Date: 2005-07-07
From: Wynnewood, PA

To: Wynnewood, PA
Miles today: 0.0

This foot, this foot. No more sharp pain, full weight bearing capacity, but it¢s easily wearied, and still a dull and low ache. I walked slowly and carefully through much worse knee pain in March and April, and eventually that pain healed itself. Can I trust that the same will now be true of this foot, as long as I am slow and careful? Or am I diving at the chance (I should say, am I only diving at the chance) to be hiking again, so eagerly that I am willfully ignoring signals to wait still longer? I find I am afraid.Am I foolish? Am I preparing to damage myself again? Is this trip still possible, or has stubbornness blinded me to stupidity? (And if I go back to the Shenandoahs, are there still hikers down there, that far south?) Is this the natural apprehension of someone justly afraid of reinjury, or the warning of a jaded better judgment? I cannot separate out the remnants of my common sense and my longing to be back in the mountains and my incredulous envy of those hikers who ¢ even if they have chosen to go home! ¢ are physically sound. I have been sitting here for what seems like so long. I am ready to throw something, just to hear the shatter. I am glaring at my leg, padded with a bag of corn that has been thawed and refrozen so many times I grimace to think of its contents, as if I might cow it into submission. I am childish and petulant and yearning.I watched a documentary about the trail last night and when the camera panned over the Whites I felt it like a pang in my chest. I¢ve a long way yet before I get there, but that¢s home, and the thought of my New England in late summer and autumn, of carrying myself there, and through, and north ¢ I cannot find the phrase¢s end. A beauty to make you silent. The sharp red edges of the turning leaves. This is how I want to be there, to have arrived: simply. By placing one foot after another. Like saltwater and granite and groves of white pines. Like deep blue on deep green and a cold snap in the air, like the smell of hemlocks and the water rushing white. Like this, to have arrived. And to have borne the gift of having been elsewhere first, in deliberate pilgrimage. To have traveled the green Southern valleys and the mid-Atlantic woods, in slow progress towards a terminus, in homage which is to a degree, as are all such journeys, inexplicable.Here it is, my heart. (Did I suspect its peculiar particular geography?) I am conceding vulnerability. I am giving up the ghost. So you can mock. I am overdone and sentimental and, for the moment, entirely unironic. I should be restrained, less florid, disaffected, purged of cheap sincerity; as a last resort I should at least have the decency to lapse into self-deprecation. (What worse, one writer asks, ¢ you see I will scrabble at the remains of my pretensions by offering up quotations like coins, or seeds ¢ than being seen to try too hard or care too much? As if the world were not full of greater sorrows.) And so it is, whether I speak or do not; and whether I travel whole and hale and healed or am obliged to stop walking, to wait for another season, so it will remain. In the meantime I am feeling the pull of place. The who and why and where and when of a journey tangle together, Gordian. So I wish I were walking. So I wish I were walking home.