Days 105-116: Imaginary Lines

MADISON, IN—

July 8-19, 2024

This piece is another amalgamation of my journaling and the Markus Summer Workshop’s week 4 assignment.

Days 105-116:

“I guess we don’t need to love a thing in order for it to be made luminous by what we say about it.” - Peter Markus

I rediscovered my affection for the road when I began seeing her not as some bitch to be conquered but as a kind of mentor, a stern but fair guide who acknowledged my humanity even though I was an object that tread upon her. This epiphany occurred while my head hung, bowed in submission toward the asphalt of some nondescript backcountry road straddling the Ohio-Indiana border. Imaginary lines, it seems, still have a curious ability to manifest into very real worlds.

The preceding two weeks had been an unmitigated beatdown, a humbling labor where every step forward felt like a Sisyphean task, and I’m fairly certain my progress would’ve stagnated indefinitely had it not been for Greg’s spiritual compass. His buoyant mantras—‘enjoy every little bit,’ and other pearls of equally sagacious simplicity—reset my bearings on the ADT, converting my westward trek into a sort of existential North Star again. Realigned in both body and mind, I resumed my march, trusting that my legs would lead and my thoughts would eventually follow.

By noon, a bead of sweat traced a line off the tip of my nose, a miniature testament to the arduous path in front of me. Perhaps it was Greg’s permission to “just let” combined with the clean slate of a new state, but something in that droplet as it hit the road seemed to whisper, ‘You are here not to conquer, but to learn,’ followed by the probing question, ‘Are you willing to learn today?’

Such thoughts are akin to those you entertain when in the presence of a woman you genuinely love, as opposed to one you merely desire; you perceive her silent communication in the quiet spaces of your mind, and the road had me entranced in just that way.

In Indiana, each day, she inquired about my readiness to learn from her rather than claim ownership. Only one of these paths is viable, yet she extended to me the courtesy of choice. My response was a deliberate ‘Yes,’ knowing she valued actions over words, and this earned my respect.

She consistently delivered profound lessons when I cooperated, the most notable being a form of humility that empowers rather than diminishes, a right-sizing that liberates one from the tyranny of outcomes. Each footfall became a prayer, ‘I’ll walk today what I will, if you’ll accept it, my love.’

It’s no accident, I believe, that my mileage improved with this mindset, nor that the road reciprocated my efforts and respect with the aid of Good Samaritans at every juncture in this Hoosier State.

The miles were largely on flat terrain, where the sun’s unmuted rays were, and have been for some time now, unapologetically bullseye-ish. Many residents paused their lives to offer water to me on the roadside in front of their homes. I learned to accept their kindness with the same simple affirmation I gave to the road each day. Accepting kindness, she’s teaching me, is a love language, too.

The waters, the kindness, the willingness to accept help—all these must originate from Greg’s metaphorical river, the one he often references. Yes, they flow from his source into the Ohio, coursing steadily between northern Kentucky and southern Indiana.

My first night in Indiana was at an RV campground in Aurora, owned by a man named Terry who graciously allowed me to pitch my tent beside his RV near the Ohio River. It reminded me of those nights I fell asleep to the Potomac’s lullaby on Maryland’s C&O Canal Trail.

“Yeah, we like it here,” he said.

The second night, I stayed at Hudson’s Old Mill campground near a firing range in Friendship. Doug Hudson, the owner, greeted me on his riding lawnmower and insisted I stay for free, including their coin-slot showers. Again, I slept by water, this time a slow-moving creek, where my pulverized legs recovered after a 25-mile day.

The third night, I reached Canaan—a town established in 1812, four years before Indiana joined the Union. I aimed for a church off the trail, granted permission to camp there by trail angel Bob Canida, ahead of me in Madison. As I walked through Canaan nearing nightfall, a woman tried to coax her five-year-old Great Pyrenees, called “Puppy,” to return home. The dog, in its own time, obliged.

Deena Schaefer, the woman and dog owner, offered her RV in front of her house, sparing me a race against the setting sun. She knew Bob Canida; their children attended the same school. We quickly bonded after she confirmed I wasn’t a “murder hobo,” as Matt Hengst would put it.

