Ameritrekking and Highpointing: Discovering America the Beautiful: Trek, #1

By Joseph G. Whelan

Ameritrekking and Highpointing: Discovering America the Beautiful is the tale of Accountant Joe, a corporate cubicle rat who was told he had saved too much vacation time and had to use it up.  So he did.  He hit the road with a map and a camera and a notebook.  He returned weeks later after driving 8,000 miles through 23 states.  Along the way he found friends, national parks, Native American battlefields, rivers, canyons, craters, mountains, deserts, wildflowers, amber waves of grain, roaring diesel trucks, and silent forests reaching to the horizon.  He called this Ameritrekking and kept traveling year after year until he had driven over 120,000 miles—halfway to the Moon—and kept on going.

Every state has one unique point higher than all other points.  It is called the highpoint and trying to go to them is called Highpointing.  On this first Ameritrek he went to the highpoints of South Dakota and Texas.  Now more than two decades later he has been to 45 of the 50 highpoints.  Some highpoints are remote; several are major mountains; all are marvelous.

Experience the adventure yourself—buy Ameritrekking and Highpointing: Discovering America the Beautiful today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Whelan
• Release date: Jun 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393748182

Book preview

Ameritrekking and Highpointing

Discovering America the Beautiful

By

Joseph G. Whelan

Copyright © 2013 by Joseph G. Whelan

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-0-9910222-0-5

I urge you to dream—I did, and one day I found myself standing on the surface of the moon.

—Gene Cernan

(Apollo 17 astronaut)

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Take risks.  A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for.  Sail out to sea and do new things.

—Grace Hopper

(US Navy Rear Admiral)

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May your life be filled with highpoints.

—Don W. Holmes

(President, Highpointers Club)

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1: The Endless Road

2: The First Trip, the First Day, the First Mile

3: The Journey Begins

4: An Unusual Marriage

5: New Roads

6: Across the Wide Missouri

7: Lakota, Dakota

8: All Hell Broke Loose

9: Paha Sapa

10: Tunkashila

11: Monumental Monuments

12: Gold Fever

13: Bear Lodge

14: The Battle of Greasy Grass Creek

15: The Battle of the Little Bighorn

16: Going-to-the-Sun

17: Heart of the Awl

18: The River of No Return

19: Hell

20: Craters of the Moon

21: Desert Lands

22: A Canyon Grand

23: The Steel Rain

24: Sonora

25: The Man Who Smiles

26: The Top of Texas

27: High Rocks

28: He Has Looked for Death

29: He Has Looked for Life

99: More to Explore

1: The Endless Road

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Still, that road not taken beckons, and it will beckon forever.

—Kent Nerburn

Road Angels

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One thing leads to another.  A small change today can cause a big change tomorrow.  That’s how I went from a cubicle-bound accountant and salaryman to an occasional wandering Ameritrekker and highpointer.

What is an Ameritrekker and what is a highpointer?  Both will be explained in this book, but beware; books change lives.  That’s how it all started with me: just by reading a book.

I’ll get back to the book soon but the day in 1995 when my boss called me into her office and started yanking my chain I wasn’t thinking about the book.  The chain-yanks weren’t as bad as they could have been and I liked my boss but what she told me did upset the applecart of my day.  As I walked back to the four gray-carpeted walls that served as a workspace, I had plenty to think about and I knew life was about to change.  At that time I was working as an accountant and computer manager at a Florida resort.  This resort was on Panama City Beach in the northwest part of the state far from Miami and Disneyland and Cape Canaveral and the Everglades and Key West and the other famous places that spring to the minds of non-Floridians when Florida is mentioned.  Northwest Florida is a humbler, rural area sometimes referred to as the Redneck Riviera because its white sand beaches have been traditional vacationing grounds for salt-of-the-earth folks from Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and the rest of the Southeast.  Those white sands had been keeping me employed for eight years on the day I was summoned into the supervisor’s office.

