I feel like I have emerged from a labyrinth. For more than a week, each mile of each day’s walk has been largely indistinct from every other mile. I’m sure botanists and ecologists would recoil in horror at that statement and I acknowledge my damning ignorance of flora and fauna, but on a sensory level most days in Missouri have been interchangeable. As I type this, I sit on the edge of Kansas City, technically within the urban limits, though the ADT won’t take me anywhere near the downtown. The last two days were markedly different, with me largely vanquishing the labyrinth on Saturday and then entering the urban realm on Sunday. And yet, there’s a certain parallel structure to the two that makes them function well as a matched set.
Saturday: An early departure, a half-hour before sunrise, following the Rock Island Spur Trail from Windsor. The spider webs are thick today, and it’s not long before my pack and I are coated. The early goal is to churn through 10 miles to Leeton, which is my lone shot at a proper meal today. The morning is cool, the walk easy.
Sunday: I had planned for a similarly early start, but was thwarted by thunderstorms strafing my bivy. The alarm went off at 5:45, but the rain didn’t calm down for another hour, so I lay back on my pad and watched the sky light up in all directions around me. I was in the “red” zone of the radar for a good half-hour. Finally, around 7:15, I was packed–soggy, muddy tent shoved poorly into the stuffsack–and ready to roll. Once again, I had a greasy spoon lined up for breakfast, just six miles down the road.
Saturday: I’m eating breakfast at Leeton Cafe, situated on a minor highway across from Leeton’s school, the latter covered in banners proclaiming it a recipient of the 2018 blue ribbon award. It’s a small place, with a dozen modest tables and chairs; two young women run the whole operation. There are three elderly couples sprinkled around the room; one is present when I arrive, while the other two totter in soon after. It becomes a long break, as the one woman in the kitchen is stretched thin, and I end up with a mountain of food that takes a while to process (in hindsight, ordering a full stack of pancakes on top of the omelette and hashbrowns was either a terrible idea or one of my more brilliant ones). Fortunately, I’m in no hurry. I’m wild camping tonight, so there’s no incentive to move quickly. I’ll have at least three good stops today and never push an aggressive pace. The length of this break affords me on an opportunity to observe, but the three couples don’t put on much of a show. The room is largely silent; the elders loom unsteadily over their plates, working methodically through their meals, with a paucity of words exchanged. This all feels routine. Saturday morning: go to the cafe, eat breakfast, go home. On to Sunday.
Sunday: I arrive at the Big Creek Cafe in Pleasant Hill (btw, no hills are visible in Pleasant Hill) more than a little bedraggled, as rains have intermittently hounded me on the short walk here. Given the late start and a different set of imperatives, I’ve been pushing the pace, so I clear the six miles in just under an hour-and-a-half. It’s game day and church day, and I don’t know what’s more important around here. The cafe is full of families, with at least two people per table wearing Chiefs red, and there’s a pleasant hum of conversation in the room. The first waitress greets me with a “sugar;” the second follows up with a “honey.” When I ask if there’s a place to store my soaking backpack that’s out of the way, the second waitress looks at me like I’m cross-eyed and instructs me to set it in the booth — “we can dry it off, you know.” I pass on the pancakes this time, as I can’t afford a case of the itis, but I’m more than pleased to get a mushroom/swiss omelette, hashbrowns, toast, and coffee for $6.98.
Saturday: I flow through the walk, settling in at a 6km/hour pace, which is kind of my default at this point. My mind wanders; I have to reset the audiobook a couple of times because of my failing attention span, and then give up on it all together. One more town of any size, Chilhowee, is a few miles ahead, and I buy a gallon of water there to get me through the long, dry stretch in front of me. The dubious strap on the jug gives out before I leave town, so I carry it like a (very sweaty) baby for the rest of the walk. The hours pass. I rest on a bridge over a creek. I shake my fist at a buzzard circling overhead. I eat a poptart on a bench at the Medford trailhead, where two English cyclists are getting bailed out by a local, who is repairing one of their tires that shredded on the first day of their ride. My plan called for me to cover 70 miles between today and Sunday (in truth, it would be 73), so it was a priority to hit at least 35 today. I reached what I thought was that mark at 6:45pm and considered my options. Another trailhead was five miles on and that sounded good; it promised a bench to sit and maybe work on, and perhaps a grassy patch to sleep on. My body felt great, so I had no concerns, and it held up resolutely right to the finish. Indeed, physically I think I would have had no trouble pressing on further, but the sun had set and darkness was nearly upon me; it was time to stop. Later, I would discover that I’d done a total of 43 miles today, making this the farthest I’ve ever walked.
