Bug Food

By Liam Burnell

The World Trade Towers collapse, the makers of war go hog-wild, and one idealistic young man goes off the deep end. He decides to walk across the country, speaking out against war and tyranny. He sets out in June of 2002, living out of a backpack, distributing homemade pamphlets, and joining in popular struggles along the way.

His meme never catches on, and he fails to save the world. Instead, he ends up on an epic adventure as wild as any fiction. Traveling on foot through both urban and rural America, he meets fascinating characters and experiences enough amazing situations to truly qualify as an odyssey. In a light-hearted and candid tone, the author shares the most beautiful, most ridiculous, most poignant, and most cathartic moments of the two weirdest years of his life. He also shares a vision of equality and a brighter future for our culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Liam Burnell
• Release date: Mar 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005411053

Book preview

BUG FOOD:

An

American

Odyssey

by

Liam Burnell

Bug Food: An American Odyssey is a work of creative nonfiction. The events portrayed are factual to the best of the author’s memory. All the stories in this book are true, but some names or personal details have been altered in order to protect the privacy of the individuals represented.

Copyright © 2021 by Liam Burnell

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be

reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express

written permission of the author.

ISBN 9798462282782

Cover art by Liam Burnell

Interior by M.C. Burnell

I dedicate this book to Amber and Eden, the wonderful children who I got to help raise for five and a half years. For about a year of that time, you insisted that I tell you more of my travelling adventure stories every night at bedtime. In so doing, you kept these memories fresh enough for me to write this book, and I want to thank you for that. You are also the most voracious readers I have ever met from the millenial generation, and you serve as good examples for your peers to follow. I hope I can give you a couple more good books to read and pass around.

1. Christian

Christian was a kid in my cub-scout pack when I was eight. We crossed paths for about three years, mostly in the scouts, and after that I have no idea what became of him. We weren’t particularly close friends, but looking back I believe Christian, through no intention of his own, had a profound impact on the direction that my life has taken since then.

See, Christian was a storyteller. Ironically, we used to pick on him a lot for it because most of his stories were obviously not true. I can still remember the one about him getting carried across the river by a dust devil, or the one about him catching a seventy-foot sturgeon. Even as eight-year-olds we could tell these things were impossible. Once Christian got a reputation for lying, then no one wanted to hear any of his stories anymore.

That was sad because he was such a gifted storyteller. I’m sure I was just as cruel as the other boys, but I never wanted him to stop. After a while, I didn’t care whether the stories were true or not, I just wanted to hear more. Christian’s face would turn red, and his arms would flail with excitement. His voice would rise up, catching the attention of everyone in the room. As the story built, cascades of descriptive vocabulary would come to his command. Every tortured expression on his face drew us further in to the drama. It was riveting!

Then, inevitably someone would demand to see the wounds where he had been attacked by eight or nine, or maybe twenty badgers, and the story would deflate, leaving Christian humiliated and me sad. I always wondered why he couldn’t use his skills to describe things that really happened. I like to imagine that he eventually learned to tell true stories, and somewhere he is telling one right now, red-faced and gesticulating wildly. Anyway, I was inspired.

I never made a conscious effort to become a storyteller, but somehow along the way it just happened. Being a kid, I was endlessly thrilled with my life anyway, so I found great pleasure in describing the thrilling things I experienced. Every day, something noteworthy would happen. Maybe I would fall off my bike, or see a coyote, or get chased across the neighborhood by a sixth-grade bully. With just the right vocabulary, facial expressions, and attention to detail, I could make daily occurrences into epic adventure stories. I drew in listeners using stylistic tricks I learned watching Christian, but I didn’t lie or exaggerate so much that they would notice. I got my turn being the center of attention, and the other kids seemed to be thoroughly amused. It was a win-win situation, and so a love and a knack for storytelling cemented itself into my developing personality.

Well, if you can imagine the progression, a kid who loves storytelling should grow into an adventurous teenager. The more I explored, the more I discovered, feeding my curious mind and my repertoire of stories. Hiking, fishing, and camping were regular sources of adventure for an avid outdoorsman, and humans were fascinating too. For some reason I felt drawn to the people in places that my parents considered bad neighborhoods. It was probably just my rebellious attitude, but the people there really seemed more interesting to me. They had amazing stories and if that wasn’t enough they would do crazy shit right in front of me.

