In the morning, I got up and took a shower, which went on to flood the bathroom floor.  I used the towel to mop it up the best I could, then headed out, stopping by a Foodland to pick up some groceries.  There I asked about a park and was referred to one called McFarland.  It ended up being on the Tennessee River.  There was a swinging bench facing the river next to the O’Neil Bridge.  It seemed like a good place to attempt a morning meditation.  My mind was already jumping so hard that trying to contain it later that day would probably be impossible, especially since I was on my way to Nashville.

Sitting down on the bench swing, I pushed off the pavement with my toes and the swing slightly rocked back and forth.  It made me think back to being a kid, swinging with all my might, stretching out my legs to the sky, feeling freer than any other way I knew how.  White clouds were bunched up in the sky.  The reflection of them almost floated downstream.  There was a steady whir of cars passing over the bridge.  Songbirds were singing in the trees.  A V formation of ducks flew overhead.  Somewhere off in the distance a train whistle blew. 

It was hard to focus and keep track of my breaths.  A couple passed by, both of them with gray hair.  Off to the side of me a crew was setting up a stage.  There was a festival scheduled to take place that weekend.  The sound of trucks went rolling by.  Some motorcycle freedom fighter went roaring over the bridge.

The first time I went to Nashville, I was about twenty-five and traveling around the country on a Greyhound bus.  I had a five-hour layover and made my way to Broad Street, or Broadway, finding the Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry, on my own, then cutting through the alley over to Tootsie’s to drink beer and watch some country music up and comers take the stage.  From there, I went into Ernest Tubb’s Record Store to browse through records, and hit up a few other bars, before making my way back uphill to jump on my bus.

It was two and a half hours to get to Nashville from Muscle Shoals.  I Googled the Country Music Hall of Fame and let Karen direct me to it, taking the 64 to freeway 65.  When I got off in downtown Nashville, it was thirty dollars to park.  There was no way to back out of the garage I’d pulled into.  I was steamed.  Then when I got out on the street there were all these partiers on pedal tavern tours, cranking up Brittney Spears and the Back Street Boys.  This was all part of the new pop country movement.  Any moment now, they’d all start rapping.

I decided to take a stroll before visiting the Hall of Fame.  There was the Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline Museum, what you might call old-schoolers in this part of town.  I walked past the Sun Diner, a red rooster playing the electric guitar, and Luke’s 32, a cowgirl in short shorts with an electric guitar of her own.  There was Jason Aldean’s, not far from Betty Boots, the Music City Showcase, Nudie’s Honkytonk, and the Ernest Tubb’s Guitar Store, just about to go out of business.  A mural at Legend’s Corner, depicted some true legends, seated amongst a crowd of new up and comers.  Time would tell how many of them deserved to be seated there.

From the Ryman Auditorium, where statues of Bill Munroe, Loretta Lynn, and Little Jimmy Dickens, stand outside, I went looking for Tootsie’s, and found it had been refurbished, almost as if an old honkytonk had been archived inside a new one.  There were two stages and a thousand headshots on the walls.

It was almost ninety degrees out.  As I made my way back to the Hall of Fame, I realized how much I needed to find a laundry mat.  It was thirty dollars to get in, the same as I’d paid for parking.  The museum traces the evolution of country music.  The origins of it are based in folk music, much of it derived from England and Ireland, and blues from the rural south.  Black and white photos showed an old man on a porch with a guitar, two young men, one with a fiddle, the other with a banjo.  Most of the earliest recordings were done in the Appalachians and the South.  There were pictures on the walls of early heroes like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Roy Rogers, Eddie Arnold, and Roy Acuff.

There was also an exhibit about the Outlaw Country movement that sprung up in Texas during the 70s, songwriters like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, who grew their hair out and injected some rock and roll attitude into their performances.  The Hall of Fame itself, is a circular enclosure with plaques on the walls commemorating those who have been inducted.  To the young people pedaling bicycle bars around out front, most of the names on the wall probably meant little. 

It became popular about fifteen years ago, for people to claim how much country music had always meant to them.  In reality, when we were kids, whenever Hee Haw came on I wanted to run out of the room and throw up.  I liked Kenny Rogers.  I liked Alabama.  I liked Willie Nelson when he sang with Julio Iglesias.  I liked Waylon on the Dukes of Hazard. If it crossed over to top 40 radio, there’s a chance I might’ve listened to it.  If not, I wanted nothing to do with it.  Country music was just music for old people and rednecks.  Now it’s for everybody, popstars, rappers, and DJs too.

