Baltimore

I made it into the D.C. area on Friday, carrying a new sign that I picked up two days before. It's a big dry erase board, and I've made it say different things on and off but mostly it says 'GIVE SHOES.ORG,' and it's given me a new way of connecting with the cars that drive by all day. I had thought about getting a sign before but had always thought that it would be too much of a hassle, but now that I have one I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

Saturday I was supposed to meet up with Sondra Clark, Allan and Silvana's daughter and a S4S spokesperson, but I woke up feeling woosy and a little dizzy, and before I got to downtown I threw up next to the road, so I turned around and went back to my room. By evening I felt a little better, and Sunday morning seemed to have gotten over whatever it was, and I walked through most of the day.

I had been in contact for a few days with Rachel, a friend from college in Durango who lives in Baltimore, and as the timing would have it another friend from Durango, Cherie, had flown out to visit Rachel earlier in the eek. Sunday night they drove down and picked me up, and since then I've been staying here in Baltimore, finishing off a great few days of leisure and respite and meeting a lot of people. Yesterday we drove to Cunningham Falls State Park, and climbed up a waterfall and swam in the nearby lake. Today we went to the Baltimore Zoo and got a tour of the city and the bay.

Probably I'll be walking again tomorrow, and as always it will be hard to leave friends and a bed and roof behind.

Ladysmith

I didn't leave South Hill until Tuesday afternoon, and made only slow progress for a while, meaning that I had to walk late into the night. At some point, maybe around ten or ten thirty, still several miles out of the next town, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and looked over to see a fawn laying on its side in the middle of the opposite lane, kicking its legs. My first reaction was to turn my head away and keep walking, but twenty feet up the road I swung about and came back. The fawn, still splashed with spots, lay with its right eye swollen up badly, its head bruised and slightly bloody. I picked the poor thing up and it thrashed hard in my hands and cried out little neighs, and I laid it back down in the grass on the side of the road. I poured a little water in its mouth, then just stood there for a minute or two, quietly watching and unwantingly judging its chances. Without knowing anything else to do I walked away.

My feet have their good days and their bad days, their good and bad weeks. The heat, which yes, is back, doesn't help them but I find ways around it - walking in the ditch instead of on the pavement, or on the white line instead of the shoulder, or on the yellow line down the middle, even. Sometimes, too, I've gotten in the habit of pouring a little bit of water in the dirt and making mud, then stomping around in it until my feet are covered. No tactic helps for very long, because conditions change quickly, but together they get me through.

The insects have been bad in Virginia, so far. I have woken up on several mornings to find ants swarming inside seemingly every nook of my backpack, and I pour them out in cupfulls and dance around to keep from being bitten. Flying ones, too, harass me as I walk, and I've pulled close to two dozen ticks of of myself in the last ten days or so.

My spirits, I think, remain high on average, and the seperation that I described in my last post seems like an old and unneeded vice. Yes I'm talking to people every day and yes I enjoy interaction at every level. Of course I'd rather not have to scrounge for my daily social requirements, but I take what I can get.

South Hill

I crossed into Virginia yesterday before noon, a boundary which sat roughly 910 miles into the trip and which I'm calling the halfway mark. To celebrate I crawled into the woods and changed into clean shorts, then strummed around on my new guitar. The guitar is extremely lightweight, picked up in Raleigh with the intention of making me miss the piano less.
The weather has been cooling down for me the last four or five days. The mornings here, in the rippling hills, still seemingly as densely forested as Georgia though not as wet, are cool and cloudy, and either break into the early afternoon into light sun or light rain. If it does get hot it doesn't do so until later in the day and gives me plenty of time to walk while it's cooler. I hope this trend lasts; I'm told that it won't.

I find that I grow less and less wanton in satisfying people and more and more so in satisfying the road. I have less desire seemingly everyday for contact, am less inclined to look for conversation in a grocery store or watch the faces the pass by in each car. I'm seeking less momentary interaction, growing tired of brief flashes of small talk, or the same exact questions lined up in the identical, neat row.
Certainly if I were a more social person I have little doubt that I'd be here. My driving engine when I'm walking, is built from the individualistic and the independent, and it runs better on the calm quiet of an empty road than the hum of a bar. Maybe it's needless to say, but I find that I want to move more slowly than most people, not rushing along with crowd. Because I'm stubborn sometimes that means total detachment, breaking completely away before I can find the pace that fits.

Raleigh

Somebody a while back, in Georgia if I remember correctly, that North Carolina was going to be cooler. For a few days earlier in the week I indeed had a bit of respite from the sun, and I thought that whoever that person was might have been right. But now it's a hundred again, and not really scheduled to cool down, so oh well. The humidity, I think it's safe to say, has gone down some from Georgia.
Made it to Laurinburg the night of my last post, then stopped just before Raeford the next night and slept next to an old church. In town Thursday morning I found the library, and was treated to breakfast by the librarians. Also they had me dig through some books to find something that I liked. The second one that I pulled out was Seabiscuit, and though I haven't been doing as much reading lately as I was at the beginning of the trip, by the next afternoon I'd finished it, and left it at a closed library in Lillington Sunday morning, after spending the night in town.
Sunday afternoon I stopped to roll out my pad in the grass next to a Methodist church for a power nap, and didn't wake up until the pastor walked by and invited me to the church's 4th of July picnic across the street. So I got a big meal, met some nice people, and left by six. Not too much later, anxious kids started lighting up firecrackers, and all through the evening I walked to the sound of hisses and pops, and glowing bursts of crumbling night lit up above the treeline.
Sunday night I stayed outside another church in Fuquay-Varina, and then walked well into Raleigh by Monday night. Yesterday I didn't get far, and didn't even manage to find a library all day even though I was in the city the whole time. Took most of the day off, was interviewed by a local paper, and got myself a hotel for the night.