A little validation goes a long way

A little before 5am on the morn of my 42^nd birthday, I left the Cataloochee Valley. The Catalooch, as it is locally known, is in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and, moreover, it’s where I currently live. This secluded valley is visited by a tiny minority (~thousands) of the million-strong throngs who explore more well-known sites along the main thoroughfare of the park.

I wanted to honor my tradition of getting high (uh, in terms of elevation, that is) on my birthday, and doing so meant that I would have to venture to those locations more familiar to the tourist crowds. In fact, the high point I sought is one of the most famous places in the Smokies, aside from Dollywood:  Clingman’s Dome.

I had hoped to watch the sunrise from Clingman’s, which explains why l strove to reach the trailhead before 6:45am. Alas, although the 2+ hour drive to Newfound Gap was bathed in morning glow, the Dome was shrouded in fog so thick that I couldn’t see across the parking lot. I drowsed in my truck for an hour waiting for the fog to show some hint of surrender, but it only seemed to grow heavier. The booming, disembodied voices of obnoxious groups of college kids and families pierced the gloom. Touring motorcycles appeared and disappeared, trailing the musical choices of the Harley-mounted dentists and contractors through the mist. Some people appeared to be hiking up the trail to the dome itself, a structure known for both its position on the mountain and its gaudy tackiness. I don’t know what those intrepid day-trippers expected to see; I suspected that the experience of being in the dome would have been akin to being wrapped in wet cotton.

I finally gave up and drove away from the parking area.  As I lost elevation, the dripping fog began to lessen. I stopped briefly at the dedication site, where Franklin D. Roosevelt officially proclaimed the existence of Great Smoky Mountains National Park back in 1941, watching tendrils of fog drift among the green ridges visible all around.  I wound my way ‘down the mountain’, as we say here in the Smokies, stopping at a few short nature trails and spots of interest. I relaxed next to a stream, watched a man back his F-150 into his wife’s minivan while trying to park in a picnic area, honked in panic at inattentive people drifting into my lane over the double yellow line – in other words, I had a typical national park experience.

Having entered the park at the south end of 441, in the casino-funded town of Cherokee, NC, I decided to exit in that most ‘gatewayish’ of the infamous gateway communities, Gatlinburg, Tennessee. I had an ulterior motive in doing so – I could stop in and do some quick shopping while most people were still standing in line at the pancake houses.  One stop was the Nantahala Outdoor Center. Without going into icky details, I had realized that one of my hydration bladders was supporting what threatened to become intelligent life and I planned to pick up a cleaning kit from the NOC.

While in the NOC, I fell into discussion with an older staffer about various gear and gizmos, as we men of the outdoors are prone to do. As we talked about the usefulness of various devices for designed to signal for help, this fellow chanced to mention that he was careful about such things, because he sometimes guided less-than-capable folks into the woods and he had to be conscious of his MS.

I was intrigued by his mention of our shared disease, and we talked more. He was a former attack helo pilot (he flew ‘snakes’, which I suspected meant AH-1 Cobras or variants). His tours in Vietnam and that technology likely put him a little beyond my father’s age; he was also an ‘SF’ medic. That means Special Forces – I presumed Army – in the acronym-filled and often unpretentious parlance of the infantry-based Spec Ops community. In sum, then, this old guy was a badass who had seen and done a great deal but didn’t see the need to brag too much.

I told him that I was in the same boat, medically speaking. We chatted about this confusing, crippling disease for a few minutes. He said that he was a ‘reader’ – he started reading about MS after his diagnosis but almost immediately stopped. I call myself a ‘researcher’ – I too, delved into the research about MS, but quickly quit:  there is, simply put, not a lot of good news out there. Neither of us wanted to read the obligatorily horrible stories of tragedy and disability, and lives destroyed.

His combat medic background allowed him to rationally dismiss the MS theories about milk allergies, plastic exposure, or bee sting cures, just as my EMS training led me to do. He’d been diagnosed more than 30 years ago, and he just kept doing what he wanted to do and hoping for the best.

Jesus, I thought as I stood there leaning on the GPS cabinet, surrounded by wealthy tourists buying over-priced backpacks and bear bells. This man is the only other person I’ve met with this damn disease who’s acting like me.

Two . . ahem . . mature men who’ve spent our lives doing things, sometimes tough things, outside the norm. No picket fences, no IBM or WalMart health plans, no 401k. More than that, we continued this wandering life in the face of the staggering uncertainty that MS uses to crush many people. We each ignored the wacko theories, tried to dismiss the ubiquitous bad MS news, worked to stay in good health, and kept on pushing ourselves. We had a good bit in common, this stranger and I.

