Lookout Mountain

N 35.0135° W 85.3416°
I sat with my Camelbak behind my head, my body cupped in the slant of the rock, twisted at the hips, my legs crossed and crooked. The heat was oppressive. I couldn't stay awake, really: I couldn't. The fellowship meal at the East Ridge Adventist Church had knocked me out. Postprandial.
When I woke up, the back of my shirt was drenched in water that had leaked from my Camelbak's bladder. I hadn't cranked the lid closed. The rubber gasket is failing slowly, and though I guess that's something I could replace, it's something I won't. Not yet. Besides, that way I had a healthy base of wetness to use as a starting point as we hiked up to Point Park from Craven's house on the eastern edge of Lookout Mountain.
If you're savvy like me, you buy an America the Beautiful pass which gets you free parking and entrance at Point Park on the Saturday you arrive and at the lake above Ocoee Dam 1 the Saturday before you leave. If you're savvy like the young adults from East Ridge, you park at Craven's house for free and walk to the top, again: for free. My method would have involved a lot less sweating, anyway. The summit path we walked snaked back and forth up the mountain, twisting over ruts and logs and hillocks. The ridge pushed up into the sky on one side and slid down to the river on the other. My shoes clicked on the occasional rock, and I could feel sweat sliding down my back with the leaked water from my backpack.
"Hey, Curtis."
"Yeah."
"I've been asking people this question and I want to know your answer. If you were ruler of the world, what would be your first three orders of business, and where would you put your secret base?"
"Oh, okay."
"It doesn't have to be secret. Where would you put your base?" For whatever reason, my mind always jumps ahead of me, and I unconsciously assume that to become supreme ruler, you would essentially have to be a supervillain and your base would, therefore, be secret.
"Let me think," Curtis pants out, breath on the edge of ragged.
I ask these sorts of questions a lot. I don't know if mind exercises are just easier, or if they feel fun and that's why they work, but an insane hypothetical tends to draw people out faster than, say, asking about their first breakup or their mom's quilting. It's all harmless, but I can poke at things when it's your fake future we're discussing, and not your real past. I can pull things apart, and you don't get hurt by it. When I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway, I asked this question of Sarah.
"I would put my base in the Painted Desert." I heard her say she would put her "face" there, and I thought that would be awesome.
"What, like visible from space, or something?"
"No, invisible. I would make it blend with the landscape."
"So you would use native rocks and vegetation, and . . ."
"Yeah, really make it blend in."
I had a picture of an enormous woman's face staring out from the rocks of the high plains at anyone lucky enough to get a hundred kilometers above. I thought this was brilliant, and said so.
"No, my base."
"Oh, that's disappointing."
Sarah said she would change the world's economic incentives to be oriented towards the greater good, not personal gain. "Wealth," she argued, "should not be the major motivator of human actions."
"Okay. But what if my greater good--my personal happiness--is dependent on how fast a car I can drive? And I don't need to go to school for that. Just get me a fast car."
"You have to go to school."
"So who decides what this ultimate good is? Because if it's not me . . ."
"I decide. You go to school."
"Can I still get that fast car, though?"
"It can't be a gas guzzler. Probably a Tesla."
"Okay, you have my vote. I'll take mine now, please."
We did laugh, but I poked the weaknesses in her economic platform a few more times just to see if they poked back. I'm not sure, but I think that might be why we won't be friends forever, why she didn't give me her phone number and I didn't press her for it. Why when I make it to Oakland, I'll ride past the nonprofits and not call to ask if their designer's name is Sarah, just so I can check up on her. I think she could tell I wasn't the sort of person she needed, and all because she was hypothetical ruler of the world for four questions.
I'm still waiting for Curtis' answers, explaining Sarah's. He's ahead of me on the path, so his words are sometimes harder to make out. He only turns around to look at me for half of a sentence or less before the rocks demand his eyesight again.
I don't remember his answers, which annoys me. We talked about diseases and AI and energy independence--he's bullish on nuclear power, like me, but not to the level of Chris Dant--but I can't remember even where he said he would put his (secret) base. It bothers me that I can't remember. But I do remember being utterly comfortable with his answers, with poking holes, with hearing him shore those holes up. I remember revealing my concerns about space travel and hearing him echo it all back to me. (And I think his reflexive first policy decision was "Resign.") But as much as I don't remember exactly what he said, I do remember stopping where an old hotel was built on the edge of the cliff and staring out at the river aghast.
"If I had a time machine, I would come back and stay here," he said.
"Oh, man, I am right there with you. This would be the most boss hotel ever."
On the way back down, I asked Chris Dant the same questions. He was a little more Chris Dant than Curtis was, whose answers were aligned with his sociopolitical beliefs. Chris was infinitely more practical.
"First order of business. Find who your enemies are and eliminate them, because once you've consolidated power you want stability, and you're sure to have enemies."
Woah.
"I would put my base in a mid-sized city, I guess. It would be fun to be in a volcano for some geothermal power, but there's nothing to be gained defensively from that. I would prefer to blend into a city that's small enough to not attract attention to the military installations and not be big enough to be the target of a biological attack." Chris wants to remain in power, because he assumes that his fifth and eighth and fifty seventh policy will be more valuable than his first three. I got to hand it to him: it makes sense, even though it technically doesn't reveal anything new to me about his character and his mode.

Just for the record? Base on the moon. Get to Mars, make all policy decisions by double-blind randomized controlled longitudinal study, establish benevolent, self-improving AI. At that point, the show runs itself.

