic embarking on a transformative adventure. To go from his “old” self to his hopefully smarter, keener, more developed “new” self, he must endure a period of struggle and sacrifice.

Of course one hopes that all the struggle and sacrifice will be worth it one day. But that’s an easy gamble for me to make. Despite graduating with $32K in student loans, and Josh with over $60K, I’m sure neither of us would go back in time and change things around. Really, it’s unthinkable since we’re more than aware of the transformative power of a college education. Some things I’m not looking forward to:

-Waking up in a 100 degree van. -Waking up and having to disrobe in a 20 degree van. -The coffee addiction that comes with too much school work and not enough time. -The loneliness that comes with being a man on a journey who knows he ought not forge ties that are sure to be severed. -Invading swarms of ants and shelter-seeking mice.

Things I am looking forward to:

-The rare “rush” or “click” one feels—upon reading a book, listening to a lecture, or writing down thoughts—when the world, suddenly, makes a lot more sense. -Cooking evening feasts on the lawn in front of my van. -My dear, darling elementary-aged tutees -Being lulled to sleep by the cicadas’ hum -Feeling the cool air on my face when bundled in a sleeping bag on a cold winter’s day.

I have just two semesters left. If all goes according to plan, I will have no problem graduating debt-free.

Lastly, here are some end-of-summer cleaning shots. My van was in nasty shape and it needed a thorough cleaning. This summer I killed two more mice in the van with traps. Here’s a few pics with everything removed.

This is what a three-month-old apple looks like.

Over the past year and a half, I’ve accumulated my fair share of crap. This is pretty much everything I own except for my clothes, some drawers, my sleeping bags, and cooking supplies.

The great thing about living in a van is that it helps you keep your stuff at a minimum because you can only fit so much stuff in there. Mine was starting to get uncomfortably dense so I gave a box of books away to a used bookstore.

This is the first time I’ve been able to vacuum the van.

Giving the ole coat hook a shining.

All clean!

Home sweet home.

Images of semi-sustainability

I don’t know anyone who loves a place as much as David loves Acorn Abbey. It’s not just the home he loves, it’s also the plants, trees, stream, and animals that call this place home, too. Even though Mr. Groundhog—our leaf-eating neighbor—is often found snacking in our sweet potato patch, David doesn’t have the heart to shoot him like any normal farmer would. When we went through a dry spell and the bees didn’t have enough flowers, he refused to cut the flowers off our basil plants because “the bees have to eat too.”

He spends a large part of his day scanning weather updates on the internet to keep tabs on the storms that will make the plants grow and help him realize his green-bearded, vine-choked vision of Acorn Abbey. David’s mood—I’ve learned—is oftentimes directly linked to the weather. If it’s hot and dry for a protracted period of time, his curmudgeonly side is sure to rears its head. When the radar shows that other counties are getting dumped on when we’re not, he’s overcome with envy.

“It’s just our luck,” he says, gazing at a hopelessly blue sky. “I swear I’m going to sell this place in move to the mountains where there’s rain.”

The truth is that we do get our fair share of rain. And sometimes—even when we do—David is still unhappy if he knows some other place is getting more. David could be standing knee-high in a flood and still be dissatisified. “You think this is rain,” he’d say. “You should see what Yadkin County’s getting on the radar!”

When we get dumped on with rain, though, he’s as happy as can be—which is, to me, a reaction that only someone who dearly loves his home and feels a sense of unity with the natural world can have.

Anyway, I want to point out that the following are images of semi-sustainability because—of all the lessons I’ve learned this summer—I’ve realized that it takes a lot of determination, sweat, blood, money, know-how (of which I had none), and—most importantly—rain to even begin to live off the land.

It’s David’s goal to set the clocks back to 1935; to grow his own food and to cut back on all the non-necessities. It’s a work in progress. When he bought his five acres of land, the plot of land where his garden would go used to be a pine forest standing atop eye-stingingly acidic soil. To go from a stand of pines to a fully sustainable garden overnight is impossible. It takes time and a lot of work. That’s why he gave me room and board this summer.

These are not images of complete sustainability (if that’s even possible) quite yet. These are images of the projects we’ve undertaken to begin to lessen our dependence on the corporate food industry, and to sow the seeds today, which—hopefully—will make Acorn Abbey’s inhabitants happier and healthier human beings when reaped tomorrow.