We said farewell and I went on my way. I reflected that our 10-minute conversation had taken place amid kayaks, backpacks and compasses, parts of a lifestyle that some people tell me I can’t have any more. Well, they told this man the same thing – decades ago. His plan worked for him into his 70s, and so I take this random, unexpected experience as validation of my hopes that my plan will work for me. I listened to Kasey Chambers on the way home and decided to squeeze some more travel into my future.

It was nearing the end of April, and my first day of driving across the isle of Newfoundland had been uneventful, with sunny – yes, sunny – skies and dry roads, something no one expected. I reached Corner Brook having encountered a minimum of traffic, something which was expected. The ferry website revealed that the nightly crossing had been cancelled due to high winds. I hoped the dawn would bring better weather and retired early in anticipation of driving the remaining 216 km to the marine terminal by 9am the next day.

I was approaching the terminal in Port aux Basques Saturday morning, having driven 200 of those 216 km, when an automated message informed me that the morning crossing also had been cancelled. Ahead, a truck had been forced off the road (but not rolled over) by the classic Wreckhouse area winds, so I stopped and bowed to the inevitability of the North Atlantic. I returned to Corner Brook and spent most of the day drowsing in my truck in the WalMart parking lot, and walking around the mall when I needed to step out of the truck (the same harsh, frigid wind which was keeping the ferries docked also made outdoor strolling unpleasant). I finally prevailed upon a fellow LESA (Landscape Ecology and Spatial Analysis) labber, Stacey, and her landlord/roommate, Isabelle, a school chum of Yolanda’s, for a place to stay that evening. Thanks, ladies.

I rose early yet again on Sunday and struck out for the Port aux Basques terminal. The weather front had passed through and the ferries were running. Because of the cancellations over the last few days, my morning crossing was almost empty; even though I was pretty far back in the boarding queue, I parked one row back from the front/unloading door of the ship. The ship’s crew said the evening crossing was scheduled to be full, but there were plenty of empty seats and berths for my cruise.

When the ferry finally lurched into motion, I went out on the deck and watched Newfoundland’s harsh south coastline retreat rapidly into the snowy distance. The Long Range mountains and the south barrens looked rugged and inviting in a challenging sort of way. It is the landscape of Random Passage and The Shipping News and reflects the singularly brutal introductory narrative by which millions of people have come to know Newfoundland. They are taught about the austerity and little else. It would take too long to contrast the stories of lonely, isolated and backward outport life with my academic, multinational, pseudo-cosmopolitan experiences in St. John’s over the last two years. I’ve come to believe that we’ve struggled, all of us who’ve lived and laughed and loved and learned on The Rock, but in very, very different ways.

After a mildly unpleasant sensation experienced while assisting Emily ‘Captain Cod’ Zimmerman in her statistically-driven gadiform-jigging duties, I feared that I might get seasick on the passage, given the whitecaps and swells. After wolfing down a really crappy sandwich, however, the huge ship promptly rocked me to sleep. I snoozed in the viewing lounge facing out over the Cabot Straight, under a sign which explained in four languages that no one was allowed to sleep in the lounge. Over the six-hour ride, almost everyone in the room was asleep at some point. Some slept soundly, snoring, while others, like me, woke and quickly returned to sleep whenever a strong wave hit the hull and sent spray high into the air, splashing against the large observation windows, seven decks above the water.

Within four hours, Cape Breton had replaced the horizon featureless horizon of the North Atlantic on starboard. Two hours later, with little fanfare and considerably less shouting, gesturing, exhaust fumes and general complexity than my last superferry deboarding (February 2010), I set foot on the mainland of North America for the first time in over two years.

For those years, the bulk of the continent had been so near and yet so far, in terms of mail service and politics and shopping and weather, that my sudden transition from the Rock to the Rest of the World seemed a little surreal. Unlike other MUN students, I had not flown home from St. John’s for holidays or concerts; I still have no idea how they afforded all that travel while I went into debt buying groceries and spark plugs. The sensation of arriving in a new world was intensified as I stopped at a small road-side motel and paid $40 for a room. My 6-hour stay in a Corner Brook Holiday Inn cost $150.