The resort ran around the clock and I was accustomed to being called in to handle computer problems night and day seven days a week.  During my years of employment I had never taken more than a day of vacation at a time; instead the owner of the resort had converted some of my unused days into extra pay and the rest had been allowed to accumulate beyond the restrictions of the employee handbook, an arrangement the two of us found agreeable.  But now the owner had changed his mind and the result was that I had been called to a short meeting with my boss and informed that there would be no more extra pay and no more additional accumulation of vacation days.  Furthermore, I was required to whittle away at the weeks of extra vacation time I had saved up.  In short, I was ordered to take a vacation.  A local computer-maintenance technician would be contracted to provide coverage while I was away.

Ironically, there was a culture of overwork at the resort, so when I tossed out the ridiculous figure of two weeks as a possible duration of the mandatory vacation, I was surprised when my boss merely hesitated for a moment before acquiescing.  I skedaddled before she had a chance to change her mind.  Two weeks it was!

Being ordered to go on vacation is not exactly the end of the world.  As chain-yanks went, it was possible to imagine much worse.  Walking back to my assigned desk, I realized I did not know how to plan my own vacation, never having done such a thing before.  But how hard could it be?  Surely, it could not be terribly difficult, right?  And, with two weeks to play with, I could go anywhere.

I had been hired originally as an accountant and then after a couple of years invited to become the resort’s first computer operations manager, although initially I protested saying that I knew nothing about computers.  Neither does anybody else around here, the boss lady said, so good luck and best wishes to you.  The roads that ran through computer land proved to be rocky and potholed in places but I learned to drive them anyway.  Common sense told me that learning to drive the roads in vacationland had to be easier.  After all, half-dead old guys did it all the time in boxy, top-heavy RVs (recreational vehicles).  The meeting with my boss happened on a Friday, so my plan was to buy a map of the United States on the way home, study it over the weekend, and come up with a route and a schedule by Monday.  It was late summer and the roads everywhere were free of snow.  I could drive wherever I wanted.  I had two weeks of unrestrained freedom.  What could possibly go wrong?

(At the time of this memoir, many of the events described were already almost two decades in the past.  Despite their age, they are accurate.  I took extensive notes by hand with a notebook and pencil throughout each trip and then after returning spent much time turning the notes and pictures and memories into extensive travel journals, many of them hundreds of pages in length.  Together they total about a million words.  The goal after each trip was to create a written document at once comprehensive and correct.  This book is based on those lengthy documents.  The goal of this book is to faithfully recreate the feel of the first trip as I experienced it at the time.  The point here is that in 1995, I did not use Internet maps.  Yes, kids, back in 1995 we dealt with witches, bubonic plague, and paper maps.  If you attempt to create your own Ameritrekking memories in the Modern World, your results may vary.)

As per the plan, I stopped to buy a Rand McNally road map on the way home.  The store had two types of maps: a spiral-bound version about the size of a regular piece of copier paper and an oversized version with more detail.  I went with the smaller map because the spiral binding allowed it to stay flat and open to any particular page, which I thought might come in handy living life behind the wheel.  The vehicle I would be driving was a Ford Festiva, one of the smallest cars on the road at that time, if not the smallest, and I had a sneaking suspicion that space was going to be at a premium during the two weeks I would be rolling around.  As an added bonus, the booklet had condensed maps of Mexico and Canada.  The back cover was an advertisement for Motel 6 showing where their motels were located along the interstates; it was another map altogether, not able to show much detail on its single page but highlighting the entire interstate system.  Perhaps it would be useful; perhaps it wouldn’t.  The booklet as a whole had an interesting title: Deluxe Road Atlas & Travel Guide 1995 and I called it the RAT map.  With the word Deluxe in the title, it had to be good, right?  In any case, I had a collection of state maps.  Now all I needed was a route to follow.

