Insult to Injury

I'm rereading some stories I wrote when I was ten.

Suddenly, she was zapped into a desert. Right into the middle of a desert. Without a pumpkin pie!

New Jersey Tea

I had a great time in West Virginia, and ate and ate and ate. I got caught up with my aunt Tami's clan, including finding out what sort of a teenager Jackie has become. A pretty good one, that's what kind. I played some cornhole, and even practiced my poker skills against Tami, her husband Jim, and his son Ben. (I was the last one Jim knocked out. And while I did get knocked out, I maintain that it's solely down to Jim's impossibly good luck. He casually got two pairs of pocket rockets in a row in Indian poker, he managed a full house in 7-card draw, and he just generally got unbeatable hands way more often than someone that smug deserves.)
   For the last few days I've been in Fearrington Village, North Carolina, with Viki's parents, mostly relaxing and talking. They're nice people. I've had some tasty Hungarian food, namely fasirt (mini-meatloaves) and paprikás csirke (paprika chicken). I learned how to count to ten in Hungarian.
   Today we went on a little walk to see some trees that have been yarnbombed - covered in yarn. And I learned another wild edible, New Jersey tea. It grows all over; it's one of the first wild edibles I've found where I could just harvest bag after bag of it if I wanted. Strictly speaking, I guess it'd be more correct to call it a wild beverage. It makes a pretty tasty tea. A lot like real tea, but it has no caffeine, and it also has a sort of a leafy taste.
   Next stop, Cincinnati... for just three days. And I'm already plotting my next travels. Today I decided I'm going to have to make a stop-off at a primitive skills gathering, probably one I found out about today that's happening in August in Missoula, Montana. Eeee, plans plans plans.

Relaxation

I probably won't be able to note on Facebook that I've written this, because despite years of promises to the contrary, the phone company or whoever is in charge of these things has yet to bring high-speed internet out to my Nana & Papaw's place in West Virginia to replace the dial-up that they're still using ten years after the rest of the world switched.
   I spent 2½ days in the woods in Maine, in Camden Hills State Park on top of a big rock outcropping near a winding up-and-down trail. One of those days I sat there in the thick carpet of fallen oak leaves and just meditated on how nice it was to be in the woods with birds chirping incomprehensibly around me. But what I did more was I went on walks. All barefoot, of course, and as I walked I constantly looked out for edible plants. I found a fair few, too—bunchberries, blueberries, raspberries, milkweed, white lettuce, Solomon's plume, old acorns. Trouble was, I was such a temporary visitor that I arrived out of the season of most of them. The bunchberries were barely more thatn swollen flower buds, and the blueberry flowers must've only just dropped off; the raspberries were still in flower. The white lettuce, meanwhile, had mostly already gotten too old and bitter. Last fall's acorns obviously did me no good. I did enjoy the one Solomon's plume root I dug up, and I was set to boil some milkweed stems too, but then I ran out of time. I read a book while I was there, called A Small Farm in Maine, and though I got annoyed by some of it, I'm glad I persevered to the end, because the author came to a conclusion that I was coming to too: that familiarity with plants really only comes from years of living with them and getting to know them through the seasons. As such a temporary visitor in these woods I couldn't hope to learn anything about how to use its plants in a serious way; all I could maybe get would be a cursory survey of some of the plants that grow there that I could maybe build relationships with later on. So, put "learning edible plants" on the long list of things I can't do ideally until I settle down.
   You may have detected a certain wistfulness about me in the past few weeks, for when I eventually do settle down. As much as I love getting around and seeing new things, I do wish I knew where I'm going to end up, and I'm really looking forward to calling someplace home. I just don't want to make the wrong choice. Of course, I could make myself happy in a lot of places, but which one would be the best? Why settle for something that isn't? That's the question that keeps driving me on. And I am getting closer, bit by bit. Maine impressed me a lot. It has a strong independent bent to it, with farmers all over the place providing Maine produce for Maine residents, who buy the stuff because they like Maine and because it's good stuff. A woman working at a coffee shop in Portland gave me a lot of perspective on this, and explained that for a long time Maine was basically an island, or the Wild West, and had to develop that spirit, or I suppose become a depopulated ghost state. At the same time, there's also a lot of youthful energy and a drive to keep things going, not modernize away all the good traditions. I met a goat farmer who's just 31, and thrilled about her work—she says that after working a few other jobs, now that she's had this one land in her lap, she finds that she can finally feel good saying what she does: "I'm a farmer!"
   While I was in Wisconsin at that campsite with the wild food trail, I met a couple who had also come up for the trail; she was permaculture design certified, and he thought the issue was interesting but, I think, was less invested in it and kind of just followed along with her. At any rate, though, he was the one who had the insight that I thought was most salient: that permaculture and local farm sorts of things are the building blocks of the new society that needs to emerge, but they can't function as those building blocks yet, because it's only the haves who are starting these, just to prove that they can, and the movement won't start building its own momentum until the have-nots start doing permaculture because it's a practical way to stay afloat nutritionally and financially in the real world. Well, the goat farmer I met says she and her peers are headed back to the land not just because it's a good thing to do philosophically, but also because "we're just too damn poor." Got a little land? Turn it into something besides a property-tax suck. With those words she made Maine look even better to me. Though it's entirely possible that people in Wisconsin or Colorado or any other state are also moving back to the land for the same reason. It's one more thing for me to gauge.
   Sadly, Maine is really far away from everyone I know. For a while I thought of West Virginia being in the same general sort of region, which I conceived of as a sort of "the colonies and the states that broke off of them" region. But of course, the thirteen colonies, though way smaller than the country we've got now, were still a really big place, and span a huge range of latitudes, and so from Portland, Maine, to Nana & Papaw's house is about 12 hours by car, or 2½ days by thumb. (It could've been less if I hadn't chosen to take the quaintly wooded but unfortunately deserted US-50.) To Ohio add another several hours. I haven't decided yet how heavily to weigh proximity to all my folks in the search for The Right Place. But however I decide on that, it's one of the few strikes against Maine. (Having given Maine such a glowing review, though, I'll also point out that its ocean culture is something I don't feel very connected to at all, whereas Wisconsin's lake culture feels homey to me, thanks to all the formative time I've spent at Crowduck and Manito-wish.)
   Anyhow, to get to the present, I made it safe and sound to Nana & Papaw's as you've already deduced, and now I've commenced a nice long period of mentally relaxing. It gets exhausting after a while, all this planning the next move forward and trying to memorize things about new places. I'm going to be pretty content over the next three weeks to have other people in charge of each new thing, and arranging all my transportation for me with nary a minute spent by an onramp with my thumb in the air. Out here I've gotten a good old feeding for my travel appetite, and we've sat out on the porch watching the sun come down behind the hills and talking about everything we need to catch up on. And I've still got days to relax in the woods here before anything else really happens. This is me sighing contentedly: Ahhhhhhh.