Before leaving Nashville, I stopped at McDonald’s for a meal, part of my immersion into the consumer culture that I’d just stepped out of, dripping with grease.  There are the old times and there are the greasy times.  I was filling up my tank with both.  As I sat in the restaurant with my book of maps, I saw I wasn’t far from the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, or the grave of Daniel Boone. 

I’d just contacted an old girlfriend, Jenny, who I hadn’t seen in nearly thirty years.  She was living in Virgina.  It looked like I might be in her neck of the woods.  That hadn’t been in the plan, but yet again, there hadn’t been a plan.  Kentucky.  Ohio.  West Virgina.  I’d vaguely been thinking along those lines.  Now I was charting the course.

The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park was mostly a straight shot on the 65 north.  Then I quickly switched from one highway to the next to reach the 31E.  When I pulled up in front of it, a ranger was just closing the gate, but there was another car, pulled over on the driveway in front of me.  I waited until the ranger left, then approached the family that was stepping around the gate, pushing an old woman in a wheelchair.  They told me the ranger had given them permission to look around, but that all the buildings were closed.

Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809 in Kentucky.  From what I could see of the memorial on the property, it resembles the one in Washington D.C., something of a Greek temple.  Inside is a symbolic log cabin, like keeping a manger in a cathedral.  I heard a squawking and saw that the old woman in the wheelchair was exerting her independence, defiantly lurching forward in it, requiring the whole family to rush over and restrain her.  There were a few other cabins, also replicas, but not much else to see.

Ten miles down the road, I came across another Lincoln site, that of his childhood home.  He lived at the Knob Creek Farm between the ages of two and seven, before moving to Indiana with his family.  A younger brother was born and died here, and Lincoln himself nearly drowned in a creek before being rescued by a neighbor.

It was late afternoon by now, and I realized I needed to start looking for a campsite.  Google came up with one called My Old Kentucky Home that I headed towards.  It was a half hour away, north on the 31E, outside of Bardstown.  Once I got close, the phone signal dropped out a few times, and I was lost for a while. 

By the time I reached it the sun was starting to set.  The campground was next to a golf course and full of RVs.  There were no open spots, and I was starting to panic when I saw that people had set up tents on some grass across from it.  There were a few picnic tables and fire pits, but no designated places to camp.  I popped the trunk on the car and threw up my tent in the cover of early evening.

Later I walked over to the main site and saw I guy on a golfcart returning to the entrance booth.  I was glad he hadn’t been there when I’d showed up, as I probably would’ve been turned away. Now it was my full-time job to avoid him.  There were loud voices all around, people who’d reserved their sites months in advance, out celebrating, with enough supplies to last a month.  I had an apple and a bun. 

After dinner, I climbed into the tent and kept my flashlight aimed at the ground.  If I could make it through the night without attracting any attention that would mean another narrow escape.  Even when things got tight, however, they still kept working out.

Who was Daniel Boone?  If people think of him at all it is usually as the second guy in the coonskin hat, right behind Davy Crockett.  The truth is, he came before him, but like Crockett, became an embodiment of the American frontiersman, as much for his ability to tell a tall tale, as for his exploits. 

Boone is known for helping blaze a trail through the Cumberland Gap and settle the territory that became Kentucky.  At one point he may have been adopted by the Shawnee Indians.  Although he had the reputation for being a backwoods man, he went on to serve three terms in the General Assembly of Virgina.  He became famous when an account of his adventures, published in 1784, found him shooting a panther through the heart as a child and later swinging on vines, like Tarzan, to escape from Indians.

I’d seen that Daniel Boone’s grave was just an hour away, in Frankfurt, so of course I was going to head straight there in the morning.  It had been a rough night at My Old Kentucky Home Campground, camped on a patch of grass, my tent behind a tree, trying not to draw any attention.  At the first light of dawn, I was up and on the road. 

I took the 9002, the Bluegrass Parkway, to the 127.  Karen, from Google Maps, got me right up to the cemetery gates, but I needed a caretaker to point me in the right direction once I got there.  The grave was on a hilltop, looking down on the Kentucky River and the capital.  As I pulled up a few white-tailed deer went skipping through the headstones.  His wife, Rebecca, is said to have been buried next to Boone.  Someone had left a pencil drawing of the man there as a tribute.

