Day Twelve, Cruel Shoes

Find me in among the peach trees. Or possibly plum. You can't lead a horticultue. They are fruit trees, at any rate, of that I am certain, and are no doubt some of the best. The otherwise barren hills of central Washington supply the world with fruit. I once saw a Wenatchee apple crate on a dusty roadside in Mumbai. Later that day I saw a corpse, but that is beside the point.

Our friends at Google tell me I hiked 17 miles, uphill and in the rain. It has been just pissing down since I left my hotel, two minutes past checkout time. I had one or two things to do in town, but by 12:30 I was on a decommissioned railroad bridge, crossing the mighty Columbia. I got a passing hobo to take my picture (to be shared, someday, someday) and gave him a dollar and seventy-five cents in change for his trouble. I ain't so very well-off myself, but you have never seen a fellow who more looked he could use $1.75.

It is tempting on these cold rainy days to feel sorry for myself, but there are literal millions of people wandering around America every day. Without my state-of-the-art camping equipment and low-limit credit card. And without the Gore-Tex® raincoat my mother insisted I have. Cheers, Mom. I am one of the best-dressed bums in the country.

I, too, am the proud owner of a new pair of hiking boots. $100 with new gel insoles. I would have paid hundreds more. I left home in what were more or less running shoes and they sliced my feet into shreds. I was sure I could walk thirty miles a day in them, but I failed to appreciate what a forty-pound pack does to a fellow's geometry. And his toes.

Let's all take a moment to salute Mr. Kevin Myrbo of Famous Footwear in Wenatchee. He spent a good hour listening to my complaints and answering my questions. I cannot tell you how heartening it is to go into a shoe store in modern America and meet someone who knows something about shoes. Sa-lute!

Which is not to say my foot problems ard entirely behind me. My feet stayed dry but they've got some adjusting to do. I am seriously considering donating the little toe on my left foot to science. Poor little thing. At a truckstop I chopped the end off it with my trusty nose hair scissors. I gathered up the bits, as a courtesy, except one big piece which was carted off by a nearly microscopic ant. The buzzards and the worms may have to wait years to get me, but the ants are getting a taste.

Leaving Wenatchee I am heading more or less south, following the Columbia River. It is a grand river as rivers go, perhaps not in a class with the Mississippi or the Nile, but I am convinced it could give the Thames and the Danube a run for their money. I was born not too awfully far from it. Here it runs between high rock hills and sage brush covered plateaus. It is just the sort of country in which one expects to see rattlesnakes and, fear for me, friends, I have.

Three of them. The first was a big one, long and fat. He had been thoroughly squarshed. The second was tiny, maybe a foot long. He scared the hell out of me. I had mistaken him for a length of bungee cord, flung from a passing truck. The third was no bigger but I saw him first. I stopped and watched him for a while. I had some notion of learning his evil ways, but I can't say I reached any conclusions. But from a distance I thought I would make him my friend. I decided to call him Alger.

I would not wholly object to Alger and all his slithering, vile, hateful little friends dropping dead off the face of the earth. Venomous or not, it makes no difference to me. I hate them and want them to die. "Nature's balance," you cry, "the Great Chain of Life! We would be overrun by rodents!"

Well, I can answer that, eco-Smartypants. The solution, you see, is owls. Owls would step in pick up the slack and do it elegantly. I cannot see why any right-thinking person would object to an increase in the owl population. I can't say I have ever seen an owl. I think it would be cool.

But until the world comes around to my way of thinking, I shall struggle with girlish fear. I don't mean the dread and uneasiness I have had with me all along, but real, bone-shaking fear. Damn, I hate snakes. I had a few mile left in me when I put up my tent, but I stopped here because, in addition to being footsore and cold, and soaked to my very bones, it was the first patch of ground I have seen all day that didn't look like the rattlesnake diorama at the Woodland Park Zoo.

OTHER WILDLIFE: All manner of hawks, two or three examples of what I want to call osprey, and some odd liitle critters that look like really fat squirrels.

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