A Walk in the Woods

"To tell you the truth, I'm amazed we've come this far," he said, and I agreed. We had
hiked 500 miles, a million and a quarter steps, since setting off from Amicalola. We had
grounds to be proud. We were real hikers now. We had shit in the woods and slept with
bears. We had become, we would forever be, mountain men.
Eighteen miles was a heroic distance for us, but we were filthy and trail-weary and
more than ready for a town, and so we plodded on. We reached Front Royal about seven,
dead tired, and went to the first motel we came to. It was arrestingly dire, but cheap. The
bed sagged, the TV picture jumped as if it were being mercilessly goosed by an electronic
component, and my door didn't lock. It pretended to lock, but if you pushed on it from
outside with a finger, it popped open. This perplexed me for a moment until I realized
that no one could possibly want any of my possessions, so I just pulled it shut and went
off to find Katz and go to dinner. We ate at a steakhouse down the street and retired
happily to our televisions and beds.
In the morning, I went early to Kmart and bought two complete new sets of clothes--
socks, underwear, blue jeans, sneakers, handkerchiefs, and the two liveliest shirts I could
find (one with boats and anchors, the other with a famous-monuments-of-Europe motif). I
returned to the motel, presented Katz with half--he couldn't have been more thrilled--then
went to my room and put on my new attire. We met in the motel parking lot ten minutes
later, looking crisp and stylish, and exchanged many flattering comments. With a day to
kill, we went for breakfast, had an idle, contented saunter through the modest central
business district, poked around in thrift shops for something to do, found a camping store
where I bought a replacement hiking stick exactly like the one I had lost, had lunch, and
in the afternoon decided naturally to go for a walk. It was, after all, what we did.
We found some railroad tracks, which followed the stately curves of the Shenandoah
River. There is nothing more agreeable, more pleasantly summery, than to stroll along
railroad tracks in a new shirt. We walked without haste or particular purpose, mountain
men on holiday, chatting seamlessly about nothing in particular, stepping aside from time
to time to let a freight train lumber past, and generally enjoying the abundant sunshine,
the beckoning, infinite gleam of silver track, and the simple pleasure of moving forward
on legs that felt tireless. We walked almost till sunset. It was a perfect way to finish.
The following morning we went to breakfast, and then came the three hours of fidgety
torture of standing at the edge of a motel drive watching traffic for a particular car filled
with beaming, excited, much-missed faces. For weeks and weeks I had tried not to visit
that shadowy ache where thoughts of my family lay, but now that they were nearly here--
now that I could let my thoughts run free--the anticipation was nearly unbearable.
Well, you can imagine, I'm sure, the joyous reunion scene when they finally arrived--
the exuberant hugs, the scatter-gun chatter, the tumble of needlessly but delightfully
detailed information about the problems of finding the right interstate exit and correct
motel, the impressed appraisal of dad's new body, the less impressed appraisal of his new
shirt, the sudden remembering to include Katz (bashfully grinning on the margins) in the
celebrations, the tousling of hair, the whole transcendantly happy business of being
rejoined.
We took Katz to National Airport in Washington, where he was booked on a late
afternoon flight to Des Moines. At the airport, I realized we were already in different
universes (he in a "Where do I go to check in?" sort of distraction, I in the distraction of