Issue 3:2 | Non-Fiction | Casey Clabough

To Bristol: Along the Warrior's Path
An excerpt from the book The Warrior’s Path
Casey Clabough



Next morning I enter Smyth County, which did not exist in 1800, much of the land from which it eventually would be formed having belonged to the ingloriously slain James Patton during the decades of the mid-eighteenth century. Shortly beyond the boundary I glimpse a diminutive low-flying aircraft making a landing approach, watching as it disappears below the horizon. A brief distance ahead I discover its destination: the Mountain Empire Airport, a small landing field used mostly by private, single-engine planes. From a vantage point just off Route 11, I can watch planes coming in and taking off with interstate traffic behind them, 81 lying parallel only a couple hundred feet north of the second runway: a deep, visionary field of motion and transportation, planes lifting and landing, automotive traffic rushing behind them, northeast and southwest, the plane that takes off catching up to the car beyond it, before passing it, lifting up above it–an overlapped image of modern travel that feels to me like some curious recitation of a dream.

Just past the Mountain Empire Airport, not far from the red door of Pleasant Hill Lutheran Church, the Appalachian Trail crosses Route 11, a brief stretch of perhaps eight miles where the modern continuous footpath strays from Glade Mountain and the Blue Ridge toward Little Brushy Mountain, Walker Mountain, and on down into Brushy Valley, where it skirts along Possum Jaw Creek in the shadow of Bryant’s Knob. On the lookout for a nearby strip mine, I had forgotten all about the Appalachian Trail–at least this particular section of it, where it temporarily forsakes one range of mountains for another. I hike in a short distance both ways to see what I can see, failing to encounter anyone, though the late-summer trail nevertheless appears worn, packed and dusty in the middle, grooved boot and shoe prints, mud molds dry now and hard, along its outer edges. Heading back toward Highway 11 however from the section of path that strays along Dry Run and Davis Valley, I am met by a hiker journeying from the south who identifies himself by the trail name Glass. Each of us happy to have encountered someone else, we swap trail mix and destinations while drinking water. A former Marine, Glass had left Springer Mountain slightly before the summer solstice, a determined single-season thru-hiker traveling light, fast, and alone. Our divergent directions and purposes have conspired to lay out separate roads before us, but Glass, low on supplies and plagued by the thru-hiker’s periodic craving for heavy civilized food, decides to accompany me south to the nearby village of Atkins, the last reliable supply point before Pearisburg, a town along the New River near the West Virginia border.

As our various conversations eventually would reveal, Glass, like many hikers of the Appalachian Trail, was not so much motivated by the physical odyssey before him, but rather the search for a number of abstract things, including the nature of himself. He carried with him a small cache of hardcover self-help books, perhaps six or seven, which surprised me on account of the extra weight they added to his pack. Although he would follow my suggestion of cutting off the front and back flaps, he remained doggedly determined not to leave a book behind until it was read–the mastery of the pages motivated by the prospect of a lighter pack, a more enlightened mind. With a palpable sense of accomplishment, he told me he had already mailed two to his home address, somewhere in the northeast.

