Appalachian Trail: Amicalola to Neel's Gap

I passed a cork tree today and looked up in its boughs. In the branches I imagined my food bag suspended—the one I had to hang every night while on the Appalachian Trail to keep the bears out of my food. I had this vision in Davis, California after talking with a friend, telling him about the rattlesnake I almost stepped on in Connecticut. Looking into the branches of this tree, I realized that my life in the woods for a summer is already receding into distant memory. From late April to early September of 2016, I woke up every morning and walked all day. I seldom saw streets, garbage cans, people or cars. I got used to the trees and the sounds of distant woodpeckers in the morning. The roaring highways, the pop music, the elections and the mass-shootings became the property of another world. I thought after a season away from everything, I would not be so easily seduced by worldly things when I returned, but my reabsorption has been speedy. I drink too many coffees out of paper cups, travel from place to place in cars, sit in front of computers for hours on end as if I never left these things behind. The only thing that remains is the memory of another life in which my consumption did not rage unchecked. I remember that it is possible to live another way, but I would be baffled trying to find my way back to this life from behind my computer screen, coffee in hand, garbage can nearby ready to receive the excess of my gluttony. Satiated and exhausted, I look up into the branches of the cork tree and remember.

i.

April 29^th

I never had a doubt. I didn’t really even think much about my plan. I came back from Paraguay with the idea that I would walk the Appalachian Trail for a month or two while I waited to hear news about my next job. The Paraguay gig ended with the possibility for renewal in another country. Rather than find a home in the States, Gina and I decided to take another job overseas. I had expected to hear where we would be sent in April, May at the latest. In the meantime, I’d start the trail and see where it led, a suitable means of reintroducing myself to my country before leaving again.

The morning of April 29^th I watched the sun rise alongside the analogous bronzed plates of the World’s Fair’s Sun Sphere from my hotel room in Knoxville, Tennessee. I tried to eat a big breakfast, expecting to be on the trail by noon, but I found it hard to concentrate on the food. I compensated by drinking copious amounts of weak hotel coffee which made me so anxious that I found myself running back and forth to the car, hoping that by emptying the hotel room of our possessions to I could also evict my slow-moving parents. In the car, I insisted on driving to Georgia; I couldn’t stand the idea of just sitting there for four or five hours.

At the state line, my dad took over. We left the highway and started down the back roads, winding through the foothills and little towns of southern Appalachia. The last town we passed through—a little resort looking place called Elijay—I called Gina. I didn’t know when I was going to have a signal again. I tried to pour my conflicting emotions into the phone call, but found it difficult to talk freely in the enclosed space next to my parents. Gina is also famously successful at blocking my dramatics. Her dispassion was infectious and when I hung up, going into the woods for a month or two no longer seemed like a big deal, but I’d had too much cheap coffee to relax completely and when I tried to eat again at the Taco Bell, I found I was scarcely able to eat two burritos where normally I would’ve eaten ten.

The Trail’s southern terminus is Springer Mountain, Georgia, but Springer Mountain is hard to reach by car, besides, the nearest fire road requires that one walk south to the Mountain before turning around and beginning the journey north. To avoid rough roads and repeating sections of the Trail, I decided to walk the approach trail from Amicalola Falls which starts about 8 miles south of the AT.

In the parking lot, I changed into my hiking pants and put a bandanna around my neck, thinking I might need it for something. My old man insisted I have a beer with him before starting. I wasn’t much in the mood for a beer either so I gulped down the tall-boy can of PBR he handed me with little ceremony and started looking around for the Trail.

My folks took a few pictures of me at the AT sign with my pack and everything on. We said goodbye, but it wasn’t too big of a deal; I guess I may have been the only one in a position to see the next few months spreading out into eternity. For my folks, it was just a few months, a span of time which usually passes by quickly even under adverse circumstances. For me, in the woods, walking all day, I knew I would feel every moment, at least initially.

I filled my water bottles, said another goodbye and started for the Trail’s head. I was still standing in front of the sign thinking how even the longest journeys start with a single step and all that crap when a girl and her little dog approached me. “You hiking the Trail?” The girl asked.

“Yeah,” I told her. “I mean, I guess.” I corrected, not wanting to sound over-confidant about something I wasn’t sure I was even going to be able to complete. “I might have to get off and go to work.” I continued and explained my situation. The girl told me that she’d thru-hiked the trail the year before. Her trail name was Hollywood. “Best thing I’ve ever done.” She told me when I asked how it went. This made me feel a little more enthusiastic. “What did you like about it?” I asked. “Well,” she started and gestured to the trail, “let’s get started and I’ll tell you about it.”

For the next mile or so, I climbed the wooden stairs that dominate the approach trail rising up the Amicalola Falls, listening to Hollywood talk about the bears, the yellow-blazers and the magic of the Appalachian Trail. I asked her question after question and she answered each one with alacrity. As she was without a pack, she asked several times if I’d prefer to stop since we were climbing stairs and it was a warm day. I told her I was fine and she congratulated me on already seeming to be conditioned for the trail.

After about 45 minutes, Hollywood’s dog refused to walk any further. She tugged a little on his leash, but he was done. She scooped him up, said goodbye and turned back to the trail entrance. I was alone. For the first hour or so, I kept thinking about how I was really doing it, how I was walking down the Appalachian Trail. Then my thoughts started to flit all over the place. I ceased really thinking about one thing but sort of tuned into to a mental radio station playing portions of songs, memories and all kinds of vague ontological effluvia. Although sometimes I would break free with a clear thought or two, I stayed tuned into this station for most of the four months I was in the woods.

After I’d been walking about three hours, I came upon a man sitting in the middle of the trail. He had an exhausted look on his face, so I asked him if everything was ok. “Yeah,” he told me, fanning himself a little with his floppy hat, “I’ve just got a little sunstroke.” It wasn’t a hot day, but it wasn’t a day for a fleece either, especially not if you’re climbing up and down hills with a pack as huge as this guy’s was. I didn’t bother to tell him that it might be prudent to take off his sweater if he was so hot. It seemed so obvious, I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I wished him luck and continued on.

About half a mile after the sweaty guy in the fleece, I found another early casualty of the trail, a three-pound pepperoni sausage, still in it’s wrapper, lying like a meaty turd in the middle of the trail. It looked like it’d fallen off someone’s pack, but I knew it’d been abandoned. From the way it was sitting there, it was obvious that the sausage had proved too much for someone and had been tossed or just dropped. As I crested the hill, I came upon a couple walking south and told them, if they were hungry, there was a sausage that looked like it was still good on the trail. “I know,” the guy told me. “We picked that thing up and carried it for a while when we came out here, but in the end, we decided it wasn’t worth it and dropped it back on the Trail.” As they walked away, I wondered how long this sausage had been making its way up and down the Trail. It may have been there for months, picked up by the odd curious hiker only to be dropped later somewhere else. That sausage may have come all the way from Maine for all I knew.

The sun was beginning to set through the trees and cast long shadows when I came up a rise on the Trail to a slight clearing. Another hiker was sitting down on a rock, eating and watching the setting sun through the trees. It looked like a good place for a break, so I decided to stop. I dropped my bag, said ‘hi’ and asked the kid if he knew where the approach trail ended and where the AT officially started. I had planned to camp two miles after the start of the Trail. “This is it,” the kid told me, pointing to a plaque stuck to the side of the rock. “This is Springer Mountain; the start of the AT.” The view between the trees suddenly seemed much more profound when I considered the fact that it was the end of a trail that stretched more than 2,000 miles. A trail that after walking all day, I had only just reached the beginning of. I ate the first of 100s of Cliff Bars before staring north down the trail, toward Maine, wondering what would be down there for me.

The kid’s voice broke me from my reverie. “What’s your name?” He asked. My pause must have been significant because he corrected himself. “What’s your trail name?”