Several years previously I had returned home in the middle of the day after a long and stressful night of programming a computer during the few hours early in the morning when it was not in use.  With my mind fuzzy from lack of sleep and jet lag I checked the mail to find that a tourist brochure I had ordered touting the wonders of the Northwest Territories in Canada had arrived.  Too keyed up to sleep, I flipped through the brochure entranced by the descriptions of faraway places with exotic names: Yellowknife, the Great Slave Lake, the Yukon, and the Arctic Ocean.

That Friday night, I quickly realized that even having two weeks to play with, Arctic Canada was simply too remote to drive to and still have time to explore and then drive all the way back to Florida.  The logical thing to do is to fly into Yellowknife, the oddly named capital of the territory.  While I have no unusual fear of flying, and in fact greatly enjoy flying, I wanted to drive.  The Northwest Territories would have to wait.  After more than 15 long vacations and more than 100,000 driving miles on the odometer and more than 365 days of living life on the road, they’re still waiting.

The next idea was to generate a list of potential places to see and then pick and choose.  After about an hour at that game I realized that there are a lot of places to see in the United States, way too many to have any hope of visiting each one in two weeks.  Really, you couldn’t see all there is to see in this country in two lifetimes.  So much for Plan B.  I went on to Plan C.

Plan C involved choosing one best place to visit and then centering the rest of the trip on that area.  I couldn’t do it.  No matter how I shuffled the agenda, there were consistently two places I wanted to visit: the Little Bighorn National Monument in Montana and Saguaro National Park in Arizona.  The reader who is a little unsure as to where Montana and Arizona are need to know for the moment only that they are not just far from Florida but also far from one another.  Making what I hoped were reasonable guesses as to how much I could—or wanted—to drive each day, I didn’t think I could pull off both visits in a two-week trip without being so rushed that I felt like I was still at work, and what would be the point of that?

If you are that reader who is uncertain where some of the states are in the 50 United States, don’t get down on yourself; I was the same way in the beginning.  Eventually I visited each of the states in the Lower Forty-Eight and now know the map quite well.  If you stick with me, you’ll end up the same way, even if you never get behind the wheel of a vehicle.

Perhaps you are also confused as to the difference between a national park and a national monument.  Here too I was unsure.  There is a bureaucratic distinction having to do with why Congress established one or the other, parks being established to protect scenic wonders and monuments to protect areas of scientific or historic importance, generally.  Over time, Congress has muddied the waters by upgrading some of the monuments to parks.  Eventually I learned that from our viewpoint as visitors, there isn’t much if any practical difference.  Generally speaking, monuments seem to have fewer tourist facilities.  A cynical man would say that parks have better toilets in their visitor centers than monuments, but I am not that man.

All sarcasm aside, both are well worth visiting.  There is not a unit of the National Park Service I have regretted seeing.  The only regret is that my time at each one was limited.

Why did I place so much value on going to Little Bighorn and Saguaro?  In the case of Little Bighorn this stemmed from a long-standing interest in the history of Native Americans.  In the case of Saguaro National Park, I just wanted to see some of the big saguaro cacti; but I wanted to see them a lot.

Saguaro National Park, by the way, had just been upgraded from Saguaro National Monument the year before I went there, in 1994.  I had no knowledge of the change when I hit the road because my deluxe RAT continued to show the park as a monument.  All the time I thought I was at a Monument I was really at a Park.  This had absolutely no bearing on the enjoyment of my visit.  Nothing bad transpired because I happened to be misinformed: no crack in the earth opened to swallow me up, no third eye appeared on my forehead, and I left with pretty pictures and marvelous memories.  The bottom line is that you may think of a National Monument as just another National Park, although with an odd, bureaucratic name.  The wonders you came to see will be just as wonderful.

So I abandoned Plan C and moved on to Plan D.  Plan D was to make a great triangular circuit of the country with the distant vertices being Montana and Arizona.  Plan D involved asking my boss for permission to take off for three weeks instead of two.  No one had ever done this at work; it was unheard of.  Hell’s bells, no one had ever taken off for two weeks at a stretch.  But since my boss had not really flinched when I asked for two weeks, I was determined to ask for three.  I had in mind advice from some dead writer guy:

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.

