Date: 2004-05-08
From: Maine

To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

I bet if I were to return to Lambert¢s Meadow and to that site, I would discover deep indentations in the wood beneath my picnic table seat where I dug my fingers in straining against nine weeks of conditioning toward habitual movement: get up with the sun, pack it up, wolf down a Pop Tart, hit the trail. Every day a different place. Every day movement northward along the thin licorice whip line of the AT to a new forest, a new mountain, a new shelter, a new spring or stream to draw water to drink and eat. Go back I doubt I ever will, however. That is the nature of such a long, straight trajectory as this. Everything seen is seen for the first and last time. Every morning you awake miles from that flower, that tree, that section of trail you hiked just yesterday, never to be seen again.   But I succeeded in fighting the urge to move on. I rose late around 10 and set up shop at the campsite picnic table, laying out the makings of breakfast, lunch, dinner, leaving my hammock tent suspended in the trees behind me and simply sitting there like some receptionist at a desk offset by only a few feet from the main corridor of AT traffic. I built it, and they came. One after another of my brethren and sister thruhikers came walking, tromping, zooming, some hobbling down the trail and right by my cozy little encampment. Some said hello. Others ignored me. Most that I knew stopped for a moment to inquire if all was well and why I wasn¢t on the move. Town, you see, was just nine miles away. Town, a hotel, laundry, an outfitter, and a buffet style restaurant where at to pig out like Romans at the dedication ceremony for the new vomitorium. Shoneys! Shoneys! I heard the name repeated, almost sing-song spoken with reverence and awe again and again as they passed. How could I wish to miss out on Shoneys? They did not understand.And neither did I, really. I knew only that I was tired of the lot of them, and that my ass refused to move, and that maybe, just maybe, my friends Eric & Jess would at last catch up with me, rounding the same corner down to the creek where at I sat in my forest cubicle typing away, typing, nibbling on granola and dried mango and candied ginger.   Somehow I resisted all the force of the peak-bagging jones and just sat there. I smiled, entertained their complaints and lobbying efforts, and sent them on their way. The dialogue went something like this, repeated a dozen times at least: ¢Crucifixion? Ye-ess. First door on the right, one cross each. Crucifixion? Ye-es. First door¢¦¢I spent the whole day catching up on writing, watching Franco & Bennie and many, many others pass on. And I checked my email. Which was odd because I was deep in the woods and felt sure I wouldn¢t have signal. I did, though. And there was a message. It was from Eric & Jess, by way of Jessica¢s mother, told to her over the phone from some remote motel in some backwater Virginia Appalachian town where they¢d conked out and off the trail the day before. ¢We¢re going to the beach and want you to come along. Call us at our motel before 9:30 tonight if you get this message.¢ They told me later they thought there was about a one in fifty chance they¢d hear back from me in time. I hadn¢t checked my email in days. Miraculously, I did that day. I wrote them back immediately. I couldn¢t possibly hike the nine miles out to the nearest phone in time, so I just sat back in my hammock that evening as monsoon rains and thunder and lightning came crashing through the forest, and waited. At nine o¢clock that night, I had my reply, and was on my way to the beach!Ocean IsleNow it¢s sun and surf mellow as a bay and warm southern coastal Carolina waters and showers, as many as you can take, and cake and wine and fresh-squeezed lemonade and southern special sweet tea. It¢s three meals a day, every day something different, and stories by chef Terry of how hush puppies got their name and what makes a grit a grit. Been three or four daze of absolute, luxuriant beach living here in a rental cottage smack on the sand courtesy of Terry and Linda, trail friend Eric¢s delightfully cool parents. She talks to angels. Says they all know her name. I¢ve tried to talk to angels, but thus far they talked me into Heaven. Most days on the trail now, I feel sure this is a good thing. I haven¢t always been sure. I read about Rosie in Dharma Bums jumping off the roof, chased by imagined demons and cops, and I think of Luciano. I read about John Muir and I think of Luciano, choosing as he did to take his exit from this world in the bathroom of a friend, ironically the great or great-great grandson of the great naturalist. My life is spotted like a dirty shirt with celebrities. Ring around the Rosie. Ring around the collar of useless celebrity, the yolk of celebrity friends that does one no good.I get an email telling me the script has sold for $20 grand and that Luci¢s mother wants to pay me my half, and I don¢t think of Luci at all. I don¢t