Tuesday, December 24, 2013
ericksburg Virginia. He walked right in the road in the teeth of
advancing traffic and almost got hit several times. I plodded along in
the ditch. Any minute I expected the poor little madman to go flying in
the night dead. We never found that bridge. I left him at a railroad
underpass and in the dark because I was so sweaty from the hike; I
changed shirts and put on two sweaters; a roadhouse illuminated my sad
endeavors. A whole family came walking down the dark road and wondered
what I was doing. Strangest thing of all a tenor man was blowing very
fine blues in this Pennsylvania hick house; I listened and moaned. It
began to rain harder. A man gave me a ride back to Harrisburg and told
me I was on the wrong road. I suddenly saw the little man standing under
a street lamp with his thumb stuck out---poor forlorn man, poor lost
sometimes-boy now broken ghost of the penniless wilds. I told my driver
the story and he stopped to tell the old man. “Look here fella, you’re
on your way West not East.” “Heh?” said the little ghost. “Can’t tell me
I don’t know my way around here. Been walking this country for years.
I’m heading for Canady.” “But this ain’t the road to Canada, this is the
road to Pittsburgh and Chicago.” The little man got disgusted with us
and walked off. The last I saw of him was his bobbing little white bag
dissolving in the darkness of the mournful Alleghenies. “Hey” I yelled.
Was muttering to himself. He had no use for quitters like me. “I’m going
right…straight…into..her!” he said about Canada; said he was going to
ride a freight up there. “Lehigh Valley, Lackawanna, Erie, I ride ’em
all.” I thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the
ghost of Susquehanna showed me different. No, there is a wilderness in
the East, it’s the same Wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart
days when he was postmaster, when George Washington was a wildbuck
Indian fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and
promised to find the gap; when Bradford built his road and men whooped
her up in log cabins. There were no great Arizona spaces for the little
man, just the bushy wilderness of Eastern Pennsylvannia, Maryland and
Virginia, the back rounds, the
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