history—a microcosm of the very world I was walking away from. I did what every cell phone user has occasionally fantasized. I hurled the device as far as I could into the lake. It barely made a splash.
I stuffed everything back into my pack, then left my first camp, climbing the tall bank to get back to the road. The hill was slick, and I slipped on the way down the other side, leaving my rear and pack caked with mud and pieces of torn fern. I stood, wiped off my seat and backpack, then started on my walk.
I walked for about two hours before I reached the town of Monroe. I had asked the checker at the Woodinville Safeway about Monroe, and she said the town was nothing. Her assessment was flawed. It was bigger than I expected.
I stopped and stretched at the town’s welcome sign. Every town has a sign, like Welcome doormats. While most signs display no more creativity than a name, the more ambitious towns use these signs as advertisements. None of them say what they really mean: OKAY, YOU’RE HERE. SPEND SOME MONEY, THEN GO HOME.
As I walked down Monroe’s main street, I was aware that I was being watched from business windows, parking lots, and passing cars. This was a phenomenon that I would never fully get used to but would come to expect. In the smaller towns, a stranger walking through is met with mild suspicion or curiosity and usually both. No doubt at least one of the towns along my route would someday print an article about my appearance that would read like this.
Unidentified, hat-wearing man
walks through town
Tuesday afternoon around five p.m., an unidentified man, wearing a hat, walked through town. He left no clues as to why he came and just as quickly departed, leaving some Beauville residents feeling a little dejected. Beauville neighbor Mrs. Wally Earp told the Bugle, “I hope he comes back and stays awhile. I think he’d find we can be right hospitable. He didn’t even try my apple crisp.” Other residents, like Jack Calhoun of 76 Main Street, were glad to see him gone. “A man wearing that kind of hat can’t be up to any good. Probably a socialist.” Millicent Turnpikes, owner of Millie’s Glad Rags on Nutmeg Street, had this to say: “I don’t know what he was up to, but it was a fine hat.”
The unidentified man and his hat were unavailable for comment.
A half-mile into Monroe, I passed a one-story, stucco building with a raptor dinosaur perched on the sign out front. (I’m not sure what the raptor had to do with braces, though the specimen displayed a fine, nicely aligned row of flesh-tearing ivories.)
DR. BILL’S ORTHODONTICS
Good advertising, I thought. Every boy in town will want braces.
I had long exhausted the carbs from my one-Pop-Tart breakfast, but I felt more unsociable than hungry, and the restaurants I encountered all looked crowded, so I just kept on walking. I passed a handful of espresso shacks, which in Washington is a frequent and welcomed phenomenon. I’d wager that Seattle has more coffee shops per capita than anywhere else in the world. No wonder that it’s the birthplace of Starbucks.
Near the end of the town was a Jack in the Box drive-through. The restaurant was probably as crowded as any of the diners I’d already passed, but this was my last chance for a hot meal, and my stomach was now growling at me, so I went inside.
As I entered, I noticed the furtive, anxious glances of diners already seated. I had no beard, so I figured there must be something about the backpack that made them nervous. My mind constructed this tongue twister:
Unsettled Seattler unsettles the settled.
Just my ad-guy mind amusing itself. Or gone haywire. I ordered myself an egg and sausage sandwich and two cartons of orange juice, then sat down in a vacant corner to eat. There was a Seattle Times on the table next to me, and I grabbed it to look over the headlines. I didn’t see the man walk up to me.
“Hey, sorry to bother you man, but could you help me get some breakfast?”
I looked up. My petitioner had a bushy beard and wild hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed for a year or more. There were deep scars across his chin, but they were not as noticeable as the brown, wart-like spots that marred his skin as if mud had been splashed on his face. He was wearing light blue hospital scrubs that were loose and fell far enough below his waist to almost expose him. I was wondering why he didn’t pull them up when I noticed his hands. He had none. From the look of the stubs, they appeared to have been surgically removed at his wrists. What would require the amputation of both hands?
“. . . A big meal with pancakes is three dollars,” he said.
Just a few days ago this man would have made me uncomfortable. But now I felt none of that. I suppose I felt a kinship of sorts. We were both homeless. I opened my wallet and pulled out four dollars. “Here.”
“Thanks.” He reached forward, pressing the bills between his two stubs. “I appreciate it.”
He walked up to the front, dropped the bills on the counter, and said something to an anxious young woman at the cash register who wouldn’t look at him. A few moments later, he returned to the dining room with a sack of food. He sat down at the table next to me. I looked to see how he would eat pancakes without hands.
“Thanks again,” he said to me.
“Don’t mention it,” I said. I returned to the paper but I kept looking up at him. He lifted a pancake with his stubs and began to eat. After a moment I asked, “What’s your name?”