mix up thoughts of Luciano with cerebral wranglings over his mother and my long working relationship with her and all the mess and confusion that has come of it. When I get the news, I feel excitement for about a minute before the terror sets in. I wrestle with the fear of dealing with her on a business level again and a whole 24 hours passes before I find Terry¢s phone in my hand, her number ringing. For ten minutes she talks about some nebulous unnamed investor, a group it sounds like, interested in all her projects. Like the title of the script itself, ¢The Bridge,¢ this is a refrain I have heard before. In ten minutes she says nothing about any twenty grand, nothing about the script actually selling. In pregnant pauses, I listen to the Carolina beach waves chortling on shore and try to make sense of what she¢s telling me. As best as I can gather, she¢s telling me she wants to buy me out. But also I¢m hearing what sounds like a pitch of some sort, half pitch, half ultimatum. She¢s got two weeks to ¢fix¢ the script. What am I supposed to do? I¢m walking the Appalachian Trail. A few years back, while being paid to write a film script based on her concept and ¢Fight Club¢ director David Fincher¢s interest (by way of her rock star daughter Paz from Perfect Circle), the money to pay me had dried up during the second act of a three-act play, as it were. After I finished the script on my own time the following Fall, Luci¢s mama and I shook on a 50/50 split of the final sale to compensate me my extra time. It¢s been years since then and nothing. Nothing, that is, but the occasional rumblings of some investor or potential buyer that invariably ends.. in nothing.Today I am sad. I feel like some half-psychotic bad dream arm of gangly monster reality has reached out across the country and touched my pure white Appalachian quest with oozing, disease-ridden hands. Using false good news to lure me, some beast has sucked me back in. Not Luci¢s mother, surely. But just the energy, the entropy, the chaos surrounding any and all attempts to work with her, or she with me, in the recent past.Worse of all, I shared this good news with Eric and Jess and family, all without really knowing the truth. No, even worse is that I still don¢t know the truth. Has the script sold? It doesn¢t sound like it. But if someone wants it and they want to buy me out of it, isn¢t that good news? Maybe. I just don¢t know. The cell phone lost signal at some point in the very unclear haze of her story. I dialed her again, only to have the signal dropped shortly after saying hello. I don¢t call back. The surf rumbles and churns across a warm evening breeze. I wonder if there are tiger sharks out there. I don¢t know what to think. I decide not think at all.So back to the trail then. Yes. Except we can¢t go back, not yet anyway. Eric told me when he picked me up it would be a week. And what a glorious sun-drenched and salt airy dream week of beach life it has been, gourmet meals and all. Shrimp Creole last night. Fresh locally grown beans and corn and potatoes throughout. Chicken and sausage gumbo. Pancakes at dawn (because after weeks on the trail rising with the sun it is hard to change) chock fulla freshly picked blueberries and glazed in pure Vermont maple. Out to dinner one night at a fried fish joint so popular that folks stand in line for hours to get in, and once in no beer for thirsty me, but ¢hush puppies¢ and southern sweet tea and later the story from Papa O (Eric¢s dad Terry) about the origin of the name. Hanging out for a week solid with Grandma and sister Karen O and Mama O and cousin Molly and aunt Trina, all of us comfortably ensconced in this four bedroom house smack on the dunes, sound of surf, two big beds in every room, AC and ceiling fans and a parapet high atop the roof for sunset viewing, terrific in Monday¢s evening electrical storm. I sit here in a white porch rocker, one of six on the deck, each with a towel drying on its back, and all of them thus like little sails rocking in the wind, a ghost of some Atlantic sea watching sailor¢s widow in every one. I stare out at that immortal sea, that sea that connects me with my youth, my Father, my drowned uncle David far north in Maine, my destination. I stare and the pelicans give a constant show, flying, flying over the sea in front of me all day and dropping, one every 30 seconds or so, dropping from the sky like mortally wounded bombers straight down and into the sea with an inaudible splash. Watch them long enough as they fish from thirty feet or so above the waves and you can almost hear the snap of salt-encrusted synapse as they hone in, commit, tuck wing and drop like stones fatal to a fish. Only the constant rhythmic whirring and scraping of the sea and the tink-tinkle high pitched chirps of people on the beach reach me up here. And through all this I read Kerouac and wonder and ¢Wow¢ at his fifty-year-old words, at simple thoughts brought to me across time and space from a brother now dust and legend. I relate too strongly perhaps and too word-for-word with his struggles, but it¢s a good thing after years of being told that I sound like him, that my writing rings of his, and me having never read him, ever, not even ¢On the Road¢ although I likely fibbed and said I had to save face at some time.Eric talks to the neighbor about the trail, says he was considering quitting, that he felt ¢the tug of the real world, get a job, you know.