PDY

I think I’d like to invent something. What it is, or shall be, is an apparatus that without user intervention automatically records all the things you think about when you’re walking through the beautiful Pennsylvania countryside on a chilly Fall morning, and then organizes them in a nice way so that you can just sit down later in the evening, remember them all and write about them. Of course, this would work in any geographical area, and we could program it, so it’s only active when the user is waking, for walking does good things to activate the mind. Coupled with this device is a second invention that prevents the onset of laptop staring, that is, as its name implies, staring at your screen wondering what the hell to write about.

It is a Sunday, I love Sundays. Today was one to love. It was cold, but the sun came out a few times to warm up my backpack and me. And it was rural, surprisingly rural. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve acquired a knack for finding country roads; well this time, I’m out in the boonies. I might not seem like a lot to you vehicle-driving people, but the closest restaurant is three whole miles away. That’s an hour there, an hour back… ain’t happenin’. I walked 12 miles today without seeing one store, one open business, nada. And this hotel, which fed me quite well btw, is literally in the middle of a corn field next to a barn. Tomorrow my route takes me to another little Inn, and by the looks of the satellite imagery, there is nothing along that route either. At my destination there is one restaurant, a pizza place, so we’re good. When there’s one place, you don’t count Yelp stars.

What I find amazing is not the remoteness, I’ve gotten used to that, but the fact that I’m less than sixty miles from one of the most important cities in the world and had to move over several times to let the tractors roll by. I admit my sense of time and distance has probably been altered over the last three months, but I’m still really close to New York, even closer to the New Jersey cities, and I can be there in two or three days - that’s just around the corner! Yes, time is definitely warped. What’s even stranger is that I could drive there in an hour - that’s like Mach V in my world.

I spent a lot of time today anticipating the contrast of what I have seen over the last weeks to what I will see within a few days. The scenery will of course be different, but so will everything else as I go from very rural to very urban. The pace of life will pick up, everything will be more urgent, I’ll have fifty places to choose from within half a mile for where to eat (now I have none). I won’t look up every time a car passes. Noise will be constant, as will movement. If I need a whiff of my country roads, I’ll go hang out near the carriages on Fifth Avenue. Most people probably won’t smile back, but I’ll smile regardless, risking being considered a weirdo. Ask me how much I care. And I’ll have to refrain from waving at all the cars as I walk along Central Park South, for the weirdo could perhaps be interrogated, or worse yet, sent downtown for evaluation.

And speaking of waving… I was glad to see that six people in Pennsylvania actually read my blog last night, took my advice on how to properly wave and in fact put it into practice today, all six of them. It was awesome, about 4% of the cars that passed me today. We’re on a roll. Now if I could just get people to say please.

I’ve learned a lot about waving on this trip. In fact, I think I’ve become a waving connoisseur.

There aren’t a lot of us waving connoisseurs around, as evidenced by the fact that Wikipedia does not have a definition for such a creature, but we know our stuff. I was trying to figure out how many times I’ve waved since I left, 14 weeks ago today. Truth is, I have no idea. Ten waves an hour (easy) would be around 6,000. Ten waves a mile would be 17,400+ (remember, a mile is 20 minutes of oncoming cars). I don’t know. There is a physical upside to waving, especially when you wave at trucks. By about Arkansas, I noticed my shirt getting quite tight around my right bicep, so I looked in the mirror, and damned if my right bicep wasn’t significantly bigger than the left. So throughout Tennessee, I waved with my left arm so as to even them out, but the right one shrank a bit so they were still uneven, but finally by the end of Virginia they were balanced and I was walking straight again, without the gravitational pull of said biceps in their respective directions. Now my biceps are about as big as my ankles… not very.

I’m off to work on my inventions. I think my target market is quite large, from the little kid who has to write a little story in sixth grade, the high-schooler sitting down to write a college application essay, the many transcontinental walker/wannabe writers and anyone who has an idea, wants to write about it and then has trouble getting into words. Before I started this jaunt, a friend and writing mentor of mine just said “write, you can edit later.” I’ll keep you posted on progress.