Hazlehurst

Tuesday was the last night I spent in the Hamelin's motor home. I walked, on the day, from just above Barnesville to Smarr, five or six miles below Forsyth, and then Don and Carol picked me up for the night and drove me back to the Forsyth KOA. We said goodbyes Wednesday morning, and they dropped me off where I'd stopped the previous night. I walked into and through Macon, on the day, and put up my tent in a little field on the east side of town.
Thanksgiving I treated myself to a good breakfast after packing my things, and then called my parents. I didn't start walking until after noon, and had a long way to go.
Throughout the day as I walked I passed families playing football in the yard, young kids bouncing on trampolines with cousins. They waved at me as I passed and I waved back, lonely. I walked twenty eight miles on the day, and rolled out my sleeping bag in front of a Baptist church. Ate some pop-tarts and thought about things.
Fifteen hundred miles from home. Fifteen hundred miles from my friends and family. No turkey. No cranberry sauce. No pecan pie.
I opened my journal - the first of several, where I keep track of all the places I've slept - and looked back over the trip.
A month ago I came down sick and hid in a Civic Center in Huntingdon, TN. Two months ago I was in Lee's Summit, at my uncle's. Three months ago I spent my last night in Colorado, and four months ago I was at home, taking my reprieve. Five months ago I slept in a ditch in Wyoming. Six months ago I stayed in a Presbyterian church in Dayville, Oregon. And seven months ago, on the twenty-seventh of April, I climbed on a train.
They say that no man is an island. That nobody exists as a single being, that we're all connected. And I don't think that there's a truer thought.
I think back to something we did once in a Biology class of mine, several years ago, when I was still in Cotopaxi. We all had a cup of water and one of the cups started out with some sort of solution and the others were all just water, and several times we'd pour water into someone else's cup, and they into ours, and at the end another chemical was added to every body's cup, and all the cups who had a little bit of the original solution glowed green. The project was about the spread of AIDs, so it's probably a terrible example, but it stuck with me, and I think of it now.
I think that every time we open ourselves up to a stranger, that we take a chance beyond stereotypes, beyond pessimisms and paranoias, we pour a little bit of our cup into that stranger's. And that if that stranger opens back up, and we listen, then we get a little bit of their cup, in ours.
What I'm trying to say is that I've met a lot of people. Every day I meet people and I tell my story. Every day I hear the stories of others. And every day I feel like my cup gets a little extra color.
I climbed on the train, seven months ago, with three hundred dollars in the bank. With the first forty miles mapped out and the rest up in the air. I had no idea what I was doing. And yet now I'm only a hundred and thirty miles from the other ocean.
I think back to something Wayne told me, in Nashville. He said - and I wish I could remember the exact words - something about how people are too apt to sit beyond their walls and point fingers, and judge others from their places of sanctitude, without taking time to find out the true story. And I know that in large part, it's true. We find niches in our lives. Find a job that pays the bills and a circle of friends to drink beer with. Maybe a church that shares our views. And it's easy, sometimes far too easy, to sit in our corners and watch the world swirl without us. To watch the news every evening for stories of war and murder and sex scandals. To build up our paranoias like Lincoln Log justifications.
But if there weren't exceptions, I wouldn't be where I am. If nobody had ever turned the car around to hand a five dollar bill out the window and if no one had ever let me sleep on their couch and if no one had ever honked and waved and given a thumbs up I wouldn't have made it this far. I wouldn't have made it to Oregon.
I don't know if a single pebble can change the course of a river. Haven't figured that one out, yet. But I'm not a single pebble. Nobody is. Because we are the people we meet. We are the sunsets that we see. We are the stories that we hear.
And sitting in the cold, 1500 miles from home on Thanksgiving, that was the thought that kept me warm.
Here's a toast to sharing cups. A toast to pouring some of ourselves into the world.