On Trails (42 page)

In West Texas, the highway stretched in a straight line to a vanishing point on the horizon. Space and time started to play tricks on him. He walked for hours each day and never seemed to progress, the distant mountains retreating faster than he could catch them. The highway was lined with mileage markers, and he checked each one to convince himself that the numbers were changing.

Always, there was the wind, which pushed against his forehead during the day and blew sand into his tent at night. In an effort to escape it, one night he set up camp inside an abandoned house in a ghost town, and punctured his inflatable sleeping pad on a shard of broken glass. Another night, he spent slumped over in a booth at
a truck stop. The desert mornings were frigid. He began each day hunched over, the hood of his plastic rain poncho pulled up, hands in his pockets.

His plan was to walk from gas station to gas station, but buildings of any kind were sometimes dozens of miles apart. If people hadn't stopped to give him water, he may well have died. When he emerged from the desert, vultures were circling ominously over his head.

Other than the vultures, almost all the wildlife he had seen was dead (most of it roadkill), including a crushed coral snake, two mule-deer, a raccoon, an armadillo, numerous birds, and a group of dead coyotes wired, inexplicably, to a fence.

This experience was not unique to West Texas. Since highways optimize to speed and steel, they have a tendency to kill the slow and soft. As we talked, in short succession, we passed: a turtle, a snake, an armadillo, a baby alligator, and an unidentifiable creature, perhaps a dog, whose fur and bones were fanned out in a radial pattern, as if it had fallen asleep in the shade of a rocket's thrusters.

“We got all kind of roadkill here today,” Eberhart remarked.

I asked him if he didn't find the highways an unwelcoming space for a hiker.

“I enjoy being out on the roads,” he replied. “You get to see the towns, you get to mingle with the locals. It's a different experience entirely than the green tunnel.”

Roads have historically attracted a strange breed of walker—what might be called
gregarious ascetics
. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the poet-vagrant Vachel Lindsay walked thousands of miles across America's roads, having sworn a vow of poverty, celibacy, and sobriety, preaching what he called the “gospel of beauty.” Nearly half a century after he published
A Handy Guide For Beggars,
Especially Those of the Poetic Fraternity
, a woman named Mildred Norman decided to follow in his footsteps; she changed her name to Peace Pil
grim and began walking coast to coast across the country's roadways promoting a philosophy of nonviolence.
II
Neither carried any more possessions than would fit in his or her pockets. Both were dependent on strangers for all their food and lodging.

After seven or eight miles, we ducked into a convenience store. The air inside was delicious. The whole room reverberated with a sound at once alien and deeply familiar, a chorus of humming compressors and shushing liquid, percussed sporadically with the clatter of ice cubes and cold coins.

An ancient woman with the face of a baby bird sat behind the counter, propped up in a wheelchair, her bony arms wrapped in blue veins. She greeted us in a hoarse whisper.

“Hey, how in the heck are you?” Eberhart joyfully called out to her. “Do you have a fountain? You
do
have a fountain! Doodah!”

He carried his chipped, dirtied Styrofoam cup over to the soda fountain, where he filled it to the brim with ice and then splashed in some clear liquid. He took a long sip then filled it again. Turning with a contrite expression, he shuffled over to the counter.

“I thought that was water, carbonated. Well, what I done was, I drank about half of it, and then I hit the Sprite button, so if I pay, that's what I'm gonna be stuck with.”

“That's okay,” the woman rasped. “I ain't charging you.”

“It's just getting awful hot out there,” he said, apologetically.

“I bet it
is
,” she said.

He thanked her sincerely, and we hiked on.

“See, that ain't fair,” he later confessed to me. “You shouldn't be able to pull people's emotional cords like that. I take advantage of it so much.”

+

Bit by bit as we walked I learned the full story of how M. J. Eberhart became Nimblewill Nomad. He was born Meredith Eberhart—which, he stressed, back then was “a
boy's
name”—in a “sleepy” town in the Ozarks with a population of 336. He likened his childhood to that of Huck Finn: He spent his summers running barefoot, fishing, and riding horses. In the fall, he hunted quail with his father, a country doctor.