He turned and looked at me. “Will.”
“Nice to meet you, Will,” I said. He extended one arm. It was a little awkward, but I shook it. “What happened to your hands?”
He didn’t seem bothered by my question. “The thing is, I like bikes,” he said.
“Bikes?”
“Yeah. Mountain bikes. Diamondback. And hills. There’s something about hills. It’s a seduction, you know. Hills are a seduction. I had an accident on a hill. The doctors, well, they saved my life, but they had to take these.” He held up his arms. “But they saved my life. That’s good.”
“Is it?” I said.
He looked at me quizzically, then reached down and lifted the pancake and took another bite. There were little plastic containers of syrup on his tray, but he clearly had no way of opening them.
“Do you want me to open your syrup for you?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
I peeled back one end of the lid on the container and poured syrup over his pancakes. I didn’t know why I was so interested in this man. “Do you have family?” I asked.
He looked away, and I noticed he twitched. “Yes.”
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“The shelter when it’s cold.”
“Like now?”
“This isn’t cold.”
“Is there a shelter around here?”
“It’s in Seattle.”
I wondered what he was doing in Monroe. Of course, I could ask myself the same thing. It had never occurred to me that the homeless I encountered downtown near my agency might have plans and schedules. “What do you do during the day?”
“I walk,” he said. “I used to walk around the mall. But they don’t like me there much. Sometimes the security hassles me. One time they beat me up for fun, so I don’t go so much in person. I just think about it. It’s easier to just pretend to go. It’s better to pretend. Or wherever. I can pretend to go anywhere. To a movie. To a restaurant. I can go to New York City or Paris or Moscow. None of it don’t cost a dime. It’s the same, just easier. But it’s better to read books.”
“You like books?” I asked.
“Yeah. But I don’t like the bookstores anymore. They don’t like me there. They’ve never beat me up, but they have food in the bookstores and coffee, except the Crown bookstores, but there’s not so many of them anymore. You shouldn’t have coffee and food around books. It’s not right. I like King.”
“Stephen King?”
He leaned forward. “Do you know Mr. King?”
“I know of his books.”
“I like Dumas and Mitchum. I don’t know about textbooks.” His expression
suddenly turned grave. “In school, the teacher had the teacher book. It had all the answers in it. Why don’t they just give the teacher book to the students? Then they’d have all the answers. Isn’t that why they go to school?
“You know, everywhere I go, I just . . . I keep looking for the teacher book. If I could just find it, then it could be . . .” He looked me over. I felt like he was trying to decide whether he could trust me or not. He leaned forward and said in a softer voice, “I found it once, you know. I found it and started to read it, then I passed out before I could get all the answers. I was on the ground, unconscious. It was too much to know. Like, in the Bible, when there are things that people just can’t know, so God seals them in books. Now I just can’t find the teacher book. If I could just find it . . . it has all the answers.”
“It doesn’t have all the answers,” I said. “Nothing has all the answers.”
He grimaced. “The teacher book has the answers.”
“There is no teacher book,” I said angrily.
He looked at me curiously, then he said, “You don’t know what can happen in a blink. Time is nothing. The whole history of humanity may just be in a blink. We don’t know. I think I sometimes blink and read every book in the world. Every book in the world but the teacher book.”
“There is no teacher book,” I shouted. “There are no answers. Horrific things happen for no damn reason. Just look at your hands.”
He looked at me as if I was crazy. Others in the dining room were looking at me too. After a moment he said, “I don’t read books anymore, I pretend them. And I preserve them. Books used to be beautiful, they had this . . . you know . . . board cover. You need to preserve them. Especially with all the coffee and food they have at book-
stores now.”
I finished eating my sandwich, chugged down my last carton of juice, then stood. I didn’t want to talk to him anymore. I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my wallet and dropped it on the table next to his pancakes. “That’s for lunch.”
“Thanks.” He went back to his breakfast.
I lifted my pack over my shoulder and started walking again. About a block from the Jack in the Box was the turnoff to Highway 2. Even though I’d already traveled nearly 25 miles, I felt like this was the first step of my journey.
The first building I passed was the Reptile Zoo. From the outside, it looked like a rundown Cracker Barrel restaurant. I imagined inside there was a bunch of glass terrariums with dusty-eyed rattlesnakes and venom-mouthed Gila monsters. I wondered why we are so fascinated with things that can kill us. On another day, I probably would have stopped and paid the $7 to go inside because I like things like that. Always have.
I kept walking. Less than a block from the museum there was an old school bus that had been converted into a restaurant. It was called the Old School BBQ. McKale loved barbeque. She would like that, I thought.