At the top of the hill, there's a humdinger of a view. I heard a woman say "Oh, of course. I see it looks like a shoe, now." I looked down and finally saw that the bends in the river made Moccasin Bend look like a foolishly obvious name, but I had always assumed it was named that because it was a staging area for the Trail of Tears. It's a shoe. I saw some couples strung up in hammocks together and a film crew shooting b-roll for House Hunters. I climbed down to the shelf below the Ochs museum and saw through the broken glass to the stripped interior layered with construction materials and dust. I got my passport stamps from the guest center (to be taped in, later: nobody said we were going to Point Park, just that we were going to "a place on Lookout Mountain," so I didn't bring it). But I remember the conversations I had that day more than I remember the things I saw. Maybe: because I've seen the things before.
The first time I went up the mountain, I went with Lauren Souza. I don't remember why or what year, but I do remember the sun going down on a constant conversation. In those days, I feared that to be silent was to betray a weakness in your relationship. If you don't have anything to say to a person, you're not as compatible as you think. I've slackened my death-hold on that opinion, but silence is still a bad sign in a friendship I want to develop into love. Delight was silent with me a lot, at the end. It's been a long time since that afternoon on the tip of Chattanooga's pompous park, and a lot has happened. But when I reached out to Lauren, tentatively (she's one of five friends I have left in the area, so why not?), she betrayed no hesitation. Of course we can hang out. Coffee shop, you say? Sure, I'll be there at 10. We talked well, like real friends who haven't seen each other for a while. But we talked more honestly than people in our situation do.
After an hour of sharing out the changes we've made and the places we've been stuck, she walked into a question she didn't know the answer to. She asked about Delight, of course, and much later and much more innocently than I expected. I had pictured this going a lot of ways, but this sideways accident I didn't see coming. I didn't need to tell Lauren, and maybe it would have been best for me if I hadn't. But she was once my friend, too, and I don't have any motives for revealing or hiding my wife. She didn't know what to say, but she sighed and opened up with: "Well, if you've shared, it feels right that I should share." She told me about a trauma she's finally living her way out of. We talked about our own hesitant, abortive relationship, for a brief moment. We were honest about the garbage people we were in the past, and we said how much we hoped for the future. It was weird. It's not what you would expect from a conversation with someone you crushed on so long ago. Maybe it's my own vicious honesty that drew honesty from her. Maybe it's the type of friends we've always been, and other relationships we shared were all just diversions from this one truth.

And maybe, it's just part of being an adult, this being able to talk about things that hurt without fear. Maybe grown-up humans face their problems instead of running from them. But this last idea? It feels like a lie.

Ooltewah

I left all my bags in Curtis' house and rode down the hill, along the railroad tracks. My bike feels twitchy without the weight. It bounces too much on the ruts and potholes, and when I try to turn, the whole bike tends to lean more than I'm used to.
With the breeze in my hair, I can stand the heat. I pass a dozen moms pushing strollers and a few people walking their dogs. I see one man jog past, shiny with sweat. He smiles at me as I roll by.
I'm running errands, today. The professors I failed to see are probably at home; everything in Collegedale shuts down on Fridays. I'll just go mail home some things I probably (definitely) don't need to pull up hills with me and I'll get back to the house to chill until somebody comes up with something to do. It's Stephen's birthday, but he's at work. Things are really relaxed. I pull out my phone to check where the Ooltewah post office is, and I feel my chest go all tight. I had forgotten. I'm a hundred yards from Delight's old house.
I stuff my phone back in my pocket and pedal away without looking. That tight feeling just haunts me all the way to the post office and all the way back. Panting from the heat and the bicycle ride is so close to crying that I can feel the fear and the clutch of it at the back of my throat. My stomach feels empty and angry. My arms and legs feel weak.
At the corner, I turn into her old parking lot where I used to go on the scooter. I hop the joint between lot and road and fly through the gaps in the speed bumps. My eyes are stretching, waiting for the nondescript brick building to hove into view. When I pull up opposite to it, a thousand thousand memories try their best to break the seal and drown me. I don't know. I remember being so proud that I had found a leather jacket--she had wanted one--and being disappointed that it wasn't one she liked. I gave her that jacket in this parking lot. I remember sitting on the hood of my car waiting for her to come out and talking to some kids playing in the grass under the shade of a tree. I remember the metallic clang of the steps to her door, the place where they hid the extra key, the smell of her car after it sat in the sun, the roughness of the splatter pattern on her bedroom ceiling.
I don't think I can write anymore about it. I know I didn't have the strength to go to the place where I kissed her first, in the warm rain of the last days of fall heat. I know I would break if I went there.
But maybe every pilgrimage has to revisit where the thing began.

Crabtree Falls

It was seven and the sun was going down by the time I set off to see Crabtree Falls. The ranger had promised a brisk downhill walk to the falls and a grueling uphill slog after. The post at the trailhead claimed a forty-five minute hike to the view. None of this was daunting to me, especially. I carried my binoculars and a water bottle, wore my bike shoes, and set off at high speed through the crowded and darkening woods, alone.
Sarah was still with me at Crabtree, though it would be our last time sharing a campsite. She looked at me like I was making a mistake when I pushed off into the trees. I didn't let her dampen my enthusiasm.
I passed two hikers coming back up, but I didn't say a word. I crossed two wet parts of the path where a tiny trickle had served to make mud of the walkway. I strode across a well-made bridge with no handrails and one, much higher and stronger-looking with handrails. I practically fell downhill until the path split from the water and started going back uphill again.
Agitated, I walked a thousand feet down the trail and saw switchbacks going up. I wandered back to the path and saw what I came for: four feet of vertical waterfall.

