WhiteCrow Walking

My solo walk across America began in Maine. I walked for nearly 3 years carrying a backpack and facing countless dangers, as well as met wonderful people I could have never made it without. From bullets to bears I moved through mountains of snow and across burning desert country. The end result will be a book, and the fruition of a childhood dream. This is a blog from the field with rough stories about my steps along the way.

16 March 2008

Couchland

At Zippy's Java Lounge yesterday Marilyn asks me to speak at her coffee shop gathering scheduled at four tonight. With all my socks oiled with sweat, clothes quickly losing the illusion of clean traded down to a woven dishcloth wrung around fermented sleep and the grimy spittle of a thousand semi's roaring past, I measure distance I need to travel against the memory of dryer fresh socks and a shave. Some decisions decide themselves. I can walk faster if need be. I cannot walk myself clean, and since giving presentations about this walk is already contracted into my future (for which I am thrilled), I embrace the opportunity. Given a couch and a bowl of cut fruit, I am again a guest.
Later tonight I will catch the ferry in light rain, and stare into the evening water that is as black as a crow's eye. It will not be the first time I set camp in the dark on a field I have never seen, or squatted under a small dock where the mud flats wane. So I sip from a blue cup that isn't mine and just let my mind wander back and forward again, carried by some inner tide that looks forward to all the questions, questions that will remind me of all the little roads I never wrote down.