About five miles outside the town of Monroe, I passed a small structure that some believer had built alongside the road. There was a weathered, painted sign out front that read in a fancy, dated script:
The Wayside Chapel
Pause, Rest, Worship.
The chapel was a shedlike edifice that had a steeple added to it. I crossed the road to look inside. There were brightly colored plastic flowers covered in mud in front of the doorway. I slowly opened the door in case someone might be inside, but it was vacant. On the front wall was a large, wooden cross made from stained two-by-fours. There were four pews, each big enough to fit two people.
I stepped inside and walked up to the front of the chapel. There were notes and letters left on the pulpit by passersby. There was also a stack of music CDs someone had left on the front pew: Marvin Pious and the Holy Crooners—
Make a Joyful Noise. There was a picture of Marvin and his band, in matching orange polyester jumpsuits. Marvin’s haircut would be best described as a cross between an ’80s mullet and a Chia Pet. There was a large Bible, an aged, white leather book, fanned open to 2 Thessalonians:
Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God, even our Father, which hath loved us, and hath given us everlasting consolation and good hope through grace . . .
Good hope through grace, I thought. I closed the Bible. Love and consolation? In a sudden flash of anger, I threw the book against the wall. Love, hope, and grace? What a joke. I walked out of the place, wishing I hadn’t stopped.
I walked nearly a mile before I felt calm again. But the anger was still there. The emotion had always been there, concealed beneath a thin veneer of civility. The chapel had just exposed it.
I turned my attention to the road. The highway straightened a little, and I could clearly see the mountains in the distance. They were white with clouds and snow pack. Trees jutted up through the snow-covered slopes like beard stubble. The mountain was my destination. That’s a really long way to walk, I thought. I shook my head, amused by my stupidity. This was nothing compared to where I was going. Crossing the country, I’d face a half-dozen or so mountain passes that would make this one look like a pitcher’s mound.
I had walked about 12 miles when I reached the town of Sultan. The only way into the town was over a narrow metal bridge with no pedestrian lane and cars screaming by at 50 miles per hour or more. I wasn’t sure what to do. It looked like a sure way to get hit. For the record, I didn’t fear dying. I feared almost dying. They’re not the same thing.
I puzzled over what to do for a moment, then found a solution. There was another bridge running parallel to the highway bridge. A train bridge. There was no almost dying with a train. Trains don’t swerve.
I climbed over to the bridge and began walking across, slowly picking my way between the heavy rusted rails and the wood trestles. The bridge was about 70 yards across, and travel across it was slow. Still, I reached the other side without the least excitement. I wondered if the track was even used anymore. Part of me was disappointed. I stepped off the tracks and walked into the town.
I stopped for lunch at a deli. I’m not sure that the deli even had a name, which, in retrospect, was probably a wise choice on their part. I ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a Coke with a small tub of potato salad. Even as hungry as I was, I ate very little. The food was awful. This was one of those meals that if you had to choose between eating the food or razorblades, you would stop to weigh the pros and cons. Before I left the deli, I took out a Pop-Tart and then ate it as I walked.
The next town I came to was called Startup, a “blink and you’ll miss it” community that seemed to consist mostly of mobile homes and tall grass.
As Bill Bryson observed, American towns are usually named after “the first white person to arrive or the last Indian to leave.” Here, I thought, was a welcome
exception—a city council that had shown a little initiative. I was wrong. I learned the town name’s origin from a plaque mounted near the gas station where I stopped to use the bathroom.
It turns out that the town was originally called Wallace, after the first white settler, but the post office kept sending the town’s mail to Wallace, Idaho, so a vote was taken, and the name was officially changed to Startup, not after some hopeful ambition, rather after George Startup, manager of the Wallace Lumber Company. Bryson was wrong. City naming, like everything else in this world, is a function of money and politics.
The next town was Gold Bar, marked by a sign that declared itself Gateway to the Cascades. In the center of the town was a large totem pole and several coffee huts: The Coffee Coral, Let’s Go Espresso, and Espresso Chalet.
As I walked through those small places, I couldn’t help but wonder about their inhabitants. How they came to settle there and, more puzzling, why they stayed. Was it just because it’s what they know? Is human nature really that clinging?
Gold Bar had a roadside church, slightly bigger than the one I had stopped at—Vitality Christian Church—a one-room shack with a large cross nailed to the outside wall. This time I had the sense to just keep walking.
&nbs
p; Rain fell off and on during the day—not enough to stop my walking, but enough to soak the bottoms of my pants
and keep me cold and miserable. I had walked about
20 miles and was thinking about making camp when I saw a sign for Zeke’s Drive-in—home of world famous shakes.
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?”