Our first order of business was to build a fence. David’s garden and orchard—if left unprotected—would be at the mercy of a large white tail deer population. We bought around 40 4×4’s and 400 feet of six-foot-tall welded wire fencing. David—who prefers work in the kitchen—groaned and moaned throughout the process. I, however, loved every minute of it.

In order to dig the holes, we rented a two-man mechanical hole digger. David’s lawn was so clay-baked that it took us several days for the machine to dig the holes. The key was to hold onto the handles tightly because the torque of the machine was powerful enough to throw you if an insufficient amount of strength was applied.

Around hole 30 of 40, I started day-dreaming and lost focus. When the digger jolted against a rock I accidentally released the handles. When I regained my balance, I saw David in the air flying across the garden—zero-gravity-Matrix-style—as if he just took a roundhouse kick to the chest.

I apologized profusely after he staggered to his feet. There was a good cut on his shoulder, and he seemed a little rattled. The digger was still swinging round and round, helicoptering uncontrollably in the hole. The handles were moving so quickly and so violently, we didn’t dare try to grab them.

Here’s David about to do something stupid, which, thank god, he didn’t do.

Once the fence was up, we started planting. This is a grape trellis. We planted two native varieties (scuppernong and muscadine). They’ll start producing next year.

Here’s the orchard. Last year he planted eight apple trees. This year we added two peaches and three figs.

Here are three blueberry bushes. We have reason to suspect that Mr. Groundhog has been stealing all our berries this summer.

Our compost bin, at the moment, is overflowing. It’s 3/4ths full of chicken crap, which—from what I’ve heard—is rich in plant-loving nutrients. All our food waste goes to the chickens, which then goes to the bin. Next year, David will mulch the garden with the compost.

Our fall veggies just planted: beets, mustard, and turnip.

Early in the summer we went to a berry picking farm and made about 20 jars of strawberry preserves.

This is homemade blackberry pie. I picked the berries, David baked the pie.

I planted Shitake mushroom spores into these logs by a shaded creek on his land. If all goes well, these logs will be covered with mushrooms in 5-12 months, and will continue to produce for 3-5 years.

After the fence was erected, we let the chickens out of their coop to roam and wander. Since then, we feed them 75% less chicken mesh because they now snack on insects all day. The eggs, since then, have been noticeably tastier, and the chickens, noticeably happier.

David has five acres of land. We’ve developed one acre, and have allowed the other four acres to exist as an animal sanctuary. We have many different animals that call Acorn Abbey home. Among them are a few bats that are endangered in these parts. We put up two “bat houses” to encourage population growth. Below, there’s a picture of a bat that watched us eat dinner by clinging to the window screen.

We planted our crops in straw bales because David’s soil is still too poor for a proper garden to grow. In time, it will be revitalized with mulch, fertilizer, and compost.

What we can’t get from the garden, we get from a local farmers market. Once a month, David drives into town to get what we can’t get from the market like cheese, pasta, and rice.

Inspired by the film No Impact Man, we decided to stop using toilet paper, which kills trees and takes far longer to break down than human waste in his septic tank. On my hiking excursions, I’ve used leaves, sticks and rocks, so using a piece of cloth is no great sacrifice for me. This will, however, most certainly not be a custom I carry with me to Duke because carrying stinky rags with me on top of the van smells that have saturated into my skin would certainly ostracize me even more from the student body.

One reason to attempt to live sustainably is to limit your impact on the environment. Our food industry is floating on a sea of oil. We drive to the supermarket to buy food that has been shipped there from the ends of the earth, using up costly fossil fuels in the process. Organic farming or buying locally reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

But this is only half the reason why organic farming intrigues me. When in school, it’s easy for me to recognize just how incomplete my life is. When almost all of my time is spent in libraries and my nose in books, it’s only natural that I begin to feel desires for the fundamental ingredients of a happy life that are clearly missing from my day-to-day existence. For me, those desires—among others—are for physical labor and the outdoors.

One of my favorite pastimes this summer has been sitting on the porch and admiring my day’s labor. I love feeling tired, and fulfilled after a hard day’s work. I love wolfishly devouring the food I’ve planted in great quantities. Most of all, I love lifting heavy things, getting my clothes drenched in sweat, and being covered from head to toe in dirt.