We eat at the Atkins Grocery and Deli, a place that likely enjoys a healthy measure of trail business, before resolving to spend the afternoon consuming calories and resting: that is drinking beer and watching television, numbing our tired bodies and brains–hanging out, you might say–at the aptly named Relax Inn. Possessing on its grounds an old covered bridge, the Inn strikes me as yet another encountered intersection point for the past and present: its qualities oddly at odds yet somehow shared, divergent styles and means jumbled across time. For Glass, it is a place where the skies are clouded and the storms of the past threaten to overcast darkly the present. An ex-Marine in his late twenties, haggard and a little wild-eyed–which, after all, is an appearance shared by many thru-hikers–Glass radiates a distinctive sense of displacement, maladjustment, and even fragility, odd for a youngish serviceman, that makes his unusual trail name seem somehow appropriate, though I remain unsure if the connection has occurred to him–his blurry, wavering person of the present forged by the fire, sand, and trace elements of a place far away, on the other side of the world. Yet, for all this, for all our own separate experiences and beliefs, or perhaps the collective lack thereof, we are not all that different, bibulously lounging here, drinking Yuengling, myself headed south following in the wake of ghosts and ancestors two centuries distant, and Glass, northbound, trying to determine who he was and is, and, perhaps a little presumptuously, who he might come to be for the rest of his life. Only a couple of years older than him and fraught with many doubts, I have no opinions or suggestions I feel good about when he asks for some after crushing an empty beer can against his forehead. All I have to offer is a mangled, partially-remembered paraphrase of something very general by French philosopher Merleau-Ponty which sounds not unlike New Age self-help: “Man is not determined by his past, his temperament, his situation; but neither is he radically free in relation to these motivations.” I elaborate half-seriously that I don’t believe one should seek to resolve his life too much since, for me, order is the natural enemy of the individual mind. To this Glass only replies that he hates the French, but I write down the philosopher’s name on a piece of hotel stationary anyway and slip it inside his backpack the next morning after breakfast, just in case he finishes all the self-help books and needs something else to read.



Several miles down the road, entering Marion, which in the 1770s was known as Royal Oak, I cross the middle fork of the Holston River, a body of water I hope to trace in earnest if I can make it into Tennessee. In Marion I pause briefly to pick up fresh produce from the Pioneer Restaurant before pressing on, the balls of my feet exuding a spring they have lacked for some time, my pace recently having been more leisurely, a conspiracy of circumstance and general fatigue. But now I feel wonderful, almost as if I am the recipient of a new body, though I am reminded that my appearance is less than desirable when I glimpse myself in a large gym mirror while stopping in for water at Mike’s Health and Fitness. Beneath the moderately aged beard, my face is thinner, my body lithe, though it projects a subtle gaunt quality rather than an athletic musculature–the appearance of something forced from time to time to call upon more fuel than it has: to, in effect, feed upon itself. I have shed pounds while eating poorly, consuming fatty foods and beer at odd hours, at long intervals or before going to sleep, gorging myself whenever a store or restaurant materializes into being from the far-glimpsed mirage I initially take it to be. Of course, grease-laden frontier food had contained large amounts of fat as well, and its availability often was sporadic: subject to the impact of weather patterns on crops, the migrations of animals. Fat stores, however, were useful then, often drawn upon: for walking great distances, working from dark to dark, or enabling the body to negotiate periods of famine. In our own time, this chair-bound byproduct era of industrialization, few of us work our bodies to their physical potentials, though many of us still eat as though deprivation were imminent.

Below a hill that affords a fine view of the Appalachian Mountains, I cross the middle fork of the Holston again at Seven Mile Ford, carved out of land that once belonged to William Campbell, the hero of King’s Mountain, who also established an infamous reputation by executing several tories without trials or due process. Once a significant crossing point, the area is quiet now, sleepy, indistinguishable from many another southwestern Virginia hamlet. As the German philosopher Johan Gottfried von Herder would say, “The time of flourishing is gone,” but then who is to say what the nature of flourishing truly is or what the future may have in store for this place or any other–or even, in that present of long ago, what destiny was to hold for Herder himself? I remember distinctly standing in the Herderplatz in Weimar, the town where he had died nearly two centuries earlier, in the last hours of a late spring afternoon, having walked from the Bauhaus Museum, debating whether or not to wander along the river for a while or head back to my quarters at Beethovenplatz, perhaps stopping by the market on the way. The thought of Herder was present with me there, for I had read and then spoken his name–an appropriate occurrence since chief among his many aims was a desire to clarify the process of thought arriving from language. My own mind shudders at that undertaking, its contents far too jumbled for any such task, its state frequently murky: a limbo inside which what is now, gone, and to come collectively play notes that are by turns dissonant and overlapping, creating a music of existence in which everything and nothing, substance and emptiness, vie for the definition of the object(s) at hand. Though my vision remains unsteady, its confusion does manage to lend a peculiar perspective to my view of the places I encounter, the terrain and man-made structures before me alternately blurred, tempered, filled by an incomplete knowledge, an image, of what once was.

