Jean, Rabbit, Bill, and Jay

Gaithersburg, Maryland to Washington DC November 1, 2021

For a science major, I seem to lard my narrative with a lot of literary references.

Most of us have seen Les Misèrables, and many have read Hugo’s novel. A pivotal scene is where Jean Valjean, on the lam from Javert for years, learns another man has been mistaken for him, and is about to be sent back to jail for skipping parole. He is up all night, agonizing over whether he should let this guy take the rap for him, or whether he should confess. The song in the musical is Who Am I?

I barely slept last night. Do I stay or do I go? Do I push on or do I blow? I’d ducked out to this motel in the heart of suburbia so I could clear my head. I’d decided that taking the canal was a non-starter. But the appeal of the canal was cutting through the mountains. If you look at satellite pictures of the middle Appalachians, it looks like someone drew a rake across the landscape. One long 2000-3000 foot ridge after another. Like crossing corrugated cardboard. Similar to Connecticut, but steeper. Once you get to Mt. Davis, it gets easier. You go with the grain, riding the valleys to the southwest. But to get there, you have to go against the grain. The corrugations added up to many thousands of feet of elevation gain, more than I had bargained for. I’d gotten a little soft with my two months in the Barcalounger, and was counting on 200 miles of the Canal to toughen me up before the climbs.

The ridges metaphor evoked another favorite novel of mine, John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom was a high school basketball star, now in his twenties and dismayed by the mediocrity of his existence. So different from the glory he had known. One evening he abruptly decides to bolt from his wife and child and drive from his home in Reading PA to the sweet low cotton fields of the south, follow those Appalachian ridges until they deposit him at the Gulf of Mexico, where he can remove his shoes and fall asleep on the beach, the sun a great pillow in the sky. This is in the days before interstates and GPS, and he must negotiate the tangle of mountain roads with only a paper map.

Updike is a master of making the mundane beautiful. He makes Rabbit’s run, geographically accurate, one of the most compelling set pieces I have ever read, and I found myself following the route on my road atlas. Rabbit gets repeatedly lost, trusting to instinct as he darts around ever more frantically, finally seeing the tangle of roads on the map as a net, trapping him even more than he felt when he started. He calms down, solemnly tears the map into pieces, and hops on a straight road taking him home.

It felt so stupid, so frigging stupid, to bail again after only two short days. At least I’d come 5400 miles the first time. Again, I knew the challenges before I got on the train. I promised to be done after a year, this was my chance, it was now or never. I wanted to trust to instinct, felt once I got on the road that moxie, that mojo, would kick in, sustaining me as it had before. I didn’t want to believe I was too old for this nonsense. I haven’t read Barack Obama’s book, but the title touched a chord. The Audacity of Hope.

Another sustaining narrative is Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. It’s about these two goofballs, Bill and Katz, who decide to hike the Appalachian Trail despite being comically unprepared. The driver taking them to the trailhead tells stories of the other bozos he’s taken, knowing full well he’ll be picking them up again within a week. One guy comes back a second time—his wife refused to let him quit so soon after spending so much on equipment. Sure enough, he bails again, and the driver picks him up, asking him “what about your wife?” “This time I’m not going home.”

Anyway, Bill and Katz wind up doing more than half the trail, in dribs and drabs. After one poignant passage, involving Katz falling off the wagon and getting lost, they decide to quit, only a few days from the end at Katahdin. Bill mopes about failing, but Katz is having none of it. “We hiked it. We hiked in heat, bugs, rain, and snow. We hiked until our feet bled. I don’t care what anybody says. As far as I’m concerned, we hiked the Appalachian Trail.”

Like I said, I was up half the night, staring at that net, trying to find a way through that cardboard. I knew I could do it. At that famous outhouse, on Denali, in the quagmires around Timm’s Hill, and countless other places I’ve felt despair and misery, but pushed on, feeling ultimately enriched by an adventure, rather than just another trip. Did I now have the motivation? I thought I did. But when push came to shove, did I really? What was the funny name of that Buffalo suburb? Lackawanna.

As I imagine is obvious to many of you, this trip isn’t really about the highpoints, or sea level, or the bike, or my father, or losing weight. Those are all important, as are the kindnesses of strangers, seeing the country at ground level, reaffirming my patriotism, and reconnecting with family and friends. But what it’s really about is finding my way after retirement. Perhaps I can find a way that feeds my soul, and is a little less, shall we say, maladaptive.

Ultimately, like Rabbit, I trusted my instincts.

And like Rabbit, the way home was easier. I saw it went right by the grave of F. Scott Fitzgerald. For such an acclaimed writer, it was a little hard to find, in an obscure graveyard in Rockville, of all places. It didn’t stand out, but who could miss the stone covered with glasses and bottles? A little bizarre, considering his alcoholism.

And in another bizarre twist, guess who else was buried there? OK, one too many Ts

Close by was one of my PHIZ buddies, Matt Freeman and his wife Amanda. So great to reconnect, hadn’t seen them for almost two years. In another class move, I showed up hungry at the lunch hour, and scored some great chicken stew.

Rockville Pike was a major artery, but I still have my urban cycling skills, and it wasn’t too hairy to follow it past NIH and Bethesda Naval to the crown jewel of rail trails, the Capital Crescent. An unbroken, beautifully paved glide downhill with overpasses and tunnels

sluicing unvexed through the rush hour traffic to Georgetown, and the Three Sisters Islands.

There’s a great parable about these islands involving DC home rule, the trucking lobby, urban freeways, and the Metro. Remind me to tell you sometime.

I was deposited in the heart of DC during a glorious late afternoon and sunset, snaked my way past all the landmarks, but I’ll leave it to my Uncle David to take the iconic photos. One last obscure touchstone, by way of a coda. The water gate at the start of the C&O Canal not only leant its name to the office building, but also to the Watergate Steps hard by the Lincoln Memorial, perhaps DC’s answer to the Odessa Steps. Originally designed to serve as a grand entrance to the capital, where dignitaries would disembark from their boats, it instead was the site of concerts. A barge with the stage tied up in front, and the audience would sit on the steps. Only the old timers will remember, they stopped in the mid sixties. Now they’re mostly used by fitness buffs.

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So now it’s all over but the shouting. Another night at the Yotel, and I appreciate the twelve hour train trip to do the blog. Thankfully, this little stunt didn’t cost too much. Perhaps the second greatest wussy story ever told. Lots of work to do, figuring out my third act.

Let me close with F. Scott. The inscription on his grave is his most famous, the last line of Jay Gatsby’s story, and certainly resonates with me as a sailor. But I prefer taking the last three paragraphs together:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Like Jay, I believe in the green light.

Distance 30 miles, 4,520 total. Time 6 hours with stops. Elevation gain 985 feet