Date: 2004-03-18
To: Springer Mountain, GA
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

Train to Georgia, Day TwoWeird Memories in the Chicago stationThis is what they do. They hurry you up, stick you in a gigantic concrete lung of a station that heaves and breathes, a million commuters its nervous blood pumping through, and feed you booze, white beer at $2/pint and serenade you with a cover-band's renditions of Hotel California and Comfortably Numb and you get numb and loose and stupid, all feeling safe and happy, then they make you wait. They delay your train and make you sit, you and two hundred others, all anxious, all waiting on line light Star Wars ticket nuts camped on sidewalks for days. I've been "forced" by this situation to sit beside a sweet-smelling zit faced beauty and her boyfriend, they from some foreign country whose dialect there is no name for in the dimly lit dungeons of Amtrak, Chicago. And I am falling asleep. No, really falling. After a handful of beers and songs and good fun with Alex and Rebecca at the upstairs bar, I am tanked and zonked and in real danger of losing consciousness if I don't get up now. Now! GET UP NOW! Whew. That was a close one. Awake now and quite sure in recollection that I would have nose-dived the tile-on-concrete floor seconds later if the zit-faced Italian hottie hadn't reached over and twisted my left nipple. This, much to the abhorrence of her machismo boyfriend but hey! The girl knew her VEMT, man (that's short for Venetian Emergency Medical Training) and she acted quickly, purely duty-bound of course. Anyway, the nipple-twisty worked. Woke me right up. And good thing. My train was loading and the aggro-carnivorous sheep were clusterfucking through the gate like so much hamburger through a grinder. I just had to get in on that fun. And I did. But what happened next wasn't really fun. You see, there was this little Asian girl, er, woman I should say, name of Malu. Malu was having a helluva time with her five suitcases and her seven shopping bags such that she was blocking MY entry into MY train car. So, the gentleman that I am, I helped her transport her bags to her seat. However, idiot that I am I didn't seize the Malu day. As crowded as the train was getting, it would have been a gimme to just sit down beside this Asian cutie and avoid the inevitable dead air loneliness that would (and did) ensue the moment I secured a two-seater all my own and no one, I repeat no one, sat down beside me. In the so-called 11th hour of my two-night train trek from soCal to Chi town, I met Alex. Alex and Rebecca. Two friendly young ladies who not only graced me with their company on and off the train well into the beer-addled station layover hours that followed, but kept me red-in-the-face with compliments. Rebecca focused on my ass, whilst diminutive and well-proportioned Alex at 4-foot-11 seemed better stationed to see my heart, or its whereabouts. Alex went from catching my eye this afternoon to full out thrilling me tonight, all in a matter of just a few hours. As she herself noted, perhaps it was just the beer. But there was something there. And it was GOOD. And it was welcome, both her energy and Rebecca's. And the farewell kiss I planted on Alex felt very good indeed. Why then I am alone again so soon? Welcome to the world of the rogue rail traveler. Hi! Nice to meet you. I'm Boxcar Bertha. But I don't have Barbara Hershey's boobs and I am mute among strangers. The tide of humanity, fast-footed commuters every one of them, trotted through the station in the two hours we sat there boozing and schmoozing from 430 to 630, exercising criminal amounts of joy and freedom from THAT world. When I'd cross that flow of Grand Central pedestrian traffic to relieve my bladder in the men's room across the way, I was fording a dangerous river, no doubt, a river of stress and hurry-up and muscle & sinew-filled suits that would stomp me like a rock concert neophyte if I weren't careful. It's weird how all the world is moving at such a pace, going places, doing things, moving stuff around, making deals and faking smiles, things I'll never understand. It's amazing and beautiful! I am glad they're out there, doing their thing. I am 1000-times more glad that I am not, that I am lost & found boy, that I am Wal-Mart Boy abandoned in the store and roaming free, beneath the radar, outside the calendar and clock. Thank you, Lord, that Thou hast given unto us the freedom of choice, the choice to be or not to be, to do or... not to give a shit. I choose the latter, and of course, I am lying through my teeth. I care like crazy. And when the professors entreat their English Lit grad students to dig through all this gibberish of mine and find meaning, they will find that I cared immensely, intensely, that I wrote and I loved and I lived. End of story.