Long Trail 25: Somewhere Else

The car pulled away from the curb, the driver headed for his original destination after picking me up on the road from Middlebury Gap.

I surveyed my surroundings. Across the street was a small public park. A simple obelisk of white stone was at it’s center. I couldn’t read the inscription, but it appeared to honor the town’s fallen soldiers- perhaps from WW2 or the Civil War. The park was shaded by mature trees, under which sat wooden picnic tables. To my left I spied a cafe, and a small gas station and market.

I dropped my pack at the base of the porch outside the cafe. It was an old wooden house with a porch and small stone patio. The lower level of the house was now occupied by the coffee shop. Inside, they were doing a brisk business. Smelly and bedraggled, I waited in line considering my options. I ordered a large iced coffee, and the barista asked if I wanted it sweetened. My choices were sugar as well as the usual suspects, and maple syrup.

This is Vermont, folks. They take their syrup seriously, and I answered in the affirmative for it. You don’t travel to Vermont and put sugar in your coffee anymore than you order a Big Mac when visiting France.

( Actually, I wouldn’t order McDonald’s food anywhere, even in the U.S.)

I walked next door to the small grocery store. I picked up a sandwich (they had a kitchen inside) and a liter of water. It would be my first water in days that had not come out of a stream or mountain spring.

I sat in the park at a picnic table and ate the gas station sandwich with gusto, drinking cold coffee over ice.

It’s the simple things, when you are deprived of them, that remind us of how lucky we are.

I was not alone. Across the street on the steps of the community hall, four children sat on chairs in the shade of the covered entryway to the building. They faced each other in a circle. There were no cell phones in hand. They were playing violins, perhaps practicing for an upcoming concert. The music drifted over to me, simple folk songs from another time. A few yards away, in front of the public library an old VW bus was parked, it’s cargo door open. A young man sat in the doorway, one foot on the ground, another inside the bus, quietly playing an acoustic guitar. I felt transported back in time, or a parallel universe. I was a fixture in this scene as well. A traveler, without a plan, not in complete control of the path to my destination. A witness, and a participant.

Amazingly, I was not nervous at all, or remotely concerned where I would end my travels today. I had time, and freedom. I did not need to be anywhere. I knew that things would “work out.” I thought of the courage it took some hikers I met on the trails to travel without the surety of a regular income, of a life plan other than to live in the moment, drifting along an air current of time, wherever it might take them.

I crossed the street, my pack on my shoulders and stood for a moment in front of the town’s public library with the stained glass windows. At one time it had perhaps been a church. Change had come, and now it was something else.

I stuck my thumb out and walked a few paces. A car pulled up in front of me. I dropped my pack in the back seat, and climbed in, and moments later, I too, was on my way to somewhere else.