The Walk (13 page)

It’s a curious phenomenon that nearly all of these roadside stands had something they’re supposedly world famous for. I wondered if it was just marketing hype or if something had actually happened to make the proprietor feel worthy of the claim.

Next to the drive-in was a red train caboose. As I drew near, I noticed the land behind it was marked with
NO TRESPASSING
signs. I decided to get some dinner and ask about nearby campsites.

The menu was hand painted on a sheet of plywood mounted to the outside wall. Zeke’s had the usual drive-in fare except for one standout—the ostrich burger. Unlike me, McKale liked to try new things and probably would have ordered it.

A tall man with amber hair stood at the window watching me approach. The grill behind him was flaring with small grease fires. When I was ten feet from the window, he asked, “What can I get you?”

“What does an ostrich burger taste like?”

From the readiness of his pitch, I guessed he’d already been asked this ten thousand times. “Ostrich is popular. It’s red meat, you know, just like beef, but leaner. Very lean. It’s great for people who are watching their waistlines.”

McKale
definitely
would have ordered it. My waistline wasn’t much of a concern for me these days, but I was
curious. “I’ll have one of those,” I said. “What’s the difference between the regular ostrich burger and the deluxe ostrich burger?”

“Cheese and pickles,” he said.

“I’ll have the deluxe.”

“You want French fries to go with that?”

“Sure.”

He jotted this down with a stub of a pencil.

“And, I’d like one of your
world-famous
shakes.” I stressed the words
world-famous,
as if adding quotation marks with my voice, but he didn’t react.

“What kind?”

At least two-thirds of the menu was a listing of shakes and malts, with flavors ranging from banana caramel to grasshopper. In addition there were two seasonal specials, gingerbread and rhubarb. I asked which was better.

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether you prefer gingerbread or rhubarb.”

Ask a dumb question
. “I’ll try the rhubarb.”

“Good choice,” he said. He rang up my order. I handed him a ten-dollar bill, and he gave me back some change and a receipt. “You’re number thirty-four,” he said, which I found mildly amusing since there was no one else waiting.

“Are these woods behind your restaurant yours?”

“No. I’m not sure who owns them. It’s private property. One day the
NO TRESPASSING
signs just popped up.”

“Would anyone hassle me if I camped back there?”

“Doubt it. Every now and then, I’ll see someone crawl out of there in the morning. In fact, we had a fellow lived
back there for more than a year. No one made a fuss about that. He wasn’t shy about it, either. He built himself a little shack. I don’t remember his name.” He turned back to the girl at the grill. “What was that guy’s name who lived in the woods back there?”

She said something, and he nodded, “Oh, yeah.” He turned back. “His name was Itch. His father was a big-wig politician in Seattle. Lived back there for more than a year. Don’t know why he chose that place. Just liked it, I guess. He’d walk up and down the highway and pick up people’s lost change and aluminum cans, and when he had enough money, he’d come by and get something to eat. One day he just up and left. Haven’t seen him since. So why do you ask?”

I’d forgotten what I’d asked. “Ask what?”

“About camping back there.”

“I’m looking for a place to spend the night.”

“Well, it’s gonna rain on you.” There was another
flare-up behind him. “Where you from?”

“Seattle.”

He looked me over a moment, then said, “You can sleep in the caboose.”

I looked at the big red caboose. “That one right here?” Another stupid question.

“Only one I got. The mattresses aren’t there anymore. But if you don’t mind sleeping on wood.”

“Thank you. The shelter would be appreciated.”

Someone behind him shouted, “Number thirty-four!”

He turned around and carefully put my food in a sack, then handed it to me with the shake. “When you’re done
eating, just come back up, and I’ll unlock the caboose for you.”

“Thank you.”

There was an enclosed dining area in a separate building behind the restaurant. The room was clean and held six picnic tables. The walls were covered with maps of area hiking trails, and there was an article about bear attacks. (The article was published by the local Chamber of Commerce, so it had a lot of good things to say about bears.)

I sat down at a table and unwrapped the wax paper from my ostrich burger. Ostrich meat may look like beef, but it isn’t as good. I just put more ketchup on it.

It felt good to be off my feet. I hadn’t changed my socks since the day before, and I felt as if my flesh was absorbing them. I looked forward to taking them off, though not yet. I was eating.

When I finished my meal, I cleaned up the table, then walked back out to the drive-in. Three cars were now parked out front, and a line had formed at the window. The man saw me and said, “Just hang tight for a minute. I’ll have to unlock it for you.” About twenty minutes later he emerged from a side door. “This way.”

I followed him around back, then up a short set of stairs to the caboose. He pulled out a key ring and unlocked the door. Both of us stepped inside, standing in the narrow aisle that ran the length of the car. The interior of
the caboose had been painted submarine gray and smelled like wet paint. “Don’t use the head,” he said. “It doesn’t work, and you’d have a real mess on your hands. You can use the facilities behind the restaurant. I’ll leave the door unlocked.”

I was surprised at how trusting he was of a complete stranger.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

He walked out, shutting the door behind himself. I had never actually been inside a train (unless you count the Park train at Disneyland), let alone slept in one. The berth was a long wooden tray where I suppose a mattress once lay. I laid out my pad, then unzipped my sleeping bag and lay it across the space. I lay back to test it out. Not bad. Hard, but I was getting used to that. For the most part, the soft things of my life were gone.

