Tales from the Trail #07: Fortune found in the Forest …
The Way proved to be hot & muggy once again that later day, as I set out once more to walk yet another long night through. And yet what I didn’t know at the time was that this particular stretch of roadway was going to be almost completely water-less from the get go, with my efforts to find hydration even being rebuffed at the Whitley City Elementary School I soon passed along the way. And so it was that I was unusually thirsty on this particular evening, as I wove my way into & around oncoming traffic, doing so quite successfully until I finally came upon the Flat Rock Missionary Baptist Church. Now it has been my consistent experience that almost all the churches in the United States, very unlike their European counterparts, are locked up tight on most days (except for Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, of course), and that most of them have also removed the handles from their external water spigots as well – meaning that any poor person or pilgrim who happens by them cannot find either solace for their fatigue or resolution for their thirst. And yet in this particular instance, much to my happy surprise, a wedding rehearsal was taking place in this particular church – a church that I was allowed to enter (to obtain a drink of water) and then a rehearsal I was allowed to quietly witness (in order to cool off from The Road) …
I didn’t overstay my welcome, of course, and soon thanked everyone involved for their kindness as I headed back out to keep walking. Thankfully it was just past 8pm at that point – a pretty good time to walk America’s smaller highways (though 10pm and onward were times far more cool & peaceful), and so it was that I begin to make my way through what soon felt like the longest night of my life – limping along the highway’s thin & uneven shoulders in the night’s earlier hours, and then literally stumble-weaving down the middle of the cool abandoned roadway in the wee hours of the starlit morn; pulling over regularly throughout the night to nap in blessedly paved (and thereby mostly stone & bug free) turn-outs whenever they offered their hard yet smooth sanctuary …
I remember wondering at the time where all the people were – where were all the homes & occasional gas stations that I had found sprinkled along previous stretches of highway. And yet I later found out that I had at that point entered the wild realms of the Daniel Boone National Forest, and that I was at the time walking along a stretch of Highway 27 that had no amenities whatsoever for roughly 20 miles (!!!). And as I mentioned earlier, I was already short on water that night, and quickly ran out of the same walking through the surprisingly hot & humid night air. I was thankfully able to fill up my water bottle early on that same evening (using the external spigot at the Park’s roadside Stearns Ranger Station), and yet several hours later – deep into the middle of that dark and lonely road – my flask was empty once again, and there was no sign of any aquatic reprieve on any horizon. I frankly didn’t know what to do in this particular moment. Obtaining enough water to drink on my pilgrimage had not even been a mild worry up to that point (and, as it turned out, would never be a concern again). After all, there was almost always a business or a restaurant or a gas station or even a farm house “just up the road” no matter where I happened to be, and folks were almost always amenable to giving a thirsty Peace Pilgrim a glass or two from their taps when asked. Of course, here in the middle of a vast National Forest, there were no businesses or gas stations or homes of any kind – just miles & miles & miles of peaceful, water-less forests. It was also very late at night (or rather super early in the mooring, if I must be exact) when I ran out of “go-juice”, so there weren’t even any cars to flag down to ask for the same …
Now a lack of water in any wilderness scenario* was a pretty serious matter, and I was starting to quite reasonably get a little concerned about my precarious situation, when I looked over to my right and saw a sign in the darkness; a sign that, once illuminated by my trusty flashlight, read “Beaver Creek WMA Headquarters and Hunter Checkpoint.” Almost needless to say, it took no extra encouragement whatsoever for me to head down its blessedly short driveway, to discover the high-fenced equipment depot located at its end, to remove my satchel and drop to the ground and barely slither through the thin opening its locked gate provided, and then – finally – to drink deeply from the spigot I found on the side of a small warehouse there. And so it was that I briefly sat back and smiled while gratefully looking up to the starry skies above, filled up my water bottle to its then-dry brim, slithered back under the fence and out to my pack, and then headed quite joyfully back down the Road – loudly & smilingly singing the praises of serendipity while I strolled along.
*Some might say that labeling this particular moment as an “alone in the wilderness” moment would be an unnecessary embellishment, and yet even though I was admittedly walking down a state highway at the time, I was also doing so on foot in the middle of the night, with many hours of walking still before me (all while fatigued & injured & sleep-deprived, no less) before I would encounter any vestige of “civilization” once more.
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