it was a greeting. Finally, I reach the parking lot where the trail ends. It is brightly lit, and in the light, I regain a measure of comfort. Then, I walk from the trial parking lot, under a low tunnel and along the overland streets that will take me to the final dark stretch of my walk through Panther Hollow. I walk for a little while though a mostly vacant neighborhood until I pass by an idling car. The car’s dome light is on, and the person in driver’s seat is ripping a filter from a cigarette with his teeth, and the woman in the passenger seat looks blankly ahead. As I pass by the car, I look in, and I see that the woman was preoccupied with a needle. She glances up at me, and I see a flash of shock in her eyes. I stand frozen looking at her for a while, and then, her window slowly rolls down. The man in the driver’s seat leans across the woman, and shouts out to me,”hey, you lookin’ to hook up?” I shake my head and quickly walk into the park where again I am alone in the darkness.
The trail through Panther Hollow is even worse than the Jail Trail. It is wider open, and there is almost no unnatural light anywhere, so every sound sets my nerves on end. I try to jog again for a little bit, but my shoes still won’t stay on my feet, and so, I resign to walking, imagining pretend demons at every step. When I emerge from the park, I am so happy to see the lights of houses that I nearly cry, and all of the sudden, the exhaustion of the entire trip catches up with me, and I walk a little further and feel like I have to sit down. I sit for a while and think, about my heads, about the jail, about those desperate people in the car, about a raging Ben, and a cynical Donald, and I realize how long it has been since I ate or slept. And then I walk a little further, to the one final real obstacle: The long steps that span the hillside between where I stand, and the Pitt art building. Even in the day, I have encountered people on those steps: teenagers smoking pot, lonely homeless men drinking, but it is my final obstacle, and so I climb them, and as I do, it starts to snow. Big, fat, slow snowflakes, that gently spill from the sky and land in my palm and immediately melt. And I stop on the landing of the steps and watch the snowfall. And the bare branches of the trees frame a misty sky and I stand and let the snow fall onto my face. And then the snow starts to fall faster, and I watch it fall. And I lean my head back as far as it will go, and the snow falls onto my face, and I don’t feel cold at all, and the snow falls faster. And then all I see is the snow, like television static, and I feel like I am flying through the stars. And each flake is a star, and I am a rocket, and they are rushing past me, and then I hear it. It is far away, but I hear it. And in the winter darkness the sound carries, and I listen closer to make sure that it is true, and then I know it is. Bright and unmistakable, a trumpet plays a serenade to the snow.
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