¢ I can¢t help myself and chime in immediately, not looking up from my work but saying, ¢That ain¢t no tug.¢ It¢s true. I don¢t feel it like that. But Eric, he¢s younger, eager to meet the world eye-to-eye, to show It his stuff. Me, I am jaded at 37. I have interviewed the parents of that morning¢s dead and made front page news in New York for my sins. I rode with the King to see Amtrak from the eye of the engineer only to witness as the train ate a human and spit out her bones with teeth on glass gnashing sounds, impossible. I have seen enough with the skin of their jobman on me, and I have gone away.Mama O Linda is interested in my ¢career,¢ such as it is. She points me to an article in the May 31st New Yorker (page 30) titled, ¢A book in you.¢ It¢s about a young assistant at International Creative Management in NYC named Kate Lee who¢s job it is to turn internet ¢bloggers¢ (or web loggers) into writers with book contracts. Even out here in Appalachia, trying hard as hell to ignore the world, I am intrigued. How do I get this Kate Lee to read Jigglebox? I don¢t think if she went Googling for ¢blogs¢ for a hundred years that she¢d ever find me. I never refer to my work as blogging. Will she ever go Googling for ¢rants?¢ We can only dream. Linda¢s daughter (Eric¢s sis) Karen O turned twenty here at the beach this week. She is looking for a cause to embrace, around which to wrap her obvious gift for lobbyist gab. She speaks of going to Washington perhaps, to intern for the campaign to save the penguins of Antarctica. She has a voracious appetite for books that impresses me. I suggest, only half-jokingly, that she oughta intern for some big New York literary agent, then turn her appetite for books toward the cause of struggling writers everywhere, starting with her brother and me. We are a cause worth fighting for. I, for one, will be dead one day, perhaps never having enjoyed the fruits of my work. The penguins of Antarctica will be dancing on my bones long after we are all dead and gone. Oh, well. Kate Lee is 27, my lucky number. There¢s that, anyway.Thursday and the day of our return to Appalachia approacheth. I wake with a start (as always lately, too comfy in big beds) and this morning like no other find the strength and focus to pilot my dozy-dream-and-dropped-egg-awakened body out the glass door onto the porch and straight to the sand, drop towel, run, and splash! Into the Atlantic I go, christened and baptized and doused full body in the salty warm syrup waters, calm now but surely later in the season the stuff of hurricane floods and the sucking and slamming away of all this sand, this manmade beauty strip beach of dredged offshore sand. Thus begins another day on Ocean Isle, a tiny island separated from the mainland only by the wide channel of the Intercoastal Waterway, a community of beach houses old and new, the older houses sporting names like Crusty Cottage and Driftwood Den and Salt Box Special and Last Dime and Giggling Pelican. Correction: that last one is a restaurant. To get booze here on Ocean Isle or anywhere in North Carolina, you gotta pay a visit to the ABC store, or, as Eric calls it, ¢The Alphabet.¢ I drag Eric & Jess in there like a couple of deer in the headlights while oldman drunkard I, suddenly feeling like a big lush for buying a case of PBR beer and 5 liters of boxed sangria within the past 48 hours, my contribution to the beach house fridge fillins, buy tequila and triple sec, standard margaritas fixins. Then I take `em next door to a water¢s edge shanty bar and order up 3 margi¢s to celebrate the alleged sale of The Bridge, my script written with Luci¢s mother. Oh, well. One can never have too many causes for celebration, even if they do turn out to be bogus.Couple of days later and I¢m the only one who¢s had a margarita. It was a good one, too. Got Eric to hand-squeeze half a dozen lemons for lemonade, some sugar to sweeten and a slice of lime, mmmm! Best margarita I¢ve had in awhile. But I¢m the only taker. So it appears I¢ll be heading back into the woods with a coupla 12 oz. Coke bottles fulla booze. Groovy. The beer however, is already gone. Eradicating my drunkard¢s guilt, Eric and Jess put a major dent in that case of PBR.Papa O has a story for every type of beer or food. So sure enough when Eric and I return from the store with the PBR, he¢s got a story. His is about how Pabst lost the loyalty of Milwaukee drinkers and how they¢re just lately making a come-back. In the car, I had just told Eric my Pabst story. So Eric jumps on his father¢s story and insists that I tell mine. I do. I tell about how in my last summer before high school graduation I was taken to Colorado with friend Rudy O¢Meara and his mom and sis for a family trip to their grandparents¢ home in Aspen. Arriving there, I was stunned to pass through an archway and gates and continue driving for what seemed miles past stables and barns and various other outbuildings obviously attendant to some grand estate, then to arrive at sure enough, a log cabin mansion easily as grand as the palatial inn atop the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. This was Rudy¢s grandparent¢s ¢home.