Eberhart later attended optometry school, got married, and helped raise two boys of his own. They lived in the town of Titusville, Florida (“Space City, USA”), where he was soon making a six-figure salary performing pre- and post-operative work on cataract patients, many of them NASA scientists. He enjoyed helping people restore their sight and he prided himself on being able to provide for his family, but his work still felt oddly hollow. (He was especially irritated by the endless amount of administrative and legal paperwork, which seemed to grow worse every year.)

He retired in 1993 and began spending more time living alone on a plot of land he was developing beside Nimblewill Creek in Georgia. He and his wife started to drift apart. There followed a dark period of about five years, about which he said he didn't remember much. When I later called up his sons—neither of whom had spoken to him in years—they recalled him as a caring father and a dutiful provider, but also someone who was easily frustrated, prone to bouts of drunken brooding, and, occasionally, loud (but never violent) outbursts of rage.

His new house sat near the base of Springer Mountain, which he would regularly climb. His hikes gradually grew longer; he began
systematically hiking the AT section by section, eventually reaching as far as Pennsylvania. Then in 1998, at age sixty, he decided to set out on his first “odyssey,” a 4,400-mile walk from Florida to Cap Gaspé in Quebec, along a sketchy agglomeration of trails, roads, and a few pathless wilderness areas. Not long before, he had been diagnosed with a heart block, but he declined the doctor's admonitions to have a pacemaker installed. His sons assumed he would not make it home alive.

On the trail, Eberhart renamed himself after his adopted home, Nimblewill Creek. He began in the swamps of Florida and hiked north on flooded trails, where the dark, reptilian waters sometimes reached to his waist. When he emerged from the swamps, all ten of his toenails fell off. By the time he reached Quebec, it was already late October. Over the previous ten months, he had experienced a slow religious awakening, but his faith was shaken as he passed through those grim, freezing mountains. “Dear Lord, why have you forsaken me?” he asked, upon seeing the weather darken one day at the base of Mont Jacques-Cartier. However, a lucky break in the storm allowed him to reach the snowy mountaintop, where he sat in the sun, feeling “the warm presence of a forgiving God.” After reaching the trail's end, he returned to the South (on the back of a friend's motorcycle) and, in a blissful denouement, walked another 178 miles from a town near Miami down to the Florida Keys, where he settled into “a mood of total and absolute, perfect contentment, most-near nirvana.”

He returned home a different man. He stopped showering. He kept his hair long. He began ruthlessly shedding his possessions; over the course of three days, he burned most of the books he had collected over his lifetime, one by one, in a barrel in his front yard. In 2003, he and his wife divorced. He ceded the house and most of his assets to her, and signed over his other real estate holdings, including the land at Nimblewill Creek, to his two sons in an irrevocable trust. Since then, he has lived solely off his social security checks. If those
funds ran out by the end of the month, he went hungry. But what he had gained was the freedom to walk full-time, which felt to him like freedom itself. “As if with each step,” he wrote, “these burdens were slowly but surely being drained from my body, down to the treadway beneath my feet and onto the path behind me.”

+

Eberhart paused by the roadside to pull out a map, which he kept sealed in a plastic sleeve. The map covered no more than fifteen miles; it took one hundred seventy of these maps to cover the whole trip. He so dreaded the prospect of getting lost that he had begun carrying a little yellow GPS unit as backup, despite the added weight and cost.

I was surprised to find that in addition to the GPS, he also carried a small cell phone, a digital camera, and an iPod touch (which he used to log on to free wireless networks so he could check the weather, publish online journal entries, and answer the occasional email).

The cell phone he carried at the insistence of his girlfriend, Dwinda, an old high school sweetheart, who called twice during our trip to check in on him. Initially, he said, he had regarded it as unnecessary weight, until he broke his leg while hiking in the Ozarks and it ended up saving his life. “I don't gripe about the phone anymore,” he said. “I enjoy having it and talking to her every day.” He told me that though nobody can “totally escape” the world of technology, you can still “keep it from totally overwhelming you and controlling your life.”