—Joseph Wood Krutch

I believed I had little to lose by asking, so I decided to make like a cat.  On Monday I briefly explained my problem with a country too big and a vacation too short, and I asked for a third week.  This time it seemed like my boss hesitated for several seconds.  I had anticipated some resistance, so in the pregnant silence I tossed in the prepared statement of an offer to call back to work once a week, more often if there were an ongoing problem.  She agreed, and as before, I departed quickly before she had a chance to change her mind.  Plan D was in effect!  Three weeks!

I did take three weeks off.  I did make a giant circuit of the country, rolling through 23 states and driving over 8,000 miles before it was all over.  When I got back I tried to talk other people at work into doing likewise, both for their own good and as protective coloration for me, in hopes of making another long trip the next year, which I had already set my heart on.  Generally, other people commented favorably on my suggestion but did not act upon it.  There was always a reason: the spouse would object, or family obligations intervened, or something.  In many cases I suspected the individual feared his position would be undermined by demonstrating that the company could get by without him for an extended time.  I knew I was running that risk but I ran it anyway.  Years later, when I finally left the company, it was for reasons that had nothing to do with the long vacations. 

Nor did my sudden departure have anything to do with the discovery on the part of upper management that Joe Accountant was not indispensable to the operation of the business, a delusion under which fortunately he never labored.  In one way I was fortunate to work for a large, family-owned resort.  Operating multiple properties, employing hundreds of people, and renting thousands of rooms, it was large enough to exhibit some of the attributes of modern, professionally managed corporations.  On the other hand, it was small enough that despite the complete lack of desire on my part, I ended up getting promoted to the governing body of the entire enterprise, called the executive committee, a seat of which I unhappily filled for six miserable years.  I saw how things were done under a general manager who had been formally trained in up-to-date methods during his previous career at Marriott International, which is a big company, big enough that its ownership shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange, under the symbol MAR.  I learned a lot of things, enough to write a separate book, but for purposes of this book, what I learned right away—in fact, I already suspected as much, but sitting on the executive committee confirmed my suspicion—was that employees are not considered indispensable; employees are considered disposable.  Yes, Pardner, in the morning when you look in the mirror to put your makeup on, or shave your whiskers off—or both, not that there is anything wrong with that—you are looking at one of the disposable employees.  No moral judgment of the present economic system is intended here.  It is what it is, and I tell you that as a gimlet-eyed accountant who has complete confidence in his assessment because he has been there and done that.

Knowing the above can frighten or empower you.  The choice is up to you.  My advice is to embrace the knowledge and let it empower you.  Let it fill you with the courage to take a reasonable amount of time off, if that is what you truly wish to do, and then go Ameritrekking or do some other fulfilling thing that is for your benefit, not somebody else’s.  Be not afraid that in your absence someone will discover that you are not indispensable to the people who run the organization.  They don’t need to discover it because no one has that delusion anyway, except maybe you.

Try something a little crazy now and then.  You only live once.