And they named the campground for this? I had walked through the muggy summer night for this? I had risked myself to bears for this? I was thoroughly disappointed, but I didn't let it shake me. I sat down and listened to the hiss and crash of the water for a bit.
When I walked back up the hill, my fingers got numb from the weight of the binoculars and water bottle. My shirt stuck to my back. My shoes felt too tight. And the waterfall wasn't even worth seeing.
I settled back down at the picnic table in the thick, soupy last light that made the edges of things hard to see.
"Well?" Sarah said.
"Not worth it, really." I said. "It was a lot shorter than I thought it should be? But the path started back up again on the other side, so I can't figure anything else but that I found it."
"Really? The Ranger said it was beautiful." Sarah pulled out a map of the trail. "Did you cross a bridge?"
"Two."
"Hmm. Well, where did you get to?"
I looked at the map. There's a bridge, and afterward the path leads away from the stream, through some switchbacks, and back to the stream. That's where the waterfall is. It's a sixty foot fall. I was just on the uphill side of the falls themselves and I sat down to look at the disappointing tumble over some rocks that just happened to be on my way.
I missed the waterfall.

This story doesn't paint me as a hero or a villain, but as a fool. Sometimes, I come within spitting distance of having the experience I want, only to have it snatched away from me. I've had two relationships now in which my partner confidentially admitted that I was too clingy, too oppressive. No one has ever phrased it that way. They were both too kind for that: "I feel trapped." "I have to get out." But my obsessive drive to have the full experience has bitten me more than once.
When I fell in love for the first time, it was a non-reciprocating relationship with someone I still respect. I don't know how much she knew at the time, but she did what was right.
She told me she had something important to say--always a sign of the end--and we walked together past a few of our old haunts. Finding a picnic table littered with the first leaves of fall, she sat down and sighed, deeply.
" --- "
I wish. I want to remember what she said in that moment. She was convicted, I remember that. She didn't throw me off. I could tell this was real, and I'm not the sort of person who chases the impossible. But I do remember saying "This is hard for me, and I'm only just now realizing how hard it is." I remember her leaning in, trying to let me speak for one last time and to let it count. She didn't want to make a mockery of what had come before; it meant something to her, too. But she didn't want to hear that I had realized that day my love for her. She didn't need to know that I was willing to let her go regardless. At that point, I wasn't able to withhold that information though. "I realize that I fell in love with you." I choked up. I cried in front of her as she left me. "And I get that you have to leave, and I want to thank you for explaining why as much as you can . . ."
Honestly, I don't know how much of that I said. And I don't remember what she did. Maybe she hugged me, maybe she sat there as I left, and maybe she left me. I remember crushing and tearing apart the leaves on the table. I do remember that. I remember also walking back to the house on Eastview Terrace, crying. Someone I knew stopped to see if I was alright, because nobody walks down Apison Pike without a reason. I remember feeling dead for a long time after that.
She was important and lovely and she left me as well as she could. But the simple fact is that she couldn't be with me and all I wanted was to be with her. I got so close to seeing the waterfall, but frailty or stupidity or impatience kept me from it.

I hope she never reads this blog. She knows how I feel, I think, but I still hope she never reads it. She doesn't need to feel anything for me anymore, and that's okay. There are other things to see in life, even if Crabtree Falls and my relationships are always just beyond sight.

Nanthahala Gorge

The young man in the restaurant has curling loops of wood for earrings. He tips his eyes back as if recalling something far in his past. "Yeah, ok. So you go down the train tracks: they're literally right over there. Go down those for a quarter mile and you'll find a farm gate. It overlooks the lake, and there are camping sites back there. It's choice."

