4/26- The Awaited Wait

The Buddhists say life is change and the Greeks taught life is balance. I've always gone along with these things, but these days I'm really getting my head well wrapped around the two concepts. Sunday and Monday would also prove to be good lessons on our continued study of relaxing and letting life do the driving.

Once again we rose around 8:30, but this time we were heading out within an hour. There was no feel of a rush about it, we just woke up ready to go. It would be the first day Todd would truly introduce me to the wait-and-hitch method that he tried to introduce a few days earlier to my great agitation. This time I felt like a kid out of school, it was great.

As he noted I spent the first half the morning kicking back on the gas station curb writing up posts for the previous days. I finished after a few hours then just leaned back and watched the people go by, the waves of busy to dead that would ebb and flow in an oddly reliable pattern. That took us until around 3 when the sun made its way west and blasted us off our curb with intense heat.

Switching over to a guardrail for a few hours, then making our way down to the Food Lion, I was just reveling in how relaxed I felt about not moving anywhere. As I've said before, normally I find goals to push myself toward and get antsy when I feel stagnant. This is also my main problem with living in one apartment, or city, for any sustained duration. What the revelation was here was that I felt no rush, no need to get anything done, but no sense of being stagnant in anyway. I had no control over when we would catch a ride, where it would take us to, and with Todd's, now considered, Holy Wounded Heel to teach us to slow down again there was no thought of leaving on foot either.

I will concede I did have a crutch to help me relax that day. Early in the morning at the gas station my mind was still dabbling in "how long do we sit here before we decide no one is picking up two male back packers. Two days, three, a week?" To satiate my drivers mind I got myself giggling about having a Tortoise and the Hare race. I still really like the idea.

The race would be between Todd and I and over whose method would get them to Lewes first. I would be the tortoise with my slow but steady walking pace which, on my own, would probably be at about 20 miles a day. Todd would be the hare with his wait and sprint method. On his own he could quite likely pick up a ride on his own within an hour or two taking him 20 to 30 miles in half an hour, if not the whole way in an hour. We both got giggling about the concept. We figured if we were still there just sitting and waiting by Wednesday, four days later, we give it a go. That notion gave me the concrete vision of being in Lewes one way or another by Friday.

A bit of cheating on learning to wait, but sometimes crutches can help you learn if you're severely in need of a lesson. I never would have guessed it before, but I was in dire need and it illustrated itself beautifully between that day and the next. As Todd has already noted in his post, everything rolled out for us after that day fruitless of rides. Scouting out the "brotherhood camp" lead from our friendly librarian we found ourselves in a fully equipped State Park, complete with incredibly hospitable and friendly rangers, and a place to build a fire to stare into until about 1 or 2 in the morning. A good long stare into a fire is probably the most primal, yet best way to debrief yourself on the lessons of the day.

Click here for Todd's perspective.