There is one piece of unfinished business to deal with before we hit the road.  I promised in the beginning that I’d get back to a certain book.  That book is Journey into Summer by Edwin Way Teale, another writer guy who speaks to us from the grave.  Journey into Summer is one of a four-part series detailing Teale’s lengthy trips across the country with his wife exploring wild places.  Each trip lasted three months and was timed to precisely match one of the four seasons of the year.  Together they drove over 100,000 miles, a number that seemed unbelievable when I first came across it.  In the beginning I had no inkling that I would drive a similar distance and also spend a year on the road.  In his book Teale mentioned a friend who had driven even more miles than he and his wife had.  This friend—George H. Peters—and his adventuresome hobby were described in a chapter entitled High Rocks.  The hobby involved attempting to go to the highest natural geographic point in each state.  In some states, these points are the peaks of high mountains.  The chapter included a black-and-white picture of Peters next to a display of high rocks.  The rocks were interesting, and so was Peters.  Peters did not look like a mountaineer; he was not young and did not have the physique of an athlete.  While I was not old, I was no longer young either and no one had ever accused me of being an athlete; the most physical work I did involved changing out the boxes of computer paper for the resort’s high-speed line printer.  Peters did not live in the mountains; he lived at sea level on Long Island, New York.  I also lived at sea level (full disclosure: I live 13 feet above sea level).  Peters was not rich; he squeezed his far-ranging hobby into annual middle-class road trips.  The similarities between Peters and me didn’t require an Einstein to perceive; this was good because I was no more an Einstein than I was an athlete.  I was Joe Salaryman, accountant and keyboard monkey.

I read about this exciting quest years before my first big road trip but the memory never entirely faded away.  When it came time to planning the trip, I added two such highest points to the itinerary.  This decision, made quite casually, was to have important consequences.

At the time of the first trip, I called these highest points high rocks.  Later, I found out there is a small club devoted to pursuing this hobby, and the term that club members use is highpoint.  In the era before easy access to the World Wide Web, I generated my own list of highpoints using the Rand McNally paper maps; Rand McNally had begun showing the highpoints as black triangles with the elevation in feet printed nearby.  They provided no other information and I simply listed the triangles in ascending order by height, and picked two that seemed not too high along the route of the first trip.  I vaguely hoped to do at least one of them without attaching much importance to, or knowing anything, about either one.  They were simply black triangles floating in the city-free open spaces on two of the maps.  As to whether roads existed in the area (they often didn’t on the maps), or whether there were trails leading to the top, or whether special climbing gear and the skill to use it was required to get to the highpoints, I had not the slightest idea.

These days the entire list is available at the click of a computer mouse.  One thing I learned about highpointing is that whether the list is downloaded from the Internet or generated by hand, acquiring the list is the easiest part of the hobby.  I am not trying to frighten the reader; quite the contrary, highpointing is a wonderful hobby for the average Jo or Joe to pursue, even if she or he discovers that some of the peaks remain always out of reach.  There are five I have not been to and perhaps never will go to and yet I have no regrets.  Highpointing has proved costly and challenging and I have scared myself a few times and hurt myself a few times; nevertheless, I must say, looking back on the whole affair, that it was all Very Good.  But read on and decide for yourself.

2: The First Trip, the First Day, the First Mile

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The stable wears out a horse more than the road.

—French proverb

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No matter how far you drive, you always find your own self in the car with you.  In my case, there was always an accountant with me, making note of various numerical points of interest and writing them down.  I thought they added value to the trip.  Therefore, numbers will crop up from time to time in the book.  You can safely skip over them if desired.  There will not be a test at the end.  You will not be asked to take any square roots.  (Where would you take them?)

Before I begin, let me make a note about the notes.  I grew up in a place and an age before the metric system became the norm.  It’s still not the norm in my little part of the world.  I once made a conscious effort to switch about a quarter-century ago, writing a lengthy metric-centric letter to my brother Bob who is also an aerospace engineer, thinking a numbers guy would be receptive.  The response that came back was not positive, so I gave up and reverted to what I felt more comfortable with anyway.  For readers outside the United States, I have this to say: You’re going to get the whole nine yards in non-metric form—sorry. 

In particular, you’re going to read about gasoline measured in US gallons, distances measured in miles, fuel efficiency reported in terms of miles per gallon, and temperatures recorded in degrees Fahrenheit.  Also, I use the terms gasoline and gas interchangeably, even though the gas of interest in this book is very much a liquid, and not a gas.