Here, along this narrow middle stretch of the Holston River, is no exception: watching the water as I walk, studying or erasing the man-made features along it, contemplating the manner in which it would have been followed, skirted, viewed, in a time before roads. Although this region was still considered Indian country, Colonel James Patton, the same gentleman who would abdicate both his scalp and his life to the Shawnee at Draper’s Meadows in 1755, had begun surveying and selling areas of the Holston River region of southwestern Virginia in the 1740s. Stephen Holston (anglicized from Holstein), the German for whom the river is named, settled on its middle fork in the 1740s, raising corn for a time before selling his land and moving on. Though Holston would not retain his property and Patton was hacked to death, each met his doom, embraced his destiny, having taken the chance of achieving something new and different in a place far from others. And chance–or in their cases, desperate gambles, high odds castings of the bones–strikes me as the main justification–the most appropriate thought arriving from the apprehension of their names–for recalling their lives now. However unfounded he may have been in his myopic overvaluing of humanity, the philosopher F.C.S. Schiller was right when he maintained, “Real freedom involves indeterminism.”

Of course, freedom gives rise to many eccentricities: the preferences and actions we cannot explain, the unreasoned directives we are allowed to follow in performing the deeds that define us. And though we may share identical perspectives and courses of action, the outcomes they bear back to us often are very different. At a discount tobacco outlet I purchase a quantity of the organic dark leaf for my clay pipe, altogether aware that the habit is deemed unhealthy, yet knowing that my body’s individual response to the chemical composition of the plant is different from the reactions of others. Though ultimate outcomes often may appear similar, we all respond variously to identical things, bodily and in the abstract. The poetic thinker Stanley Burnshaw noted that lysergic acid diathylamide, when ingested, competes with serotonin for a specific enzyme. Yet, as Burnshaw explained, “No two organisms have the identical constitution or identical ways of responding, hence nobody can predict the outcome . . . whether the thought processes will be mildly or severely affected, whether the taker’s brain will be temporarily or permanently altered.” Thus, some people are intensely altered, even driven mad, by various stimuli and narcotics while others remain largely unaffected, body and brain chemistry creating in each of us different limitations and possibilities, the reactions that are ourselves.

An immediacy, a kind of case in point, is lent to this train of thought when I nearly meet my end–as violent, sudden, and senseless a potential demise as any I have yet recounted–obliviously crossing a dangerously narrow, shoulderless bridge, the road that had been utterly empty occupied suddenly by vehicles speeding toward one another from opposite directions, myself between them with nowhere to go save over the bridge. Even as a pale blue car sweeps into view from around a curve in the oncoming left lane before me, I hear the rumble of a larger-engined vehicle approaching directly from behind, having time enough only to turn and greet the considerable bulk of a dump truck and its piercing overlapped cries of brakes and sliding rubber, as it awkwardly skids to a stop perhaps five feet from me, the car sweeping past in the other lane, vague music blaring, seemingly unaware, speed unchanged. Heart fluttering, pins and needles in my legs, goose bumps everywhere, I turn and jog to the end of the bridge as the dump truck clumsily changes gears and begins rumbling forward. Trotting off the highway and onto the roadside grass where the bridge terminates, I turn to watch the large dingy red vehicle, which slows as it nears me, its driver, a bearded man in a yellow baseball cap, leaning toward the open passenger window, eyes hard. “Stay off the fucking road, dumb ass!” are the words hollered at me, before the truck engine revs and I am left alone, shaky but unharmed.