Going Outside

And now I disappear. Today I plan to go to the woods, somewhere in Maine—possibly a place I found on Google Maps near Belfast—and see what I can learn by just staying there for several days. Of course, because of Murphy's Law, the days that I have available are mostly forecast to be rainy. But rain is a real part of the wilderness, and I'm learning about wilderness as it really is. I guess I'll just have to deal.
   Before I leave, I'm going to get some lobster. After I leave, I'm going to visit Portland a bit, since it's supposed to be the most livable city in the country—I'll figure out what that's supposed to mean.
   See you on the other end.

You Can't Achieve These Things through Planning

On Hitchwiki, the internet's extremely useful repository of hitchhiking wisdom to orient non-locals on their trips, the opening sentence for the article on Vermont is: "Vermont is a hitchhiking mecca." So when my first ride out of Montréal left me at a junction with the highway to Vermont, I decided on the spur of the moment to abandon my plan of hitching all the way to the crossing into Maine several hours away, and took a ride straight down to the Vermont border and walked across carefree, with just some looks askance from the border patrol that I would dare to come without a car. And it was true. The whole time in the state, I didn't have to wait more than about ten minutes for a ride. Most people were just going a little ways down the road, but that was okay because I still made great time. The only exception to the ten-minutes thing was when I got dropped off on a fast-moving stretch of US-2, standing near a lake. There I waited maybe as much as twenty minutes before Kyle picked me up.
   He was headed all the way to Maine, so with him I was in three different states - Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. What's more, he was going several hours into Maine, so he gave me a terrific amount of progress. But none of that is the best part.
   The best part is that he knows a girl who gives him lots of flak for picking up hitchhikers all the time. This girl's family was throwing a barbecue that very night, and he considered the fact that it would be hilarious to walk into the barbecue with a hitchhiker in tow. And that's how I got invited to a family barbecue in the middle of nowhere in Maine. Kyle drove us down an encyclopedically memorized series of zigzagging backroads that would have thrown off any CIA agent, and we pulled up to the girl's family's house, and walked on in. He introduced me as a random hitchhiker, and everyone took it completely in stride and thought it was pretty funny and asked me about my trip and found it impressive. Then those of us who were of the younger generation went to the room above the garage and watched a movie (The 2012 version of 21 Jump Street). All the while I ate my fill, and I got to listen in as 21 Jump Street made everyone so nostalgic about high school that they had to pull out their yearbooks and reminisce.
   All of which goes to say that when hitchhiking is good, it's kind of unbeatable. Kyle would've even let me stay at his place for the night, but he had a date, so instead he took me to a travel plaza where I was able to set up my tent in the sadly rainy night. In the morning I was able to quickly get to Bar Harbor, where I am now. But that story is still in progress.