"Ok, awesome." I've been a little worried about finding a place to throw my hammock for tonight without having to pay an exorbitant price for amenities I won't use. I'm in the Nanthahala Gorge National Forest. Camping should be free, if I can just find some public land. Bingo. He just gave it to me.
I shake his hand and walk out to get my stuff. Across the river, down the steps of the bridge, to the tracks. Things get mighty bumpy and I can't find the gate he's talking about, so I prop up my bike against a tall stack of ties and I trudge off down the tracks. I figure he may have underestimated the distance. About another quarter mile later, I sigh, turn around, and trudge back. I don't know if you own bike cleats, or if you've walked near a friend wearing them. There is a plate of metal screwed to the bottom of the shoe. That plate seems to slap and scrape against every rock I step on for a half mile there and back. Maybe I got the direction wrong, because I didn't see a lake. I walk upriver this time, but I leave my bike at the outset. I'm weary of bumps and wary of trains. Crunch and slap go my shoes. Crunch and slap.
Alongside the tracks, there's a pitiful little pond where the Appalachian Trail crosses and climbs steeply up a hill. I still don't see a farm gate like I was promised. I keep walking and soon the pond is replaced by a sheer rock cliff. Halfway up the cliff, precariously set and lopsided, there's a sign post that proudly declares "National Forest property behind this post." That's super helpful, thanks. I can see on the road side of the river what looks like a delightful roadside and riverside park where I really want to camp. My thoughts bounce from Ooh I want to go there to Wait, I would have to carry everything up the steps for the bridge again. Can I just put that off as long as possible?
I walk about a third of a mile from the bridge with no farm gate and no hope of one. The cliff just stretches away toward infinity. Time to give up. I turn around and slap crunch my way back to my bike. Maybe I can just stay at the small offshoot road where they rent canoes and kayaks out. There were some good trees there, it's gated, and if I'm up and out by seven, who's gonna know? Nobody.
Passing back past the cliff, I see a tree with two large red paint markings and a furiously nailed-on yellow sign. I scramble down the railroad grade to take a look, getting a mouthful of cobwebs for my trouble. "Bearing Tree," it proudly proclaims. Bearing what? I look up, and the tree and to go straight up forever with no branches or deviations. It's not bearing anything, I think. Wait. This is like an orienteering or survey landmark, I guess. Wild. I wonder when it stopped being useful, or if it's still important.
I turn around and scramble back up the grade, trip, fall to my hands and knees, and feel a shocking pain fire up my left leg from the ankle. Scream. I shake my right leg, thinking to free it from the vine that's tripped me. It won't shake off, and I shake it again, uselessly. I'm not sure why it won't let go of my toe. I twitch sideways and it won't let me move, and I look at it again. Barbed-wire. Damn.
I don't want to see how badly I'm hurt, but if I'm going to die here, I might well know why, so I sink my right knee in the dirt to lift my left ankle up where I can look at it. I'm bleeding, but not really badly. There are twin steaks of sapphire staining my sick on either side. I've caught the ankle square on the back, centered on the tendon. I scream again, at the sky, but not for pain this time. For frustration. I touch the blood, and it comes away on my fingers, but it's not gushing out. It seems to have stopped somewhat. My lucky day. Returning to a crouch, I reach back to the wire that has punctured the top of my shoe two inches back from the toe. I see small fibers around the hole, and I really have to maneuver to get the trap to release my foot. There's only a small gap in the cloth to show what's happened. A small gap in my left leg reminds me I don't care.
Clambering up to the railbed, I sit down. What have I got? I reach into my wallet and pull out the tiny bandaid I stash there. I stick it to my ankle and it saturates immediately and won't stick to my bloody skin. It falls off, and I try to poke out back on. It falls off after one step. I leave it.
Crunch tap slap tap crunch, I hobble back to my bike. There's a changing room at one of the buildings, so I guess they'll have a bathroom too. I can wash this wound out and put some triple antibiotic ointment on it. That's all I can do, for now.
On the sink, I strip off shoe and sock. The tap is automatic, but it wasn't designed for ankles, so it takes a moment to position just right until—scream again. The water fires straight into the bloody mess the back of my leg and I grit my teeth under the intensity of it. I try to wipe at the dirt around it, I try to push and prod it, and every time I move, I have to reposition so the water will remember to keep running. At a certain point, I just sit, panting and grinning, letting the water run into my personal pain station.
Right now, I have a bandage from the camp nurse Odalid that is big enough for my wound. It won't stay on because I don't have any gauze tape. All I have is duct tape, and I'm not an idiot. Right now, I'm sitting next to the river writing, watching my battery percentage fall a point per sentence. Right now, I'm in a little pain.

Two months ago, I was hissing with pain. At camp, every Monday brings a code red: a fire drill. It's my job to check the headquarters building and the playground. I take things pretty seriously because it's the right thing to do. I check every room, closing doors behind me. I yell and run like it's for real, because it's my job. But at the outset of tween week, I run too slowly, or I close the door too quickly. Either way.
I ran through the upstairs door and it caught me on the ankle, stripped my shoe off, rolled my sock down, and peeled back the skin on the back of my ankle. My left ankle. I hit the ground, all momentum gone with the door closed on my foot, shrieking in acute agony. I looked back, grabbed my shoe, and finished the fire drill with minimal blood loss and no shoe on my left foot. When everyone was checked off three minutes later, my adrenaline was still so high I was barely bleeding.
Odalid took very good care of me. She changed my bandage maybe twenty times and ran through a few hundred feet of gauze, I'm sure. By the end of camp, I had a scab on top of a branching scar that ran from halfway up my Achilles tendon right down to the top of my shoe. It's still healing because twice during camp, I caught the back of my left leg and cut into the thin skin—once with my bike pedal, which flipped around and cut a deep gash horizontally and felt to me maybe as badly as the initial accident. At that time, I had Camp Council to get to and a play with campers, so I couldn't be late. I just did the play through the pain.

My right Achilles heel is perfectly fine, and as far as I can tell, always will be.

My left Achilles heel has one long scrape, two deep cuts, a puncture, and a history of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Elkton

N38°18.664' W078°43.268'
"Where do you sleep?" The man asks, concern lacing the wrinkles around his eyes.
"I camp around a lot. Last night, I was up on the mountain in the park. Tonight, I'm going back to someplace in the park."
He seems to accept this and walks away. I don't know why, but this man's questions are getting to me. I came into this Subway and right through the door he wanted to know where I was going. My bags do draw a lot of questions, and my answers don't stem the tide. But for now, I'm just on the edge of okay with answering. Yesterday in Luray caverns, I didn't say a word to anybody for an hour and a half, even though I was surrounded by people. This morning, I didn't speak to anybody outside of the waitress, and I didn't say much to her. This afternoon, I've been silent except for one screamed expletive as I corrected my posture when I shot around a sharper and steeper bend than I expected. Fill in the blank with your imagination, but remember I have extremely good impulse control when in pain or terror.
The man walks back over to me. "Hey, you don't need a place to stay, do you? We've got a place, it's no problem, really. We had six Appalachian trail walkers stay for near a week, once." Nuts. Now I have to make a decision. What do I want? Well, I want to stay with people, it's true. I think my starting with people has been one of the eye-openers this trip. I'm glad every time I do it. But on the other hand, I had my eye on a place. And I've got mileage fever, today: a condition I named for when I feel the itch to get someplace, and nowhere feels adequate to stop.
Maybe psychology has something to do with how I answer him. Daniel Kahneman pointed out in Thinking Fast, And Slow that it's easier to make a non-decision than to change your mind.
"Thanks, but I want to get some miles under me before I sleep tonight."
"Yeah, there's plenty of daylight."
I get his email and thank him and his wife. They leave, on the condition that I update them. I'm glad I met them. I don't regret a thing.

