I am 25 years old. I do not believe in Monsters Under the Bed…but I usually get a good leap onto or off my bed. Just in case they have reach.
Ah but yes, the point being, I have a bed now. No longer do I sleep on my Thermarest and in my bag liner. No, I sleep on worn sheets of drifting clouds, which I can never seem to get right-side-up on the pillowcases. I have this castle of comfort because Andy & Leda made it happen. At the same time as they were helping me gather wood. Which was only soon before Andy shot an Elk.
These people move the earth. Literally. Sometimes in boxes. From Amazon and Ebay. Before he left, Andy guided me to the new power adapter my computer needed. I had been content to work furtively around the sparks as I tried to hold to cord just so. It was funny to be caught in my own unwillingness to progress. And I was thrilled to be jump started. So much so that I got giddy high on this whole “world of stuff at my fingertips” and found and ordered The Longest Walk: An Odyssey of the Human Spirit.
Arno had told me about it; and I knew I needed it. George Meegan, a British sailor, decided he needed to walk from Ushuaia, Argentina to the tundra of Northern Alaska. 19,091 miles. He communicated this as well as he could to his Japanese girlfriend, Yoshiko. A few weeks later they set off. She had thought they would be taking a bus tour.
But they made it work and she was his support team. She became his wife and birthed two children over the course of his 7 year trek.
He walked the roads, trundling a two wheeled cart behind him. Beaten and Blessed. Determined and Delicate. Insane and Illuminated.
I carried the book everywhere. Reading as I walked to the bus and rode to work; during my breaks. Marked in pencil and yearned for a map to begin mapping out my own layover points.
After three years of South America, George Meegan was bedraggled and we were taking a break. He, for 5 months in Panama with his wife and new baby girl; I, noticed the shiny stack of books which Anne had been quietly inhaling as we sat before the fire each night.
The Hunger Games has apparently swept the youth of our nation because Teacher Anna Daugherty instructed me to refer to Katniss, the heroine of this violent, gory, and absolutely spell binging trilogy, when I spoke at Smithville Middle School.
It all becomes very exciting when I am continuing to read through Meegan’s account and have to finish Mockingjay, the third of the trilogy, and get it back to Anne’s Cousin’s Roommate’s Girlfriend, who is also addicted.
The stories mix up into an fantastical milieu in my mind. Only sometimes do I manage to come most of the way back into “this” world.
…Sometimes…
Comments (2)
I wonder what Meegan is doing now. Did he write it by himself or have help?
That one’s on my list, a gaping hole in my long-walk library! If his relationship with the Japanese girlfriend lasted, that alone is worth a book.