It was a calm, serene morning.  The view of the river, trees, and capitol building below could not have been better scripted.  I decided to sit beside the grave and do my meditation for the day.  There was the faint barking of a dog.  Then a bird began screeching.  Now came the high peeping of another bird.  Cars passed on the freeway.  The screeching bird became a nagging bird, with a high, piercing cry. 

Down below the valley began to come to life.  I hadn’t shut my eyes yet but was measuring my breathing.  Right behind me lay the remains of an American legend.  What had been real about him and what hadn’t?  At one point he’d been reinterred from an earlier burial site.  Was that even him and his wife beneath the marker?   What matters more, what we know or what we think we know?  A little bird zipped across the sky.  The barking of the dog became louder.  The streets below began to fill up with cars.

A few years earlier, I’d taken a Greyhound Bus from Laredo, Texas to Bangor, Maine.  Somewhere along the way, I’d had to make a midnight transfer in Cincinnati.  It had seemed like a mysterious destination at the time, full of bridges, strange lights, and dark shadows.  Although I’d resolved to largely avoid cities on this trip, I decided to drive through it on my way to the Serpent Mound in southern Ohio.  It was an hour and a half away.  I took the 127 north to the 71 heading east.  The city looked different during the day.  The bridges were still there.  I drove through downtown and past the stadium where the Bengals play.  Then it was the 275 to the 32.   

The Serpent Mound represents a snake with a curled tail.  It is more than 1,300 feet long.  Of all the destinations on my trip, this was one I was possibly the most excited to see.  When I pulled up in the parking lot and tried to jump out, however, I found that I was stuck fast to my seat.  I tried getting up again, and was pulled back down.  I pried one hand under an ass-cheek and it felt like I was reaching into tar.  I yanked it back out, and realized I’d sat in Juicy Fruit gum that someone had smeared on a ledge in front of Daniel Boone’s grave. 

The gum was easier to get off the seat, thank God, than it was my pants.  The pants would never recover, but what I really wanted to know is who would defile the grave of such a patriot with a mouthful of Juicy Fruit gum?  Was it anarchy or just plain ignorance at work here?

After cleaning out the car and the seat of my pants the best I could, I proceeded to go investigate the Serpent Mound.   There were three burial mounds in front of the visitor center, attributed to the Adena Culture.  The serpent mound may have been used in ceremonies designed to placate a spirit.  There was an observation tower that I needed to climb to the top of to get an overview of it.  It did seem to go on forever, both literally, and figuratively, snaking through the trees.

My old girlfriend, Jenny, had gotten back to me and was excited about the idea of seeing me again, even if it was only for a night.  We hadn’t been in touch much for the past thirty years, but every once-in-a-while, we’d exchange emails.  From what I understood she was teaching English and living with her two kids in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was only a day away.  After thirty years that had come up rather sudden, but it was what it was.

I was really pushing it on this trip, already up to around nine thousand miles on the rental car.  The agreement had been unlimited mileage, but did that mean no cap on common sense?  Ever since leaving Huntington Beach, I’d been driving nearly sixteen hours a day. 

The Mountain Bluebird, by now, had become a popular hero in my own personal folklore, but were there no limits to what it could endure?  The Sierra Range, the Rocky Mountains, now the Appalachians?  Why not?  As long as there was money to put gas in the tank we’d go on flying, around the world, east to west, north to south.  We’d fly up to heaven and visit the Thunder Beings, bring back light and understanding to all mankind.  Something like that.

It was already past noon, and I had no idea where I was going, just east, towards Virginia.  It was two and a half hours to Charlestown, West Virginia.  I continued on the 64 to Beckley.  There I was directed to the Coal Mining Campground, which seemed promising at first.  There was an Exhibition Coal Mine and little prop village when I pulled up.  When I got to the campground in back, however, reservations were required and there didn’t seem to be any spaces open.  A few locals stood around gawking at me, as I tried to back out.  I got back on the road and started to drive, although by now my head was starting to spin.