Momentarily heeding the driver’s advice, I move further from the highway and slip off my pack, removing my water bottle before unsteadily sitting down, adrenaline pumping, hands shaking slightly, forearm hair still at attention–my body’s chemical responses to the imminence of death. Rather than replaying my obliviousness, the inattention to my surroundings that had nearly been my undoing, I do my best to breathe deep and focus on where I am, the grounding quality of my surroundings. In the process of clearing my mind, an enormous weeping willow on the other side of the road attracts my attention. Like many other people, I have always considered willows beautiful and mysterious, mostly on account of their long drooping branches which hide their trunks, the true centers of their beings, not unlike long-haired humans concealing their eyes and faces behind wavy locks. There is something calming about willows, something sleepy and secret, and I am glad to have this one here to invite my consideration, subdue my pulse. It has always struck me that on some primitive level long hair continues to suggest a nameless fascination for humans in the same mysterious manner that willows do. In fact, in most cultures the transition from long to short hair among males occurred along with a shift in overall perspective from the magical to the worldly, a cutting away of nature’s perceived excess, a shearing of the animal. For a man to have long hair after this cultural change was to be considered quaint, needlessly whimsical, feeble-minded. As the old Russian proverb goes, “Hair long, mind short.” Of course, it was acceptable for women to cultivate their locks since in most cultures they were expected and encouraged to remain ignorant and capricious, defined by their animal bodies. Yet, for all this negativity of connotation, hair in abundance, especially for artists, remains an indeterminate symbol and guardian of that original human magic, of the unshorn body and mind–a curtain of wavy strands, behind which glint a pair of indefinite orbs.

All this is not to say that, as much as any other physical characteristic, hair does not remain an incidental ornament, a superficiality, of our literal lives. Against the prospect of death–of meeting our ends on roads, hills, rivers; of my own long blonde hair, lying bloody with the rest of me, not unlike one of the many mangled animal corpses I have encountered, on some narrow southwestern Virginia bridge–the patterns of our lives exist, draw, and repeat themselves on much deeper levels. The German writer Ernst Jünger, who lived to the age of one hundred and two after fighting in both world wars (receiving wounds on fourteen different occasions), experimenting with powerful psychoactive drugs, and traveling extensively, concluded at the age of ninety, “If a man’s life shows an overall unity, this is due to his character. You can be thrown into the most diverse situations. Yet what we might call the ‘melody of life’ has been there from the very outset. And until the ship goes down, we keep playing the very same tune, as they did on the Titanic.” Though our vessels be ever sinking, we hum our individual refrains even as the waters of nonexistence rise about our ankles. And except for those of us who resolve to throw themselves overboard, to dictate the nature and hour of their drowning, we have no real alternative but to continue on our sinking ships, or, if our bodies make landfall, to keep our pace, our tune and time, in the midst of our journeys, though each footstep, another spent moment of life, brings us closer to death.



The word Chilhowie means “Valley of Many Deer” but I do not perceive any while passing through the village that bears that name, though I encounter and enter in succession the Tastee Freeze, Food City, and Speedwash Laundrymat, each a useful stop albeit experienced in a kind of somnambulist haze. Whether or not I am still unconsciously stunned at nearly having been crushed by a dump truck or simply worn down by the constant mental toil of close observation, I cannot determine. While remarking from time to time on the trials of the body, I have considered little the effects of long journeys on the mind, especially those undertakings in which the intellect is not only expected to process its surroundings for itself, but expend additional energy attempting to conceptualize them in such a way as to achieve a coherence useful to others. In general, extensive foot hiking is really more a matter of the mind than the body. It is not athletic in the least. Good athletes are fast, strong, agile, and possessed of acute hand-eye coordination. None of these qualities are required in order to walk great distances, to bear the firmament as it bears you over a span of days. Provided that your body is more or less functional, the key ingredient is merely to be possessed of the will to do it. But, of course, even the firmest of wills wanders and wanes eventually, the process of which I am perhaps becoming a victim at last.