Some Other Parts of Canada

Up until last Sunday, the only parts of Canada that I'd ever seen were the ones between International Falls and Crowduck. Charming, but not much out there in the way of Canadian culture or, indeed, people generally. Best solution to this problem: go see Toronto and Montréal. Now normally I like to take a city at a pretty leisurely pace, but I'm trying to meet a friend in Bar Harbor on the 8th, so I kind of had to pack these two into a very short few days. Still, I think I now understand Canada as a country way better than I did.
   Hitching was slower than I expected getting to Niagara Falls, owing largely to a cop who was a nice guy but was obligated to remove me from the view of some tollbooth operators who called in about me. He took me to a little country road where no one was going more than about 20 miles down the road. Took me all morning and most of the afternoon to get to the border. These things happen. But then there I was at Niagara Falls, and after the border guards let me through (perhaps a tad reluctantly because I mentioned I'd been hitching in the US - but I certainly wasn't planning on doing any of that in their fine country!), I was able to look out over all that falling water. Niagara is a waterfall for all five senses. Seeing a waterfall is easy enough, and hearing it is almost as simple a matter, although you for that you usually have to get within a sensible distance. With Niagara, you get both of those from over a mile away. But more impressively, the mist - the mist drifts around and covers up the falls and also reaches all the way over to your remote viewing platform and chills out your skin infinitesimally and alerts your nose that you're smelling the edge of a Great Lake as it gets a great workout falling over the rocks. I didn't make a point of doing this, but if you open your mouth there, I'm sure you can taste it just as well.
   By the time I'd finished getting lost and dawdling around the Falls, it was kind of too late for hitching and there was a pretty cheap bus, so I just cheated my way to Toronto. That night I stayed with a Couchsurfer who told me at the last minute that I could come over. She's Czech and very friendly and also, as it happens, completely deaf. It's been a long time since I knew someone so deaf that they have to read lips and use closed captions and can't appreciate music. She's never heard herself speak, as far as I know, and it was strange to discover how certain consonants blend together for someone who doesn't know them by sound.
   The next day I took a walk all over the city. First along the Humber River (I detect homesick Brits from the city's founding), then downtown and into Chinatown. Toronto is the most diverse city in the world, presuming you don't count Miami, which is the only city with a higher percentage of foreign-born residents, but where practically all the immigrants are from Cuba. In Toronto they're from every piece of the globe. I walked to Chinatown and passed restaurants from India, the Middle East, and all over Asia, and that wasn't even in a restaurant-heavy district. And it all works. The arguments of people who are against immigration can, I think, pretty often be reduced to "I just don't want that many foreigners in my location because they make me feel scared because I'm more racist than I've ever realized." Of course there are things to be said for public funds, but Canada seems to have that worked out pretty peaceably too. What's holding us back in the US?
   I spent another night with my host, and we ate locust flowers that I picked along the Humber. Then in the morning I took the subway all the way to the edge of town and hitched out in the Canadians' fine country. My very first ride was with a half-Mohawk, half-Swedish man who was in the real estate business and unfortunately seemed to know more about that than about any of the old ways of the Natives of the area. I gave him some locust flowers too and he'd never heard of eating them before. He gave me a two-hour ride, outstanding for one caught at the edge of a city. Unfortunately things went downhill quickly. A couple small town-hops along, I got stuck for three hours in a place called Odessa. That gets mighty tiresome. For some reason, though, there's something magical about three hours. Even if you're in a lousy place where everyone drives by with stony, impassive faces, and you feel like you'll never get away, if you keep standing then somewhere within 20 minutes either side of the three-hour mark you'll get picked up. My ride came from a Korean woman. "Where you going?" I asked her. "Oh... Montréal," she said. She'd seen my sign that said that. "Perfect!" I told her. She took me a few miles down the road to Kingston, where she lives, because she had to pick up her husband. Well, guess what. Her husband works on Montréal Street in Kingston. And that was where she meant she was going. I can hardly conceive of the dunderheadedness required to think that my big MONTRÉAL sign meant that I wanted to go to Montréal Street, Kingston, Ontario. So be it.
   I got to Montréal the next day thanks to a bilingual libertarian trucker, and immediately found my second Couchsurfing host. Her name is Audrey, and we've had a heck of a time these two days. I learned ten times as much about Montréal as I ever thought I would, and, though it's been a violent break from my normal $2-a-day hobo budget, I declared a controlled splurge and we've enjoyed lots of great Québec food (including what I am assured is some of Canada's best poutine - and it is good) and some nice cider called Cidre Céleste. Now that I've been here I can tell you that in Québec they don't just insist on French packaging in order to be contrary or annoying; the language really is totally alive here and heard more on the streets than English, and there's little enough English to totally disorient someone who's not as good at languages as I admit I am. Audrey has hitchhiked from Vancouver to Whitehorse, and she introduced me to friends of hers, one of whom has hitched from Montréal to Vancouver. They have great stories and they're both planning on traveling more this year. Tonight we cooked bibimbap together. Montréal is, above all, a fun city, full of youthful energy even though it's one of the oldest cities in the hemisphere. It's a place where things happen, a hundred festivals a year. I'm pretty glad I came to visit.
   I need to get up early tomorrow to hitch to Maine if I'm going to make it to Bar Harbor sometime on the 8th, and it's just after midnight now, so I'd really better get to getting.