“Uh, Mossman,” I said, feeling slightly awkward introducing myself as a toy I’d played with as a kid. “What’s yours?”

“Tortoise,” he told me. “You headed to that next shelter for the night?”

I told him I was and after he and I spoke with the other hikers who’d come up, we set off together to the shelter. After hiking alone all afternoon, it was nice to have someone to talk to through the lonely mix of twilight and the new place, after all, I wasn’t just visiting the Trail, in a way, I’d moved out to it and the first night in a new place is always kind of lonely. Tortoise and I talked through the hour-long hike to the shelter. We set our tents up next to each other and sat around a fire, talking about the trail to come, before turning in.

In my tent, I couldn’t get to sleep. The excitement of the morning still seemed to be with me and although I felt comfortable out in the woods, I still felt uncertain about what the experience would bring or even why I was doing it. I eventually drifted off listening to the unfamiliar night sounds of the Georgia woods.

ii.

I woke up in the morning to the bustle of Tortoise taking down his tent. It was warm enough with the sun coming through my tent to entice me outside into the cool morning air. I started making coffee right away. Tortoise expressed admiration that I’d bothered to bring anything to make coffee. “I hate instant,” I told him. “I’ll never drink that crap if I don’t have to.”

While I was still enjoying my coffee, Tortoise took off. He told me he’d hiked part of the trail before and that we’d probably see each other again. “I stop a lot,” he said. “So you’ll catch up to me.”

I sat and enjoyed my coffee for a while, listening to the forest and trying to understand the trail and length of time that stretched out before me. I gave up and listened to the birds before finishing my coffee, knocking down my tent and starting out for the first full day.

I came back into the walking with no problem. After a night of intermittent tent sleep, I found the return to walking agreeable. It stretched my muscles and gave me something to do with the caffeine-induced energy.

In the afternoon, the sky darkened a little. The accompanying threat of rain didn’t bother me. I felt apart from the scenery around me, so entangled I had become in my own thoughts. At this point, I had begun projecting myself into a future: A job overseas—maybe in Ethiopia, Gina would be there and we’d have a dog. The bright green foliage blurred into an arid landscape and Amharic characters seemed to twist themselves out of the branches.

Later, the wind picked up, making the approaching storm impossible to ignore. I was coming upon a shelter. I stopped at a river which was silvery with the approaching storm’s light. I drank some water and rested a while, not knowing that I was right across from the shelter where I’d been planning to stay for the night. When I climbed over the next rise in the trail and saw the outline of the shelter through the trees, I felt conflicted. It was only just after 4. It felt too early to already stop for the day. I didn’t feel tired and there seemed to already be a crowd hanging around the area. I didn’t feel like hanging around with a bunch of people all afternoon, so I continued on. The next sheltered area was ten miles up the trail, but I’d been seeing little spots to pitch a tent all up and down the trail and I was confident that I’d see another before too long.

As I walked further down the trail, away from the happy shouts of the hikers who’d stayed on at shelter, I began to feel anxious. I was walking further into the woods, away from shelter, away from the friendly society of others with the storm clouds piling up above me. But I didn’t feel as though I could stop. I wanted to walk until just before dark. It felt like a job I had to finish.

I walked on, unsure of whether or not to turn back, until the sky cleared its throat and brought up a clot of thunder. The rain came down all at once, as if from a bucket overturned. I raced down the trail, unsure of where I was going, only at that moment realizing I had no way to get out of the rain.

Everything I had thought waterproof turned out to be merely water-resistant. Within seconds, my socks were wet, the jacket I had pulled on was damp. My pack did nothing to keep the water out and my books and odd papers were turned into pulp.

Through the grey sheets of rain, I spotted an open area, big enough for my tent and darted over to it. I tossed my pack down and jerked out my tent, which was already damp. As I was setting the thing up, the rain slackened and I almost had second thoughts, but after the rain, the sky was darker; it looked closer to night and I figured, especially as I was all wet, it was time to stop for the day.

The night before, I’d slept with my food in my tent, but, in bear country, I knew this wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was resolved to hang my food. After I got my sodden tent up and tossed my pack inside. I made a quick meal, using the rest of my water to cook and clean and started looking for a suitable tree from which to hang my food.

All the boughs looked too high or too skinny to support my food bag. I tied my water bottle to the end of my paracord and commenced tossing the thing up into the leafy wet sky, continually sending down showers of rain that had been frozen in their progress to the earth by the broad maple and oak leaves. When I finally managed to get my paracord over a branch, it looked a little too skinny, but I was too tired to try to take it down. I tied my food bag to one end and commenced dragging the thing up the tree. As I pulled, the entire trunk of the tree leaned toward me. Rather than pulling my bag up to the top of the tree, I seemed to be bringing the top of the tree down to me. Soaking wet, with a bag of food at my feet, damp tent for my abode and with a tree bent all the way to the ground, looking like something I’d roped in a rodeo, I began to feel like I had no business out in the woods and I despaired of ever getting to North Carolina, much less Maine.

By the time I’d finally gotten my food in a tree, the rain had almost completely stopped. After a few months in the Appalachian Woods, I would’ve known that the first rainfall had only been a prelude to the real storm, but it was only my second day and I assumed that the rain had stopped for the night. I also would’ve known that camping in a random spot such as I’d found, guaranteed that there would be no water source nearby. After my camp was secured, more or less, I walked back down the trail to the shelter, where I remember seeing the last stream.

Reentering the shelter area, I found Tortoise filling up his water bottles. He said he’d stopped for dinner, but that he planned on continuing on as the rain had stopped. We chatted for a minute and I felt better just talking to someone. The human contact, after spending the day in my head, was refreshing and I walked back to my spot in the woods feeling revived.

As it was still a few hours before nightfall, I decided to try to start a fire back at my campsite. Everything was wet, but I rolled over a few logs and found enough dry leaves and twigs to get something going. I had amassed a little pile when the rain started to fall again, without the violence of the first time, but with more tenacity. It was clear that this time, the rain was here to stay. I was about to duck into my tent when I spotted Tortoise struggling up the trail.

“Hey, Tortoise,” I called out over the rain. “You can set up here if you want.” I gestured to a flat spot not far from my own tent. Tortoise stopped. I could tell that, like me, he didn’t like to stop this early in the day, but by now the rain had increased and the twilight was blurred. The whole sodden forest looked almost impossible to navigate.

Tortoise resigned himself to set up his tent and, for the second night in a row, we camped together. The rain, which fell through the night, kept us from being social. Each of us, in our tents, fought against watery onslaught. By the time I fell asleep, I had given up trying to towel the rising water on the floor of my tent. It was all I could do to keep my sleeping bag from getting wet.

iii.

The morning was clear and the rain had brought the temperature down. Tortoise had woken up just before dawn and taken off. I was surprised to find that my food bag was still in the tree. I had fully expected a clever bear to have pulled it down in the night and surfeited on its contents. But there were no gnawed Cliff Bar wrappers in evidence and although the bag was soaking wet, it was intact.

Owing to the extra weight brought on by the water, my pack seemed twice as heavy. I staggered a little under the burden, but in no time I hit my stride again and as soon as I began walking, my mind began throwing off disconnected thoughts. Some I mused on, others I let pass, paying them no more attention than I did the stones and leaves that passed under my feet.

In the afternoon, I caught up to Tortoise at the base of Blood Mountain. We climbed to the top of the grey giant together. After three days of bright green forest, the ashen stones and lack of trees at the summit came as a surprise. The mountain was also skirted by a mantle of fog which covered the forest beyond it. Everything had become grey. I climbed out on a precipice to take in the first real mountain view of the trail, little knowing how many more I would see like it over the course of the summer.