So curiosity, adventure, and storytelling continued to feed each other throughout my teen years. I guess that’s how I was able to escape the crippling boredom that consumed so many of my peers at that age. First came the boredom, then the resignation. My life is going to suck anyway, so I might as well get a job, get married, and have kids just like everybody else. One by one, I watched all of my friends fall in. To me it looked like a great choreographed parade of trudging zombies.

While I was vaguely determined to not let that happen to me, there appeared to be literally no alternative. My parents, teachers, friends, and all the writing on the cultural wall seemed to be telling me that eventually I would grow up and choose a career. Apparently death was the only way out.

Well, I did have some time. I was lucky enough to be born into a middle-class family where I was not expected to start working at age fourteen. Traumatized by poverty in their own youth, my parents were determined to incubate my little soul for as long as I needed. I also never conceived any children of my own so my life was never railroaded into disciplined money-making. At age eighteen, I left my parents and moved into a college dorm that was basically a halfway house for slowly developing teens. My storytelling abilities were warmly received there, and alcohol and weed brought the stories to all new ridiculous levels of calamity. I became a notorious smart-ass and the life of many parties. Nothing really promising ever developed as a career interest though, and eventually I dropped out of college.

It turned out to be pretty easy for me to get crappy jobs and make a living. The variety of different jobs actually fascinated me for a while. So many new experiences to explore and so many new stories! I worked all over town. As soon as I got tired of dealing with the boss, I’d quit and get a new job. I had my mother’s charm, and my father’s ability to sound smart, plus I was a tall, clean-looking white guy with blue eyes. I was eligible for pretty much any job as long as I didn’t expect to get paid more than eight dollars an-hour. I didn’t have any particularly expensive tastes or hobbies, so that was fine. I loved to travel, but gas was only ninety cents a gallon back then. I filed charts, delivered pizzas, answered phones, stocked shelves, inspected parts, watered plants, mopped grease, collected trash, sorted trash, and kissed customer’s asses. If there were a merit badge for each different peon job, my sash would be full.

I got pulled into politics for a while because of my love of nature. I was going door-to-door raising money to stop water-pollution when the bosses noticed I was very passionate about the issue and promoted me. For the next three years I kept getting promoted and transferred all over the country to campaign for the environment. It actually started to look like I was going to have a career, but I had to get out of there. My bosses were total sell-outs and egotistical fools. I actually got fired before I could even quit.

I believed the party line at first, but after a couple years it became obvious that something was wrong. The leaders talked the talk but they didn’t seem to be walking the walk. Supposedly we were fighting for peace and equality for all the different kinds of people, freedom from oppression and a healthy respect for the environment, but despite all our efforts, we never got any closer to any of that. Something just wasn’t right. We had all the best, brightest and most enthusiastic people working on our campaigns. Where was all that energy going?

An event in the fall of ’99 helped clarify a lot of things for me. A trusted friend told me I had to get my butt to Seattle in the last week of November. Remember when the Berlin Wall came down? she said. This is gonna be like that only right here in America. From what I could gather an international conspiracy of billionaires was plotting to take over the country, and the only way to stop them was for thousands of Americans to go to Seattle and bust up their meeting. It sounded like an irresistible adventure to me. Wanna come help save the whole country from sinister white-collar criminals? You bet!

Well. The experiences of that week in Seattle rocked me more than all my stories of youthful mischief, college road trips, and wildlife encounters combined. At some point I should write an entire book about it because it is that good a story. The week of November 28th through December 4th 1999 was a very eventful week in the history of Seattle. There are actually many thousands of people who could write their own books about that week. I had never seen so many people assembled in one place before for any reason other than watching sports. The idea that tens of thousands of people would all defy police orders and try to disrupt a meeting of businessmen is one that I would not believe if I had not seen it myself.

I hope you already know that we succeeded in breaking up the whole first day of the meetings. It was an historical event on par with the smashing of the Berlin Wall but the T.V. news made it look like something far less significant. Through clouds of tear gas thousands of people maintained a perimeter around the sprawling convention center from dawn until dusk. All sixteen of the building’s entrances remained mostly blocked and by the end of the day almost all of the trade delegates had given up and returned to their hotel rooms.