The next morning, her husband Norbert made breakfast sandwiches before I returned to the road. Deena walked with me for a half-mile, giving a tour of her lifelong home, save for college. We passed the charter school she started in 2012, previously a public school that closed. She and her mother were long-time teachers there, and she felt a duty to reopen it—a rigorous endeavor that has since created positive waves of influence throughout the community. Every local seemed to be her former student. As such, I walked with two teachers that morning until Deena’s farewell.

The fourth and fifth nights were with Bob Canida and his wife Charlotte. I met Bob on the road, zipping by on his bike. At 75, he’s incredibly active. Later, he watched for me through binoculars as I approached his house along the Ohio River in downtown Madison. The Riverside Inn lay to the right, the Milton-Madison Bridge to the left, connecting Kentucky and Indiana. Bob and Charlotte had dinner ready—chicken and rice with gravy, steamed green beans on the side. Their reputation as pillars of the community was well-earned. They offered me the studio on their third floor for two nights, allowing me to slack pack (walk with a lighter bag).

Bob picked me up from a McDonald’s in Hanover after a day of slack-packing and gave me a tour of Madison, rich in history, especially its ties to the Underground Railroad. We passed homes preserved by the Madison Historical Society, where runaway slaves fled from Kentucky’s chains. Bob also revisited his youth, pointing out his childhood home near his high school. His father ran a dental practice from their house. Bob followed in his footsteps, both in the art of dentistry and the peculiar tradition of situating his own practice within the cozy confines of his property—though in a separate building in the backyard, an annex that served as both a professional haven and a daily reminder of his inherited vocation.

On our way back to Bob and Charlotte’s place along the Downtown Riverfront, Bob spotted a group of folks he knew, sitting on benches along the sidewalk. This wasn’t a surprise—Bob seemed to know everyone. He struck me as the type who genuinely delighted in connecting different people. What made Bob particularly special was his belief in the fundamental sameness of everyone, a rare quality that shone through in the way he brought others together. Very rarely do you encounter someone of Bob’s intelligence who engages with people in such an unguarded and inclusive manner. It was as if his sharp mind only deepened his appreciation for the common threads that bind us all, rather than setting him apart. This wasn’t just some philosophical stance; it was a lived reality for him, a genuine openness that made his interactions feel deep and meaningful, especially when witnessed first hand.

A homeless woman named Nancy was seated on one of the benches. Her pretty silver blonde hair was frayed but not in a way that revealed her living situation. The evening sun traced an aureate outline of her head, each tousled strand faintly drifting in the light summer breeze. In front of her was a pull wagon filled with her belongings: groceries, a mishmash of bags in various colors and sizes, and a surprising number of books, all leaning toward the conspiracy theory genre.

Bob walked up to her, and I tagged along. He introduced me as his friend who’s trekking across the country. Bob had spent quite a bit of time with her before, especially during his volunteer hours at the Salvation Army, where he provided dental services to those in need.

Once Nancy started talking, she barely took a breath. She was deep into this idea that Bill Gates had put a hit out on her for some COVID-related thing. She went on about this for what felt like chapters, with a level of detail that made it seem like she’d done her homework—whether those details were accurate was another matter entirely. It didn’t take long for me to realize she wasn’t well.

Bob knew this going in, yet he stood there, fully engaged, looking her in the eye and listening to every word. At first, I couldn’t understand why he was indulging her, given her obvious instability. It was only after a while that I figured out this was probably the first time anyone had actually listened to her all day. Most people likely thought, as I did, ‘why even get her started?’ But Bob didn’t care about that at all.

As Nancy’s monologue wandered further into the incoherent, I began to see that what set Bob apart was his ability to tune into the core of a person, beyond their words. This was how he found his own way each day. He saw Nancy as a kind of teacher, someone who could offer him something—not through her words, but through her essence, her humanity. In listening to her, he acknowledged her existence and, in doing so, received a rare and valuable currency. This was the same currency he shared with me as we hugged goodbye the next morning, having told me the night before, “What I like about you is that you’re a real person.” I think he saw everyone in this way. And if my intuition is worth anything, this was his method for making himself available and real—in the most heartfelt and fundamentally human sense. It was like he knew that imaginary lines, the kind people draw around themselves or others, still have this ability to manifest into very real worlds, and he was determined to step across those lines, into those worlds, as often as he could.

In this way, the trail angels walk with their thru-hikers, their heads bowing so that their halos cast light onto the epiphanies hidden in the seemingly nondescript. There, love is found untethered from desire, between the real lines of the road and the imagined ones she taught me.