Too much time spent on the computer last semester gave me my first nasty case of Carpel tunnel. My palms turn soft and delicate; my fingers, aristocratic. That’s my biggest gripe with my lifestyle at school: there’s a huge imbalance between seclusion and society, work and leisure, security and independence, work of the mind and work of the body. I could work sixteen hours straight on some meaningful essay or article, and go to bed not feeling half as fulfilled with my day’s labor as I would on a day that I’d planted trees for an hour.

What is the best way to live is a question I continually ponder. I certainly don’t have it all figured out, but after each endeavor and after each experience, I feel I’m slowly getting there. Just to throw a few numbers out there… I think this formula might best suit me spread out over the course of a given year: 5 weeks of hard physical labor (chopping wood, building fence, lifting heavy things), 35 weeks of light labor (maintaining garden, tending animals) and 12 weeks of ultra-light labor (cooking, cleaning).

My mind turns soft when my body does, so I view hard physical labor as less a pain and more an essential need. I like to bleed a little everyday. Maybe scrape my arm against a blackberry bush, or slice open a tender callus. I prefer tough, desensitized hands; the sort of hands terrible for love-making; hands—armed with jagged-edged calluses—that are so rough they’d leave white lines of scraped skin cells on a woman like barbed-wire scars on a cow.

When you’re working for yourself and living minimally, my experience tells me that work no longer feels like work. And no longer does your work life feel separate from your personal life; rather, they become intimately entwined. And the pace and seclusion of abbey life gives its monks time for meditation, art, books, and the enjoyment of simple things: watching the chickens scratch, looking at the stars at night, listening to the wind blow in the trees.

Of course, monk life is not without drawbacks. On my few excursions into town, I found that some of my social skills had atrophied considerably. When I bumped into people, I was overly self-conscious, even nervous.

Over the course of the summer, I’ve probably seen less than a dozen cars pass David’s home. Sometimes David will casually remark that the “neighbors are out walking.” I pretend not to be excited, but within seconds my palms are plastered to the window pane like a suction-cupped Garfield. I take in the views of their each stride with as much wonder and delight as if we’d spotted an alien starship carving crop circles in the field out yonder.

To get out more, I’d occasionally take runs down sleepy country roads to the Dan River. David loves apple pie, so when I spotted someone who has an apple tree I stopped to try to talk her into giving me some.

“Dems dare some mighty fine apples you got,” I said, admiring her tree. Why I suddenly started speaking in a caricatured southern dialect both baffled and worried me.

The woman looked at me curiously but kindly. “Well, thank you,” she said.

“Lord a’mercy, I reckon that they’d make a mighty fine pie. Any chance I could buy a few off you.” Lord a’ mercy? Why the fuck are you speaking this way? This isn’t even how southern people talk.

“These apples ain’t mine. Let me ask Genie if you can have some.” She looked over to the double wide and yelled “GENIE!!” A naked black toddler stumbled out, followed by Genie—a large white woman with straggly brown hair.

“This man here wants to buy some apples from us.”

“I’s jus lookin at dem mighty fine apples of yurs them-air yonder. I feels like I ain’t had sump’n teet so good as apple pie since Sherman marched through Savannah.” By this time, I wanted to forget about the apples and get away. The women looked at each other confused.

“Well, they ain’t ready yet,” Genie said. “But you can come back in a couple weeks when they’re ripe. Are you out runnin? Do you want a glass of water?”

“Oh no missus. I sure don’ wanna kick up a ruckus. I hafta get going anyway,” I said, starting to run away.

“Well you can pick the apples whenever you want. Sure you don’t want any water? It’s awfully hot out.”

“I do declare,” I said, now in mid-stride.

I made my way to the Dan. It was a Monday afternoon and I had the river all to myself. Below is my first and—don’t worry—last poem that will grace the pages of this blog.

I’m sittin nipple-high in the Dan

Ain’t got no schedule. Ain’t got no plan

Got nowhere to go. Got nowhere to be soon

Just thought I’d sit in the Dan this Monday afternoon

On the bridge ahead, one guy’s watchin me He’s wearin an orange hardhat I can see Wonder what he’s thinking of me just sittin there Without any worry, without any care

Maybe he’s thinkin, as he takes his breather that I got no job. No woman, no money neither And he can prolly tell that I got no 401(k), nor any insurance plan but that’s just fine, cause it ain’t me lookin at him sittin in the Dan

(Thanks go to David for a few of the photos, and of course for letting me stay with him.)