I arrived at the international border crossing in the hamlet of Houlton, Maine, armed with itemized lists of my belongings and protracted explanations as to where I’d been for the last two years. Unlike my entry into Canada, the DHS border guard simply asked me where I was born, where I was going, and if I was bringing anything into the country that I didn’t have when I left it. As one might guess, I hadn’t done a lot of shopping for durable goods as a grad student, and the few expensive things I’d bought were all shipped from the US anyway. As I looked at him, broad-chested, buffed, crewcut and wearing military-style BDU clothing and flak gear, I thought about:

(a) joking that 30% of my truck was now comprised of Canadian auto parts; or

(b) explaining that the RNC, the RCMP and the CBSA had been surprisingly effective - for competing federal agencies, I mean - in their conspired efforts to confiscate and destroy my Marlin .22 rifle

but in the end I bowed to expediency and simply said ‘no’. He gave me a perfunctory 'welcome home' and waved me through.

Home? I thought. Personally speaking, that’s a much more complicated concept than it was even just a few years ago. In the name of road-numbed half-consciousness, I shrugged off the pending introspection and prepared myself for the loud, aggressive onslaught of NE US traffic. This preparation neglected the fact that I was still in northern Maine. The roads of Maine where hemmed in by timber on either side – dark forests brimming with moose, and in that way they continued the trend of the roads on which I’d been since I left Regina Place. But as I left the coast, the Maine sun revealed itself in a blue sky and soon the bulk of the northern terminus of the AT and that storied outdoorsperson’s mecha, Katahdin, appeared. I’m no Main-ah, but it was a beautiful area.

The rest of the trip was characterized by linking numerous interstate highways together to take me on my southeasterly course, in the process avoiding New York city, Philly, Washington, D.C and New Jersey entirely. I passed through so many states that I had trouble keeping track of which jurisdiction I was in at any given time. The traffic did get heavy at times, but remained surprisingly well-mannered. I stayed in cheap motels along the way, slowly reminding my body what beds feel like.

After skimming north of the most thickly-populated areas of my homeland, I met my boss at the BP (that’s not a BP station; it is the BP which serves as my main social outlet - Britney, Amanda and that friendly old guy - and main source of last-minute groceries, batteries, morning pastries and gas). Then I proceeded to wind along the narrow mountain road which led to the secluded and historically significant valley simply called Cataloochee. I pulled into the ranger station and introduced myself to my flatmates and neighbors: elk, pileated woodpeckers, two species of mice, a toad or two, quite a few turkeys, and a few bears.

While my arrival in the Cataloochee Valley was not celebrated (the mice may have even complained), it did mark the end of my 2700-mile odyssey, including as it did long hours, complex intersections and signage, variable road conditions, exhaustion, delicate negotiations with all manner of large, fast-moving tractor-trailer rigs, rain, fog and night driving. Naturally, my first assignment for GRSM was to click through a three-hour DOI online training about safe/defensive driving.

Friday: Corner Brook, or as close to the west coast (of Newfoundland) as I can get

Saturday: mainland North America and all points east

I leave the Rock in the same manner in which I arrived - a six to ten hour ferry ride (let's hope for six, shall we?) with my truck and RocketBox loaded to capacity, although I don't seem to own much other than clothes, camping gear, and books. This will be followed by Nova Scotia, then New Brunswick, then into the good 'ol US of A via Houlton, Maine.

Provided CBSA lets me out, and CBP lets me in, I should re-enter the country of my birth on Sunday. This marks the first time in 27 months that I've been in the US or even on the continent proper. I hope there are no firearms issues:  Canada took away my .22 rifle; will the US allow me to enter unarmed?

I leave having defended, but not finished, my thesis. The onus is on me to keep writing each night in hopes of producing a draft to my committee this summer. Being the oddball scientist, writing is easier for me that numbers, so I think I can pull it off. I will be doing that pulling from the Appalachians. I return to the green and gray in the early days of May, joining the ranks of those harassing the elk of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Yes, the thought of finishing my thesis alone is intimidating, but first I have to concentrate on starting my new job. Yes, the thought of starting my new job is intimidating, but first I have to concentrate on driving from Maine to North Carolina. Yes, the thought of driving down the eastern seaboard is intimidating, but first I have to concentrate on getting across the island. Yes, the thought of driving across Newfoundland is intimidating, but first I have to finish packing . . . ah, well, you get the point. Generally, my plans involving avoiding Boston, New York, New Jersey, the Washington, DC, area, trying to minimize sleeping in the driver's seat and encountering no snow.

So, in sum, tomorrow begins another series of days lived entirely on the road (or in the belly of a superferry) with most of my life on my back, much like a turtle or a snail. I hope to make better speed than either of those taxa, but safe and slow(er) has gotten me through snowy Montana mountains and icy Newfoundland roads, and hence it should get me to the southlands.