The next place that came up was called the Beaver Creek Campground, another two hours away, back again on the 64 to the 219.   By now I’d reached the rounded mountains of the Appalachians.  Some local radio station was playing bluegrass music, the perfect soundtrack to the rambling turn of events, the galloping banjo, mandolin, and guitar, leaping forward in a three-legged race, a rickety wheelbarrow ride of a good time.  Wow.  Was I having a flashback?  I slapped my knee in time to the music and the Mountain Bluebird surged forward.

It was a wonderful relief to find that they did indeed have open campsites at Beaver Creek.  Not only that, there were no reservations required.  They also sold firewood.  The site that I claimed seemed to be a half an acre, with trees all around, a table, and a firepit, which for only the second time on the whole trip I was able to use.  Camping isn’t really camping without a fire.  What I’d been doing so far was mostly crashing. 

On this night I had time to gather up some kindling and branches, however, and keep a fire going for a few hours with the wood I’d bought.  In the night air, I could hear another group.  It sounded like they were singing hymns.  I got my ukelele out and sat plucking along to the music.

In the morning, I was up at six and back on the road again.  The fog was so thick it was almost like driving through a blizzard.  There was only about twenty feet of visibility ahead of me.  Suddenly, I came over a rise and there was the sun, looking like the ghostly light at the end of the tunnel.  The stripes on the road were white, the fog was white, and the sun was even whiter.  The whole of my time and attention were being sucked into it.  It felt like I was driving straight into the light that never dies.

The Shenandoah National Park is part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are themselves a region of the Appalachian Mountains.  These were all storied names to me, and though I may have passed through them once or twice, I’d never set out specifically just to see them.  I’d done the math and it was about two and a half hours to get to the park.  I could drive travel north through it until I reached the 33, then take the 29 south to Charlottesville and be there by late afternoon. 

It was a relief upon reaching the park to find that my National Park Pass was still opening doors.  It had been one of the soundest investments in a long time.  The road into the park was called Skyline Drive.  There were leafy trees, oak, chestnut, and ash on both sides of the roads and hardly any traffic.  I leaned into the Mountain Bluebird, making the gentle ascent with ease.  First, I pulled over at the Calf Mountain Overlook, then at Sawmill Run.  When I got to Horsehead Mountain, I stopped the car and got out, finding a stone to sit on and contemplate the sprawling green valley below.

Was I meditating these days or simply just mind traveling?  It was hard to know what to call it, outside of trying to sit still a few moments and practice awareness.  There was a pine tree right in front of me and the ever-present rattle of insects.  Some gnats began to swarm around my face immediately.  This was going to be fun.  A breeze was running through the treetops, making a slight stir on the floor of the valley.  Instead of focusing on that, I mostly just wondered what it would be like to see Jenny again. 

She’d done me a great favor nearly thirty years earlier by leaving me and breaking my heart, the first and last woman ever to do so.  Most of the songs I’d written before then I promptly tore up and started again.  They were too sarcastic and smart-alecky, the product of a cynical youth.  When I got my heart broken, I immediately understood why everyone writes about love.  Songs about love leapt out at me from the radio and reduced me to sobs. 

I’d sat in a bathroom after slashing myself with a razor, crying and bleeding all over a scrap of paper that I’d just written a new song on called My Beautiful Dream.  All the songs that followed sprang from that battered lineage.  Many years had passed since then.  There were no hard feelings by now.  She’d gone on to get married.  I’d rambled the world like I’d always been threatening to do.  What would it be like to see her again?  I could hardly imagine but had no expectations.

The trees below were mostly green, with a little bit of red sprinkled in.  The breeze started whipping around, barely keeping the gnats at bay.  There were purple flowers in the grass in front of me.  The electric outlets of the world were all humming as one.   

By the time I got to the 33, it felt like I might be running late.  I called Jenny to let her know I was still on my way and give an approximate time of arrival.  At Ruckersville I got on the 29 south.  Now I was just thirty minutes away.  I had Karen directing me on Google Maps, not even paying attention to where I was going, just knowing I was getting closer and closer to my destination.  Then I was there, driving through an ordinary-looking neighborhood, and pulling up in front of a brick duplex.  I took a breath and knocked at the door.  Here came Jenny.

We’d met studying in Oxford and been friends before we fell into a relationship.  Now we were old, grizzled veterans of life.  There was nothing to be explained or forgiven.  It was only how is this and how is that.  Her teenage son came down the stairs and met me.  Later, her daughter came down as well and we decided to walk downtown and get some dumplings.  It was a hot afternoon.  The pedestrian mall we sat outside and ate at seemed fairly tame, outside of some gutter punks bunched up at one end of it. 