Along with the old bodily plagues that always accompany this kind of travel–being overly hot, cold, wet, hungry, thirsty, constantly fatigued–I have been eyed with malignant suspicion, stalked, showered in trash and fuck yous, and nearly run over–all of which conspire to wear upon the senses over time. Yet, these are not experiences to take pride in or perversely celebrate in the tradition of Dostoevskey’s underground man, that alienated self-conscious cynic who in sneering at humanity’s barbarity and inviting its rancor only succeeded in painfully disconnecting and dehumanizing himself. They are, instead, invitations, reminders, of the tenuous nature of our being, the vividness of our interactions in the now, which, in turn, provides us with a greater appreciation and valuing of our future lives–a kind of hope–as well as those already lived: the patterned existences of the past. As the theological philosopher Franz Rosenzweig said, “To escape the power of the past, to transcend the law which constitutes causation, the moment must, at each instant, be reborn. The future is the inexhaustible well from which moments are drawn; every instant new-born moments rise and replace the moments disappearing into the past.” So moments cling to us through memory even as the essence of them is abdicated forever, continually replaced by the unlimited reservoirs of that which is yet to come.

Among the spent moments, here in this place, is the now-distant measure of time expended by Dr. Thomas Walker, who in 1750 had helped Samuel Stalnaker build a log cabin nearby–the farthest western settlement of that period. Stalnaker had been one of the first Germans, along with Jost Hite and several others, to enter the Shenandoah Valley in the 1730s. However, his decision to eventually part company with other families and venture so far south would have grave consequences. In the mid-1750s he and his family would be taken prisoner during a Shawnee raid and though Stalnaker himself would escape captivity, his wife and son, Adam, were killed. Against all threat of danger and death, all sense and caution, something seemed to draw Stalnaker to the personal trials, independence, and isolation demanded by the frontier wilderness. Could it have been that in naming his son Adam he hoped to cultivate his own edenic garden here, himself its maker and master? On account of the language barrier and other cultural differences–as well as the practical collective endeavors of planting, harvesting, slaughtering livestock, and raising houses and barns–German settlers usually moved together in groups, reluctant to strike out on their own. Yet Stalnaker was a resourceful hunter, trapper, and guide who often strayed into the wilderness alone for long periods of time. He was the first European to come upon the Cumberland Gap and knew the ancestral Indian paths of eastern Kentucky long before Daniel Boone ever ventured into that area. In fact, Dr. Walker would ask him to guide an exploratory party into the Kentucky country in 1750. Although Stalnaker declined to accompany Walker, on such excursions he would have worn a cape to wrap about himself in foul weather and which also served to cover a loose-fitting shirt of deerskin or linsey. Clasped over the shirt, about his waist, would have been a belt of leather from which hung a hunting knife and possibly a tomahawk. Somewhere on his person–whether in a sling, pouch, or sack–he would have carried provisions: dried meat, meal, pemmican, salt. His breeches and leggings would have been of deerskin and possibly his shoes, though he may have had means enough to purchase boots. In cold weather Stalnaker probably would have worn a cap wrought of racoon or beaver hide. However, his most crucial implements, both for hunting and personal safety, would have been his flintlock rifle–probably a jaegar, a product of Pennsylvania-German gunsmiths–and the accompanying powder horn and shot pouch.

Like many frontiersmen, Stalnaker’s relationship with Indians was ambivalent. He amicably treated with them during his travels and his house was an occasional meeting place for Indian leaders and His Majesties’ Commissioners. On the other hand, Stalnaker was deprived of his family by the Shawnee and later pressed for the construction of forts in the area. Over the course of his many journeys, Stalnaker likely came to understand their views and ways better than all but a handful of colonials, yet what this knowledge ultimately meant to him remains a mystery. Bloody episodes between settlers and Indians were rarer and defensive measures later to arrive in this particular southwestern portion of Virginia. In fact, south of the vicinity of Stalnaker’s dwelling, I come upon the site of Fort Kilmachronan, not built until 1776 and of which there now remains no sign–its rough wooden beams and boards long since rotted, or carried away to lend heat to a fireplace or material for some other building: as invisible and forgotten as the events that once took place here, as capricious and mysterious as Stalnaker himself.



