prayer wrapped in my father’s red bandana

14 September 2015 — Day 6
Solo backpacking the length of Vermont on the Long Trail

So early the next morning I set off — first out of camp. My knee tied with Dad’s red bandanna.

[So far that morning] the trail was more or less level — the downhills weren’t too bad, and my knee, while not feeling great, didn’t feel as bad as yesterday.

The morning was gray and a little foggy. [And the forest was beautiful, absolutely glistening from the previous day’s rain. I conflicted — enchanted by the beauty of the forest, and forlorn with the weight of uncertainty about what to do regarding my knee….]

I made it to the junction of Old Rootville Road and started the two-mile descent down. A nice backwoods road, but relatively steep and felt long. I wondered how/if I could manage coming back up it. At some point I saw headlights and a Subaru passed me coming up. I smiled to the car and trudged downward.

Although I knew the route was 2 miles, it felt longer than I expected.

Several streams ran down from the brown hardwood forest.

Eventually the road became less steep and began to level out, and an occasional little house appeared by the roadside and soon I found myself at a major intersection.

Not entirely sure where I was, I crossed over to a single tree in the intersection, pulled out my thermos of tea and my map and tried to get my bearings. Not two minutes later the Subaru [that had been] going up the Rootville Road came back and pulled up to the intersection. It then backed up a little bit and its windows came down: “Do you want a ride?” the driver called out. “I would LOVE a ride!”

He jumped out and cleared space in the back, “Don’t worry about any of the stuff,” he said, shoving aside stacks of old yellow papers that looked to be from the 19th century. “Are you an artist?” for the stuff looked like great collage material. “No, I just photograph a lot of this stuff.” In the front passenger seat was a very elderly but spry woman — his mother — up from Florida to bury her husband. She’d lived in Vermont for some seventy years, and they were out for a drive to visit some of her old haunts. He knew exactly where “Sutton’s Place” is, and in fact Frank Sutton was his high school French teacher many years ago. Drove me right to the door of a lovely New England Victorian clapboard-sided house down a quiet road, at the top of a small hill just a couple blocks from town.

Welcome to Manchester!

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