Walking Home
July 21
2024
Last time you heard from me, we were just approaching the halfway point. I now write to you from Warwick, NY and let me tell you, it has not been an easy time getting here. The first task was making it through Pennsylvania, an impassible labyrinth of razor-sharp rock. Picture, if you will, a stretch of about 150 miles; sometimes you're clambering over gargantuan rock piles, kind of like someone bought a mountain at IKEA and never bothered to assemble it, and other times it's like the entire earth has been covered in infinite quantities of jagged teeth, which you have to somehow pick your way through without twisting or spraining every joint in your body. It's a feet-eater, Pennsylvania, it's a shoe-chewer. It's also home to approximately 18 quadrillion affectionately-suicidal gnats, such that by the end of the day, it looks like you've been sprinkled with a giant pepper shaker.
Luckily, things mellow out fairly quickly after the state line. The rocks get a bit smoother in New Jersey and slowly coalesce into the mountainous rock flows that make up my home state of New York. The weather also for this stretch has been an improvement. Nothing above the mid-80's, and humidity a definite notch or two lower than the underwater levels of Virginia. The one notable exception was a massive, surprise thunderstorm a week or so back that took my poor tarp to task. I woke up in the middle of the night to a very wet bivy and in desperate need of a replacement shelter. Needless to say this left me in quite low spirits for a few days. On the trail the lows can be quite low just as the highs are abnormally high but this low was different for a very important reason: for the first time in 4 months, I was experiencing this low alone.
I decided to leave my tramily in Duncannon, Pennsylvania. I’ve been hiking on my own ever since. My reasons are complicated, and still a bit too jumbled up inside of me to try and articulate here. Suffice it to say I’m at a crossroads. I find myself the closest I’ve been to home in months and I’ve been thinking about the city and you, my readers. I think I’ve decided I’m going to catch the train in. I’ve had my Mom send a package with a replacement tarp and other stuff I need to that local gear shop in Crown Heights. If you’re in the city, which from some of your comments I think a few of you might be, would you meet me? I know that might sound crazy - I probably feel like a story in your head, like a character from a book that has just asked to leap off the page. I want to bring the story to you now. I’m struggling with what it all means and I don’t think there’s anyone else in my life who can understand quite like you can. You’ve been there since the beginning…will you meet me somewhere in the confused middle? I hope you will.