Part of our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical and irresponsible and when it is an expression of our deepest tendencies and self. The other, of course, is the fundamental reckoning and balancing of all we touch, see, feel, and otherwise perceive. Somewhere between these two phenomena lies my own minor decision to enter the Ernie Sullins Outlet on the outskirts of Abingdon, a kind of thrift store, where I buy a shirt to replace one that has become almost threadbare, offering little cushion against the rubbing of my pack. Incidentally, much of Abingdon’s early history too, including its original naming, is heavily steeped in whimsey and curious perception, those indefinite catalysts by which things come to be known. Walking through town, I encounter the site of Black’s Fort, named for Joseph Black, who built the structure in 1774 for the purpose of protecting local residents from Indian attacks. Yet, it was Daniel Boone who had passed through the area much earlier, in 1760, and given it the provocative name Wolf Hills after a pack of cave-dwelling wolves attacked his dogs. Such creatures were common in the area and a nuisance to settler’s livestock, but as early as the end of the eighteenth century their population had been greatly diminished. In 1785 the Virginia General Assembly raised the bounty on mature wolves to more than three hundred pounds of tobacco per head, the dark leaf preferable to American and British currency, both of which were in use at the time. Bounty hunters brought great sacks full of decapitated wolf heads to outposts like Fort Chiswell, where they would be reimbursed for their morbid labors. The sack set upon a great wooden table, the putrid heads spilled forth, dried or rotting, in various states of decomposition, a dream feast for maggots, while a government official busily recorded the number and whether or not the skulls were full-grown or merely those of pups, since the latter fetched a much lower price.

Like many other places, modern Abingdon is seemingly oblivious to the more grisly and capricious nuances of its past, offering its history instead in a shiny upbeat package, always positioning its best side toward the highway–a strategy that appears to have worked rather well, for on this sunny day of late summer slick-looking tourists abound, ambling along streets, large shopping bags in hand, full, I suspect, of local souvenirs. I buy some perishable keepsakes of my own at the farmer’s market, well-shaped creations of the soil of Washington County, its minerals and other qualities drawn from the ground by the shallow root systems of plants and fruit trees, lodging in the buds as they swell, plucked along with the fruit–brought here to be sold and, in turn, consumed by me: passed into my body and born away.

I am glad to depart Abingdon and relieved when the town’s moderately heavy tourist traffic is funneled back onto 81. Local fruit having failed to appease my hunger entirely, I undergo a greasy calorie infusion south of town at Hi-Lo Burger before pausing again, a few more miles down the road, at Red Barn Tobacco–an outlet and gift shop located inside a large converted barn built originally in the German style. Soon thereafter begins the outlying sprawl of Bristol, land and businesses in transition, physical features and manmade monikers cropping up or vanishing into oblivion forever. Among them the heaped ruins of the Robert E. Lee Motel, while close by a relatively new looking Christ the King Apartments appears to enjoy a healthy collection of tenants, though it too, like all these local human phenomena, myself included, remains in my peculiar mind’s eye only dust on a dragonfly’s wing, matter riding the flutter of time.

Inside these outward constructions, those still inhabited, are the people and lives that dwell and unfold within, the worried faces entering and emerging from doorways, bodies hustling to and from their motorized vehicles, eyes and expressions bent upon something other than what is before them–the abstract anxieties of civilization. Rosenzweig warned, “Man should remain human; he should not be converted into a thing, a part of the world, prey to its organization,” yet freedom from man’s system usually involves some kind of successful preliminary negotiation of it–an intervaled capitulation to the rules, a planned deferral, until one has the means to defy or ignore it. This is an opportunity those crushed by the system at the beginning are never afforded, while the rest of us play along, or pretend to, with the banalities of society, paying lip service to that lesser, crude beauty which constitutes human culture.

