Project Eveningland

4/12/2023 Wednesday

Are you really gonna make us leave this place? That’s the question my body asked me. Later I asked Wedge the same question over baked eggs, spicy pimento and cheese grits, some kind of flaky tart with sour cream and jam, and I can’t remember what else. I did the math on our average. Look, I said, with the miles we’ve done in the last three days, we have enough to cover four days with a 12-mile average and also add three miles toward bringing our overall average up to 12. And that’s if we take the whole day off. Hint hint.

He did change his mind when the only shuttler we could reach—he tried a bunch—said they could drive us to the motel at the end of our hike, but not today, tomorrow. “The universe is trying to keep us here,” he said, “and I’m going to listen because bad things happen when you push.” Well, maybe the universe was saying that and maybe it wasn’t, but ol’ Rhetoric definitely was saying it! Wedge had also had a really rough day yesterday and was sore as heck, so it’s a good idea whoever came up with it. It was me. It was my idea.

So we are staying in this lovely, relaxing, isolated place. No cell service! You can get a single bar of Verizon on the porch but only for a minute or two (that’s how I posted this). There’s a landline that anyone can use for calls inside the United States or Canada free of charge. It’s a cordless phone. You can walk to a private space and there’s hardly anyone here so you could easily talk for an hour if you needed to. But, yeah, I feel terribly cut off! I mean, a landline? Honestly it does have a retro appeal. Sometimes I watch a movie with, say, a sorority house in the 1980s and they have a pay phone people have to wait to use. So romantic!

I took a short nap and when I came down Wedge and the other three guys who were here last night were still chatting around the table. David (trail name Zaxby? Zaxanar? Something like that) and Bear Bait (from near where my parents live). Can’t remember the third.

Later Tina (hostel owner—I have legit met three Tinas who own hostels. And 2-3 Amys) and Wedge went foraging for ramps and mushrooms. After SQRL arrived, I joined the foraging expedition in progress. We didn’t find any morel but Tina says they aren’t that common on her property. She has a miraculous spring that has as much flow as a small creek but just slips right out from under a rock, without any particular fuss. It looks so refreshing. I think they filmed a Kohler advertisement there.

Hazelnut, Tina’s shy, somewhat cautious black and brown dog, becomes a joyful pup in the forest. One so rarely has the opportunity to use a verb like gambol, but here we are.

I had a heavy lunch, fell asleep again briefly. I laid in bed and read in the tiny “semi-private” curtained off space where Wedge and I each have a bed. Country-hostels are catnip to me. Much better than Hostel, in which international businessmen pay to torture people to death. Just this man’s opinion. This kind of hostel is quieter, for one thing.

I tried a dehydrated meal from Tina’s little resupply shop (two bookshelves neatly arranged with backpacker food). It was mashed potatoes and beef. It’s ok but that’s a lot of eating for less’n 400 calories. It’s mostly water. I could eat 400 calories of peanuts without even noticing. And I do. On more days than not.

At some point Wedge and I worked on a list of archetypes to classify all the most common reasons people say they’re hiking. As a researcher, I use archetypes as a tool to characterize large patterns in textual data—it was the focus of my dissertation and three of my articles. Wedge is great at naming archetypes but he kept arguing with me when I said that the Dad in Dad Hiker is figurative and not gender specific.

The weather was divine for country living. The homey, clean, rambling place has been a balm for this weary traveler. Tina has Boursin cheese to share. I wonder if it would make her uncomfortable if I suggested that we are kindred spirits.