Something else that’s distinctly odd but fortunately doesn’t make much difference is that motor fuel in the United States is rounded down by one-tenth of a penny, the smallest US coin.  This was a marketing stratagem adopted a long time ago and never abandoned to make the price seem a bit lower.  For example, when a motorist pulls up to a filling station advertising gas at $3.999 a gallon, or one-tenth of a cent lower than the effective price of $4.00 a gallon, the buying public has become accustomed to speaking of the price as $3.99 a gallon, a full penny lower, whereas in fact it is only one-tenth of a penny lower.  The good news is that this has no practical effect.  If he cares at all, the non-US reader can simply add $0.01 to the prices I mention.  For example, when I say gas cost $3.99 in Searchlight, it really cost almost $4.00; or when I say it cost $4.00 in Needles, it really cost almost $4.01.

It may be of interest to note that I paid $1.15 a gallon for the last tank of gas I bought in Florida.  Of course, the precise cost was $1.159 a gallon

Searchlight and Needles are real places, by the way, located in the states of Nevada and California, respectively.  We will be driving through both a little later.

Finally, I don’t like ante and post meridiem times, AMs and PMs.  Instead, I use the 24-hour daily clock, which adds 12 to each hour after high noon and leaves each hour before unscathed.  In this system 9:00 AM stays about the same, turning into 0900 hours but 1:00 PM becomes 1300 hours, 10:00 PM becomes 2200 hours, and so forth.  Midnight becomes 2400 or 0000 hours, depending on your pleasure.  I think 0000 makes more sense and is a pretty cool number to boot, what with all those zeroes; besides, the next minute is logically 0001.  In this system there is never any confusion between 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM, only the unique and crystal-clear times of 0800 and 2000 hours.

Having said all of the above, here are the basic statistics of the first Ameritrek:

States visited:  23

Miles driven:  8,407

Days on the road:  19

From time to time I will write as if you are going on a similar adventure even though you may never do so.  Just skip over those parts if you like or read them for armchair entertainment.  If you do decide to go one day, whatever I recommend you can follow or modify or ignore as you see fit.  My father, who has left this vale of tears but who used to earn good money as a consultant selling advice to other people, once gave me advice about advice:

Advice is worth what you pay for it.

—William Thomas Whelan

Preparations were lengthy.  The hassles of escaping from responsibilities at work seemed insurmountable at times.  In addition to being the head computer person, I still had accounting duties and accounting is filled with many monthly deadlines.  At home, there were new trip-related problems.  I dealt with them by preparing a list of tasks that had to be accomplished and then worked diligently at checking off every item.  There were a lot of late nights at work, followed by rushed evening meals, followed by actual trip work, sometimes going on till midnight.  It was hectic and exhausting and often I wondered whether it was worth it.

There was a big part of me that didn’t want to go.  Strange as that sounds, it is absolutely true.  I feared the unknown.  I was afraid of a vehicle breakdown far from home.  I was harried by vague but persistent fears that I cannot at this time even describe, although they were important then.  Had a problem come up at work that necessitated canceling the trip, I don’t believe I would have minded so much as been relieved.  I had done an overly good job of turning myself into a cubicle rat.  The work devil that I knew was less fearsome than the vacation devil that I did not.  The rat was afraid to leave its cage.

The key to breaking the chains, once permission was obtained, was to make steady progress on the to-do lists.  I recommend that the lists be in writing, whether paper or electronic, and that new tasks be added when they come to mind.  A task thought of but not written down and then forgotten and not done is—not done.  In the future as I became more efficient, I found that it was easiest to start with the lists from the previous year and then modify them as necessary for the present year.  So while each year involved a lot of work, the first year was the worst and future years were somewhat easier both in terms of actual labor as well as psychological stress.  Using lists will help you feel more in control and compel you to get things done before time runs out.  Another benefit is that if, once on the road you realize that you’ve botched or forgotten something, at least you’ll have the comfort of knowing you did your best.  The last thing to realize about long lists is that at least one thing—or two or three, maybe even five or ten things—always gets forgotten.  Learn to live with your own imperfections and do your best as you go along.  The first Americans came to this part of the world at least ten thousand years ago equipped with little more than stone tools, open fires, and limited Internet connectivity; it can be done.  I think it is safe to assume that improvisation was an important coping strategy back then.  It still is today.