Rule of Thumb #12: Trust

Days 25-28. June 8-11, 2007. Aurora, Colorado to Niagara Falls, New York. (1,757 miles)

“Keep your hands where I can see them!” the cop screeched. “Put them on the hood of your van!”

Tom and I stood side by side with our palms flat against the hood of his massive white Chevy. I’d seen scenes like this played out hundreds of times in movies, so I spread my legs as wide as I could, as if struggling to do a split.

Tom—a Korean-born, American-adopted, 29-year-old cook—had picked me up that morning in Aurora, Colorado. I knew an old friend just outside of Denver so I stayed at his place for a day, vegging out, watching films, and updating my journal. I found Tom on Craigslist where he put up an ad looking for passengers to help pay for gas on his road trip from his home in Oregon to the east coast.

Around the time we drove through Lincoln, Nebraska it was getting dark so we decided to get off the I-80 in hopes of finding a quiet place to park and set up camp for the night.

On a sleepy country road we happened upon an abandoned school next to what looked like a thousand-mile-long square of cornfield illuminated by the moon. The stars sparkled and crickets strung us a steady electric hum. We cracked open a few PBRs and boiled ramen noodles on our stoves for dinner.

It was a fairly idyllic scene until we were interrupted by a dark figure who advanced toward us with a flashlight. We called out “Hi there!,” but he turned off his light and shuffled away in the opposite direction. Tom and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and continued enjoying our meals. Fifteen minutes later, another man bearing a flashlight emerged from the cornfield.

“How many of you are there?” the man growled in the dark.

“Just us,” Tom said casually.

“How many of you are there?” he repeated. He came close enough so that we could see he was a policeman.

“Two.”

“Is there anybody else?”

“No just us,” we both said, each, now, with voices quavering.

“Keep your hands where I can see them! Put them on the hood of the van,” demanded the cop, who sounded far more frightened than we did.

“What are you guys doing?” he said, oscillating his light from side to side.

“Camping, I guess,” I said.

“Do you have anything… You know… illegal?”

“No.”

“Can I see your IDs?”

“My wallet is inside in the center console in the van,” Tom said.

“Can I go in and search your van?”

“Yeah, sure, I don’t care,” Tom said.

“YES OR NO!?” the cop roared, clearly dissatisfied with Tom’s word choice.

“

Sure, I don’t care. I mean, Yes!” Tom sputtered nervously.

The cop proceeded to scour the van for anything, you know, illegal. I was still pressed against the hood, my groin beginning to feel the strain. After he got done looking in the van, he dipped his hand deep into my back pocket, giving my ass a deep tissue massage as he struggled to fish out my wallet.

“This is private property,” the cop said. “You can’t be here. Why do you think it’s okay to be here?”

“We didn’t know,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Well you can’t be here. People get pretty heated in these parts. You guys just wait here. I’m going to see if anything was stolen.” He ambled over to the abandoned school that, from what we could tell, only contained a scattering of wooden chairs draped in spider webs.

Seeing that the chairs were still in place strewn across the floor, the cop let us go and gave us directions to Mahoney State Park, where we parked for the night, electing not to pay the required camping fee on our way out the next morning.

Tom was headed to Grand Rapids, Michigan to see a friend from a Bible camp he used to work at. For the whole next day we play acted our dialogue with the cop.

“Okay, I want to be the cop this time,” I’d tell Tom. By the time I got to “YES OR NO!?” I’d be giggling uncontrollably.

While Tom snoozed in the passenger seat, I popped in a Neil Young CD mix that Natalia had made for me. We were cruising along Iowa’s Highway 30—one of the prettiest roads I’ve ever been on. Tom and I had—it seemed—wandered into a Norman Rockwell painting. The modest country homes looked as if they’d just received a fresh coating of paint the week before. The fields were neat and trim, with lines of rich black soil in between the crop rows. Curvy, parallel arcs of corn stood strong and erect.

Tom was smart and funny and we got along. And like on almost all my other rides, we ended up sharing intimate details of our lives. I told him about my Natalia conundrum: how I thought I’d found the “one,” yet didn’t have the slightest urge to settle down. He told me about the depression he’d suffered from for years, related to his adoption. He even admitted that he’d even tried to take his life.

Tom was a Bible “literalist” meaning that he takes everything the Bible says literally. “Even Noah’s Arc?” I asked. “What about Adam and Eve?” I asked him these questions politely, but deep down I couldn’t help but question the sanity of someone who believes it’s possible to live inside a fish for three days. He wasn’t pushy with his beliefs and I didn’t force the issue, so we managed to dodge what could have been a bond-breaking religious row.

