Walking Away

After a day of walking until the sun is in my head kicking at something hard that I think I need, or might need later, I am back in St. Francisville smelling of sweat mixed with old soils of the road. My shirt has become oil cloth. My morale is somewhere near boot-top because I have turned my back on New Orleans. I am not lazy for the sun. The fear of miles to walk after the local police pull me over yet again to run my name just because does not still my feet one step. Two hundred troops are moving into the New Orleans area to establish some kind of order. I have been told thirty six deaths have taken place there sence April. Six people were killed there this past weekend with New Orleans police holding their hands in the air as they shug shoulders over what happened. I don't envy them. A woman named Zola at the Choo-Choo Junction hands me a glass of fresh squeezed lemonade on the house. The sun is all over my face although I'm in the shade. Zola looks alot like my mother, and litterly begs me to turn back from my course. "Call home, wherever your home is. Have your mom send money for a ticket, or a car. Call somebody. Whatever you do, promise me you won't go any farther toward New Orleans. People are killing each there. Please, tell me you'll stop this foolishness?"
No matter how old we get, or how bumpy the flight getting to where we are was, the reasoning voice of a parent still can alter the course of blood in our veins. It is my mother I see standing in this burger stand, pleading with me to take the gun out of my mouth. I hear her well enough to give pause. My map is tossed on the shaded picnic table as I chew ice, my finger moves over roads that will take my legs weeks to repeat. In a half hour I approach a man at the gas pump driving a worn white pick-up. He doesn't smile but agrees to take me up the road I just walked down. In minutes I'm in the pick-up going back to where this morning held me. I walk every step of this journey. I don't have to walk miles in a direction I'm not going. I tell myself this as road rewinds.
The ride back to Saint Francisville is an eraser on the pencil of my feet. Sadly I watch from the truck wimdow as all the miles I walked become weaving undone. The man driving put it this way, "You've come too far to throw it all away just so you will be able to say that you were stupid enough to walk into New Orleans all alone, no cell phone, no real weapon, nobody to call for help. Now it's a national police city, that at the very least puts all that you carry at risk to complete the journey, being searched and re-searched. Some things may not find their way into your pack again. A fool would keep walking to New Orleans. I know of a group that went over to help with the clean up a while back. They slept in a bus. The National Guard patroled the vehicle all night for their protection. You sleep outside right? Get across the Mississippi, and come back in a couple of years when they get their shit together. If they get their shit together." We both stared ahead at the road coming at us fast.
From the moment I awoke this morning until now I have had to complete the call of nature six times. My own nature is telling me something. I have been preparing for battle inside. The postcards I put in the mail today sounded like I was writing my last words. I was. It was all that my hand would put down. I wrote anyhow thinking that at least I was getting out last thoughts. When we just shut up and listen we can hear the counsil of our hearts. In blogs before this one told you that I was just a man living a dream. Sometimes I have to admit that the course I planned when the sun was shining through autumn leaves a year before Katrina I made a sketch. This is no reason to walk roads police don't comb without guns, body armor, well supplied cars, and back-up. Tomorrow I will cross the Mississippi with my feet aimed for the gulf via Layfaette. Louisiana has so much to show me before I rise my hand up her ankle in leaving. I don't have to die for it.
Tonight Lynn Wood, owner of the Birdman Coffee and Books in Francisville, hands me the key again to the small apartment beside her store. I have rested here for two nights as a gift from her. She smiles a huge grin when I walk into her coffee shop a bit tossed from my travels. I am safe again. Lynn and I have become good friends over coffee and stories, and art. I am deeply honored to be a friend she'd like to keep.
This morning Lynn mentioned as I prepared to leave that her insides didn't sit right with me heading to New Orleans. Tomorrow I leave again with new wind in my sails, with my feet eager for fresh earth. Even the walk wants this journey to live.