That evening as we danced in the streets celebrating our victory, some anonymous cop shot me in the head with a rubber bullet and changed my life forever. In one instant, he blasted away a lifetime worth of middle-class illusions. I went to Seattle to stand up for freedom and democracy and the police shot me! Gushing blood and throbbing with a concussion, I stumbled to the protest clinic and got a bandage. That night as the pain subsided, my mind spread out and made itself at home in the new levels of previously undiscovered reality. Suddenly it all made sense. The police were not there to protect and serve me. They were not there to uphold the constitution. They were hired to fight for the billionaires. The government was not a democracy at all. It didn’t want my input as a citizen. The whole political system I had poured my energy into for the previous two years was only intended to maintain the illusion of democracy.

These were some heavy conclusions. Just to make sure, I went back to the protest the next morning with a copy of the bill of rights. My plan was to show it to the police and explain to them that I was peacefully assembled to petition the government for redress of my grievances just like it says in the First Amendment.

I ended up getting arrested so quickly and violently that there was no space for any philosophical discussion. I remember seeing the sun rise while lying belly-down on the pavement with my hands zip-tied behind me, surrounded by dozens of other people who had been placed in the same position. Some of them were crying out in pain. We spent the next four days locked in a state prison (the county jail was already filled beyond capacity with local poor people and other protestors.) My cellmates taught me all about the global system of economic oppression and the movements of resistance against it. They taught me methods of resistance and then we practiced defying the guards and sticking up for each other right then and there. We were already locked up anyway. Why the hell not?

I felt like I had been initiated into Robin Hood’s gang. Finally I had found something meaningful enough to really get into. This was the career I had been waiting for. I would spend my life working to free the world from economic oppression. Ooh Dalolly!

I tried to hang on to my political job for a while after that, but it was no place for an honest man. The political game had turned me against half of my own countrymen. I was aligned with the whole Green/Democrat camp and we were supposed to be saving the world from this horrible swarm of gay-bashing hillbilly warmongers. You didn’t dare go out in the country for fear these people would lynch ye. At least that was what I was supposed to believe.

Meanwhile, the Republicans went over to the hillbillies and told them that the communist-hippy-faggots were coming to take away their land. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw them pointing at me. At some point I realized that I was going to have to start hanging out with conservative Americans right away or else they would think I was their enemy. The politicians gain power and luxury from the conflicts they stir up. It is their creed that makes the people of the world into enemies. Without them, I believe conservatives and liberals and everyone else would live in utopian harmony. We are all good people by nature. We all believe that everyone deserves an equal shot at freedom. We all believe that we owe it to each other to pull our own weight and no one should take advantage of anyone else.

I was ejected from politics in the summer of 2001. I traveled the country for a couple months until I ran out of money and ended up in rural Maine working in a factory making chemical warfare suits for the army. I’m against war and all that, but my best friend from high-school had just signed up for his second tour of duty in the army and I liked the idea of him being able to survive a gas attack.

I had been on that job for just over a month when the world shook again. Just after morning break we heard that a jet airliner had crashed into one of the world trade towers in New York. Within an hour another plane hit the other tower and you know the rest. The nation was in an uproar. The president vowed revenge every few minutes on the television. The light turned green for the makers of war and they put the pedal to the metal. It was just the scenario they needed to foment a nation-wide wave of hysteria. Every television station was frothing with panic. What were we gonna do?! The fanatic Muslim jihad was upon us!

The very next day, congress passed the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, a several-thousand-page document that basically served to consolidate power in the hands of the people who were already the most powerful. The under-classes were to demonstrate their obedience by supporting the war. If you’re not with us you’re against us! We were encouraged to keep spending money and report our neighbors to the government for any suspicious activities. Anyone could be a terrorist!

