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CINCINNATI, OH—
June 9-27, 2024
The following is a piece I've written for Peter Markus' Summer Workshop, an eight-week virtual writing class he hosts annually. Naturally, Greg is also in attendance! We’ve taken this course together before, and it was the impetus for our Certain Steps Writing Workshop concept. I’ve combined Peter’s assignment with my journal entry, using his prompt from week one as a thematic guide. I’ve taken some creative liberties here as well, experimenting with tone, voice, vocabulary, and narrative that I hope you’ll enjoy (or at least tolerate for fun!).
Days 77-94:
“What makes any ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ object into something ‘luminous’ is how we take it and make it our own.” - Peter Markus
Dinner, hag stones, wagons. These are what the angels cherish in the Elysian Fields of the Buckeye State’s western landscape, where without the sky, the weight of a backpack becomes a crucible under the unforgiving summer sun.
In that firmament above the footsteps of travelers, there are those who watch and wait.
The first angel, Dori Bishop, made herself known in the second week of June. She and her husband, Jim, took me in for four nights over an 80-mile span, carrying me back and forth from Fort Hill State Memorial to Shawnee State Forest, where each stride amid the sweltering heat was a labor against Earth’s pull.
Their home stood on a quiet farmland, its grounds traced by two-and-a-half miles of wooded trails hand-built by Jim and their adult son, Andrew. Among these trails loomed ‘the face tree,’ a beech with its trunk marred by a stoic visage carved into its bark by an unknown artist.
A personal firing range stretched nearby, where missed shots were as rare as an easy 30 miles on foot. In a pond, paddlefish grew as long as a boy is tall. Across the gravel driveway, Amish neighbors pitched hay and cooled their sun-baked skin in a pond of their own. An old bearded collie named Dexter, fifteen years of age and still panting with the joy of life, watched over it all, a loyal sentinel of the Bishops’ domain.
Evening would fall, casting long shadows over the land. This was when Dori’s essence surfaced.
“What would you like for dinner?” she would ask.
She routinely cooked for the hollow-bellied thru-hikers she welcomed in. Even me, from that state up north! After having my fill, her words would lift my freshly cleaned plate up for a second serving:
“Please, help yourself! There’s more!”
During one golden-hour drive back from the trail, I mentioned the coney dogs from Detroit’s famed Greek chain restaurant, Coney Island, leading to a conversation about how the chili is prepared. The subject inspired Dori to whip up some Four-Way Chili for me—a Cincinnati specialty featuring Skyline Chili over spaghetti noodles, topped with onions and shredded cheese. Something about her dinner table evoked the warmth of a loving relative passing your favorite dish at Thanksgiving. It didn’t matter what the food was or that it was summer; what mattered was the sharing.
Night after night, I relived that moment at their table, savoring a different meal with a new flavor for my palate. But time passed as it always does, and the road summoned me back to it.
After they left me at Shawnee, the last time we would see each other, I discovered clumps of Dexter’s white fur clinging to the bottom of my backpack, as if he were still watching from some unseen place. I texted Dori an image of his shaggy sheddings.
“I was just thinking about you as I’m figuring out dinner,” she replied.
“What are you having tonight?”
“Leftover Skyline.”
I smiled and walked on, reflecting on the generosity of these people. Their kindness was a reminder of the good I often forget when comfort is in plenty.
As the landscape rolled and the faces changed in the passing hours, the sun bore down unyielding, while the kindness of the angels remained a constant balm.
The second angel, Nikki Allen, known along the river as ‘MoonDoggie,’ made herself known in the second week of June and hosted me in the third. I first met her as I walked beyond the ancient coils of Serpent Mound, a prehistoric effigy forged by Indigenous hands a millennium gone. With celestial reckonings in mind, they aligned the serpent’s head with where the sun dies on the longest day—the summer solstice sunset.
Across the road from where I walked, Nikki led a guided tour for disadvantaged children with animated enthusiasm, sweeping her arm in a broad arc to indicate the grandeur of the terrain sprawling before them. Her raspy, vibrant voice honed in on the Serpent Mound Crater, a geological marvel long preceding its namesake.
She explained a meteor birthed it—some cosmic colossus between 330 and 980 feet wide—that tore through the heavens and hissed upon the seas 295 million years ago. The collision unleashed a maelstrom of fire and water that roiled ocean and sky. Yet, from this chaos, Adams County, Ohio, emerged as a sanctuary of unparalleled biodiversity. This 5.5-mile-wide impact crater was the craggy, verdant bowl we found ourselves in.
“Buckeye Trail?! ADT?!” her voice burst forth unexpectedly, shooting her robust energy across the road and ringing into my sternum.
“ADT!” I answered.
She turned to the children.
“Folks, this guy is walking across America!”
The children’s amusement over a lone nomad pulled the corners of my lips upward into a smile as I continued on the path. The next morning, as my eyes met the gaze of an eastern garter nestled in the dimness of my tent in the pre-dawn light, the memory of Serpent Mound returned.
Nikki found me on the road a week later in Manchester. It was the day before the summer solstice. She drove me in her pickup truck a mile and a half off the trail to her campground and kayak rental. MoonDoggie Liveree, she called it. I pitched my tent beside a picnic table near her shop and stayed three nights.