The fog was beautiful. It spread evenly from the base of the mountain and leveled all the hills and valleys until the forest below resembled a nacreous sea, at once grey and sparkling.

Neel’s Gap came as a surprise. The first real road crossing since I’d entered the woods, offered up the bounties of civilization in the form of an outfitting store. After nearly 72 hours in the woods, I found myself standing indoors, browsing bags of chips and candy bars. I bought a Cherry Coke, a bag of chips and a few postcards to send home. Everything was still kind of wet and, as I wrote, the ink of the postcards began to run and smear. I tried not to smudge the addressees so that the salutations, as blurred as they might be, would still reach their destinations.

The rain had begun to fall again and Tortoise and I found refuge next to a sheltered woodpile. There was a logbook for thru-hikers next to the woodpile and we each signed it. It was May 1^st. I wrote ‘Happy Mayday’ and tried to remember how to write it in Russian, but had to resign myself to writing dobre dien because it was all I could think of.

When the rain let up, we walked up a rise in the trail, out of the gap and seemed to walk into the clouds. The scenery, dripping, grey and gauzy began to resemble nothing so much as the Pacific Northwest. Under this realization, I began to feel slightly homesick, not in an anxious way, but in a way that felt satisfying. It was good to be out in the woods, but still feel like I had a place to be in the world when I should come off the trail.

The camping area looked haunted. A few brightly colored tents rose up through the fog and their tenants drifted around like ghosts. I set up, having learned from the previous night to stop before it got too late and at a place where there was a reliable water source.

Tortoise decided to keep walking. “You’ll catch up to me again tomorrow,” he told me before being swallowed up by the fog. I felt tired and soon after I ate and got my bag into a tree, I crawled into my tent and fell asleep, swaddled by the seaweed fog of the Pacific Northwest.

Nowhere on the Verge of Everywhere

I’d been complaining all week about never running into anyone I knew in my hometown, despite having been back for over three months. Every day, I had been crossing town on my bike, running unimportant errands, trying to keep myself occupied. Downtown, under the blossoming apple trees or on the north side, on West Ave. up by the mall, I kept expecting to run into someone, the way I had so often as a kid, when I couldn’t walk down the street for more than a few blocks without someone stopping, saying ‘hi’ or offering a ride. No one was forthcoming. In the cafés, kids I didn’t know had long conversations about relationships, conversations I had been a part of once and now sat on the periphery of. In the streets, the cars roared by anonymously. Some honked, but it was only to get me to move. The sun was continually falling back behind the clouds and every evening as I rode home, I cleared my throat after not using my voice all day other than to order a coffee or thank a checkout clerk.

It was clear that everyone had gone, even the people who had once remained. Everyone left was unfamiliar to me. They were kids of another generation. Maybe some of them had gone too; maybe some of them felt left. I wanted to assure them. I wanted to say: “don’t worry, eventually, you’ll all leave.”

I had to call the people who were still around. We had to arrange times to hang out. They had stayed because they’d found niches. I had no niche and was only floating, like I had been for so long. Sometimes on Friday, we’d get a beer and I’d tell them a few of my stories; they’d tell me some of theirs and we’d go back to a time when we hadn’t been so completely defined by experience.

There was nowhere to eat, so I ate at home, often alone—never making it back for dinnertime, sitting at the counter, reading a library book. I looked forward to dinner as a time when I could accomplish a simple goal with a very real result. Cooking and eating felt successful like nothing else.

I applied to a few jobs, but no employers ever wrote back. My follow-up e-mails all went unanswered. Only Montana State University wrote to inform me that their job posting for a pooled adjunct position (barely even a job) probably wouldn’t even be relevant until 2018, which begged the question, ‘why even post it?’ ‘To keep the pool open,’ they’d responded.

In the evenings, I tried to read, but something from the day made me so tired, something about being alone, watching other people communicating and feeling so apart from them wore me down. I couldn’t read for more than 15 minutes before I’d start to fall asleep.

I never slept less than 8 hours. There was no reason to rush through sleep. When I woke up, I’d lay there, stunned by my situation, like the feeling that sets in after a car crash where the mind struggles to catch up to everything that just happened and the attendant consequences. Downstairs, I’d have coffee and check my mail. My inbox never contained anything other than Capital One bills and ‘Account Statement is Now Ready’ notices from the bank.

All day, I’d think of the e-mail. Not checking it felt like more of an accomplishment as time went on. I’d leave the house just to avoid it, until I began to believe that I’d gotten something from a potential job. The feeling would be so strong, I’d stop whatever I was doing and hurry home. While Gmail opened, I’d actually feel a chest-tightening anxiety, like I wouldn’t be able to stand seeing another empty inbox and yet, in a flash, there it’d be. Empty. “I’ll get something tomorrow,” I’d tell myself with a sigh before going to cook some food I really wasn’t hungry for.

After about three months, I went to Ann Arbor with my mother. I had been taking a lot of these trips. Primarily because this is what we usually did when I visited. Because my visit had gone on so inordinately long, force of habit kept us doing the same thing.

There was a Moth Storytelling event, but because I had told a story the month before, I didn’t want to ruin the good feeling (one of the few of accomplishment I still clung to) by going back and doing it again. But at the last minute, I decided to go, with my mom. I thought maybe it’d make her happy to see her son doing something other than sitting on the couch, reading overdue library books.

We left early and while she shopped for upcoming birthdays, I asked her to drop me off at the skatepark. I was 33 years old, being dropped off at the skatepark by my mom.

The morning was grey and slightly rainy, like a weather pattern out of the Pacific Northwest. There was only one other skater at the park. He went to the back of the park and I went to the front. In our separate worlds, we kicked our boards against the ground and pushed off the smooth concrete with the balls of our feet, bending out legs to take the varied transitions of the ramps, going up, coming down, getting hung up and jumping off.

After 10 minutes, he skated over to me.

“Ha,” he said pointing, “Look there’s a gummy bear standing up.” I had noticed the gummy bear before, but hadn’t thought much about it. I still didn’t really think about it, but that voice, the way he pointed out the gummy bear apropos of nothing. I knew this kid. I looked at his face, much changed.

“Don?” I asked.

He looked into my face, much changed.

“Jon?”

And here, at last, was someone I knew.

It was almost too rainy to skate anyway. We sat on a concrete ledge together and talked about people we knew and the places they’d all gone. He had to leave to get back to work, but it had been good seeing him. It made me believe more in the unseen. I started to think of my e-mail, luckily, I had no way to check it.

The Moth was sold out, but there were only 13 storytellers. I got picked to go 4^th, just before the break. Being on stage and being applauded felt like accomplishing something. However briefly, I was entertaining this room full of people. I was performing a function other than riding around on a bike or making myself dinner. After I came down from the stage, a number of people thanked me for my story telling me they’d really enjoyed it. Some of the staff remembered my last story and told me they liked my style. A drunk girl told me I was ‘sexy.’ These things pulled me from anonymity, however briefly, but when I got home, I couldn’t resist checking my mail. There was nothing there. I sat at the counter and drank a beer, just staring off into space. Not really prepared to do anything else for the night.

In bed, I finished The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I guess it was after midnight. I didn’t sleep well and when I woke up the next day, I just lay there for a while, less sure of how to start than ever. Eventually, I went downtown to the café, finished another job application and wrote this.

…

The next morning was grey and rainy. No one else was awake when I went downstairs. I made the coffee and started to write about a dream I had where my high school had become part of an airport or an airport had become part of my high school. I looked for jobs half-heartedly for a while.

…

I went up north to see an old friend. I stopped for a minute at another skatepark and noticed that there were tent caterpillar worms all over the park. I was conflicted about skating because it was impossible not to run over the worms. I tried my best to avoid them, but I kept thinking about how they used to be a nuisance species in Michigan. People were always saying they killed trees; I never hear anything about them anymore, but here they were, in the skatepark, nowhere near any trees. Maybe they were trying to ruin the skatepark, having run out of trees to eat.