-RSM Chicago's central station was a trip. I thought I'd left behind the weird heebie-jeebies of bungled x-lives somewhere back near the northeastern edge of New Mexico. Not quite. A beer at the upstairs bar at central station reduced my walk to a wobble, my stance to a hunch as I recalled the day in 1996 when there in that very train station bar I had asked K to marry me, and poor as I was, had naught to offer for a ring but a one-shot whiskey bottle screw-on cap, punched through and fashioned into a ring. I¢m sad just thinking about it, about how a fine woman K deserved so much more, and a fine man I would have liked to have had more to offer. But I was poor and struggling hard against a depressive mind, so hard that it was all I could do half the time to just remember to breathe. I remember that I had to go back to Arizona for some job, which meant regrettably leaving K in Chicago with her sister. So right there in the station with my train rumbling nearby, I asked the girl I loved to marry me, and she said yes. It was the first such request to cross my lips and the last. As it happened, I got on my train and rode it as far as St. Louis before that same heart-wrenching love caused me to detrain and ride right back the way I came, back to K and of course a fair helping of the kind of awkwardness that comes with such rash romantic acts. I never made good on my wish to turn that bottleneck ring into the real thing. Not a year later my mental battles were bad enough that I had to pull out of the engagement altogether. Marriage is not the sort of decision one makes when half out of one's mind. Or it shouldn't be anyway. So that was I, in 1996 and there again today, sitting a few tables away and fully weirded out with the disheveled and disillusioned deja vu. I¢m sorry K. But then again, no I am not. Every great moment in life simply IS and must be honored as it IS, not as it happened to be fucked up later on or changed or whatever. That moment of pure love will always exist for me and I am grateful for it. I must admit however that it was a little weird sitting there again, drinking beers and being flirty with Rebecca and Alex while out of the corner of my eye seeing very clearly the Rick & K of ¢96 going gaga and silly in love just a few tables away. ¢RSM Gear. Yes of course gear. I get the impression from my reading that well-hung thruhikers are super gearheads. And they have to be. Just try throwing together a Coleman tent, $40 Wal-Mart sleeping bag, propane stove, army surplus mess kit, full-length foam mattress, fuel, canned tuna, canned chili, and a typical week's worth of your usual clothing: jeans, cotton shirts, cotton socks, lederhosen, jungle pith helmet, cast iron chastity belt, Kevlar vest, you know, the usual stuff, and just see how many megatons your pack weighs in at. Over 50 lbs I bet. More likely 60 or 70. So some smarty pants long distance trekkers started thinking light, figuring I guess that the lighter you packed the further you could go. These guys really got it down to a science, too. They started drilling holes in their watchbands, cutting the ends of their toothbrushes, severing superfluous limbs, a finger here, a little toe there, stuff like that. It got pretty out of hand. Then I came along and revolutionized the whole thruhiker "thang." While everyone else was spending ten times the money on ultralite gear like sleeping bags made out of origami paper, I invented "negative weight" gear, gear so light it actually subtracted pounds from heavy gear loads. With a tent that weighs in at -5 kilos (that's measured in quantum kelvin divided by the speed of light in a black hole) a down bag made from the feathers of actual ghost geese (ectoplasm extracted of course) and a cookstove so light it actually draws its fuel energy from the negative attraction of atoms in an inverse universe. Anyway, every good hydraulic system has its bleeder valve, and this train ride is mine. Four foul nights of scant sleep and insatiable questions across a country chock fulla dead dreams and broken love schemes, yes! That's my kinda warmup, my way of bleeding the brakes on this carbonate machine, bleed em now so we know they work then never use em again, not once. Not for the entirety of the 2,200 mile walk. Just go go and go some more. Bad memories bled, masochistic impulses fed and then tucked away in the barn. Got me my negative weight gear and eight six packs of beer (for ballast of course, to keep me from floating away on a hot air balloon pack of negative weight). I'm gonna stomp on the terra! Coursing along the Ohio River now, pea soup green and choked with skeleton trees beige and brown, gray skies, now and again a bridge, flood plains full of rocks and naked trees, moss and lichen and white caps over shallow spots. Aside from trash and the government-green and cement-gray dam ahead, no other sign of man other than the tracks on which we the train people roll, a water moccasin, a witch on her crooked broom, a caterpillar of coffins linked and diesel pumping boxlike hearts. And the forest. All around us woods now. And then we cross the river at last, slow as snails, the required speed for an ancient bridge no doubt. On the other side a sign: Hawk's Nest. And behind it in the woods a sign with a symbol.. could it be? The symbol of the AT? I don't know. For all my planning and packing I neglected to bring one map, not even just a xerox of the whole eastern seaboard. Nothing. So though I know this train will very soon pass right over the squiggly line of Earth that is my future home, I'm afraid I won't know it, not consciously anyway. Perhaps I will just feel it. And perhaps months from now while on foot near here I will see the silver snake Am-trak its way right past me, and I'll say, "Aha." Well, please excuse my flight into fancy, but I needed that. The train crowded in thick in West Virginia, causing my space bubble to shrink by half and coincidentally and messily a Budweiser burst in my bag. I shall return shortly will a full and serious list of my actual, real-life super-expensive hi-tech ultralight gear. Over and Out. -RSM