¢ And so I soon came to learn Rudy¢s mother¢s maiden name. It was, as you may have guessed by now, Pabst.In another strange flicker of small world irony, last night Eric¢s sister is working through a crossword puzzle when she asks aloud for a five letter city in Utah staring with O. Without so much as a thought, my mouth blurts out ¢Ogden.¢ Bingo. It¢s a good 30 seconds or so before my brain catches up and reminds me of the sad story behind my knowledge of this obscure piece of Utah geography. Ogden was home to my first publisher, the crooked fuckers Northwest Publishing, Inc who accepted my first novel in 1994, sat on it for a year, then went bankrupt, taking my innocence, my naivete, and my vanity press investment of $2000 with them at first to Vegas and the Bahamas, then later to prison in one of the largest & ugliest examples of vanity press fraud on record. I still feel the sting of this, and its scars are easily visible in my life, the most obvious being the stacks of manuscript beneath my bed, never final edited, never published. But beyond my scars, I think of all the other writers who likewise took it in the ass from the pirates of Ogden, some 1700 of them in all, or so the legal documents said.Out here in Appalachia, 700 miles along and now on brief hiatus at the beach and soon to stomp another 400 miles of AT terra before I break again for Independence Day in New Hampshire, out here I feel only pity for the scumsuckers and tricksters of the world. I read Kerouac and feel a Dharma bum-kinda peace wash over me as I forgive them all and laugh a happy Buddha laugh and heft my 35 pound rucksack fulla all I need in the world to walk and live and breathe and feel truly free and for the first time in a long time there is a twinkle in my eye. It is the smile of God. It is the knowledge that out here on the perimeter, on the other perimeter, the opposite perimeter from where Jim Morrison saw no stars, there are a zillion stars and infinite possibilities and joys and there is no death, no need of early exit, no fear of that monster emptiness for which Bukowski said, ¢Dying will solve its power.¢ I have but just begun to breath and see again. And there are many, many miles to go before I sleep the sleep of Kerouac or Morrison or Luci, too. I love you all, and now leave you to the joys of Heaven. I will get there soon enough.So on the last full day here at the beach to fully ¢be me¢ in every sense and feel me and breathe me and drink me, I niggle Eric into driving me to a thrift store and then to Home Depot where I buy a coupla baby dolls, a caulking gun and an 11 ounce tube of silicon glue. On return to the beach, I hunt down a pile of beach detritus I¢ve been gathering for days and set to work gluing colorful shells to the bare plastic skin of dolls. Jessica¢s first reaction is typical, and thus forgivable. She finds it ¢strange¢ and probes me for answers or reassurance. I give her both, and at once, neither. What¢s the point of telling her that dolls are cool because, with all the umpff of a disease vector, a doll carries with it so much inbred subconscious ¢meaning¢ and ¢significance¢ and elicits such personal feelings that, well, they make the perfect template upon which to glue a Freudian id¢s wortha junk. By dusk I am the proud father of two bouncing baby boys. Both sport natty gray hair down to their bare butts, courtesy of the local brand of Spanish moss heretofore hanging from some Carolina coastal jungle tree. And they are armed. Or armored, I should say. Each sports a calcium carbonate equivalent of Kevlar, a bulletproof vest of oyster and every other imaginable seashell. My boys are seashell mosaic and wild-haired beasts. They are my creations, and soon they will land in the hands of nephews Matty and Jake. May they love them, and be loved. The moon rises tonight dark as a wet dagger¢s shine. It sits not two fingers-width above the horizon at arm¢s length. She is a lone blood orange in a Parisian black market night sky begging for the memory of Benedict Emerieu, my lost lover and friend. She is the moon, and Pierre de Joinville is the ink on my hip bone, and ever only I can guess they are lost. Not even Google has unearthed them, and thus said is this my greatest fear, that somewhere, mon frere du tatouage et mort. Bad French notwithstanding, I want all my friends accounted for. I want them here with me again, wherever I am.And the last beach night wanes, and I grow tired. I had so much more to say. C¢est la Vie. C¢est la Vie.-RSM