After the worms, I met with my friend in a little café. He was sitting in the back and rose quickly to meet me with the air of someone greeting a person they haven’t seen in a long time, expectant but also scanning for changes. He’d already drank his coffee and his empty cup stood before him. The last few times we’ve met he’d told me how much I had grown to resemble my dad, so he told me again. I’m sure it must be odd for him, watching the change over the years, from one person into another. He doesn’t look anything like his dad, but when he and I first met his dad already had a lot of silver hair, so I guess he’s got a way to go anyway. But in other ways, there’s a resemblance. He told me he goes home after work and likes to write. “All that time in front of the computer,” he said. “Just like my dad.” Which was true, the predominant memory I have of his dad is of someone sitting in front of a computer. I asked him if he knew what it was his dad had been doing all those years in front of the computer. He answered that he still didn’t know. “Maybe he’s been writing, too,” I offered. He admitted that this might have been true.

We spent the next few hours talking about what our lives had been like lately, a big change from the way we used to talk about the past exclusively. I guess the past has become so distant that the old stories don’t spring to mind as ready anecdotes the way they used to. I couldn’t help but to wonder how many of these memories might be in his writing now.

After we parted, I went over to my old house, where two friends of mine still live. After some coffee, we talked all night as we usually do. Around 4:30 they went upstairs to their rooms and I wrapped myself up in throw blankets on the couch and looked around the room in the soft golden color that pours through the windows from the street. Some houses are day houses and some are night houses, designed for optimal use at one time or the other. This house, my old house, is a night house. The daylight seems to make it cold; the street lights warm it up. At night, after the doors are closed, the cats are sleeping and the heat is blowing up from the ducts, the house, like no other I know, almost seethes in its personality. Even the house I grew up in has no such display of character. Phantasmal footsteps bound down the stairs, shreds of conversation fall like dry leaves through the living room. A static, a snowfall, pulses with old phone signals and voicemail recordings like a cloud pulsing with lightening.  In the groans of the door shifting in its frame are delayed reactions to years of different knocks. I haven’t lived here for ten years, but this house is pamplisest, written over into illegibility, but with occasional glimpses into the lives it has contained.

I lay there awake, listening to the conversations of the past swirl through the house. The night brought them out of the carpets and the coffee cups where they had lain preserved under a canopy of dust. I fell asleep listening to the sounds I had made packing up my room, years before.

In the morning, the sun flashed through the windows. I kicked my feet into my shoes and stumbled outside. I drove around the state the rest of the day trying to reconcile the changes with the visions the house had offered up. I felt ten years out of step, like someone who’s emerged groggily from a time machine, not initially sure it’s worked until they notice the cracks in the new paint and the wrinkles on the face with the same young eyes, but looking out on the world, as if from the past itself.

It felt like I’d never be able to catch up with the time that had passed. Everything seemed to have run off ahead into the distance, into age. I tried to skate at another park, but found I couldn’t, at least not very well. I stood back and watched the local kids skate over the tent caterpillar worms, like a stranger waiting for a ride.

…

There’s a building so large on the horizon it looks like a perpetual dawn, like a manila sun spreading beyond the highway, under the trees. If it wasn’t for the large white refrigerators on the roof, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. I’ll be setting off toward that big-box store horizon in a few days. I’d hoped to leave carrying some kind of certainty to lighten the long walk into the future, but nothing has come; I’ll set out with no idea where I’ll be going. I’ll walk north for a while, just to go somewhere while I wait for something—an idea, a mission, a home—to pluck me from the woods, set me down someplace and say “Here. This is where you’re going to be now.” It could be anywhere. Last night, I applied to a job in New Jersey. I’ve got resumes on desks in Hawaii, Washington and Addis Ababa. They’re all supposed to start in the fall. I’m still signed up to take a hard-to-fill position with the fellowship. If, at the last minute, someone declines to go to Kigali, Urumqi or Tashkent, they might ask me.

So, for the next few months, I’ll be nowhere on the verge of everywhere, finally pushing myself out of this place, I will go to the woods, like so many other Americans before me to listen for something. I woke up last night and tried to imagine sleeping in a small forest clearing; I couldn’t, but that’s how these things work. You can’t really imagine the next place. From the woods, I probably won’t be able to imagine a Seattle apartment or even this place very well. It’s good; I guess it’s indicative of finding a place in the present, which is something I’ve never been able to do very well, but I’m getting better at.

Right now, in this café, I’m making another memory, packing it together like a snowball, something to hold onto when all this disappears. From the woods of Appalachia, it’ll be nice to remember the months I’ve spent here, the blooming cherry and apple trees, and when I come back years from now, it’ll mean even more than it does now. Everything already does.   

Donuts

I woke up a little groggy from the microbrews of the previous evening, but it had been nothing a cup of coffee and a donut or two wouldn’t fix. I rolled off the air mattress and, while everyone else slept, considering ducking out to the café just a block away in Detroit’s West Village, where I was staying with Brendan and his girlfriend Maria. As I was pulling on my sweater, I heard Davor get up. The grey morning sun was gaining strength in the windows and the fragrant dust of new carpets swirled in the air with a silver glint. Davor said good morning and as I was about to ask him if he wanted to get coffee, Brendan came out of his room. We all traded bleary good mornings and shuffled around looking for something to do while Brendan made coffee, then I remembered the donuts.

Since the first time I went to Seattle, I have loved Mighty O donuts. The Mighty O was one of the first places in the country (at least that I knew of) to make vegan donuts. After the artisanal donut craze of the last few years, there are now quite a few other bakeries that make them, but, for me, none rival the original. When I’m in Seattle, The Mighty O is a requisite stop, so it had come as a beautiful surprise the previous day when Davor had produced a box from his backpack. Before flying in from Seattle, he’d bought a box of donuts to go with coffee for the next few days while he would be visiting.

I told Brendan and Davor I was going to run out and grab the donuts from the car. The sun was burning through the leaden clouds above the street and certain spots of the neighborhood leapt up in color where the sun had broken through. A mailbox, a passenger side mirror, a roof tile, these things detached themselves from the ordinary street and raised themselves up in the way favored things do; they stood out proudly among the dim spots: the flaking paint, cracked concrete and the weather-beaten roof tops. I walked off the porch onto St. Paul Street and saw the dimness spread and deepen crowding out the bright spots, overtaking them. The sun had burnt out, now a white dwarf lent its ashen and feeble light to the street and the light was rent with holes, yawning blackouts stretching out from the rotten buildings into the broken streets, one such place shone with particular vehemence, the color of rust, stagnant water and decay. Its gloaming and sickening light shone on the place where I had parked the car the night before, where now there were only tire treads in the mud and surrounding street detritus.

The car was gone.

I stopped and then thought, ‘no; I must’ve parked it somewhere else.’ I started up the block again, but only took a few steps before realizing that there had been no error and would be no point walking down the block further. The car had been here. I remembered parking it here. Now, it was gone. The tire treads were the only indication that I had once had a car in my possession. Even those were dubious. They could’ve come from another car. 100s of cars could have come and parked briefly in the spot where I had parked the night before, 100s of years ago in another place, another city, one not plagued with the oily light of this worm-eaten star, crumbling in the sky and festering in each abandoned reflection.

I grasped wildly at the idea that the car had been towed, but, like the notion that I had parked somewhere else, it diminished into impossibility immediately. The other cars remained silently parked on St. Paul St. unticketed and otherwise unmolested. I found myself hating the Subarus and other foreign cars, much newer than mine, which hadn’t been taken, which still gleamed in the wholesome light of the sun on a spring day.

