Date: 2004-08-03
From: Georgia

To: Maine
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: moderate rain

Yab-Yuck Undisclosed in ConnecticutAwoke this morning to the pleasant sound of rain outside, dropsplopping on large leaves of garden plants, dripping from tree branches,lovely. And just what I needed to hear at 6:45 a.m., still wrung outfrom a week of solid big mile days capped off by the past two nights ofhorrid, survival sleep, first in a rain of daddy long legs and next ina real downpour that flooded the ground beneath my tarp. I rise from comfy futon and visit the commode. Therein, I contemplatethe connection between the words "commode" and "accommodation." Perhaps it simply means that an accommodation is a place to stay wherethere's a commode? The accommodations here are just dandy. Peg Leg and I had been pickedup at a road crossing by a woman I'll call Switch. Switch introducedherself as a devout Buddhist and said we could stay the night at herplace in a nearby small Connecticut town provided we made a donation tothe erection of a large Buddha statue she was building to adorn herfront lawn. Sure, why not. It was cheaper than a motel by far, and itincluded laundry and a shower. Back at her house, things went smoothly enough save one detail. Thetransfer of money. You can tell a lot about a person by how they askfor and/or receive money. Switch was not what you might call "at ease"with the transaction, and her uneasy tone of voice stuck a brief oddchord in my first impressions of this otherwise pleasant woman . I wasso exhausted at this point, however, that Switch could have been Satanhimself in female form and for the love of a bed I would have seen onlyan angel, a shower and a pillow. This morning then, my musings complete, I returned to bed toute suite. Feeling a bit of a headache, I took a few ibuprofen andwent back to sleep. Ahh, it was a divine sleep. And had been allnight, starting from around 7 pm when I first hit the pillow. All toldI slept about 14 hours. Wonderful. I'd needed it badly.Then WHAM! Like the crash of unfriendly thunder, reality slams into mysleep with locomotive force. "No!   No, this can't be!" a voice isshouting. My eyes snap open and I roll over to face the shouting. What I see is gruesome. The third eye Switch had been telling us aboutjust the night before had flared and swollen, grown pustulent and meanand twitchy. Downright cannibalistic, it had eaten her two normal eyesmaking of her the first Buddhist Cyclops I've ever seen. "No this isn't right! You must be out of here at once! This is theonly time I have to clean the room! No! I'll give you 15 minutes toclear out! Dammit!" And then it was gone with the slam of the door. It, she, whatever thatwas. It wasn't the kindly calm Buddhist woman we'd met the nightbefore. No, this was no bodhisattva, but a beast, a monster withbloated head & gaunt body, an hemorrhoidal & hysterical jabbering thing,a bipolar version of the Switch we'd recently known but not at all thesame. Just the night before, whilst drifting off to sleep, I had thankedKerouac for working his dharma bum magic for me and landing me thissweet haven of rest. As Peg Leg and I hurriedly pack our bags to go, Ihalf revoke that gratitude. So much for yab-yum and the sweet loving girls of the Buddhist beatrevolution. Homegirl's yab-yum days were over. Switch had clearlyslipped a gear out of sync with dharma and straight into yab-yuck, theculture of fear and angst and worry, an ugly zone where truefull-hearted altruism (of which I have seen so much in my AT travels)is clearly an impossible dream. To think the night before I had arrived at a possible name for my bookon the trail: "Faith in humanity restored." Oh, well. I still havethe faith. But I won't be using that title now, it having come to mein the wrong place at the wrong time, in the angst-ridden morning realmof Switch the schizoid Buddhist.[Postscript: Three or four days later, I arrived in Massachusetts andnoted that a thruhiker-friendly and quite reasonably-priced place tostay the night was, of all things, a Buddhist retreat. Like a childfallen from his bicycle just days after the training wheels came off, Iforced myself to get back on the bike and give it another try. Theretreat turned out to be a fine place, and I am grateful. I was,however, plagued by horrid dreams that night, dreams that time hadtricked me, that in my race to cross the mid-Atlantic states withimpossible speed, I myself had jumped gears and in fact here was reallythere, and in the morning I would be rudely awakened again, adream-loop of yab-yuck infinitum. -RSM