Well, I have to tell you all the 9/11 panic got right into my head. I thought the biblical apocalypse had come at last and we were all gonna die. I didn’t react the way an obedient American was supposed to, but I sure did freak out. I quit my job at the factory and hid in the woods. I saw my entire country being hijacked by power-hungry psychopaths. Really the desire to have control over other people is sick, and if you’re going to convince whole nations of people to kill each other just so you can tighten your grip of control over them, that’s really sick. To have people with that particular mental illness at the top of the chain of command that governs our whole society seemed like a worst-case scenario emergency to me. It was not time to put my head down and go with the flow as we were herded to the slaughter. I had to stand up and do something for my country. I am a patriotic American and I love my country more than any billionaire war-monger ever could. I wasn’t gonna let the land of the free and the home of the brave go down like a bunch of suckers!

Of course I wasn’t sure exactly what to do right away. I just knew it had to be big. One night in late October, I awoke from a dream that I had walked to New York City. The city was in the middle of some full-on catastrophe with buildings on fire and collapsing around me as I walked. Then I was picking up wounded people and carrying them to safety in the countryside. It was an intense, sobering dream and when I awoke I decided to walk across America. In a beautiful solipsism I decided to make my entire life into an adventure story. I would walk for peace, freedom and equality. I would walk for the spirit of the land and the people. I would walk to see every last mile of America because I loved it and I would spread my love to every last mile as I went.

I’m still not sure how that was supposed to save America from our predicament. I guess I hoped people would notice what I was doing and be inspired. Maybe I could give them the courage to stand up for those same ideals and we could all rise together and save our culture from the dead end of patriarchal war. All I know is that I was determined to do something heroic at the time. It seemed better to die trying than to give up and there didn’t seem to be any time to hesitate.

Of course I was living in rural Maine at the time, and winter was already underway so I did have to wait until spring. I got a job at a small grocery store and rented a cheap art studio where I slept even though it was not up to code to rent as an apartment. I sold my car and gave away most of my stuff. I sewed a big cloth sign that said Freedom, and attached it to the back of my backpack so that passing motorists could see it as they drove by.

Originally, I didn’t plan to write a book. The plan was to distribute printed updates of my travels called zines, (basically a home-made magazine.) I would walk, write the text, take pictures, and collect money and addresses from subscribers along the way. I recruited the help of an old high-school buddy who would receive all this in the mail, format it into a zine, duplicate it and mail it out to subscribers.

Well it didn’t really work out like that. My friend had his own life to live. I ended up producing two issues of the zine mostly by myself during down-time on the road and distributed them to about 400 subscribers on the east coast. The two issues I completed account for only about one eighth of the entire journey. Some of my subscribers probably think I died along the way and that’s why they haven’t received any more. Many warned me that I would.

Politically, my journey was a failure. I didn’t stop any of the wars or save America from the billionaires. I didn’t even really influence anyone to change their opinions about the matter. The only people I was really able to connect with were the ones who are not afraid to talk to a hairy, stinky, travelling stranger. Most of them already shared the same opinions as me, and many of them had come up with far better strategies than walking across the country. After about two years I became convinced that I wasn’t making a damn bit of difference and I quit. I was also becoming desperately lonesome and I couldn’t find a single woman who wanted to share my martyr’s life with me, so I moved back to rural Maine and took up a life as a farm-worker.

That was almost two decades ago now. I have had a lot of time to reflect on the experiences of my big walk. I have had years to feel silly for ever thinking I was so important. Most middle-class white guys think they are God’s gift to humanity, but I really went for it! At the time it made perfect sense to think that I could save the entire world with my ego. Now as an older and humbler person, it’s pretty embarrassing to write a whole book just about myself. Still, friends and family who have heard pieces of my story over the years have insisted that I write it down, and assured me that it’s still worth telling.

I am still a philosopher after all these years. That appears to be a defect I was born with. I will try to keep my rambling analyses to a minimum, but they are what inspired me to create this story, and you will get stuck reading a few of them here and there. I come out of left field sometimes, but my throw is dead-on and the runner is out. I come out of right field and center field sometimes too. I am not a liberal or a conservative, or a moderate. I am not a Christian or a Muslim or an atheist. Hopefully I don’t represent any of the perspectives you are tired of hearing about. My intention is to be helpful and honest. I’m trying to tell it like it is and like it was twenty years ago when I went walking. It’s a real story about a real guy and it’s not always fit for small children. I cuss and pee and make mistakes, and at one point I even have sex with someone. I have a strong sense of morality, but no respect for the law and I frequently break the law and tell you about it.