Last night, I saw a bear. I was on top of the mountain at the Harry F. Byrd Sr. Visitor Center and Big Meadows campground, getting my backwoods camping pass. I turn into the bike path, and ten feet down the trail, I see it: a black bear, maybe two and a half feet at the shoulder. I stop, scream "That's a freaking bear," and pull out my cellphone so I can prove what I've seen. It skids to a halt and shuffles back into the woods, trying to avoid me and photographic capture. I do my level best to capture it anyway. All I get is some Bigfoot-style mess-o-graphs.

When I finally get my backwoods pass, the ranger gives me some harsh words and a half-joking warning that she'll check on me later that night. I laugh and ride to a different spot than she tells me to go, not because I don't trust her, but because I don't want to lug my bike a mile or more down the Appalachian Trail. Instead, I do my level best to follow all the park guidelines. I'm sure I didn't get a quarter mile from the road, but I definitely covered a thousand feet before I parked and hung my hammock. I didn't want to make it too hard to find my campsite, in case the bear came after my peanut butter. I swung my butter from a tree and swung myself from a different pair. The ferns grew thick around me and choked out any view of the first floor. It may be the most beautiful campsite I find on my entire trip. Green above and green below. Everything felt prehistoric, as if (improbably) I was the first person putting my feet on that ground. I scoffed a little at my silliness and went to sleep, bundled up.

During the night, I wake up groggy to use the restroom. I hate waking up in a hammock. Getting into the sleeping bag is like stuffing yourself into an uncooperative snake, and the prospect of doing it twice in a night is daunting. I unzip the mosquito netting and swing my head out to find my shoes. They're nestled in the ferns, covered in millipedes. There are about forty per shoe. I shudder and hyperventilate as I gingerly pick each shoe up and brush off the insects. I can hear their soft plopping in the greenery as they fall. I feel faint by the time I invert them and shake out a few more from inside. When I'm done with my business, I tie my shoes together and hang them over the rope that suspends the hammock. No more creepies for me.

Of course, the ranger doesn't find me. I take my customary nine-hour semi-hibernation and tear down camp, retrieving my food from the tree in which I had strung it. During the morning, I walk down to see a waterfall. I strip my shoes and socks and sit on a rock in the pool at the bottom. Soon, loads of kids are following suit. One didn't realize how cold it would be and starts crying. Her mom just throws her hands out as if to say: "the hug is waiting over here, but don't be mistaken, I am not saving you from a puddle." A truly beefy man shows up with his waif-like woman. As they're taking selfies, a cut young Latino takes his shirt off. I think he's intimidated by the beefcake, but I don't ask him. I just sit and sketch the waterfall as best I can. I take zero pictures. Maybe I'm a genius, but I'll have to tell you that later. I slap my notebook closed, take my shirt off and put it in the water, and get back into my gear. I think this may be the waterfall dad and Philip and I saw the last time I was here on skyline drive. I may never know for sure. That doesn't bother me.

My ride out of the park is mostly downhill. That doesn't bother me either. At the end, there's a tremendous downhill stretch, and I get tempted to use my watch to measure my speed. I swear I must have hit thirty miles an hour. At the bottom is where I met the kind family in the Subway.

Eleven miles later, I pull up to the fire road that should take me into the National Park. The gate has two signs that tell me it's private and I shouldn't go in. I fiddle with my phone for a minute: what happens if I try to go around to get to the same spot? Hm. Six miles. I duck under the gate and hope nobody sees me. I pedal up the old road and stop short when I see a building. My heart starts beating out of my chest. If I weren't already dripping with sweat, I would have started that, too, a nervous sweatiness. The old place has a steeply peaked roof and a wide open space in front. Maybe I can email that family and say I changed my mind. Or maybe . . . I don't see any vehicles. I don't see any tire tracks. I don't see any signs of humans at all. Cautious, I pedal up to the building, and speed past it when nobody is evident. "I'll just go deep into the woods behind and nobody will ever know I was here." But as I go deeper into the woods, following a trail, it becomes clear where I am.

I pass spigots and electric boxes in pairs, each with a space clear of old trees, anyway. There's an old square nailed to a tree that says "74."
This old abandoned campsite is accidentally exactly what I want. When I dismount, I shuffle over to the closest spigot, and check. Nothing comes out, except maybe my paranoia. I set everything up before I walk back to the camp headquarters, swinging a stick to clear the spiderwebs. I try the door to the women's restroom, which has a hook latch, troublingly, on the outside. Locked. The men's has the same hook, but isn't locked. When I go inside, I see some humorless signs about gas and bears (don't look). Oh, the sigh I heaved. Roaming around the back, I try the laundry. Hook latch again, and again, unlocked. But this time, the ceiling is caved in and I don't venture inside. I can't fully close the door, either, and jeweling on it wakes some wasps. I beat a retreat. The pump house for the terrible pool is unlocked, even if it's latched. Nothing interesting is inside. So it's time, whether I'm ready or not. Is the front door unlocked?

