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.