I worry that my writing might be offensive to some of the more polite, church-going folks out there, and I’ve thought a lot about editing a more polite version of the story. I want to make ripples without making a splash, and that’s a delicate balance to maintain. If my writing is too crass for you I apologize. Please know I am still trying to do God’s work. I’ve just come up with a different method than what you might be used to.

When I set out to make my whole life an adventure, I had no idea what I was getting in to. I ended up with a story that would make my old cub-scout buddy Christian’s eyes bug out. It’s as if adventure has a spirit of its own, and when you invite it into your life, every day becomes extra-weird. Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming, but here goes. The vocal tones and facial expressions that support my usual storytelling habit will have no effect here. It will be a new challenge for me to do it all with written words, but the story should speak for itself. It was truly a wild ride and I don’t feel shy at all about calling it an American Odyssey.

2. Physical training

My journey began in Old Town, Maine in early June of 2002. I had been visiting friends in Old Town, which is just outside of Bangor, America’s eastern-most city. The town’s name derives from the fact that there has been a village of Penobscot natives living there for literally thousands of years, but I didn’t even know that at the time. I just thought it seemed like the perfect place to start a walk across the country because it was all the way in the northeastern corner. First I had to get to New York City though. I had never been there before, but since the terrorist attacks, I felt inexplicably drawn to it. It is America’s biggest city, and I felt like it was my American duty to go there and be a part of it at least once in my life.

My first day of walking found me giddy with excitement. I had been dreaming about it all winter and it was finally happening. I felt like a hero of great historical importance. I probably looked like a complete idiot. Wobbling under the immense weight of my over-stuffed backpack, I was so proud of myself that I was grinning, and waving to the passing cars. Look honey! It’s an overgrown renegade boy scout and he’s waving at us!

It was a chilly day early in June, cloudy in the morning, but bright and sunny by afternoon. I followed a road south along the Penobscot River, which is probably the largest river in Maine. It’s really a grand river, fast flowing, and there are even some white ripples in a few places where it squeezes between some big exposed rocks. Following the river’s mighty flow as it charged downstream kept me in a reverent mood all morning. I was initially sad when the road pulled away from it and climbed up the steep bank, but once I reached the top, I was rewarded with a view of a whole range of knobby green hills off to the east. The scenery of eastern Maine is so beautiful that I lack the words to describe it. Perhaps that is my shortcoming, but I blame the English language.

So high were my spirits on that first day that I might have floated up into the air if it weren’t for the fact that I packed so much extra crap. Be Prepared, says the Boy Scout motto, and I took it to heart. I had two big heavy blankets, a tarp and a ground pad, two rain ponchos, a water filter, a canteen, a fairly heavy one-burner stove, and an entire half-gallon can of white gas. I had notebooks and pens and my big, heavy camera from the 1970’s to document the voyage. I had a bag full of hygiene products, a sewing kit, and a first-aid kit full of gear that I didn’t even know how to use. Then there was all the extra clothing. I was soon to discover that walking across the country makes a person dirty and smelly no matter what. It is much more comfortable to just roll with that and wear the same clothing every day than it is to carry an entire spare wardrobe on your back. I learned that lesson the hard way by carrying a wide selection of shirts, pants, and undergarments across a fair portion of Maine. I even had a spare pair of shoes crammed into my backpack. Throw in a couple cans of beans, sardines, and other random food, and it probably weighed about sixty or seventy pounds.

It felt like a ton on that first day. A lot of people have asked me what I did to train for my walk. The truth is that I didn’t do anything on purpose. I just started walking one day and figured my body would tune itself up as it needed to. That is indeed how it worked. I just didn’t go very far the first few days, and I put my body through some excruciating toil.

By the time I stopped for lunch on the first day, I was up to my waist in searing pain. The bottoms and sides of my feet were rubbed raw, the joints in my knees and ankles were aching, and the muscles in my calves, thighs and butt were sore from exertion. I got pizza from a corner store in a little town called Veazie and hobbled down to the river to rest. I pulled off my boots to discover that both my feet were bubbling. Blisters had popped up on my heels, the balls of my feet, and in between every toe. I dipped my poor tortured feet into the cold waters of the Penobscot and wondered how far I would actually make it. My spirits sank. Every motion I made resulted in pain.

