Date: 2004-11-03
From: Maine state line

To: Home
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

Mad WorldJournal from September 16, 2000FearMaine/New Hampshire State Line¢All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces.Bright and early for the daily races, going nowhere, going nowhere.The tears are filling up their glasses, no expression, no expression.Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow, no tomorrow, no tomorrow.¢I awake like Donnie Darko this morning, narcoleptic, knocked-out of time and space, sick to my stomach. Patrick Swayze and some other guy standing over me where I lay on a golf course green, the sun behind them blinding so that I cannot see their eyes. But it¢s Jess and Eric with me this morning, and it¢s not the sun but my own shame that¢s forestalling direct eye contact.As with everyday for six months now, we no more than rub the sleepies from our eyes then we¢re packing, bright and early for the daily races, going.. somewhere? No. Not today. Today we¢re going nowhere, just like the song says. I can feel it in the crawling of my skin, the hollowness of my bones, the rat rattling the cage of my chest in the throes of death. ¢When is this gonna stop?¢ Donnie asks Frank, the six foot tall rabbit that haunts his days and nights. Today. Today I must hike on alone. I have to. I can¢t do this anymore. ¢And I find it kinda funny and I find it kinda sad, the dreams in which I¢m dying are the best I¢ve ever had. I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take, when people run in circles, it¢s a very very.. mad world, mad world.¢I find it hard to tell them. I skip breakfast and pack fast. My actions are a dead giveaway that something¢s wrong, but it¢s all I can do until I find the words. I don¢t feel ready to speak, but they¢re staring at me, bewildered. Jess walks off into the woods to pee. I seize the moment alone with Eric. ¢I¢ve decided to hike on ahead,¢ I say. ¢I¢m going to try and catch up with Yazzy. We had a spark, she and I, and I¢m starved for companionship, Eric, you know? You¢re lucky. You¢ve got Jess. I¢ve got no one.¢ It¢s a mad world, all right.The night before, I crossed over into Maine alone. Jess was held back by the rocks, and Eric stuck with her. If she¢d been mine, I would have stayed behind with her as well. But as the pain of her not-mine-ness grew in me, I could not but race ahead. I reached the state line just before dark. Standing there at the ¢Welcome to Maine¢ sign, I fondly recalled the day Jessica and I joined hands and, upon the count of three, hopped into Virginia together with a laugh.Now at the last state line on the northbound Appalachian Trail, I put my left arm around the sign as one would a lover, held out my right as far as I could reach, and clicked the shutter button on a disposable camera. I had about an hour alone at the next shelter before they arrived. Jessica had a look about her that seemed to say, ¢Thanks for waiting for us, Jerko.¢ (Probably not at all her thoughts, but that look!) They were both tapped, pouring sweat and rabid from an all-too-familiar run with the after-dark devil of determination to reach a certain point, sundown be damned. The shelter had a recessed loft probably capable of sleeping six above and six below, plus a roomy front area for cooking. Unlike most shelters, their existed a front wall as well giving the feeling more of a cabin than a lean-to. I myself had cooked sitting in the entryway. Finding it comfortable to sit with my feet on the ground outside, I¢d cooked on a rock and watched the sunset.Unfailingly polite and conscious of others, Jessica asked if I minded if she cooked up on the loft. I did mind. I was exhausted and ready to at least try and sleep, already cozily ensconced in my bag, head on my pillow. No, wait a minute. Did I say cozily? Let me rephrase that: I felt trapped. Trapped in my bag, trapped in the corner and heartsick to boot. Was this some unprovoked fit of paranoia? Hardly.You see, the moment they had arrived, well, a minute or so after her dagger-eyed stare, Jessica had complained of overwhelming hunger. I could relate, having many times pulled too-long days only to arrive so tired I didn¢t feel I could possibly muster the strength to cook. I, meanwhile, was three-quarters done with my two-serving dehydrated lasagna-in-a-bag dinner and adequately fed. Without hesitation, I handed Jess the remainder and said, ¢Here, eat.¢And here¢s where the story gets highly subjective. Here¢s where the jet engine comes hurling through the wormhole and smashes into Donnie Darko¢s bedroom and pops the question, ¢Did Donnie really survive just because his imaginary friend called him out of bed that night? Or is he dead? Or did just part of him die, leaving him trapped in space but dead in time?¢In all the time I¢d hiked with Jess & Eric, I recall seeing him kiss her twice. Both times the kisses were of a conciliatory nature, making up for something he¢d done that pissed her off. I don¢t recall ever seeing her offer up a kiss. If I had witnessed regular displays of affection between the two from the get-go, would I have allowed myself to fall in love with this woman? No way. It would have been a whole different ball game. For the sake of this story and within the limits of my memory, they NEVER openly displayed affection. Then right there in the soft light of my little rose-scented burgundy votive candle, she spoon fed him from my dinner. She fed him and they giggled, two newlyweds feeding one another from the top of a tier cake. Cut to Donnie¢s bedroom: the ceiling collapses in a shower of plaster and burning steel.Cut to me in the corner in the dark, crushed and dying.