I pull open the screen door, and if the spring is rusted or missing I don't know. It doesn't swing shut. Undoing the hook latch, I reach for the handle, brushing away cobwebs with a stick. It creaks open, leaving a clean arc in the mud on the floor. Disgusting. I tiptoe inside, stepping only on the ceiling tiles that have fallen to the floor and become sodden with wet, avoiding the slimy mud. There's a lot of mowing equipment and old broken chairs. On one wall, it says "Coffee Shoppe" in big, round, seventies font. There's no counter, no coffee. On the other side of the room, there are two utterly outdated maps of the Shenandoah valley. One has an x in Sharpie and the words "Pine Ridge." There is a surfeit of deciduous vegetation outside and a dearth of pines. I cough back a laugh.
That's when I hear the bump in the attic.
Raccoon? Anything bigger would have fallen through on my head by now. And I still have one room to look in. I'm worried, now, that there may be some rabid animal inside true manager's office, and opening it will be my undoing. I undo the ubiquitous hook latch and shove the door open. There's a foam pad and a filling system that's fallen to the ground. The aren't even any chairs. I'm not exactly disappointed, but not enthralled, either. I close everything up as I leave. I crush the ceiling tiles a little more and I stride away into the woods again. In the dying sunlight, Pine Ridge is almost pretty, but for the unnamed and unknown terror in the attic.

I had no idea this place existed earlier in the day. I had no clue that I would end in campsite 74 of a defunct tourist destination. I had no inkling that my evening would be this. But looking back, I don't regret a thing.

Maybe someday, I'll stay with the couple from Elkton. Maybe I'll come through on the Appalachian Trail and I'll hit them up. But for today, I made the right decisions.

Antietam

N39.059946°, W78.139887°

Antietam battlefield is beautiful. I went in knowing that it was the bloodiest single day of fighting the US has ever experienced, Tet and D-Day and all not holding a candle to this one strip of hills in Maryland.
Ashley Dunbar McMullen took me to Antietam. Technically, she swooped me up to Gettysburg first, which I had planned on passing through the day before. Do you know about Google maps? I use it exclusively. When it loses GPS, it re-routes you upon regaining signal. So if you choose a different variant of the route, it will place you on its preferred route without telling you. So my plans were thwarted by a hilly countryside and a general incompetence. She got me to Gettysburg to get my NPS passport stamp.
We drove to Antietam, gabbing all the way, being judgy judgers and gossiping about people we hadn't seen in years. You know the type of conversation, even if you weren't there. It was old friends getting mad at things that happened eons ago, talking smack about teachers and weirdos from the halcyon time before moving apart. I loved it. And it consumes the drive right up until we pulled into the Antietam National Historic Battlefield parking lot. I was not prepared.
"Hold on, let me just like . . . I don't know. I'm not in the proper frame to be discussing this place."
Ashley gave me a funny look and just let me have a minute. I don't know. It wasn't right, going in high on silliness.
We walked through the doors, I got my stamps, and we waited for the ranger talk upstairs. There's a nearly 200° view of the battlefield's major landmarks from upstairs. Of course, the area would have been significantly denuded (Thanks Helga) during the battle, and this place would have been an incredible vantage. As it was, we could see the steeple near where McClellan sat and watched his men get cut to pieces. We could see the end of bloody lane, where five hundred Confederates held against two thousand advancing Yanks for hours. We could see the trees that marked the edge of a cornfield where 2,500 men bled to death over the course of one September day a hundred fifty years ago.
The battle itself is fairly simple: Lee, just as always, positioned his troops better than his opposition. Stonewall Jackson, just as always, impressed his enemies and generally made everything much easier for Lee by just getting things done. Burnsides, just as you'd expect, spent the day combing out his beard and not getting his troops slaughtered on a terrible order. And McClellan, though you may not expect it, failed to take advantage of his opponent's inferior numbers, and didn't push his advantages when he finally had them. Maybe you did expect that, in which case, your pattern recognition is at least strong enough to make you the next general of the Army of the Potomac.
Regardless, the battle was fought to a draw, and exacted terrible losses on both sides.
When Ashley and I went through Bloody Lane, the sunken farm road in which do many lost their lives, Ashley exclaimed, "My gosh! Imagine sitting here and over that hill right there, there's all of a sudden Union troops pouring over the crest at you! I hadn't thought of that until the ranger said it: that's what makes this battle so awful. You feel like it's open and you can see everything, and all of a sudden there's men attacking you out of nowhere."
"Yeah, the suspense must be terrible."
"I'd probably be the guy just standing up when they come over," she remarked. "I'm like: 'Hey, guys! What's going on? That a gun you got there?' and then the Union pop up and shoot me."
"Ugh. I would prefer to be up here on this end. At least you can see more of the advance from up here."
"You would want to see?"
"Well, yeah. More time to prepare."
"More time to psych myself out."
Ashley had a point, I suppose. There's a value to not seeing. You don't want to see an old man at the beach in a speedo, because there are things better unseen. You don't want to have the image in your mind to dwell on, not now, not ever. But that's not always the case.
Sometimes you just want to see.