I had been living in a town called Belfast for the last year, and I had lots of friends there who I could stay with. Starting in Old Town gave me a bit of a runway before my walk became a serious adventure into the unknown. I would have to pass back through Belfast in a couple of days, so if worse came to worst, I could just stumble back there and give up. Still, I had a sense that my body would toughen if I just had the guts to stick it out, so eventually I pulled my terrible boots back on and forged ahead.

At first, things got even worse. Trying to follow the river downstream, I found my path blocked by a huge complex of power plants and transformer stations all surrounded by high razor-wire fences. I had to backtrack through Veazie, and somehow I got lost. It was a frustrating quagmire, and I was again losing hope. Just in the nick of time, I heard the plinking jingle of an ice cream truck. Normally I hate that sound, but this time it was different. The friend who I was visiting in Old Town had just taken a job as an ice cream truck driver. I chased the sound around a corner and sure enough, it was him. We chatted some more and said our goodbyes again. He told me how to get back on the road to Bangor and sent me off with a free popsicle. The coincidence was a little too good to be true, but I would soon find that in a life of adventure, things like that happen all the time.

Bangor (pronounced Bang-gor as if there are two G’s) is the third largest city in Maine. It’s a pretty small city by east coast standards, but it’s a distinct place with its own pride and personality. The downtown district sits in a narrow junction of river valleys where the Kenduskeag Stream joins the Penobscot. The rest of the city climbs up the steep river banks that rise several hundred feet above. The steep hills shatter the grid of streets into a variety of odd angles and peculiar intersections. The mighty Penobscot churns through its final little stretch of rapids in Bangor, and every twelve hours or so, the tide sloshes up to the bottom of the rapids. Ocean-going ships can float up the river to that point, and that’s why Bangor exists where it does.

I straggled down the big hill into downtown with only a couple hours of daylight to spare and naturally began to wonder where I was going to sleep. I had no plan, and very few ideas, but luckily half an hour of aimless wandering paid off. I happened by a sign in an office window that said, Clean Clothes Campaign. Wondering what that meant, I knocked on the door and asked. I met Jack who was the director of an organization that was trying to keep Americans from losing their jobs. The Clean Clothes Campaign was an effort to convince people to boycott clothing made in sweatshops, but Jack’s more immediate concern was a campaign to stop the closure of the Hathaway Shirt factory in the nearby city of Waterville.

Maine was once a powerhouse of manufacturing for the clothing industry, but one by one every single clothing and shoe factory in Maine had shut down and been replaced by factories in third-world countries. No company that wants to maximize profits to its shareholders will manufacture clothing in the United States anymore. Supposedly it costs too much to hire American workers. Sometimes they even claim that we are lazy and unproductive. Most of the world’s garments are now manufactured in China, Southeast Asia, and Indonesia where it is still legal to beat employees who don’t work fast enough and fire them when they get pregnant. Hathaway Shirts was the last shirt factory to employ American workers in the United States, and it was threatening to close that summer. Jack and his crew were busy hassling politicians and corporate executives to try to keep their factory in Waterville which employed over 400 people. (It closed later that year.)

Anyway, Jack thought what I was doing was great and he offered to let me stay at his house. First I had to sit through a very tense and interesting meeting. Some union leaders had come from across town to talk about the Hathaway situation, and for three hours their team and Jacks team hammered out an alliance and a strategy to save the doomed factory. Why I was invited to join the meeting I don’t know, but I ended up being very helpful. For some reason a man had shown up who kept interrupting to tell everyone about how President Bush belonged to some kind of secret sex cult. He claimed that ever since he found out the Secret Service had been buzzing his house with helicopters trying to get him to shut up about it. I didn’t doubt that the president was part of a secret sex cult, but the Hathaway strategy meeting was hardly the place to discuss it. Somehow I managed to convince him to come outside and tell me more, so I actually spent most of the evening listening to strange and fanciful accounts of weird sexual positions involving three or more people, one of whom was George W. Bush.

