6/23- Beth

Again I missed the house heading off to work, though I'd kind of figured I would and said my goodbyes the night before. The plan for today was to meet up with Ang's friend Beth who I'd half assedly tried to call the week before when I was in Curtice, but made the serious attempt from Dave and Lindsay's with great success. I also figured out where the school was that Loreli had attended on a scholarship and a nearby library where I could meet Beth at. The school was the landmark I had thought I was heading to the day before on my meander.

After my morning coffee I packed up my things I said goodbye to the house, this time heading north along the river. The heat had kicked up a notch hitting probably somewhere in the 90s. It was a three mile walk to the library and it was time to get a taste of just how stupid I had been about piling so much weight in Ole Blue. Dripping in sweat I found my way to her old school and got a picture, then back to the library just as it opened its doors at noon. Beth would be meeting me there at 1pm and I was allotted an hour on the computer, so the timing worked out perfectly.

Most of my time was consumed by a really impressive, insightful email from my friend Marion, whom I'd met up with in NYC last month for the first time in 13 years. I had received it when I got to the library the day before but only had time to read it and not respond. This was a fortunate slight of timing in that I needed another reading to really soak in everything she had to say comparing many of the similarities between our fathers' situations among other outlooks. I did my best to articulate a decent response of insights right back, but I don't think my fingers were properly connected to my head for accurate communication. A small taste of what she said that I've taken with me was that "we humans are a little dumb sometimes". Succinctly summing up this lesson I keep having to relearn, and am in the process of relearning again, that we can be told the exact solution to all our ailments in life but we won't soak them up until we learn them ourselves. That's where the incessant lesson of patience keeps biting me on the ass, and has been nibbling on mine with relentless vigor for the past week or two.

Not long after my time was up there Beth arrived on cue to ferry me away through Ang's past this time. I liked Beth immediately. She didn't know what to do with the day either, but was just as content to drive around aimlessly as I was. We spent a little while trying to find the "crackhead" apartment Ang had told me about, which was when she lived above a crack den. Then we settled on lunch at Freeway, which was a favorite greasy spoon of theirs from back in the day.

Our waitress was adorable. Beth had gotten a sundae, while I indulged in a cheeseburger, but was one to take her time with it. The little old lady kept popping by wondering why she hadn't completely gorged herself on it in a fury and insisted that she'd failed us and given her a bad sundae. When we left we'd intended to get a picture of the two of us in front of the old haunt, but in true tradition we both completely forgot about it until we had long left.

From there we parked downtown by the river and strolled along the waterfront, another favorite past time of theirs. While there Ang happened to call to check in and make sure we had actually connected, so they talked for a bit while I looked over the Maumee River. Afterward we wandered our way into a three storey antique shop for an hour or so picking through the goods.

Ultimately the day was just spent moseying about talking about what she's up to these days, and what the two of them used to do before Ang lit off to Denver. After the antique store we drove around a little until I realized I should probably start thinking about where I'd be camping out that night. Beth drove me out about a mile past the western loop of I-475 on Rt. 2 and wished me well from there. On our way out of town we talked about the possibility of her visiting Ang later in the summer, so we split ways with the notion of maybe seeing each other again out in Denver.

It was about 6pm when she dropped me off leaving me a good amount of time to walk a ways and ferret out a good place to bed down for the night. Where I'd gotten a taste of the unwieldy weight I'd put on in my pack, now I began to get the full dose. The heat had risen up to somewhere in the mid-90s if not higher with 100% humidity, and my pack was now likely around 60 lbs. After about two or three miles I picked up quite a bit of water as well to cook with that night sending the pack back up to probably 70 lbs. The weight wasn't as much the problem as the design of it was at that weight. It began cutting into my back.

By 8pm I'd made it three miles down Rt. 2 and another mile down a side road that would become County Rd. J. I was drenched with sweat, overheated, exhausted from the excess weight, and starting to be in pain from the poor hip belt design carving little holes over where I think my kidneys are. I ducked into a dense little thicket about an acre big and dropped down into a swarm of mosquitoes. I had been hoping to cook a nice meal with all that water I'd picked up, but was so aggravated by the assault of vampiric little needles that I just flopped out my bivy and scooted in as quickly as I could to escape. I was, however, pleasantly surprised that I didn't roast in the open sun while it was still out over the next two hours, but instead was treated to breathable cool shade as well as shielded from the bugs. After an hour of watching the swarms persisting against the mesh I dared letting a hand out to my bag in order to dig up Bob's bug coils he'd given us. Lighting a few of those cleared the air in a few minutes to the point where I could pop my head out and lay out under the setting sun for the night.