The ground begins to fall away toward Bristol, which was surveyed in 1749 under the name Sapling Grove Tract. A few decades later, in 1771, a Welsh-descended Marylander named Evan Shelby, a veteran of Lord Dunmore’s War destined to become Kentucky’s first governor, would build a substantial fort and store on the banks of Beaver Creek which would collectively come to be known as Shelby’s Station. Tract or station, then and now, Bristol has always been a popular stopping spot–a place between places–for travelers drawn elsewhere. Today, the city is split into neat halves by the Virginia-Tennessee state line, home to a kind of limbo of identity, hemmed in geologically by a series of knobs to the south and east, and the foothills of Walker Mountain to the north. Feeling the press of terrain, the dimming of daylight, knowing the Tennessee line to be near, I stop to pass the night among a specific group of modern thru-travelers: the motorhome contingent at the RV-laden Lee Highway Campground. Massive vessels, drawn side by side, their rope-like power cords plugged into nearby outlets, these Recreation Vehicles resemble so many anchored boats come in to port, tethered for some indeterminate span of time, resting in this inland harbor–a respite from the great storm and tide of the interstate. And just as sailors and fishermen may socialize and interact at a dockside inn, so the various RV operators swap food or discuss vehicle maintenance while the evening grills are fired and children run about–an adult, here or there, embarking on or returning from a walk to alleviate a long day of stiff chair-bound travel; myself, by contrast, sprawled in the dampening grass, savoring the body’s stillness, absorbing the rewards of motionlessness.

Sitting beside my tent, pipe lit, drowsy in the midst of the motion surrounding me, the flutter in twilight before night, I glimpse an enormously obese man climbing laboriously out of his Recreation Vehicle. From his features and hue it is easy to discern that he is of Indian ancestry–the only such person I have encountered over the course of my entire journey. For all his ponderous bulk, he walks softly with a slight limp, attracting no one’s attention, disappearing in the direction of the main office. Painted on the side of his RV in large purple cursive are the words: Tenaco’s Ride.

I empty my pipe bowl in the grass beside my tent and lean back to watch for the arrival of the stars, the heavens dimming above the last of a pink horizon, waiting for the mosquitoes to set in on me in earnest. Despite everything that has passed, the skies are all but the same in this still new century, the signs and objects we ponder now in the heavens nearly identical to those gazed upon by the North American travelers of the distant past, Indian or settler, bound in the same direction along a path, a wagon road, a highway, an interstate–Athowominee, which is becoming to me more and more an idea, a direction, a bearing, than an actual road: as instinctual and indefinite, as unknowable, as the senses of the animals who first established it, migrating vaguely, joined in time, followed, by the bipeds who sought their flesh, their fur. Since that time in which it was established by the pounding of hooves, the soft pad of feet, Athowominee ever has welcomed and borne new travelers: animals, Indians, settlers, and modern wayfarers, propelled in their chariots of fiberglass and steel on an all but invisible route of antiquity clad now in concrete and asphalt.

Athowominee, whatever it once was, is gone, along with all those beings who suffered and died, the tears and blood of millions, along it. Yet an idea of it, a roughly translated spirit, remains, palpable even among these modern travelers–their possessions, their lives, packed into RVs, as once they would have been into horse-drawn wagons. And despite our divergent means of travel, among them I feel a kinship, for the road beckons to us all–our immediate hopes, lives, drawn out upon it. Though it is likely that none of us will ever see each other again, tonight we sleep close together and on the morrow the road that lies before shall be the one that each of us embarks upon. All of that, however, remains woven, for now, into the as yet unrealized unfolding of a day still to come; in the twinkling of the present, sleep arrives with the stars and takes us: the slumber of the weary traveler bears us our separate ways.