5/1- Contrasts of Luxuries

Not much more than 36 hours pass by and I go from packing up my gear, tucked away in some woods by the side of the road, to dropping my pack on a big, comfy, fluffy bed. The contrast between the two stagger me in a rather unexpected way. The progression from one end to the other flowed quite steadily and quickly, as well, yet I'm still surprised to see where my brain has ended up in its thinking.

Todd talks mostly of what we did over those days so hopefully you've read his post as a guideline for what the events were, and the details in between. Essentially, we set off into walking mode again now that his heel had healed and were in a nice unhurried pace that took us about 10 miles. With the notion of my Mom coming to pick us up Saturday we felt no need to make it to any specific spot. We were gaining a glimpse of the luxury of freedom from having to reach anything. This is something we've been looking forward to after we reach Michigan and fulfill our urge to see everyone here. We still were hoping to get rides so we could close the gap and shorten my Mom's drive down to get us, if not eliminate it, but spoiled by the offer we felt no desperation behind our drive.

This freed up our mindsets to relax and have coffee in front of the Wawas and talk with people who stopped to talk with us. I felt no need to push to keep walking, not that that would do much for us anyway, but usually if I need to be somewhere I get overwhelmed with a compulsion to be there early to get that out of the way. I'm a work then play sort of guy. Never-the-less, despite this meandering mindset we were in we covered more ground on foot than we had before as well as met quite a few interesting characters along the way that Todd talked about. Let that be a lesson to me.

At the end of the day of this curiosity driven hike, on the offer of a free round of beer, which I saw as a free round of sitting in a nice roadside dive bar getting to chat with locals, we felt free to spontaneously drop in and made a night of it. It was a great time, and made us quite aware that that was exactly the sort of thing we should be doing more of on this trip. There's strapping on a pack and going out hiking for the experience of it, then there's going out on a trip with just what you can carry so you can meet more people and see what is really going on in the world. The latter was always said to be one of the main ideas for this adventure, but we seem to continually need to remind ourselves to get out there and do it rather than hole away in the woods.

From this bar excursion at The Corbin Cafe we dropped enough money to move ourselves well into next week's budget, but we could care less from what we got out of it. Meeting Wendy, and everyone there with their stories, and her offer to put us up for the night made sharp the drifting focus of kindness from strangers that Todd and I have both felt in our previous trips. It reinvigorates you to keep exploring and keep looking around. Not to sleep in someone's pop-up trailer or eat the food you're fed in the morning; but to witness generosity first hand with frequency and prove to yourself that the world has not only not gone to shit, but is in fact pretty good still on a person to person level.

So within that 24 hour period I went from sleeping in shrubs to sleeping on a mattress in a trailer. Waking up, Wendy prepared us a huge breakfast for the rest of our walk ahead of us. Again, we spent that day walking down the roads aiming for Mays Landing with the now fading, to lost, hope of getting a ride. The illegality of hitching in Jersey seemed to have stuck tightly in people's craw which I was honestly a bit surprised at. It was a rain threatening day that hung a nasty clout of muggy in the air.

When I called my Mom to let her know we'd failed at finding a ride, and to arrange a pick up, I discovered her drive to Mays Landing would be three hours one way. On top of that it was supposed to rain that day and with her back all of that wrapped together was no good. With all our fixation on envisioning ourselves there by the next night we then worked out a plan to just simply bus up. The spoiled luxury of not worrying about destination was revoked and with even only having one day of that, still having a full week to make it north before my sister arrived, we cracked and decided on bussing up with little thought to the adventure that would be missed in that. We formed a plan to march hard to Mays Landing which, if we allowed ourselves only a 10 minute rest, we'd just make a bus to Atlantic City. From there we could grab another bus to NYC where she could then grab us.

The sky then began to open up with rain. As we strapped on our packs to hustle suddenly a mini van pulled a double U-turn and pulled up next to us. We'd had no luck hailing rides since Monday in Delaware and as soon as we decided to commit to the fast route through New Jersey a middle aged woman, on her own, stopped to pick up two haggard looking guys off the side of the road claiming she never picks up hitchers but something had told her to get us. She even went so far as to attribute it to a Heavenly command which I found intensely interesting and which we talked about the whole way up as the clouds emptied themselves outside.