If we don't have it, we don't need it.

—Daniel Fagre

(Hiking in

Glacier National Park,

Montana)

The to-do list with respect to the vehicle is important.  What you should put on your vehicle list will depend on the age of the machine, your knowledge of its internal workings, the nature of the journey, and your financial resources.  You will probably have to make some judgment calls.  Personally, even a single new sound or smell or feel oppresses my mind and the farther from home the greater the oppression.  I have frittered away the better part of a day at a shop ten miles from home and a thousand miles.  Neither was fun, but worrying the hours away at the distant garage was a lot less fun.

Avoidable problems should be avoided.

—Joe Ameritrekker

The Ford Festiva was loaded to the gills.  It had no trunk and the hatchback area was crammed almost to the point where vision rearward was obstructed, but not quite.  There was no room at all in the back seats, and the front passenger seat had largely been taken over, too.  There was no physical space remaining to take on a hitchhiker, even had I been so inclined, which I was not.  The three biggest items were a suitcase, a large ice chest that contained no ice but lots of snacks, and a six-gallon plastic jug filled with water.  The thin-walled water jug cost five dollars at Whale-Mart and bulged so much when I filled it that I feared it would burst inside the car, disgorging nearly 50 pounds of water; I set it aside in the garage for several days as a test before transferring it to the car.  It weighed so much I found it hard to move.

You will note that sometimes I refer to the Wal-Mart Stores corporation as Whale-Mart, not because of any disdain for the entity but because I prefer my version of the name: its whale-sized stores with their whale-sized parking lots deserve a whale-sized name.

While I was shopping for the trip at Whale-Mart, I thought it would be a good idea to prepare for the rigors of highpointing, but I had no idea what those might be.  After a good half-hour of bothersome dithering, I purchased a ten-dollar book bag, a cheap compass, a water canteen, and a pair of thick white socks.  When I left the store my wallet was twenty dollars lighter but I didn’t feel much better because I suspected I had no idea what I was doing when it came to serious hiking, and possibly climbing.  I was beginning to fear Rand McNally’s little black triangles.

Loading the car and everything else required several long nights after work.  There was a time when the to-do list got longer, not shorter.  It was amazing how much there was to do.  In Florida, near the coast, in the month of August, the humidity at night is about one hundred percent and the temperature is likely to be 85.  I spent hours going in and out of the house and ended up soaked in sweat.  But it was worth it because bit by bit the list got beaten down.

I had cleaned the car exterior and the windows.  The window cleaning dealt with safety and sightseeing, whereas the cleaning and polishing of the paint dealt with the hope of impressing mechanics on the road, should I have the misfortune of having to deal with them.  As the person at work in charge of expensive computer equipment, I had started pushing the idea that the equipment should not only be kept in working order but should also be maintained in a clean, attractive state.  For years I told users and eventually assistants when I got them that if the equipment looks like junk, people will treat it like junk, and the mistreatment will generate a self-fulfilling prophecy and in the end it will turn into junk.  Likewise, I wanted any mechanics I might have to work with to think that I valued the car and wanted it handled carefully, which was exactly what I thought.  So the car had been cleaned and shined.

On the way home from work the Friday night before leaving, I refueled the car.  I like to monitor the vehicle’s fuel efficiency and this is best done starting from a filled tank.

I had said all good-byes the night before.  It was my design to avoid painful, last-minute farewells on the morning of leaving.  I planned to accomplish this by departing early.  In truth, I had worked myself into a disturbed mental state in the final days and probably would have changed my mind about going except for the fact that everyone I knew expected me to go.  I had to go.  In the end I did go and it was very much the right decision.  But the getting away was hard and I found it easiest to vanish silently like a ghost.  As far as my family