Today, I rolled past the trappiest of tourist traps. It's time like these when the etymology of that phrase takes physical form and shoves my course off the road. I pulled to a stop near the twenty-foot tall dinosaur mouth that frames a doorway. The sign promised a prehistoric forest learning experience. Educational! There were about forty dinosaurs and a statue of King Kong behind a head-high chain-link fence. I went inside to find a hundred thousand baubles and statuettes, many kitschy and cheap, but relatively many without any connection to the dinosaurs tauted on the signs.
A mother called her son.
"Paulie, come here. Be careful with your grabber! Which of these do you think—be careful! You'll knock all the glass over! Which of these do you think would go best on the fridge?"
The small boy rambled through the aisles with a plastic armature, making his treacherous way to his mother. In the back, a Hispanic mother and father struggled to satisfy their child with the cheaper coloring book. Over their heads, an edited sign proclaimed the prices. Five dollars for children. Six for adults. I walked to the dinosaur's mouth door. Six dollars? Madness. Antietam can be had for free. So can Harper's Ferry, if you're clever or a dunce and you walk instead of driving. I leaned up against the fence, my hands feeling the roughness of the rust under the flaking paint. I saw an older woman walking out of the park with what must be grandkids orbiting her. I wanted to shout to her: "What's the return on your investment? Is six dollars a fair price?" But I didn't. I looked at the King Kong up the hill and sighed, deeply.
No! I shook my head as if to clear it and steeled myself, walking back to the bike to grab the six dollars I would need to see the wonders of the park's flaking skulpturery. Some things are better seen and experienced. Some things deserve to be bought. But my steps slowed, stopped, and picked up again, less deliberate this time. I'd want that six dollars back, almost certainly. I'd want to go inside Luray, and maybe I'd want to see a movie with Curtis or Stephen, and six dollars was a lot when I would only have the story, afterwards. I then realized something utterly suffering.

If Delight had been there, twelve dollars world have been a steal.

The are times in life when I get more value than what I put in. There are people who make an experience more worthy. Maybe with a few people I know, you'd have to pay me more to see aging dinosaur statuary. Maybe with some people, the six dollars would be a fair asking price for an experience that brought us both together. And with some people, precious few of them, no experience is poorer, no place too dull, no time taxing, whatever the anatomical faults of the lizards you're examining. Delight was that for me.
Earlier today, on the C&O mule path, I was trying to remember what I must have loved about Delight, but in the way of things, all I could remember was the way she hurt me at the end, the complaints she had about my conduct, the fear she had of the future. Humans are not designed to take the memories of goodness. We assume those as the baseline, and we keen over things that throw us down, we write paeans to our losses, memorialize the hurt, and build temples to a hurt we've suffered. But the over value we place on hurt means I couldn't remember what I loved about a woman I love. Until a park of cracked and fading dinosaurs caused me to remember. And part of me wishes I hadn't. And most of me is glad I did. And all of me knows there are things not worth seeing.