After having my first (and last) White Castle burger experience in Illinois, we parked for the night on a patch of grass near Lake Michigan. Tom slept on the bed in the back and I wormed into my sleeping bag on the van floor in front of the middle pilot chairs. In the morning, we could see the towers of Chicago in the distance.

We arrived at his friend Michelle’s parents’ home in Grand Rapids in the late afternoon of our third day together. Their home sat nicely in an affluent, upper-middle class suburban neighborhood. The family ordered us a pizza and we recounted the scene with the Nebraskan cop much to everyone’s delight. Michelle said we could sleep there tonight.

The family looked a little too perfect. The father wore slacks, and tucked in a polo that had a little alligator stitched onto the breast. The mother wore a yellow sundress. Michelle’s brother—get this—parted his hair. Hedgerows were expertly trimmed and the home was immaculately clean. Their coffee table was so polished I could clearly see my three day’s worth of stubble.

Maybe they really were perfect. But it all just seemed so strange to me because I come from a family in which males are considered “overdressed” if they’re wearing something more than a six-year-old pair of briefs; and a home where things are “clean” even when a tumbleweed of golden retriever sheddings bounce from one end of the kitchen to the other.

After supper we went down into their refurbished basement where Michelle and her brother popped in the film “Bruce Almighty.” Halfway through, her father came down the stairs. I saw Michelle look at him frightfully and I wondered what was about to happen.

Tom saw what I saw, too, so all eyes were on the father who sat down on the sofa and nervously rubbed his hands from his thighs to his knees.

“So,” the father said, looking at me and Tom, “have you guys been sleeping in your van at night?”

Tom said that we had been.

“Well,” the father started. “I’m not really comfortable with two guys sleeping here with Michelle and her mom.”

“That’s fine,” Tom jumped in, eager to get started on ‘damage control.’ “We totally understand.”

“Me and Michelle’s mother talked, and we’re not very comfortable with two guys in the house. I thought you guys all knew each other better. I’m sorry. I hope you can see it from my perspective.”

And so, we were kicked out of the house. I’m not sure what did it. Maybe it was the fact that I was a hitchhiker. Or that Tom and I had only known each other for two days. Or perhaps the mother was taken aback when she caught me swiping my finger on her mantel piece in search of a morsel of dust.

Tom and I went back to the van. I derided the father, but Tom was more forgiving. No one appeared to trust us, but Tom trusted me enough to let me sleep in his van, and drive it half the time. In fact, we got along so well that he decided to take a detour to Niagara Falls so he could see the Falls for the first time and to drop me off at my home.

On our fourth and final day together, we opted to take a shortcut through Ontario, Canada, but Canada wouldn’t let us in because Tom didn’t have his registration or passport, and because there was something on his record about peeing on a police car in a drunken stupor five years before.

Instead of going through Canada, we drove through Detroit, a city that—between the mile-long lines of contiguous graffiti and pavement so cracked it looks like it rains anvils in Michigan—makes the roads of Buffalo (my equally depressed hometown) seem like the sort of place where floating angels welcome road-tripping visitors with harpsichords.

Then we briefly passed through Ohio and Pennsylvania en route to New York.

I knew that, at this point, with a few hours of daylight left, I was finally going to make it home. I hadn’t seen my friends or family in over a year. While I had lived away from home before, I’d never been gone for more than a couple months at a time.

As I drew closer, I became more and more excited. I was ready for my journey to end. I was, however, a little anxious about telling my mom about how I traveled home.

At a gas station in Pennsylvania, I cooked up my last Mountain House meal on my backpacking stove. A gruff-looking middle-aged clerk rushed out to ask what I was doing.

“Just boiling water.”

“Whew…” he said, greatly relieved, his hands on his hips. “I thought you were lighting a bomb or something. You never know these days.”

For the last year I’d been almost completely out of touch with the news, but I thought I surely would have heard something about terrorists targeting Sonocos and Exxons in rural America. Oh, the paranoia. Over the course of my journey, I’d learned that paranoia had swept across our once wild and courageous and free country as if some giant cropduster had flown over in sown fear into the bellies of every man, woman, and child.