I was so intrigued by the sudden occurrence of her feeling of being called upon that, as she pulled into the station, a train was just pulling in and I jumped on it figuring that just must be the train we should be on. Quite possibly really stupid and following the heat of a gut feeling, but she had showed up right when we needed her to and had no question in stopping and taking us to the train station in Egg Harbor City, past Mays Landing, which just hit us while we were riding with her. She suprisingly then called her son, whom she was meeting, to say she'd be about 20 minutes late because she had to drop "these two guys" off in Egg Harbor.

The train went to Philly. The next train to NYC was in 20 minutes so we got tickets and went there. When we got into Penn Station the next train to my Mom's house also left in 20 minutes, so we got those tickets and were at her door by 10pm. It was so quick, so fluid, and so easy. I dropped my pack upstairs and caught up with my Mom and step dad, Musty, oddly unphased by how simple getting there suddenly had been. It seems this East Coast phase is not the time for us to walk or hitch.

This last luxury shift, from feet and dirt beds, to road bars and trailers mattresses, to, finally, train rides and the comfort of a family home with all the amenities didn't really hit me until late in the night. At my home in Denver I don't watch TV, in fact, I only use my TV for watching movies and haven't watched TV as a regular habit since probably 1996. Once the visiting was done and everyone had gone to bed, I found myself wanting to just sit down stairs and brain out to something entirely mind numbing on the tube. This may seem completely normal and understandable to people, but this was the last thing I could see myself seeking after the kind of travel I've been doing these past weeks.

As I sat there, at about 2am, I realized that it had only been 4 hours since I'd gotten in and already the travel was slipping in my mind as something that was passed and done. Almost dreamlike in that way an exotic vacation is when you get back to work. It reminded me of a waitress I met a few days before I got into Denver back in 2003 on my walk. She'd asked what I was doing and I said I'd spent the past 5 months walking across the country because I'd always wanted to. She looked like she really liked that notion and said that that didn't seem like a bad way to waste some time. The question had hit me then of why is it that doing these things that we really like, that really makes us feel alive, is seen as a waste of time? Why, also, is trudging through work not seen as a waste of time? If you love your work then its a moot question, but so often I meet people who don't but still take that attitude.

That feeling that I got, that the trip already felt like a past dream after only 4 hours, and this question of what wasted time is also reminded me of that notion you have of a kid of being anxious to get into the real world. All of this combined because being back at my Mom's house felt like the real world to me, and it had quickly hit me that this trip didn't. It hit me quite hard that I was still not seeing this trip as something permanent, but as a vacation. That was disturbing to me because what I was very wary of, when Todd and I first started talking about doing this last summer, was that I wasn't looking for an escape, or a trip away to relax. I've pulled back enough over the past years to look over where my next forward steps were going to take me, I'm at the point where I'm now quite ready to start taking them. The fact that this switch could flip so quickly and easily made me aware that I was still not seeing this trip this way.

This separation between "real world" and traveling need to be blended otherwise all the things I'm thinking that could be accomplished on this trip won't happen. It will be like Levin in Anna Karenina who would create brilliant theories while alone in the back country, but as soon as he got into society and tried to implement them practically he'd see there was nothing but useless idealism there.

Its fear of this as to where the past two days culminate into a lesson for me. Rushing through this phase of this experience is seeing the experience through a finite lens of being something temporary. I have no desire to live the rest of my life roaming around in a backpack, but I do want to figure out how to live indefinitely that way so that I think on the level of permanent ideas that I can begin practicing immediately, rather than idealistic ideas that, in that mindset, I'd feel were perfect but unable to apply until I was stable. Keeping the mindset that this traveling is real life, and not a breather from it, will make me "stable" and therefore leave me with no excuse as to why I can't start practicing any idea right away. Then the reason to quit traveling around comes from a lack of feeling a need to do it, rather than from the want to have community, comfort, and stability back when I tire of wanderlust.

When the time comes that I want to really work on opening a shop, which requires staying put, I want to know I'm stopping and working on that because that honestly is what I want to do. I don't want it to be a self excuse for me to cut an exploration short because I'm going through a difficult time and jump to the opposite of what I'm doing at the time as the solution to the problem.

Click here for Todd's perspective.