I walked to the edge of the dim spot, but there was nothing to see; nothing to be done. I was defeated at once and then, after I had accepted my defeat, did I realize its extent. I walked back inside out from under the hideous light swirling and storming under the oak, next to which, the car had been.

I pulled the door open and kicked off my shoes. “You better hurry up with that coffee,” I told Brendan. “I’m really going to need it in a second when my brain catches up to the fact that the car is gone.”

They yelled, incredulous. They went to the window, they went to the porch. They saw. They stood in their socks, gestured and made disgusted facial expressions at the empty spot up the street and the dim light which radiated from it. But nothing changed. Nothing could be done to arrest what had already happened.

We drank the coffee. The liquid had been separated from its flavor. Even the comforting warmth had been stolen by my own consuming blandness, my fear. The car wasn’t empty. There was nothing of monetary value, but everything left inside had been richly sentimental. These things too were gone and the worst part is that no one wanted them. Now, they were in a ditch, floating in the Detroit river, run over on the Lodge expressway, stomped, smashed, ruined. But there were worse thoughts yet. The car which had become an empty spot, which at that moment was being dismantled, broken and melted into nothing, wasn’t even mine.

…

I came back to stay with my parents a few months ago while I waited for my next job assignment. I wouldn’t be living with them, but my stay would be longer than a normal visit, a few months. My dad offered his jeep. Normally, he didn’t use it in the winter much. My first day in it, I had flipped the thing, rolling it off the highway after hitting a patch of ice. I felt terrible. There was no coverage. I offered to pay the cost of the repairs. “I don’t know,” my dad had said, “we might just have to scrap it.” I worried for a few days until the assessment came back. The car was alright. 500 bucks and it would be fine to drive again. Happily, I paid this, glad to have restored to car to its former condition.

Mostly, I drove the car from my parents’ place up to a café, at the edge of town to write in the mornings, but a few times, I took it to Ann Arbor or Lansing. Detroit was as far as it had gone. I had fully expected to return the jeep to my dad in the same condition he had lent it to me in, but now there was no condition; there was nothing to return.

A phone was handed to me, the police. It was ringing. “Detroit Police Department?” A voice asked, as if it were shorthand for “why are you calling the Detroit Police Department?”

“Hi, uh, I need to report a stolen car.”

“You have to go into a precinct for that.”

“Ok, thanks” and I hung up. Brendan knew the closest precinct and we piled into the car breakfastless, mirthless. The acid coffee sloshed in our empty stomachs.

The precinct was empty and weathered. The windows had that strange buffered look that old windows of municipal buildings take on. We drove on and found a patrolman sitting in his car before a block of rotted homes.

“You could try the gaming building. That would probably be the closest.” He gave us directions and in a few blocks we had reached the gaming building. It had the same bleached and buffered look, but the parkinglot was full of copcars and cops. We drove in. I approached a cop walking leisurely toward the building. “Can I report a stolen car here?” He told me they didn’t do that and that I’d have to go downtown. We drove out that way, through the beautiful faded grandeur of downtown Detroit, the red brick sky scrapers, the art deco façades and the steaming manholes.

The cop at the door of the precinct didn’t want to let us in. He was clearly annoyed that we had come to his precinct on a Saturday with our problem. After asking a battery of stupid question, he gestured irritably to a woman sitting at a desk before a computer.

I explained the situation to her and she told me that my connection to the car was too tenuous. I wasn’t the owner. I had a California license. I wouldn’t be able to file a report. My dad would have to come to Detroit. A vision from high school spread before me. I was a teenager again, sitting cowed in an office while my dad took care of things. I waited for him to give my useless ass a ride home, feeling his strong disapproval and weariness. It was a situation I didn’t care to repeat. Frantically, I looked through my wallet for something that might connect me to the car or at least to Michigan. I found an old driver’s license bearing my parents’ address. I offered it. The woman glanced at it before tapping the hole punched from its upper corner. “Expired,” she said handing it back to me. “Yeah,” I started, trying to be extremely polite without being too cowed. “But, you see it connects me to my parents’ address. You can see I lived there.” She gave in and handed me a form to fill out.

Everyone’s attention was on me, on the form, the purpose for all this disruption. The spaces to be filled in were too small. My hand shook with coffee, irritation and selfpity. When I handed the form over, the woman bemoaned my awful handwriting. “These are numbers?” She yelled. “They look like letters.” She held it up for Davor and Brendan, “don’t these look like letters to you?” She asked, confirming my own suspicions that I was an utter idiot.

The idea had been growing in my mind since I had found the car gone that I was somehow inept, or at the very least, obviously sophomoric. I had flipped the car on the ice, gotten it stolen and now I couldn’t even fill out a form correctly. We left the precinct and I walked out into the parking lot devalued, the way a new car leaving the lot loses value. I left my dignity and any notion that I was worth a damn in the police station.

There was nothing left to do. We drove around a little looking for the car, thinking maybe someone had taken it joyriding and dropped it off somewhere nearby. But the city was huge. Empty buildings and abandoned cars without plates littered the streets. Weeds would grow from the remnants of the car before anyone ever did anything about it. The hulk of the car would become another place where the pale, watery light of neglect, abandonment and theft fell. It would be another piece of junk to bury Detroit, from under which no light of the sun would reach, leaving the city to seethe and bleach and crumble.

We came back into West Village and, for lack of anything else to do, we went to get another cup of coffee. Around the café, people were out enjoying the warm weather. They greeted each other and the aroma of coffee drifted out into the street. The patrons of a nearby restaurant joined in the friendly throng. The music of their voices seemed to rise up and pierce the grey sky. A restorative light fell upon the scene and I felt my optimism rise, if only slightly. If a city, long mired in its problems, both perceived and real, could banish the oily light that had so long seeped out over its abandoned streets and crumbling walls than perhaps I too could find something redemptive in myself. Maybe every useful thing is occasionally plagued by uselessness, maybe we only cycle through periods of utility and inutility. Maybe, we wax and wane, shining in different lights, under different stars.

I bought a coffee. I thought about the Mighty O donuts that had been in the car which were now gone and I noticed that the café had a vegan pastry that looked a lot like a donut. I ordered it and went outside to eat. The taste was amazing. The sun shone again. I found myself thinking “at least they couldn’t take my donuts.”       

When I Come Home, if I Come Home

I flew in the night before with a bad cold. The pressure of the take-off and landing blocked my ears and everything sounded faraway and muffled, giving me the impression that I was somehow removed from everything, like I was floating in a tank of water in view of everyone, but separate, of a different world. 

It was cold, 17 degrees when I left the house. Sunday and Valentine's Day, there was very little traffic and despite the blockage in my ears, I could hear the chirping of the birds in the trees and the occasional crack of a branch in the woods as a deer, or maybe someone's dog passed through. 

Along the bike path, the city had torn up a large swatch of trees and the earthy smell of ripe winter wood was earthen and sweet, like the smell of milk left over in a bowl of cereal. I walked down where the trees had been, looking at the sky and the thin clouds that drifted over the tops of the powerlines. The mulch of white pines and dry nettles was tossed over the snow like a grade school note ripped up and thrown away. A few stolid oak stumps crowned the soil, looking chewed and frayed at the ends, like pencils poorly sharpened. The scene was braided with the straw of dead grass which the snow and wind had tangled in spindly hummocks. Bluebirds and robins flitted down from the trees to search this newly turned earth for worms and insects.

I turned on to West Ave. at the end of the trail and made my way along the park where dry tree branches shook in the absence of a wind break. The snow was all mashed down on the sidewalks in icy bootprints of varied sizes. Under my feet, it squelched like ice cubes chewed between the back teeth. A few of the larger pines disclosed mantles of copper-colored needles that carpeted an immediate area around the base of the tree before disappearing under the snow along a ragged border.

