Date: 2006-06-05
From: Congdon Shelter

To: Williamstown, Mass
Miles today: 0.0

absolutely no life in my step today. i try to get excited that i am going home, but there is nothing there. but i am not sad to be going home. i will not miss the hardships that i whine on so frequently. i just feel empty. maybe this is a reminder that a journey itself is the destination.road walking is also much less fun. yes, it is graded, and in general stays in valleys, but country roads weren't meant for pedestrians. the suvs and semis have the right of way now. sometimes when the shoulder vanishes, i find myself in that way.in towns i get waves and smiles, thumbs up here and there. but out on the highway, drivers look at me with a sense of wariness, perhaps guilt, as we all become aware of the sickening and destructive addiction we have with oil. but i am not here to condemn anyone's lifestyle. i am just a man who wanted to go for a walk. i own a car as well. but the looks seem to feel like, "damn hippie, who does he think he is using those damn feet on my highway!"i made it into Williamstown late in the afternoon, and it is like a ghost town. it is a college town, and i think that yesterday was graduation. even the coffee shop was slow. i went to the laundromat, and there was one guy washing what looked to be a semester's worth of clothing. that was it.....me and my: 1 shirt, 1 pair of shorts, 2 boxer briefs, 5 pairs of socks, and 1 do-rag...and he with 7 or 8 washing machines going at once.i checked into a hotel. i managed to negotiate price, as i've only recently started realizing how negotiable everything in life is. but everything was stacked against the hotel owner here. there are a dozen hotels in town. but no people. i squeezed out a 50% discount, and felt good for using the principles of logic to my benefit. a man's got to find something to feel good about when he has no job, no friends, is hundreds of miles from home, and is about to go home to an empty space.i decided to go out, to treat myself to a celebratory dinner. the closest place to the hotel was a diner. this was fine, a man who has eaten granola bars for a month straight certainly isn't going to turn into a foodie at the flip of a switch. diner menus are huge though, and commingling rabid hunger with an 8 page menu is unwise.i ended up ordering the eggplant quesadillas, which turned out to be as unappetizing as it now sounds writing about it. this is what happens when said commingling occurs...your brain explodes...and the scraps that remain say "i know...i'll go with the one unique dish i see on this menu". there is a reason that it is unique...NO ONE...is going to steal that recipe!I tried to stay up late watching t.v., but there was nothing on. i watched the end of "Oceans 11" and then clicked it off. i began trying to imagine what a video montage of my hike would look like. certainly it would not have an inspirational feeling to it. do you know what i mean, the kind with an R. Kelly or Tom Petty song playing along with the clips. it also would not be one of those nostalgic pieces with Green Days "Time of your Life" playing. Nor would it have some rugged, macho, outdoorsy theme.Nope it would probably be a blooper reel. i think i can imagine it. there would be absurd circus music (like the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" theme), and it would just be clips of me falling down, swatting in vain at hordes of bugs, the day that i tried to hitchhike but no one would give me a ride, a little montage of the ridiculous places i've slept, the strange people that i've encountered and tried to avoid, getting rained on, wandering around in circles in the dark trying to actually find a white blaze marking the trail.....and then maybe, just for an enigmatic ending...it would show one final shot of me sitting on a mountain bald looking like i just went a few rounds with a rhinoceros, covered in sweat and bug bites, dirty and nasty, my odor actually permeating the camera...with a half-cocked grin on my face.