Sunday: After a few minutes spent gawking at Pleasant Hill’s lovely old town, I gun it. After yesterday’s slow pace, today’s job is to hustle, hoping to maximize time in the hotel. Not only do I have two days of clothes to handwash, I also need to attend to my bivy and get in some quality time off of my feet. “Gunning it,” in this case, means pushing the pace to 7km/hour. That might not sound like a huge shift, but it really is; with this much weight on my back, that’s the main range in speeds that is sensible. I can pull 8km/hour for an hour or two, but I can feel the strain and don’t want to play with fire. Given the late start and breakfast, I don’t make it out of Pleasant Hill until 9:30am. I have 24 miles to go. I finish at 3:30pm on the nose, exactly a 4mph pace. This feels harder than yesterday’s walk, despite the shorter distance, and there are lots of good reasons for that–some carry-over from yesterday, a shift to pavement, and the pace. Despite that, though, I feel great. I can see! Each mile looks different! It’s often still tedious–I broke with the ADT to follow a highway for a while and that was a lot of time spent on the shoulder of a high-traffic road–but it’s thrilling to not know what the next mile will bring. And, there’s a certain swagger that comes with nailing a walk; whereas Saturday brought distance, today demanded pace, and my body responded brilliantly. I think I might have done a fist-pump when I saw my hotel break the horizon.
Saturday Night: As I approach Wingate, it sounds like every dog in Missouri starts barking. I turn the corner into the trailhead’s parking lot and see three dogs bounding towards me. Shoving down the PTSD, I start talking with them pleasantly. “Don’t be scared,” comes a haggard voice from the darkness, “they’re friendly. They just can’t see shit at night.”
Gradually, a hulking figure shambles forth, using a thick fence post as a walking stick. Is this the minotaur? No, it turns out his name is K and he looks a bit like Dog the Bounty Hunter after a really rough decade. He’s surrounded by a pack of pups, a whole brood of young mutts with two burly parents.
K’s golden hair hangs past his shoulders, a cascading bush that frames a face full of stubble. His jeans have a significant tear down the interior of one leg, providing generous ventilation. He tells me that he lives in the adjacent lot, camping in an old tent. In the fading light, the lot looks like the offspring of a forest and a junkyard, with broken down cars interspersed with trees.
We chat around a picnic bench. One brown pup has taken to me, repeatedly pouncing on my leg. The mom, a very sturdy beast that I’d like to keep on my side, nuzzles me relentlessly. Another pup immediately plopped itself down under the bench and fell asleep. For all his gruff exterior, K is disarmingly candid and friendly, immediately launching into stories about his cross-country trip from his youth, when he hitched across the US with eight thousand dollars in his boot. Within ten minutes, I feel like I know more about his life than I do about people I’ve known for years; he’s that forthcoming. Every so often, I move to get something set up for sleeping, unrolling the tent here, inflating the pad there, but he continues to regale me throughout.
I marvel at the inconsistency of my mindset. For days on the Katy, I struggled with the excessive solitude of the route. Whereas I was a curiosity to people in Illinois and Indiana, I was just another customer on the Katy, and few people came in contact with me during the walk. There’s a massive distance between alone and lonely; I was alone in Illinois; I was damn lonely in Missouri, and it wore me down. Despite that, my first instinct when K approached me on this night was to curse under my breath. I was ready to crash hard. After just a couple minutes with K, though, I feel rejuvenated, so grateful to have pushed on to Wingate. Nonetheless, K understands what my day has been, and withdraws soon after my camp is ready, wishing me a good night.
As I lie down to sleep, I look northward and see fireworks flashing across the horizon, some miles in the distance, in an unknown town.
Sunday morning: At 6:45am, I squeeze out of the bivy, ready to hustle. The radar makes it clear that I have a chance to pack in dry conditions, but they may not last long. I’m not the only one to note the shift, though; after no more than 30 seconds, K and the brood approach. He looks half-drowned and some of the pups are coated in mud, having fully enjoyed the early storm. He’s drinking something–coffee, maybe?–out of a re-used gas station coffee cup and needs little time to retake his seat on the bench. The quick packing process is complicated by the muddy pups, especially when a frog plops onto my bivy. One very fascinated pup couldn’t stop nosing the frog, trying to figure out what the hell this mysterious thing was.
K asks about the bivy and then transitions to footwear. He talks about the challenge of finding good boots. He priced them out online and then researched how much they cost to make in China. Outraged to discover that they cost around $4 per item, he proceeded to reach out to Chinese companies like Alibaba to find out if he could order directly. Apparently, he found a way to get an individual item order submitted. For all my urgency, I couldn’t help but pause and marvel at this man, living in a tent on a lot in rural Missouri, communicating with Chinese multinationals in pursuit of a cheap pair of boots.
Nonetheless, it’s time to leave K. And soon after, I leave the rail trails behind. On to Kansas.