Almost every ride would tell me something along the lines of: “You know, you shouldn’t be hitching in this day and age. It ain’t how it used to be. Nope. Times are different now.” They’d look wistfully out the window, imagining a different time—some time long ago when the world was supposedly a

safer, kinder, nicer place.

By the time this journey was winding down, I’d come to a very different conclusion—a conclusion that I still wholeheartedly believe.

The Nebraskan cop, Michelle’s father, and this gas station clerk live in a world where people fear before they trust. It’s a world where people are afraid to go for walks at night. Where parents don’t let their kids wander through their neighborhood. Where young men and women don’t think about embarking on adventures for fear of all the terribleness out there.

I’d seen a different world. One that is full of beauty and wonder and adventure. A world where people are welcomed with open arms into open homes. It’s a world where we see the best in people instead of seeing the worst. A world where even a cynic can come to love and feel pride for his country and countrymen.

This world, of course, is not devoid of danger, but it’s not crawling with marauding hordes of rapists, child molesters, and face-masked henchmen as many seem to believe it to be.

As Tom drove us through my rural-suburban hometown of Wheatfield, the streets that I’d driven a thousand times before seemed different now; they carried a strange air of “newness” to them. Yet, they looked exactly the same.

We arrived at my home late; around 10:30 pm. I knew my dad was probably out working the night shift and I predicted that my mom had fallen asleep in her bed with the TV on. Tom parked the van and I walked into the house (unlocked as it always is) and up the stairs to my parents’ room.

I anticipated a dramatic embrace. “Ken!” I figured my mom would exclaim. “My baby boy. You’re home!” She’d leap out of bed, give me a hug and kiss me on the cheek.

I went into her room and woke her up.

“Mom, I’m home. It’s Ken,” I whispered.

She lifted the covers and moved her feet to the floor without saying a word.

I remember how, under my bedroom door, she used to slide newspaper clippings about how to get on the fast track to become a biomedical engineer, or some career or other that didn’t befit my interests or education in the slightest. I remember how, when I told her I was moving up to Alaska again, she exclaimed, “Oh, no you’re not.”

She was looking facedown at the rug, probably piecing her thoughts together, trying to figure out what I’d been up to again. So it was fitting that her first words were “Ken, why do you do this to me?” which she uttered (rhetorically) before staggering to her feet and giving me a hug.

“How did you get here?” she asked.

“Uh… well a guy named Tom gave me a ride.”

It was late and I didn’t want to further excite her by revealing how I’d gotten across the continent. I led Tom to the couch in the living room where he’d sleep for the night. I stretched my limbs to the corners of my water bed underneath the Super Mario fan whose revolutions had whirred me to sleep many a night before.

I thought about how much I’d seen and how far I’d come. I’d fired a Tommy Gun in a gravel yard in Alaska. I’d seen 30 black bears one day in British Columbia. I crossed the border of two great nations. I’d slept in a Mormon church. I’d seen mountains and lakes and rivers and wavy green plains. I’d been in vehicles with ex-cons, drunks, addicts, hunters, truckers, immigrants, carnies, retirees, doomers, and a 300-pound Yukon woman. And I’d seen and said goodbye to my beautiful and loving girlfriend.

I’d spent the last month traveling across 5,500 miles of our great continent. From Coldfoot to Niagara Falls; from my new life back to my old one.

I think it’s true that—as the proverb goes—that it’s not as much about the destination as it is the journey; and that upon arriving at your destination—depending on your expectations—one might feel disappointment; that it may seem anticlimactic.

As my lids closed, I’m sure I was smiling because I knew, right then and there, that my journey was far from over. No, no, no. This… this was just the beginning.

***

Epilogue

The next morning my dad took us out for breakfast, I took Tom to the Maid of the Mist at Niagara Falls, and then we shook hands and said goodbye, making promises to stay in touch, which we never held ourselves to.

That afternoon my aunt came over and I recounted my journey to her and my mom at the kitchen table. They were visibly upset, yet seemed entranced with the tale. While my mother didn’t appreciate being lied to, she did acknowledge that she would have been worried sick otherwise.

Natalia and I kept our long-distanced relationship together for the summer, but we had a cordial separation in the fall.

I suppose I haven’t said anything about why I was traveling home. In just two weeks I would embark on a 60-day canoe voyage across Ontario, Canada. I and three others would live as the 18th Century voyageurs, paddling birch bark canoes and using gear and clothes that were “period correct.” But that is, I’m afraid, another story that will have to be told another day.