“I think I've been pretty successful in that regard,” he said.

Around our tenth mile together, Eberhart noticed that the shoulder of the road had begun to narrow. He predicted that we were nearing the city of Port Arthur. Sure enough, the city soon appeared: a jagged row of mechanical spires spouting white steam, which turned and dissipated hypnotically in the blue air.

Port Arthur was a petro-town, known for refining the oil pulled from deep beneath the gulf. (“Where oil and water mix, beautifully,” read the Chamber of Commerce's motto.) We passed a series of barbed wire fences, behind which long white tubes shone like bones. The looming oil refineries recalled the Futurist architectural designs of Antonio Sant'Elia. This was where much of the nation's gasoline came from, as well as its plastics and its petrochemicals. I had never seen anything like it before. It was as if we had wandered below the deck of a gleaming cruise ship and found ourselves in the engine room, amid the sooty machinery that kept the ship gliding along.

Cars were lined up, idling, in their rush to get home. The air was sickly with their exhaust. “How do they live like this?” Eberhart said, looking at the pinched faces behind the windshields. “They spend more time sitting around in their vehicles than they do at home!”

At a wide intersection in front of the Valero refinery, we stopped at the window of a squad car to ask for directions. A police officer with a buzzed scalp and two missing teeth sat at the wheel, with a woman in plain clothes sitting beside him.

“Hang a left in about four blocks,” he said. “Stay on the main road, though, because you're heading into the worst part of town.”

We walked along the sidewalk—a luxury, after fifteen miles of highway shoulder—through a neighborhood of small, tidy houses. In the parking lot of the convenience store, a man sat on the tailgate of his truck drinking a tallboy of beer. Inside the store, it was again clean and cold. To Eberhart's delight, this store had six varieties of frozen burrito. He had been living off of frozen burritos for weeks and had acquired a taste for them. (“If you didn't eat them out west there, you didn't eat, because that's all they've got. Breakfast burritos, lunch burritos, I think they even had a dessert burrito.”) We sat near the back of the store, on crates of soda, eating our dinners in the cool air.

As Eberhart was moving on to his dessert course—a half-pint of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream—one of the store's clerks asked him
to move to the side so he could restock the refrigerator. Eberhart apologized.

“Everyone else who comes through here has a car to sit in, but we're walking,” Eberhart explained.

The store clerk looked suspicious.

“Where you going?” the clerk asked, in the rapid, trilled patter of a native Hindi speaker. Eberhart had a thick, slow Missouri accent that bent “wash” into “warsh.” A certain amount of miscommunication ensued; I found myself playing translator between the two.

“Well,” Eberhart said, “we're going to go across the bridge tomorrow and into Louisiana. I'm heading for Florida at the end of this month.”

“Are you going for a record?”

“No, just walking.”

“Just for fun?”

“Well, yeah . . .”

“Where are you living, nighttime?”

“I have a tent for camping.”

“You take a bath anywhere?”

“Not as often as you do . . .”

“How many days?”

“I started in New Mexico forty-six days ago.”

The man paused and cocked his head. “What is your reason?”

“Well, I'm a long-distance hiker, and I enjoy walking. Meet people. Have some ice cream,” Eberhart chuckled.

“Yes, yes.”

“It's not a bad life. Sometimes when it storms real hard you get wet . . .”

Eberhart fished around in his wallet and pulled out a business card, on which a red line marked the entire route around the continent. The store owner still looked perplexed. “You should tell the media,” he said. “You could be in the local paper.”

Eberhart's smile tightened.

Later, Eberhart told me that these questions were exceedingly common. He understood why people asked them; they saw him as “a total alien.” Naturally, they were curious. However, the one question he dreaded was the simplest:
Why?
“You can answer questions all day, but you just don't want to answer
that
question,” he said. “You know why? Because you
can't
answer the damn question.”