I turned on Michigan Ave. and fell into reverie after passing Frankie's old house. The place had been painted and I had no idea who lived there anymore, but the attic window that I had looked out from many years ago was still there and looking into it, I began to displaced, almost like I wasn’t sure which side of the house I was on. I felt guilty, like I had stolen something just by having once been inside this house. I stood on the sidewalk and waited to see if there was any movement inside, but I saw nothing. The windows were dark, but unshaded. It looked empty.

The old water tower, the one I had climbed and spraypainted before moving was still hanging over the Westwood Mall like a rotten moon, the silver paint flaking off in rusty patches. What I had written was illegible, just part of the rust. Even my goodbye to the city had faded. Everything once familiar had been similarly oxidized with strangeness. I went back into the neighborhood off Michigan Ave. a little and couldn't remember where anything had been. I stood on the sidewalk, block after block, waiting for a familiar object to present itself, but nothing came, only the Tyvek logo stamped all over housing insulation where the siding hadn't been put up.

I went into a new Tim Horton's, for a coffee. I couldn't remember what had been there before. In front of me in line was a young woman with Down's Syndrome and her mother. "Do you want whipped cream on your hot chocolate?" The mother asked. I tried to push it down, but something about the scene overwhelmed me. A lump grew in my throat. The young woman didn't answer and her mother repeated the question. They both had ears like little sea shells sticking out of their cotton hats on the sides and the same dry-looking brown bangs spilling out of the front. Hot chocolate for Valentine's Day, with whipped cream, mom’s treat. I could hear the young woman’s mom proposing the outing in some house somewhere, probably not too far away, one with the paint flaking around the windows and one of those bonneted geese motifs in the kitchen. The radio in Tim Horton’s was playing a Beach Boys song; an elderly couple was crumpling newspapers, sitting by the glass case that held the cakes. The young woman nodded her head in response to the questions about the whipped cream but said nothing. She went to sit down, tired-looking. The mom ordered donuts. The total was just over six dollars. I couldn't help it, my field of vision softened and blurred and for a moment, with the tears in my eyes and the watery pressure in my ears, I felt like I was standing right there, underwater, like I was in one of those dunk tanks at the fair. I drew a ragged breath to fortify myself a little, stepped up to the register, ordered a coffee and walked out looking straight ahead so that I couldn't see anything else. 

I crossed the parking lot and walked onto Matt's old street. The house had been panted a different color years ago, but the paint had already gone all scaly. The front porch was empty and a few pieces of paper announcing different things to the public were tapped up in the window. I didn’t try to read what they said, but looked back down the street trying to remember what it had been like years before, what it felt like to have the whole world starting at the end of that street. It looked small, was all I noticed, but the trees seemed to have grown.

The heavy smell of the McDonald's followed me up the street. It seemed a pervasive smell that had been following me all over town. The old supermarket was closed. I crossed the empty parking lot, shuffling through the tire treads and out back onto Michigan Ave. The Mall's Cinema marquee was still up, a large 1 and 2 and naked boards next to them. The sidewalk ended and I walked in the snow. The cars passed by, crossing the emptiness between storefronts.

I walked past the airport, looking out over the naked fields. A dead and frozen deer lay in a snow drift, the wind lifting and dropping hairs on her back. A part of cyclone fence had fallen down and beyond it, a backhoe sat up to its axles in snow. The larches offered up bouquets of robins in lieu of leaves and blooms to the grey landscape. I began to think how Christ would’ve had a good deal if he could’ve taken away the sins of mankind forever instead of them just coming right back. I wondered how the world would be different if he had died to remove the sadness of mankind rather than the sins, perhaps we would’ve been better off. I wondered if I would do it, I mean die to take away everyone’s sadness. In the moment, it seemed like a good deal. I didn’t want to die, but it just seemed like a nice thing to be able to do.

Over the highway, Jason and I had spraypainted something years, almost decades ago, and the concrete had drunk the words leaving a cold outline that no one had probably ever tried to make out. It was cold on the overpass. I didn't try to read the words either, having written them myself, I knew they couldn't have been worth reading. 

I sat down in a Taco Bell and tried to remember the name for the condition of the young woman with the hot chocolate in the Tim Horton's. All I could think of was 'Tourette's syndrome.' From underwater, I listened to the pop music coming out of the radio. All the heartbreaks, emotional raptures and Saturday nights lost their intention and seemed to clatter to the floor, inert and lifeless from the speakers.

It was getting dark when I left and the wind had picked up a little, churned up by the passing traffic. The backhoe was mired a little deeper in the drifting snow and the robins were gone. 

Down on Franklin, I suddenly slapped my forehead and yelled out "Down's!" It didn't matter what I looked like. I was alone on the street and indifferent to the passing traffic

.

I walked into neighborhood behind the old supermarket, trying to remember which street April had lived on. I could see the little house with its lamp glowing in the window in my memory, but everything looked the same and, in the dark, every house had a lamp on in the window. Street names from every place I had ever lived bumped around in my head and combined to form names that had never existed. I looked up and saw about ten deer with their heads turned toward me no more than 100 feet away. In the dull light, I could only see their ears and lighter bellies; their coats blended into the winter evening and their eyes looked pierced from the darkness, like little tunnels leading further into the night. I continued walking toward them and at fifty feet, they crossed the street, unhurried, and were gone. 

I walked through the neighborhood without finding anyone’s old house, everyone was gone anyway. There didn’t seem to be much point in standing in front of these houses trying to remember different cars in the garages and different names on the mailboxes. Closer to the park, I walked past Justin's old house without even realizing it. I didn’t turn around.

 I walked across the Frost Elementary playground between the slides and swings and saw traces of the same kid, over and over, at different ages, doing different things, making the same mistakes we all do, making them repeatedly. 

The combination locks around the guide wire connected to the utility pole on High Street had multiplied. There must've been over fifty, my own lock somewhere among them, buried. It was dark now and I watched the snow falling through the streetlights onto all those combination locks and I kept thinking that line from Joyce about the snow falling on the living and dead alike. I started to brush the snow from the locks and then, remembering how far I still had to walk, stopped and continued into the pale glow of streetlights, the falling snow covering what I had only temporarily brushed aside.

Shadows on Empty Buildings

I can’t pay attention on buses, at least not the way I should. Even the most enthralling spectacle, as seen from a bus, seems less radiant. Glaciers, salt flats, distant roseate mountains, looking at any of these things from a bus window is like looking at a poster. Sometimes, I fall asleep going through a forest and wake up in a desert. Some of the best bus-window vistas I have seen were in Montenegro when the Adriatic Sea drove into the land and exhaled its morning mists into the sky; it was like driving through a flooded mountain chain and still, it was from a bus window. As much as I enjoyed the sight, I only wanted to get out and really experience it for myself, without the buffer.

It seems like it would be a matter of senses. It would be easy to say that any bus experience pales in comparison to actually standing there because you can’t feel the wind, smell the pine needles crushed under your feet or hear the echoing screech of an ornery bird of prey, but, no. It’s not just the glass that separates one from the scene. I don’t feel the same way on trains, or even airplanes, despite the glass. Each offers a unique experience. When I see the Carpathian forest from a train window, it’s as if the train was a part of the experience, almost as if I were in the forest, enjoying the opposite sight of the train going by. The experience of a plane, with the earth constantly 1,000s of feet almost directly beneath the soles of my Converse, is tinged with a kind of primordial fear. The sublime appearance of a vertically distant desert is only increased by the sudden bubble of turbulence: you drop, you choke, you believe in your mortality as never before until the plane rights itself and the fasten seatbelt sign goes out again. Everyone breathes a sigh, hands relax on the armrests and the desert floor is so much closer. In fact, it’s right there, right beneath your feet.