The Hands of God, Plus a Spare Thumb

I'm visiting my friend Ike at his grandparents' house in the Finger Lakes, in upstate New York. One of my discoveries along the way was that hitchhiking in Ohio sucks. Growing up in Ohio, I thought it was flat and dull and full of uninteresting people. Then in Korea I had enough time to get nice and homesick for Cincinnati chili and the Ohio River and everyone in the family, and Ohio started to seem pretty okay after all. Now I've been back for long enough that I'm no longer in awe of being back home, and also I've got way more perspective than I did before I left, and I'm coming back around to the opinion that Ohio really doesn't have a lot going for it. I waited in two perfect spots for three hours apiece to get only as far as Cleveland. That gets old. In other states (except Texas), the people have been way more trusting and adventurous. Maybe I was having bad luck, but it seems to me that I can deduce that Ohioans are extremely conventional, look askance at anyone doing something out of the ordinary, and aren't nearly as friendly as I would hope for.
   Of course, it can't be all bad. I visited my friend Dan in Columbus, and he took me to a swing dance. He started dancing at Grinnell and now it's one of his favorite things ever—and at this point you should take a moment to visualize him, a guy with long brown hair, a neatly groomed beard down to his chest, and often a plaid fedora—and he tells me that the Midwest has a terrifically good swing dancing scene. I wouldn't have expected that Columbus, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh would be hives of such a quaint activity. My expectations would have run more along the lines of tailgate parties and NASCAR enthusiast clubs. I didn't dance myself because, at least until I decide to seriously work at it, my dance moves are mostly reminiscent of a convulsing monkey, but I had fun watching him.
   With the help of a couple very well-placed rides after I got out of Ohio, I made it here to Ike's grandparents' house, and we started hanging out. We decided it would be a very good idea to buy a bottle of whisky. In this manner I discovered that whisky is the devil himself. I felt perfectly fine, all up until I was lying in the grass trying to will the contents of my stomach out. This morning we slept through lunch in the nice, dimly-lit basement, and then moved very gingerly for several hours. But we've had some interesting conversations, about language and philosophy and jokes. We both know a lot of groaners. How many flies does it take to screw in a light bulb? Two, but you have to get them in there first. His nana makes awesome quilts; his papa offers deadpan punch lines and history lessons about the area.
   The Finger Lakes (the eleven of them), as I'd expected, are largely where pretty well-off people come for the summer. But the nature around is beautiful. The wildflowers are showing off white and purple by the roads, and the forests are big and dense behind the farms. It's Mennonite country up here besides being rich-people country, and I saw a horse and buggy in the traffic while I was walking through town. There are a few things that I want to learn before I decide where upstate New York (and Pennsylvania, which was beautiful yesterday morning from the seat of the car of the guy who picked me up) stand in the where-to-live rankings, but I'd say they're definitely in the running, which is a step up from a few weeks ago when I hadn't even considered them.
   Tomorrow morning they're dropping me off on the highway on their way to Rochester, and I'll probably make it to Toronto without too much trouble (he said jinxingly). I think I'll even take a little while to admire Niagara Falls for the first time on the way.