On midsummer night, after the summer solstice sun had set, the moon rose full, its face lit by the sunken star. Across the acreage, fireflies danced to tree frogs, their songs reminiscent of Greg Man’s reverence for listening.
“What are they saying?” he always says.
Nikki and her beloved, Jamie, emerged from their house and crossed the street to where my tent stood. They were curious about my journey and asked if I’d join them for a walk in the night along the river.
We went down to the riverbank and searched for rocks and fossils by the light of our phones, cutting through what the moon couldn’t reach.
The women called out to one another with each finding.
“Babe!” Jamie exclaimed, holding up an oblong stone with a natural hole near the top edge. “Look at this one!”
“A hag stone!” Nikki belted out, sharing her child-like bliss and taking it in her hand to study its textures and contours with careful attention.
She then offered the stone to me, describing its significance as it rested in my palm.
“Legend has it that hag stones give magical sight if you look at a full moon through its hole.”
“How are those holes formed?” I asked, turning the stone over and over.
“Water erosion over a long, long time.”
“Makes sense,” I said, placing the hole over my eye and peering into the night. “What kind of magic are you supposed to see?”
“They say you can see fairies.”
“Hmm. I don’t see any,” I paused, then added, “Maybe the fireflies are the fairies.”
Quick footfalls echoed across the riverbank. Through the peephole, I watched MoonDoggie leap into the air, her silhouette stark against the full moon’s light.
“Hey, look!” she howled. “It’s me!”
The third angel, Mike Vogel, made himself known in the fourth week of June. He found me at the edge of his drive, the pickup pulling forward and idling as I trudged along the road before his farmhouse. The far-reaching property lay manicured to perfection, resembling something torn from the glossy pages of a patriotic estate magazine.
From his seat in the rumbling truck, he offered to retrieve me at day’s end and put me up for the night. Behind the tree-line beyond the field and the house was the place I would rest, known along the trail as the ‘Vogel Shelter.’ I accepted his generosity, exchanged contact information, and continued on my way, content to spare myself from stealth-camping along Grant Lake as originally planned.
He fetched me from Mount Orab at the end of a 21-mile day, true to his word. As we rode back, he spoke of his completion of the Appalachian Trail, going south to north—a trek made all the more impressive for having been done in his retirement years.
“That’s why I help hikers now,” he said. “For all the help I received then, It’s how I give back.”
When we returned to the homestead, he nodded toward his utility ATV and said I could use it to haul my bag to the shelter a quarter mile away, and back in the morning. I thanked him, knowing from his own thru-hike of the AT that he could feel in his bones the tangible gratitude of my legs, now sagging with the weight of 21 miles dragged over cooking pavement.
While I filled my water bottles from the spigot in his tool barn, he drew my attention to another barn, hulking yet silent, which I had somehow missed.
“I have a museum in there, if you’d like to see it before you turn in,” he said. “Not everybody cares to, but I’d be happy to show ya’. Just wagons and stuff.”
When you’re writing about walking across America and your trail angel tells you they have a museum, you don’t decline their offer to show it.
Mike eased open the barn door. Its hinges creaked softly, as if to hint the antiques inside were aged but secretly so.
Before us were several fully-renovated wagons, each at least over a century old. Among them were three Troy Wagons, a chuck wagon, a miniature chuck wagon, and two manure wagons.
One manure wagon, a 1910 model called ‘The New Idea,’ was designed to scatter shit across a crop field, a marked departure from the straight-line method, which was groundbreaking tech in its time. Per Mike’s touch, it bore a scale model of itself perched on its driver seat. This mis en abyme echoed an earlier memory of Mike in his tool barn, holding a framed photograph of himself standing victorious on the summit of Mount Katahdin after finishing the Appalachian Trail. Both the wagon and the summit brought him to life.
Mike had spent the last six years refurbishing these wagons with a meticulous hand, fine-tuning them to a vintage aesthetic so refined that it felt as though you lived in every year they were made, all at once. His knowledge of them was polished as well. He spoke of them with the authority of a 20th century historian—each word a nail driven true, every detail laid bare with the care of a craftsman. This was his ‘New Idea,’ his new Mount Katahdin.
And so I took a picture of him standing there, victorious in his balance.
The following morning, I drove the utility ATV back to Mike’s tool barn with my backpack in tow and with the America of today waiting to be discovered by a mind now a little more full of her past—the red and blue desperate to emulsify like vinegar and oil in each step I took.
Mike would soon ferry me back to Mount Orab. For now, we stood beneath a purple martin birdhouse in the morning light, prudently discussing American polarization while my phone charged in the tool barn. I glanced at my Garmin watch and saw my heart rate was elevating.
“I think America is going to come together again,” I said. “I think it has to.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But it might take another war.”
Our conversation faltered momentarily and fell into the sky a silent prayer.
The pause drew my gaze upward, where I surveyed the martin colony zooming overhead, their dark and aerodynamic profiles cutting through the sharp blue sky and docking in space-age-looking compartments like a living piece of futurist art. This imagery evoked in me a rift in space and time, where I could see what is to come yet could not understand what it means to wear the eye-shaped mirrors of existence.
The imprint of Mike and his manure wagon, 'The New Idea,' along with the smile in his eyes while standing beside it, grounded me. And so I leaned into this novelty: no matter what happens to us, to this American Experiment, there will be those to come who will love the silly relics of our age. Not for their future material worth, but because we made them our own.
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