After the meeting, Jack drove me out to his house and put me up in a spare room that was decorated from floor to ceiling with maps. I love maps and I felt right at home. I fell asleep in no time flat. I had walked a grand total of just nine miles that day, and I have never been so sore and tired in my life.

When I awoke the next morning, I could barely stand. My feet did not want to support any weight at all, so when I first stood up, the pain shot through my entire body. With teeth clenched and every muscle in my face wincing, I descended the staircase to get out of Jack’s house. It was a torturously slow process. It must have taken me almost five minutes just to get down the stairs, but I made it, and after a few hundred paces on the ground, the pain started to work itself out of my body. The reluctant stiffness that had built up during the short night of rest slowly let go and began to accept that I was going to spend another day in motion. After a half mile or so, I was no longer lurching like a zombie.

I packed my big heavy hiking boots in my pack, and walked the second day in my sneakers. Within a few short hours, I began to notice what a difference that made. The blisters on my heels shrank and eventually went away, and each step became considerably lighter. It turned out that most of the pain in my muscles was a result of carrying several pounds of boot on each foot. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you multiply that by ten million steps it really adds up. Boots are for walking in snow or mud, not long distances on the side of the road. For that I recommend the lightest pair of shoes you can find.

Jack’s house was in southwest Bangor, out by the airport. I walked back towards downtown, and soon found a walking path along the Kenduskeag Stream. The Kenduskeag is just big enough to float in a canoe, but it would not be a relaxing ride. It is swift water the entire way, splashing over rapids and dodging between rocks. The trail took me through a beautiful rocky gorge that looked and felt like the Great North Woods. I had almost forgotten that I was in a city when the trail suddenly emerged into the heart of downtown. The stream, whose rushing waters had soothed my ears for the past hour, disappeared into a tunnel beneath the pavement. Oh well. I made my way to the southern end of the city, past the giant statue of Paul Bunyan, under the bypass, and through the harbor district where the air smelled like fish.

I trudged on through the suburb of Hampden for several hours and then came to another lovely little stream. This one was smaller than the Kenduskeag, and it went over a ten-foot waterfall right underneath the bridge. Upstream, the creek was flanked by meadows on either side, and below the falls, the waterscape widened into tidal mudflats flanked by salt marsh. The tide was out and the fresh water splashed out over the rocks and into the tidal mud. It was another one of those beautiful views that make my heart soar, so I stopped for a good long rest.

I was sitting there daydreaming when a big red SUV pulled up next to me and stopped. The window rolled down and a middle-aged woman thrust her arm out offering me a giant ice cream cone. At first I was a bit bashful, overcome by the unexpected hospitality, but I got over it quickly enough. After all, the ice cream was melting fast and it needed to be eaten. We chatted for a while, and then she drove away, leaving me to ponder the implications of what had just happened. Clearly, the god of ice cream was smiling upon me. Like Odysseus of old, I was going to meet with frequent intervention from the spirit world. Well, so far it was working to my advantage.

I kept on going. A long road construction site gave me some trouble. For several hot hours, I wound my way between orange cones and DOT employees leaning on signs, over loose surfaces, and past great loud machines kicking up dust and belching hot exhaust. By mid-afternoon I had escaped into the countryside. The highway took me through some forested hills, and then swung back down to the riverside and into the town of Winterport.

At that point, the Penobscot is not only a mighty river, but also a narrow arm of the ocean. The water flows downstream for six hours while the tide goes out, then turns around and flows upstream for six hours while the tide comes in. Maine has the deepest tides on the east coast of the U.S. The difference between high and low tide there on the Penobscot is over 14 feet. At Winterport, a bright green prairie of marsh grass flanks the water’s edge just above the level of high tide. The mighty river/inlet dwarfs the tiny town, which was only a few blocks from one end to the other. A few fancy new houses and tourist shops warned of a coming tide of wealth, but for the most part, Winterport was a modest town. The people spoke quietly in thick accents and let the intricate cracked patterns of chipping paint spread across the aging facades of their old wooden houses. One big dock served as the port for the entire town.

The tide was most of the way in when I got to Winterport, and I walked down onto the meadow to take in the stunning view. The river/bay must be over a mile wide at that point, but just south of town, two great bubble-shaped hills rise up on either side, pinching it into a narrow strait. Beyond