Later, we went back to the house, and I got out my ukelele.  She’d been my entire audience for a few years, still loving and requesting certain songs that I’d gone on to disown.  If anything was true it’s that I’d never really known what I wanted, just to be free.  I’d had ideas, thousands of ideas, about places I wanted to go and things I wanted to see, but there’d never been a plan.  One time, outside of a cemetery, I’d picked her up on my back and began to leap up and down, so delirious to ramble that I could barely contain myself. 

Jenny had longed for something more stable, a nest of her own, and she’d had it for a while and then lost it.  Now she was trying to build it up again for her kids.  The beautiful thing about being young is that we all still have our dreams.  She asked me to play a song called Jim White and though I’d forgotten half the words, I still played for her and sang as if I’d finally made it to the stage of Carnegie Hall.

In the morning, Jenny had to get up early and taken the kids to school.  She was taking the day off so we could go get breakfast before I hit the road again.  I’d crashed out on the couch in the living room, only sleeping for a few hours under a small blanket.  There was about an hour where I had the place to myself. 

The only time we’d lived together was in a tent our first year in Alaska and a camper our second.  I’d crashed off and on at her apartment in Minneapolis a few months before we’d broken up.  Since then, I’d continued my vagabond lifestyle, and the last twelve or thirteen years had been extreme, basically living out of a suitcase all that time.

Now I sat in her living room and waited for her to get home.  I took the time to attempt to meditate or at least process my surroundings.  A fan was spinning and there was a lamp on a nearby table.  The couch I’d slept on was to the right of me, the blanket folded up at the foot of it.  There in a guitar case was her guitar from back in the day.  A dreamcatcher hung from the ceiling, revolving slightly.  On a low table there were some painted rocks.  A bookshelf was collapsing inwards under the weight off all the books stacked on it.  There on the floor was my book of maps, my blue cooler, my ukelele.

The night before Jenny said she’d learned a lot from me about letting go.  How was that, I’d wondered.  She told me there was never a time when I hadn’t reminded her, I had one foot out the door.  True, perhaps, the Ballad of the Rambling Man.  The fact that she’d gotten married to another musician was her own fault, I guess.  I never gave my heart to anything beyond my journey.  Saddled with a job or responsibility, I’d try to satisfy it, but if there was no way out, I’d feel trapped and get anxious, needing to drink until I could at least sit still.  What about this meditation then?  How was that working out?  Well, I was sitting still.  All I was doing was thinking, but I was sitting still.  For five more minutes.

When Jenny got back, she took me out for breakfast.  That had been a rare treat back in the day.  We’d always been broke.  Our finest moment had come after the first salmon season in Alaska, when we’d been flush with a few thousand each.  We’d bought a Ford Mustang for two hundred dollars that pulled so hard to the right it was like I was arm wrestling it.  Then we’d splurged on a hotel in Alaska, Chinese food, cigarettes, weed, beer, magazines.  A million dollars couldn’t have bought us a greater amount of satisfaction, at least for the next few weeks. 

Now it was time to go our separate ways again.  She had her work cut out for her with her classes and her kids.  I had a long way to go to make it back to California in one piece.  I considered driving to Virgina Beach, just to say I’d made it to the Atlantic, but decided to save that for another trip.  I’d have to do a trip about the Revolutionary War and another about the Civil War.  This one had started out about Native Americans but had gone on to incorporate the whole of Western expansion.  I could live with that.

Before leaving Charlottesville, I decided to hit up Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson.  Thinking I’d probably revisit it on a later trip, I just parked in the parking lot and visited the gift shop.  Thomas Jefferson had engineered the Louisiana Purchase, acquiring much of the land that became states I’d either passed through, or would be passing through on my way back west.  He’d also been the one who’d appointed Lewis and Clark to explore the Northwest Territory.  So, there was definitely a connection.

Inside the gift shop, there was a statue of Jefferson wearing a COVID mask.  The other visitors were all wearing COVID masks, and I was too.  Although many of us had never gotten the virus, it had changed our lives forever.  If anything, we now knew that someone out there had the power to lockdown the whole world within the span of one week.  When had that ever been possible before? 

