Heat

I have read in a book at French Camp that if I apply vinager to my feet and underarms, then blot dry, I will smell fresh all day long. I buy white vinager, pouring out three quarters of the bottle onto the ground to save weight, and slip it into my pack. Great, now I'll hop through the woods smelling like an Easter egg. Guess it is better than smelling like a gym locker-room stored in a humidore.
New Orleans is heavy on my mind. I have told myself no. I have made other plans. Everywhere I go people tell me all the reasons that I should slip away and head north. My ears are eagerly open. North is a new leg. North is part one of the walk complete. The sun is an angry poker that wags "No" from the sky, making my feet ready to turn toward the Dakotas. Still. There is a voice, gentle and slow, that calls me southward. I heard alot of warning about Mississippi only to find an affectionate people I am thankful to have in my life, in our country. I am certain that cultures and mannerisms I can not begin to collect out of my own limited reasonings wait to speak to me south of Mississippi. Two days ago a woman pulled up to talk to a new friend of mine from her car. My friend Debra Collier whispered to me, "Listen to Her Speak. It is wonderful." The stranger was fresh fom New Orleans. She sped into her conversation as if she was singing. She was singing. I was perfectly drunk. I had never heard a diction move so like ballad before. There were parts of me that sprang up children to peer out of my eyes. As all the world perkulated about in their separate urgencies, I just wanted to sit in the sun that I could no longer feel and listen to her dent and folding words in colors I had never heard. New Orleans is still a dog that will not lie down in me and go to sleep.
To walk a nation is a positively slow science. There are miles of trees, tar, dirt, grasses that look no different than the miles and miles of such that came before. America is such a large onion to layer off. There is no quickness to it. This is a mind pause for the explorer. There is so much always happening when the happenings come. The long meadows framed in old pine let me think. So many strangers peer into my world, and are gone. A million names become tissues I let fall. Some faces and names are now brillant parts of me that shine through the trials of the walk.
A cotton mouth slids up beside me as I float on my back in a rare clear creek. It is cold skin beside me before it swims away, silent as a ribbon of silk on water. While I lie awake at night and listen to animals come and go from around my tent, I think about the fresh mountain lion prints down at the water three miles back. I think of the feral boar that can run over 300 pounds hunting these woods, eating anything they find. I think of the polite girl that called me sir as she asked about my adventure like I was fresh out a history book. I know that I am given just what I can handle at the time. Miles of seemingly nothing new allow me to be and to heal. They are the silence between the notes.