By comparison, being on a bus is narcotizing. The passengers are passive, the scenery is passive. There is little interaction between the two. Perhaps this is why so many bus trips are offered at night: passengers would rather just arrive at their destination. Even little children are dazed into passivity by the bus. If someone were to take a poll on the number of people found sleeping on a bus, train or plane after an hour of travel, headed in the same direction, the number for the bus would probably be higher than the other two combined.  

If anything lies in direct contrast to the dull sensation of the bus, it is the excitement that comes when bordering a passenger ferry. I seldom give much thought to my means of transport. If I’m in A. and I have to go to B., I buy the cheapest passage. It is only when I am getting on the bike, bus, boat, train, taxi or plane that I realize what this means for me and my impression of the place I am going. But when I find myself standing on a ferry dock, thinking that I will soon be on deck watching the land recede on the horizon, I feel contended. I look forward to the voyage in a way that I won’t even when watching trains pull against platforms or listening to airport boarding calls.

I felt this way standing at the port of Tres Puentes watching the massive Pathagon ferry dock. It was a few days before Christmas and most of the passengers waiting for their boat were clutching bags overflowing with gifts purchased at cheaper prices on the mainland in Punta Arenas. Among those waiting was a very young girl holding a baby in her arms and wearing brightly colored children’s shoes. The baby was wearing a fuzzy hat with smiling animal’s face stitched at the opening directly above the child’s own face. As the passengers bound for the mainland disembarked, one among them broke away and came toward the girl with arms outstretched. The girl held up the baby so he could see better. The fuzzy animal hat blew off the baby’s head and down to the water but stopped precariously on the edge of the lapping current. The crowd waiting to board noticed the errant hat before either parent. The crowd yelled, hooted and pointed after the water-bound hat. The father went after it. He stepped down the launch where the hat had stalled, failing to notice that it was slimy with algae, he lost his balance and slid slightly into the water, arms pin wheeling. The crowd, overjoyed at the unexpected spectacle, hooted and whistled even louder. The young mother, turned away, 

embarrassed, as he brought the sopping hat up, the animal’s face still grinning.

On the boat, after boarding, everyone took their seats and bought coffee. The children broke from their parents and climbed over the couchettes into the recessed viewing windows. I felt like them, a boat to Tierra del Fuego before Christmas, not even 1,000 miles from Antarctica. Punta Arenas and its red-gold lights receded into the water as the heavy motors roared to life and pushed the massive boat into the mythic waters of the Strait of Magellan, the color of warehouse steel.

We hadn’t made any hotel reservations before leaving, but we had bought plenty of food. When we arrived, I noticed that despite the town’s small size, all the little markets were open. The hotels, however, were full. Every place was booked or closed for the holiday. After visiting five different hotels, I was beginning to lose hope. I returned to one I had passed, initially thinking it looked too expensive. I was surprised to find the price lower than others I had checked. When I asked if there was a room available, the teenage girl looked at me like I was asking if I was in a hotel or something equally obvious. “Yeah,” she said and took me up to see it.

Rather than haul our bags around from hotel to hotel, Gina had agreed to wait in the main plaza with our stuff while I searched for a room. After I secured a room, I went running back across the small town to find Gina still camped out in the plaza with an entire marching band practicing in front of the bench she was sitting on, with two giant bags she had been helpless, unable to move or even change benches. As I walked up, she gave me an ironic smile. “Sorry,” I apologized, “but I found a good place.”

The catch with our last minute hotel was that we had to pay full price for the next three days, yet we would receive no amenities, no breakfast, no staff at our disposal, no wake up calls, nothing. For the next three days, we would be alone in the hotel. Not even a skeleton crew was to stay on, the teenaged girl at the desk explained. I asked if we would be able to use the kitchen. “If you clean it up after,” she replied in the same deadpan tone she had employed earlier to tell me about the room. “How will we get out?” I asked. “You can use the backdoor.” And she showed us the backdoor.

After she handed me the key the girl explained that the staff would be leaving in a few hours, someone would be in the next morning to clean a little, but after that we were on our own. Alone in a hotel at the edge of the world for Christmas, it sounded great to me, in fact, I preferred it over having to interact with a bunch of other guests. One can only imagine the sort of listless characters that find themselves exiled to Tierra del Fuego for Christmas, being one of them myself, I was in no hurry to meet the others. It seemed fortunate that we were to be on our own.

After taking a 20 minute shower and lying around a while, I found I’d become immobilized by comfort. After weeks of sleeping outside, on buses and in cramped hostel dormitories, a room of my own was far too great a comfort to abandon so soon. We decided to stay in.

As the Patagonian summer sun set, the hour passed 11 pm and an impatient sort of darkness fell about the town in fitful strands. Most of the sky, even after midnight, was still shot through with dull twilight. The color was peaceful, slate blue and dusty vermillion and before the darkness enveloped the sky completely, I was asleep.

I awoke with a start an hour or two later. “Did you hear that?” Gina whispered to me in the darkness. “It’s just the wind,” I replied, saying the first calming thing I could think of, having no idea if it was the wind or not. I listened in the darkness. A heavy creaking sound swelled up from the ground floor. Soon after, the sound was repeated. A streetlight shone through the window gleaming off the room’s TV screen and doorknob but without bringing any real light to the room. The creaking sound on the ground floor repeated itself, sounding close now to the stairs. “Are those footsteps?” Gina asked. “No,” I replied, pretty sure what I was hearing were, indeed, footsteps. “It’s just the building settling, or something.” I strained my ears, listening down the hall for someone coming. The creaking sound had been replaced with a profound silence. If anyone else had been in the building, they were gone now. This was one aspect of staying alone in the hotel I hadn’t anticipated. Rather than the comforting sounds of other guests moving around in the night, each noise in the building was converted into a phantasm or a burglar. If we were alone in the hotel, who was walking around downstairs in the dark?

I woke up late the next morning. The room was stuffy and the comforter felt heavy and oppressive. I pulled it back. “Do you think we’ll get breakfast?” I asked Gina who was already awake. “Only one way to find out,” she told me, “kitchen is down the hall.”

I pulled my shoes over my bare feet and shuffled out into the hall. In the kitchen, a light spread had been set out: bread, jam, juice, hot water, tea bags and instant coffee packets. I poured instant coffee into two cups and poured hot water over the powder like dry earth. The sound of my spoon clanking around in the cup must’ve brought the cleaning lady in.

“Did you sleep well?” She asked.

“Yeah,” I replied, taking a big slurp of my coffee. “Was there someone here last night?”

“No,” she said shaking her head. “I got here this morning.”

I thought about telling the woman about the sound I’d heard during the night of someone moving around, but thought better of it, afraid that maybe she’d tell the owner and the owner would make us leave for fear that the hotel wouldn’t be secure with us in there. Really, it still seemed absurd to me that we’d been trusted to stay in this place all alone. We could be downstairs trying to open the register or getting into the restaurant bar. We could be getting the keys from behind the desk and stealing the little soaps out of each room. It was a wonder these people had trusted us as much as they had. I didn’t want to undermine that trust be spouting off about sounds late at night, especially now that it was the 24^th and all the other hotels were probably already closed.

“I’m going to leave in an hour or two.” The cleaning lady told me. “Was there anything else you needed?”

“So no one else will be coming until the 26^th?” I asked, just to be sure.

“No.”

“Ok, no, I think we’re fine. Thanks. Uh, merry Christmas.”

“You, too,” she said and began clearing away the breakfast spread that had been put out for us alone.

I brought the coffee to the room and closed it with my foot. “It’s instant,” I told Gina holding the steaming cup out to her.

“That’s ok,” she said taking the cup. “Tomorrow, for Christmas, we can make our own coffee in the kitchen.”