You would hear about things going on in China, or some other country, and be glad it wasn’t happening to you.  Now it was happening everywhere, all at once.  Technology and mass media have made it possible to feel like danger is at the doorstep every second of our lives. When is too safe, not safe at all?  Just stick around.  We may know the answer to that question sooner than we think.

It was time to race on now.  I’d put so many miles on the Mountain Bluebird that it hurt my stomach to see the odometer.  It made me laugh out loud, but still hurt my stomach.  I knew they were tracking me, but no one had contacted me yet.  If they did, I could say I was on my way back and it would be the truth.  By the time I left Monticello, it was early afternoon.  The day had gotten away from me.  My idea was to hit up the Great Smoky Mountains, another extension of the Appalachians, and the Cherokee reservation there.

I took the 29 to Lynchburg and then cut over to Roanoke and got on the 77 south, heading towards Charlotte, North Carolina.  It was already late in the day.  There was a campground sign at a place called Lake Norman, but I didn’t see it in time to make the exit, so pulled off on the 150 and did a search on Google.  Karen led me to the Rock Springs Campground, nearly fifteen miles away. 

I had to cross the lake and then pass down a series of country roads to get there.  It was like no other campground I’d ever seen, more a grouping of pioneer cabins and shacks bunched together with a pavilion in the middle for meetings.  It was all closed up.  No one was around.  I considered trying to throw up a tent in the parking lot.  That was a sure sign of desperation.

My best bet, I decided was to backtrack to the Lake Norman Campground.  Now evening was falling fast and it was nearly dark.  When I got there, I had to drive through a tunnel of trees before reaching a gate, that fortunately, was still open.  When I reached the camp site it was a circular loop with mainly RV’s.  I had to go around twice before finding a small lane reserved for tents.  I pulled into the first spot, number 4, and almost collapsed with relief.  The whole trip had been too close for comfort, although comfort doesn’t usually produce too many thrills.  The forest was alive with percussion, the throbbing and clacking of a million insects.

That night I was had to use the bathroom and when I shined the flashlight on the roof of the tent, saw that there were at least two dozen Daddy Long Leg spiders on the mesh below the rain cover.  It was like an alien invasion, crowded together, fumbling around, their long legs all entwined.  I wasn’t worried, but a little freaked out, just by the sheer volume of them.  When I took the tent down in the early dawn, hundreds of them came streaming down the sides.  I had to shake it again and again.  Lord knows how many I’d be transporting across state lines, despite my best efforts to get rid of them.

The plan for the day was to drive to the birthplace of Davy Crockett.  I’d noticed that I could stop by the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, so made that my first destination.  As soon as I got on the road, it started raining.  So far, I’d been lucky.  Bad weather would’ve annihilated my trip.  I passed the outskirts of Charlotte and then got on the 74.  There were about 30 miles of road construction that required a lot of sitting and waiting.  Also, at one point some prick swerved over and nearly sideswiped me.  I had to pull over hard to the side to avoid a collision.  That could not happen on this trip.  It simply wasn’t allowed to happen.

When I arrived at the Carl Sandburg home in Flat Rock it was still raining.  A sign in the parking lot said that the home was closed, due to COVID.  I decided to walk and see what I could see anyway.  Carl Sandburg was a poet and folksinger, who also wrote an extensive biography of Abraham Lincoln.  After his death, in 1967, he was remembered as being the quintessential American.  I knew him mostly from a book of folk songs that he’d compiled.  Most of the songs I write have their base in folk, country, and blues, so I’m always happy to pay my respects given the chance.

No one else was on the grounds, and the rain fell intermittently.  There was a small open enclosure with some black and white photos of Sandburg, a few with his guitar.  He seemed to have been an earthy guy.  There was a lake in front of the house, and a creek you had to cross to reach it, but the house wasn’t open.  I walked up to it, but then returned to find some place to sit beside the creek.  Leaves were scattered all over the walkway and the bridge.

My attempt to meditate didn’t last long.  Voices came from the parking lot.  A group was coming down the trail.  The surface of the water was calm by now, outside of a few isolated drops.  When the visitors got too close, I vacated my seat and allowed them to take over.  Back in the car, I sat and counted my breaths, as quickly as if I’d just run a wind-sprint.  It wasn’t easy at all to focus, knowing that as soon as I left, I was on my way to see Davy Crockett.