I woke up in Marietta, Ohio. The town held no appeal beyond proximity to Parkersburg and its position on the Ohio side of the river; across the way in West Virginia, hotels announced strict limitations to essential workers, so it seemed better to circumvent than test those.
Yesterday’s flight from Portland was met with an immediate setback when I learned that my initial flight from PDX to Chicago was cancelled. After a flurry of typing and glares, the lady at the counter managed to get me re-routed via Seattle and a brief stopover in Minneapolis. Instead of a 7pm arrival, I’d be pushed back to 10pm (though the flight would ultimately arrive early, just after 9pm), but at least I’d still get to Columbus same-day.
Departing PDX, I had an aisle seat. In the window seat to my left was a man without a face mask. To my right, opposite the aisle, was a man in an N95, clearly tense to be on a plane. Two of the last people to board were a mother-daughter combo, marching down the aisle with two boxes of Mod Pizza and no masks. The Alaska Air announcement included a new line, noting that they had hospital-grade HEPA filters to protect travelers. We were up and down in no time. At the gate, several passengers shot up when the seat belt light deactivated, grabbed their bags, and immediately pushed forward in the aisle, with one getting stuck right next to me. The N95 dude on the other side was not pleased, cursing beneath his mask about the asshole not respecting social distancing. Of course, with the mask muffling his voice and restraining his jaw, I think the aisle interloper might have been entirely oblivious.
SeaTac Airport had a steady stream of travelers–well below capacity, certainly, but far from a graveyard. A clear majority were without masks, though it seemed like many had them accessible for their flights. Indeed, I took ten minutes to give my face a rest, already feeling the line being pushed into the brow of my nose. Safety is uncomfortable.
On my next flight, I once again had an aisle seat. This time, the man in the window seat near me was decked out in a disposable hazmat suit, complete with full face covering and shoe slippers. He sat perfectly straight, head looking forward, hands crossed, throughout the journey.
At Columbus Airport, I met Fritz, the photojournalist who previously accompanied me on the first few days of walking in Delaware. After having already driven from Iowa that day, he then shuttled us along to Marietta, arriving just before midnight.
So anyway, I woke up in Marietta, some six hours later. The hotel breakfast bar was a Covid casualty, so we looped past the Kroger and picked up some McDonald’s coffee, then dropped off the car in Parkersburg. From there, a taxi carried us back to Pennsboro, West Virginia.
That experience, reversing my departure nearly two months earlier, was the first time that I really felt the loss that the interruption had spurred. Riding in Sharon’s car, I was fatalistic and numb, going through the motions, simply moving mechanically through the process of getting home. Seeing it all again, I was surprised to be moved. In deciding to return, I was driven by determination, an internal compulsion to take another shot, but now I felt the spark of adventure rekindling, the excitement of the road. What good fortune to have another chance!
The walk’s resumption proceeded without fanfare. We disembarked at the Dollar General, looped back past the Crossroads Cafe, where I had my last meal on the past trip, and then stepped onto the North Bend Rail Trail. We had 20 miles standing between us and Petroleum. The day was unseasonably cold, dipping down to near the freezing level overnight, and mostly cloudy, but that made for easy walking. We quickly settled into an easy rhythm, enjoying the gentle terrain. While I had spent a lot of time on the NBRT in the days prior to my departure, this was clearly its finest section, filled with old train tunnels and often flanked by sinuous rivers slicing through tree-covered hills and finger-thin valleys. In one, we spotted a mostly-white skunk ambling through the tall grass. We didn’t wait for it to come closer.
We enjoyed a lunch break in the Matt Turner Gazebo–a five-star rest stop if ever there was one, and a perfect place to overnight on the trail–and then carried on to Cairo. Walking into town, we saw a six- or seven-year-old girl, all long brown tresses and steely determination, puttering towards us on a mini dirt bike. She kept making loops through much of our visit. My eye was quickly seized by a giant ADT logo on a building that turned out to be a bike shop. While it looked closed, only moments after we passed a woman shuffled out to ask if we were walking the ADT by any chance. It turns out, DJ Allen was the former state coordinator for West Virginia, and has a history with the route dating back to the four-person scouting team that helped officially open it. The ADT logo on the building was the first to be posted anywhere. DJ invited us to sign her registry and then regaled us with a bit of the town’s history. I noted that we hadn’t seen anybody out, but she ascribed that to the cold, adding that there have been lots of people on the trail lately, including groups.
Staggering into Petroleum in the late-afternoon, we quickly set up shop under the hiker shelter. Two picnic benches became the living room, while my bivy and Fritz’s tent slid in around them. The outhouse, twenty feet away, was surprisingly clean and even equipped with two rolls of toilet paper. Petroleum itself seemed to consist of no more than a dozen houses, with six structures in particular forming a rough semi-circle around a grassy field opposite our shelter. Two were condemned; a mobile home seemed to be in nearly as much trouble. We saw signs of life at only two of them. One, clearly the best maintained, housed a family, while we only saw a single man in a truck connected to the second.
We had a long night ahead, with temperatures dipping back to near freezing. Knowing that temps would be rebounding to their typical, warmer realm within a few days, I eschewed the quality sleeping bag I had in February, instead going with lighter gear. That was fine for 90% of me, but my feet were little more than ice cubes, causing a constant disruption to my shallow sleep. An even greater interruption, though, were the plaintiff cries of a scorned lover around midnight. A Petroleum man was having a very difficult night, shouting into his phone to his partner, or more likely his ex-partner about his love and loss. And I mean shouting; his raw emotion ripped across the small town like a summer storm, generating no evident response. It felt like this was not an entirely unusual occurrence. Not long after the call concluded, we heard gunshots in the hills. I will never know the relationship between those two events.