Ziam a.k.a. X

I was packing all my things back up. Ashlee has more than enough space in her living room for my bike and all the gear I spread out, and I was stepping back and forth through the detritus, trying to put things away after a three-night explosion. I had my toothbrush over here and my money over there and Bonney's charm in the pocket of the wrong pants. All this time, I hear the booming of soulful music outside. It gets so loud, I feel compelled to check. It's like the music is on the porch. Ashlee's apartment is on the ground floor, and I flick aside the blinds to look outside into the parking lot, expecting to see somebody in a car with the lights on. Behind a car, there. It looks like a couple dancing? Their movement is fluid, the way I remember it being when you push into someone who pushes into you. No, it's a person walking, very slowly, very deliberately, like they're caring a heavy load. No.
It's a person in a wheelchair, struggling to get up the slope. He cuts left, then right, tacking like a sailboat.
I have about five seconds of indecision. I don't have my shoes on, my phone is dead on the floor, and it's not my neighborhood. But I'm on the ground floor and i know where Ashlee set her keys. I jump over my sleeping bag and peanut butter and grab the keys. I lock the door on my way out and I jog over to the man in the wheelchair.
"Hey, I'm Robby. You want some help?"
"Yeah, much appreciated."
"How far are we going?"
"Oh, all the way down there."
"Alright."
He has on a black shirt and hat, and the hat has an embroidered circle with an x of negative space in it. His wheelchair has two bike bottle cages on the front, and the bottles have ice, but no water. His phone is attached to the right arm with a high-quality car mount and somewhere on the contraption there's a speaker booming out some modern-sounding soul throwback sounds. I grab the handles on the back of his wheelchair and he lets off the brake.
Ten seconds later, we hear a distant squeal and crash. It sounds medium-sized, like a car hitting an empty dumpster. It's away on our left, and I stop and turn him around.
"From over there," I say.
He peers out through the half-lit parking lot labyrinth. "Sounds like it's right over there."
"I think it came from further away, though. It sounded like it could have come from the light."
"No. No, it's over there." I push us back to where we can see around the building, but there's nothing obvious. I see a man walking around. I point it out
"I bet he'll take care of it, or I hope so, if it is right there." I don't have my phone, and I'm not going to push this man all the way over there unless he asks. I pause just long enough and then turn.
"I hope you didn't park over there," he says.
"Oh, nope. I'm on a bike; I'm going across the country."
"Where from? Where to?"
"I started in Massachusetts. It took me two weeks to get here, and I want to get to family by Thanksgiving." I'm getting tired of saying the same spiel again and again. I can't even imagine how Peter Jenkins must have felt after years of it.
"Well, how can you afford to finance that?"  We're to the top of the hill, now. The man turns a little, and looks at me. "I can make it from here."
I stop pushing and walk around to answer his question.
"Well," I begin, a little embarrassed. "My wife was a nurse, and I was a teacher. We saved up and paid off or debts. Then, she left. We didn't have kids or nothing, so I just saved up to do this." It's the truth, and I tell it, but it feels so cut and dried. I'm honestly not sure how I can afford this.
"Well, if—she didn't explain why she was going? I would at least think you deserve that." He's not quite looking at me, so all I can see is the brim of his hat and his greying beard. He has an accent like a black man from Virginia or further north.
"She tried to, but it wasn't good enough for me. She said she felt trapped, like she didn't want to be in the marriage anymore."
"Trapped?" That one bit him. He is ready to figure this out, or at least bite back before he admitted that there isn't an answer for my situation.
"Yeah. We were young, but it's her decision that trapped her in. It takes two to tango; it takes two people to get married. And I was happy."
He settles back a little. His hand comes up to stoke his beard. "I've lost some people in my life, and it wasn't ever worth it."
"Well, with the way she left—I decided I didn't want to love anybody who didn't love me. And ain't nobody who loves me can do what she did."
"Now, I used to be an intellectual. I used to have an answer, an opinion, a thought or a science fact for everything. But I learned, a while back, from an old relationship, sometimes things gotta be simple. You know? I used to think too much, and I would think myself into problems. You know what I'm saying?"
"I think so."
"I dated this Russian girl, for a while. And I wasn't good enough—I wasn't doing enough for her. And I thought too much. I liked her a lot. But I thought too much: got myself into problems. And now, I guess I miss her. She lied to me, she cheated on me, she stole from me." He taps his fingers, listing her crimes. He finally looks up from under the brim of his hat. "But I still feel for her. She's with somebody, now. She has a kid, I know that much. I don't know why that guy won't marry her, but that's something else. I'm saying that even if she hurt me, I just want her to be happy."
I can feel it. In my chest, there, underneath the ribs, between my bones and my heart. The ache begins to thrum behind my breathing.
"Are you in contact with her? You talk?" He leans forward a little.
I throw my arms out into the night air, desperate, confused. "I wrote her letters. I know where she lives. But she hasn't written back." The ache threatens.
He settles right back. I don't remember if he said anything to that. He's got his answer. I think maybe he knows how we both feel: he's certainly got me pegged. It feels like a good stopping place for the conversation, and so I stop it. I have to sleep sometime.
"Uhh," I offer, as I stretch out my hand. "Like I said, my name's Robby. I've gotta get back. I'm glad I could help."
"No problem. Name's Ziam, but people call me 'X,' " he says, reaching up to tap the x on his hat. "So just call me 'X.' "
"Alright, X. Glad to help."
"Thanks, Danny. Good luck on your trip."
I walk away, and he rolls away. Danny's as good as Robby.

I know what X is saying, about being too clever for your own good. I don't mean brag about myself, but I tend to intellectualize my faith and my relationships. Sometimes it doesn't go as well as I want.
When Kayla and I were dating, things got slow and sad toward the end. She didn't like being around me anymore and I was trying to figure out what I could do to salvage what was left. I didn't want to end the relationship without fighting for it. It seemed worthwhile. I read the little book about Love Languages that seemed to be making the rounds and I loved the simple way it talked about love: input received denotes output generated. Love language quality time + time spent together = stronger relationship. It was so clear. I endeavored to determine what exactly i could do to fetch our relationship from the pits it lived in.
I bought a smoothie and offered it to her out of nowhere. She didn't want it and wouldn't even come out of her dorm to see me. Gifts and quality time turned down. I sent her a little note that pointed out some good things about her. She didn't even text me about it. Kind words dead. I called her and opened up about how I felt about my grandfather passing away, and she said so what? And she sure didn't want anything from me. I started to get desperate and confused. I wandered the campus, trying to think about my next move.
Maybe this is the conundrum of a manipulator who finds themselves rebuffed. Maybe this is the sign of an intellectual who doesn't understand humanity's complexities. Maybe this is the sign of a child who doesn't want to admit he has some growing to do. But that day was the first time I ever thought about hurting myself, in any way. I've never had those kind of thoughts even occur to me. I'm not that mentality, and I'm lucky for that. But that day was different.
It was the middle of the day in early fall. It was still hot, this being Southern, and I didn't have any classes. I walked behind the Village Market to the footbridge over the creek. I threw my legs over the side and sat there, swinging my feet. Standing up on the handrail, I looked down on the runners on the path, on the cars in the parking lot, on the trickling brook below me. And I focused on one rock. I thought to myself: "If I jumped from here, I could fall right on that rock. I could cut myself really bad. I don't think I would die, but it would show her how much I hurt right now, because she doesn't get it. She doesn't know how much she's hurting me."
Well, that thought freaked me right out. I practically threw myself back into the bridge and down the path. I didn't go back to that bridge for months. Since that time, I've only ever wanted to die once. And that memory waits to be told, maybe. Maybe it will wait forever.

X probably knows what he's talking about. Stop thinking so much about Delight, about why she left, about where she's going. It hasn't helped me yet and it may not help me ever. You know about the leopard who tried to change his spots? We'll see if I stop over thinking this.