¢Children waiting for the day they feel good, happy birthday, happy birthday. And I feel the way that every child should, sit and listen, sit and listen. Went to school and I was very nervous, no one knew me, no one knew me. Hello teacher tell me what¢s my lesson, look right through me, look right through me.¢ I lay awake beside the pair that night feeling, in the words of Tom Waits, lonlier than a parking lot when the last car pulls away. I wanted to leave that night, but I was trapped, ashamed.Outside the shelter in a locked steel ¢bear box¢ was my stuff sack full of food. Unlike the usual method of hanging food in the trees, the steel box guarantees there is no way in hell a bear is gettin¢ to your food that night. But inside the shelter, something far more vital than my food lay torn open and exposed for any creature to devour. I held my heart tight in my chest that night, felt its every liquid breath of red, red life.And in the morning I took my heart away. It was hard as hell to say goodbye. Despite my efforts to make it a smooth break, the vibe was clearly ugly. Eric spoke in monotone. Jessica returned my embrace with wooden arms. She was brushing her teeth when I walked away. What was that intense look in her eyes? Was it betrayal? Did she feel betrayed?Just out of sight of the shelter but still well within earshot, I stood still and tried to speak. Were it not, I believe, for my own feelings of shame, I would have shouted these words. ¢I LOVE YOU, GUYS. I REALLY DO.¢ But no words came, and I walked off alone into the woods of Maine. "And I find it kinda funny and I find it kinda sad, the dreams in which I¢m dying are the best I¢ve ever had. I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take, the people run in circles, it¢s a very very mad world, mad world, enlarging your world.. mad world.¢ [Entire lyrics of theme song from the film Donnie Darko]*****Editing my journals now, the journey over, I¢d like to explain why all the reference to the film Donnie Darko. The shelter had been down a canyon of sorts, so there would have been no radio reception. No matter. The ¢silence¢ of the forest and my own footfalls were all I could take for awhile. When I later reached the next point of high elevation, I carefully searched for signal from the one last radio station I knew to be clearly audible up here in Nowhereland. And what song do you suppose comes on the radio and starts to play that very moment? A song not heard in the regular rotation of most commercial stations, one I¢d heard only one other time on my hike: ¢Mad World,¢ the theme song from Donnie Darko.With the words of that haunting line, ¢The dreams in which I¢m dying are the best I¢ve ever had,¢ I lost it. Right there in a rather narrow corridor of the Appalachian Trail, I dropped to the Earth and cried. As it happened, I would never see Jessica and Eric again. Not on the Appalachian Trail, anyway. I would run into them by accident in Millinocket, at the tackiest hotel I¢ve ever had the displeasure of overnighting in. And in that horrid setting, I got the news: Jessica was engaged. Game over. As though it had ever begun. It was a game begun and played out only in the deluded mind of a dreamer, of a man who had dreamt he would meet the woman of his dreams on a 2000-mile trail with a male/female ratio worse than that of Alaska. Dreamer.Fool.Jester.¢Wanna know what I think?¢ An old Inuit Indian chief sits beside me tonight as I write. He likes me to call him Cheif SpongeBob. If I had to give him a job description, I¢d call him my ¢Meddlesome Muse.¢   I stare into the flames of a small fire warming the igloo here in the tundra far above the Artic Circle, and I know full well what he thinks. But I humor him. He is my host after all, his tribe having found me paradoxically undressed and blue as a robins egg jabbering insanely to a crudely made snowman somewhere outside the town of Old Crow.¢Tell me, Cheif SpongeBob, what do you think?¢ I say with a sigh.And then, in a manner that I¢m quickly learning is his way, he says nothing for like two minutes. While I wait for him to speak, I reflect a moment on just why I¢m here. It¢s a little fuzzy, thanks to the hypothermia I suffered, but I recall that it had something to do with a heightened sense of patriotism in the face of all that freedom on the Appalachian Trail, a real love of country, that and a total sense of despair following some doom-filled event in early November. Oh, yeah, that¢s when they shipped my 19-year old buddy from the trail off to Iraq... Or was it something else? I can¢t quite remember.¢I think you found her.¢ ¢Wh-what?¢ I snap out of it at the sound of the old man¢s voice.¢You found her and you let her go.¢¢Who?¢¢You know who, Chris. (He calls me Chris because of something I said when they found me.) The woman from your dream. Your mate for life.¢¢But she was TAKEN!¢ I raise my voice angrily and am immediatly ashamed. I go quiet. I try and shut her out of my mind. I tell myself silently, ¢Now that I have told the story, I can let go. Let it all go.¢The chief is patient, unphased by my outburst. He scoops a burning ember from the fire with a spade-shaped shoulder bone of some animal, touches it to his pipe and smokes. ¢Was she now,¢ he says.*****The Inuit people say that when they found me in the snow, I kept repeating two things: ¢America is lost,¢ and ¢I am here to visit Chris McCandless. Have you seen him?¢-RSM