As night fell, the rain started coming down harder, and the sound was amplified by the wooden box I was sheltered in. I was glad to be inside.

I pulled the flashlight from my pack and my road journal and jotted down a few notes for the day. I wrote a little about the homeless man at the Jack in the Box and the teacher’s book. I wondered if, in time, I would become like him—rambling about things others couldn’t understand.
The teacher book.

I hated the night and the demons that waited until dark to come out. Even though I thought about McKale all day and sometimes about Kyle or his treachery, there was some power in walking that kept my demons at bay. But in
the silence and still of the night, they came out in legion. At such times, I felt like a stranger in my own mind, wandering through a mysterious and precarious landscape.

I think it was Twain who wrote, “I suppose I’m like the rest of humanity: not quite sane at night.”

The world was quiet when I woke. The dawn sun had not yet climbed over the mountain, and the world was still blue and gray. The air was cold enough that I could see my breath.

I packed up my things. It wasn’t raining anymore, but the world outside was still wet, as if the rain had stopped just an hour or two earlier. I walked around to the back of the darkened drive-in and pushed on the bathroom door. I was glad when it opened.

I shaved with warm water, then filled my canteen with cold. I shrugged on my pack, then walked back out to the road.

The highway passed over a river, and below me there was a group of people unloading kayaks from a truck. No one was in a hurry. It occurred to me that neither was I. For the first time, I thought about the simplicity of my new life. No deadlines. No appointments or meetings. No e-mails or phone conferences. All I had to think about were the necessities—water, food, sleep, and occasional shelter.

The road was veiled in a haze, a cool mist that either rose from the asphalt or fell from the sky, I wasn’t sure which. After a steep climb of a few miles, I saw waterfalls cascading off the north side of the mountains. To the
south of me was the Skykomish River. Even in my state of mind, I couldn’t deny the beauty of this country.

Around ten, I entered the city of Baring, where I ate a simple but delicious breakfast of eggs and link sausage at a roadside diner. It was a quiet day, gray and morose. If the sky wasn’t overcast I still would have been in shadow from the lush canopy of trees. The deep forest was green in moss and lichen, and even the concrete rails of the bridges were flocked with moss.

At Moneycreek campground, I stopped to rest and eat an apple, jerky, and a couple handfuls of trail mix.

The road had become more narrow and dangerous. Compounding the problem was that this city did not tolerate slow drivers. It’s the only place I had ever seen with signs threatening drivers with tickets if they had more than five cars trailing behind them. The offered solution was “shoulder driving,” an obvious hazard for bikers and hikers. Baring wasn’t a place to be walking after dusk. At least if you wanted to live.

In Skykomish, I stopped at the only place I could find to eat lunch, the Sky Deli. The next town was farther than I could reasonably walk, so I resigned myself to my last hot meal for the day. I ordered spaghetti with raguot and garlic bread. I let the food settle a bit, then headed back out to the road.

By mile marker 56, I had walked nearly 25 miles, almost all of it uphill, which became obvious even without the elevation signs that were now posted at regular intervals. I could feel it in my calves. The first of the elevation signs
was at 1,500 feet where, for the first time, I encountered snow on the road.

By dusk, my legs were cramping, and I started looking in earnest for a place to camp. There were few possibilities, as the road was surrounded by steep terrain on both sides. An hour later, I seriously wondered how much farther I could walk and scolded myself for not stopping earlier. I even considered walking back 7 miles to where I saw the last campsite, but the thought of losing those hard-earned miles was too painful, so I just trudged ahead, hoping for something.

In the next mile, the elevation rose to 1,800 feet, a 300-foot climb evidenced by the increasing amount of snow on the mountain and shoulders. My thighs and calves were burning, while my breath froze in front of me. I was near my limit when, through the dark, I saw a sign for Deception Falls campground. I was filled with relief.

I crossed the street to the camp, stepping over the chain pulled across the entrance. The site was closed for the season. There were
NO CAMPING
signs posted in the parking lot, but this did nothing to deter me. My legs were gone. I had no choice but to stop.

The public outhouses were locked. I followed a cut trail down into a dark, wet valley. The river and falls roared loud enough to drown out the sound of the highway. The foliage was thick and green, accented with occasional patches of snow. It seemed as if moss coated everything, and I was certain that if I stayed there long enough, the ecosystem would claim me as well.

The falls were not high but strong, a collusion of violent, mountain-borne waters falling 100 feet or more in a series of sharp rocky inclines. According to the engraved wooden park sign, the waters pounded down with seven tons of force. At the bottom of the sign was a quote:

Beneath that quote were the handwritten words:

Everyone’s a philosopher,
I thought. The words may have been true, but it wasn’t going to change in my lifetime.

There were more
NO CAMPING
signs on the trail below. That time of the year, the public was not even supposed to be hiking there. I doubted that the Park Service patrolled these places so late in the season, but in case they did, I found a flat piece of ground, hidden from the trail, to construct my tent. It was dark by the time I finished.

The air was considerably warmer inside my tent, but the sound of the water was only slightly dulled. I laid out my pad and sleeping bag, then pulled off my shoes and socks to let my feet breathe. The crash of the falls drowned out not only the occasional car on the highway above but my thoughts as well. For the first time in days, I slept soundly.