We went out to explore the town that day, leaving the hotel by the back door. I was surprised at the number of places still open on Christmas Eve. We spent most of the day in the local history museum before walking around and eventually stopping at a grocery store to buy a bottle of wine. It was late in the afternoon when we returned to the hotel. The backdoor by which we’d left, now had a milk crate full of glass bottles pushed against it. “Somebody probably forgot something,” I explained to Gina, pushing the crate out of the way.

After we had gotten into the room, we began carrying food into the kitchen, eager to start cooking our Christmas Eve dinner. I started cooking the pasta, while Gina went back to the room for a few extra things. The rest of the hotel was dark, but we passed between the light in our room and the light in the kitchen with no problem. For just the two of us, there didn’t seem to be a reason to turn all the hallway lights on.

I was chopping onions in the kitchen when I heard a noise in the hallway, I nearly called out to Gina but, for some reason, stopped myself. I stepped out of the kitchen almost right into the arms of a squat, balding man and a squint so strong in one eye, his head appeared to be cocked to one side. I stepped back and involuntarily uttered ‘oh.’ The man merely nodded. While I’d been totally surprised by him, he seemed to be expecting me. “Hello,” I greeted him after a few awkward seconds had passed.

“Hello,” he responded in a Spanish that sounded like a piece of clam he was chewing on.

“Do you work here?” I asked when he offered no explanation.

“Yeah, I watch the place at night,” he said, walking around the dining room as if unsure what to do with himself.

“Ah, ok. They told me that there wasn’t going to be anyone else here.”

“I’m here.” The squinty guy told me, as if it were something to be refuted.

“I see, I see.” I could think of nothing else to say.

“I come to watch the place at night,” the man said, continually moving around the room as if he’d lost something and was looking for it. “I always watch the place at night. My room’s right there.” He said gesturing to the dark hallway past the door.

Gina came in and the squinty guy seemed even more awkward. “Well, I guess I’ll go to my room. Let me just grab a cup here,” he said grabbing for a plastic cup on the kitchen counter. I wished him a merry Christmas as he vanished into the hallway. It was, after all, Christmas Eve. A minute later, I heard the sound of a door shutting in the corridor.

After he left, I turned to Gina. “I bet that’s who you heard last night.”

“How come they didn’t tell us that he was coming?”

“Who knows; maybe they forgot, anyway, I guess we’re not going to be alone here, at least not at night.”

“I just don’t get why they told us we’d be alone then.” Gina said, pouring the wine.

“Maybe they just meant there wouldn’t be anyone around that we could expect much from. I have the impression that guy doesn’t do much.”

And indeed he didn’t. We didn’t see him again the rest of the night and I slept soundly until morning.

“Merry Christmas,” I told Gina stretching out and yawning in the stuffy room.

“Merry Christmas,” she returned.

“I’ll get the coffee,” I said slipping out of bed. “Do you think that guy’s still here?”

“No, I heard a door shut early this morning.” Gina said rolling back over. “I think it was him going out.”

Indeed, the hallway seemed empty, like no one had passed through it for hours. It was late in the morning, but the lack of windows in the hallway made it feel like the middle of the night. I had a feeling for a moment like I was sleepwalking and hadn’t woken up entirely.

I stumbled into the kitchen. A plate had been set out with two pieces of bread on it and a jam packet. I imagined the squinty guy must’ve set it out for us before he left for the morning. It was a nice gesture, but it seemed like he would’ve reasoned that if we were using the kitchen, as we had been when he’d come in the night before, we’d be able to find the bread on our own.  From the irritable quality of this thought, I reasoned that it was a good thing I was making coffee. Clearly, I’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed to be annoyed with this guy for leaving bread out for us.

The low rumbling of the stovetop espresso maker announced the coffee’s arrival. I picked the pot up and began pouring the brew in even measures into our cups when I heard the floorboards squeak under someone’s weight out in the dining room. I knew right away it wasn’t going to be Gina.

I set the coffee down and looked out from the kitchen in time to see a short man using a cane to almost pull himself into the dining room. When he reached the place where the two pieces of bread had been set out, he lowered himself into the seat and looked up at me.

“Do you work here?” I asked, perturbed that even Christmas morning I wasn’t going to have the place to myself. Why did they tell us we’d be alone here if we were going to have visits from the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future during our stay? Who the hell was this guy, the day watchman?

“No,” the man answered my question and broke my irritated train of thought. “I’m staying here.”

“You mean like a guest?” I asked dumbfounded.

“Yeah, a guest.”

“Oh, because they told us we would be alone.”

The man didn’t say anything to this but just shrugged and went back to buttering his toast. I wished him a merry Christmas, took my coffees and went back to the room. I found Gina sitting up in bed, awaiting the coffee.

“There’s a guy out there.” I told her, handing the coffee over.

“Who? You mean the guy from last night? He’s still here?”

“No. There’s an entirely different guy out there. This one limps.”

“Who the hell are all these people?”

“I don’t know, but he told me he’s staying here.”

“You mean like a guest?”

“Yeah, like a guest.”

Just then I heard some footsteps descending the stairs one at a time, slowly. “There he goes.” I said. 

“Do you want breakfast?”

After we finished our coffee we went into the kitchen to find the man’s place still set out, only now the bread had been eaten and only the crusts remained.

We went out, walked along the water and fed some botched Christmas cookies to the local stray dogs. 

We took a long walk into the island toward Lago de los Cisnes which seemed an appropriate destination for Christmas. At the edge of the lake, walking through a grey and blustery pampas, a llama went galloping past, stopped about 100 feet away and made some kind of threatening coughing sound at us. Among the long and rough grass, there were scores of dead sheep and lambs in various states of decomposition. It was enough to make one believe that the animals must’ve been incredibly delicate to die in such a hazardless place, unless there was something we weren’t seeing. We walked toward the water, heedful of some hidden danger, the coughing/bleating of the llama following us as we walked.

We made it back to the hotel before dark and found the backdoor locked. Frantically, I ran around, trying all the doors. Bizarrely, I found two other doors unlocked that led only to self-contained little rooms, each one with no more than a bed and bathroom. The sheets and blankets in each room were in disorder, like they’d recently been slept in and the rooms had the warmth and smell of inhabited places. I called out, but could find no occupants in either room, nor did there seem to be anyone around. Gina called out; she had found another way back into the hotel.

That night, the squinty guy came back. I talked to him while making dinner like we were old roommates. He asked me if the other guy was around. “You mean the guy with a limp?” I asked. “Yeah, I saw him this morning.” I hoped the squinty guy would give me some information as to who this other guy was, but he said nothing more than ‘goodnight’ and walked out of the kitchen.

In the morning, the hotel was again full of people. The cleaning lady was back in the kitchen setting our breakfast and the teenage girl who’d checked me in was back downstairs. After we’d gotten our stuff together and called a cab, we left just as a tour group was coming in through the restaurant doors. I tossed a wave over my back and an ‘adios.’ No one acknowledged it, save for a lone voice seated at a corner table of the restaurant where I hadn’t noticed anyone sitting, I glanced back and just before the door closed, I noticed the guy with the limp, sitting by himself and waving.

After we boarded the ferry and found our spot by the window, I bought a coffee and sat down to watch Tierra del Fuego quietly recede into the horizon and with it, what was surely one of the most bizarre hotel experiences of my life.

“You know,” I said to Gina, still looking out the window long after I’d lost sight of the land, “I bet they were all there the entire time, in the hotel, I mean.”

“You think so?” She said looking up from her magazine.

“I have no idea,” I responded. “From the beginning, I had no idea what was going on in that place, but it seems appropriate doesn’t it. I mean, it makes sense that things should’ve been so unaccountable at the end of the world.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she responded going back to her magazine. “Except for that limping guy. We never figured out who he was.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Who the hell was that guy?”