After two long weeks of lonely wooded paths and walking through thousands of face-clinging spiderwebs I decided that it was time for my AT experience to come to a close. The decision was simple, as are most when you’re unafraid to follow your own intuition. It went like this: I stepped off the trail onto the highway, started walking towards a town, didn’t look back.

It’s midnight now, and I’m waiting for a Greyhound in Wytheville, VA. I walked ten miles to get from the trail to the station and my feet are busted up, but the one other guy sitting on the curb with me has apparently been living in this parking lot for three days now so I figure his bad luck trumps mine.

He’s 54, black as coal, and keeps insisting that his manager fucked him over while he taps ash from a monster cigarillo. I don’t ask, he doesn’t elaborate. We make fun of impersonal things instead, like Donald Trump and the political state of America and drug addicts and the fact that we’re both stranded at present in a conservative backwater Bermuda Triangle whose corners are staked out by a Super 8 motel, a Hardee’s, and a bowling alley with dysfunctional neon lettering.

Our conversation is a quiet one, mainly because it’d be bad news for both of us if the good ol’ boys dealing crack/meth/heroin/K2 out of the oversized truck at the other end of the lot overheard us.

A sheriff comes snooping by once, twice, then he’s gone. My companion watches the cruiser’s taillights until they disappear down the road. The end of the cigarillo flares orange as he finally breathes again.

“You know, that guy is more likely to cuff me for loitering than he is to round up the bumpkins over there. Doesn’t matter all that much that they’re pushin’. He knows. Just don’t care.” A pause. “Darker fish to fry, I guess.”

We both laugh. It’s a good punch line.

Still, there’s something decidedly unfunny about the comment. Maybe because it points a big fat accusatory finger at the American justice system and the powers that be and at the ethnic discrimination that time has proven exceedingly difficult to eradicate. Or maybe it isn’t funny because all of it’s true. Or maybe it’s because we both laugh.

My poor, black buddy is probably right about the sheriff, but the way he says “darker fish to fry” and makes it all a big joke frustrates me. Because it’s a defense mechanism. Twisted humor used to gloss over an even more twisted reality. A last ditch measure taken by a man in a position of weakness to numb himself to a status quo he doesn’t agree with but can’t see a way of changing. An embrace of helplessness.

And to those few of us who (naivety be damned) believe in a world where individuals are agents of their own fate, it looks a hell of a lot like giving up.

That’s what it looks like to me.

 But – and here’s what I don’t get, here’s what crushes me – the guy believes he’s living in this society that’s pretty much guaranteed to snub him at every turn, and he’s given up on trying to change it because it seems a hopeless case, but he’s still got this secret belief that there’s somewhere he can go, someplace where the grass is greener, some escape. Why else would he be waiting on a bus in the middle of nowhere clutching a duffel bag that anybody walking by can tell holds everything he owns?

“I’m going to West Virginia,” he says when I ask. “For work.” He rubs his thumb and forefinger together suggestively and winks. To me that gesture had always meant “Wanna joint?” To him, though, it seemed to mean cash. Maybe it meant both. I don’t know.

But he’s lying about the work. I can tell when he looks away and changes the subject then later contradicts himself by saying he’s not going for work but instead to find his wife and kid. It’s clear he’s just looking for a place to go and he’s hoping the bus will take him there. He’s pinned his hopes to a greyhound.

And when the bus finally does arrive I see that he’s not the only one who’s all mixed up and looking for a place to go.

The first person to spill through the retractable door is a wire-thin guy with sunken eyes desperate for a smoke from anyone who’ll supply. He’s going through withdrawal and volunteers the information freely because it’s in his best interest for people to pity him.

The next guy off the bus is 300+, dressed in baggy jeans with pocket chains, and has the manic look of somebody who’s coked out. He’s also got the greasy curls and gothic accoutrements of a metalhead, and is, in fact, a metalhead. Oblivious to the other bus-goers, he wanders behind the bus and starts shadow boxing.

Others follow. Equally as off-center.

An elderly black woman sits down on the curb next to my comedian friend and I, lights up a cigarette (which she smokes openly fifteen feet from the salivating nicotine addict) and says through charred vocal chords, “drugs are everywhere.”

I nod. My companion snorts. The woman takes a drag, keeps on. “They got this stuff down in Florida (pronounced Flo-RI-da) that everybody doin’ nowadays that’ll send you for a loop. I mean one hit and you pass out.” Her eyes are wide, fingers splayed out in front of her. “But they say you can’t let go of it even as you fallin’ to the floor.” By the time her story is over the junkie is conspicuously closer. Neither he, nor the woman have mentioned where they’re headed. My money’s on Florida, but who knows, drugs are everywhere.

Finally it’s time to get on the bus that will take me from Wytheville, VA to Nashville, TN where I’ve got family coming to take me home. I board, find a seat, and look out the window.

The guy who has been waiting on his bus for three days is still out there on the curb waiting. He said his bus comes at five AM. I wonder if he’s even got a ticket. The cabin lights dim and the bus pulls away. I won’t get the chance to know.

It’s fitting, in a way, that I’m leaving the Appalachian Trail via a bus full of drifters desperate to get somewhere but not sure where to go. I’ve been detached from family and friends and “stable” life too, if only for a while. I’ve slept in the woods and wildly overgrown backyards and in offered bedrooms abandoned by teenagers now away at college. I’ve hitched rides from farmers driving beat up old pickup trucks down bumpy dirt roads miles from anywhere. I’ve stolen squares of toilet paper from gas stations all along the Eastern seaboard. I’ve walked twice the length of Great Britain, and over mountains to boot. I know what it’s like to only be able to rely on my own two feet.

I tied myself to the trail for a bit of guidance, a bit of purpose, and, pushing past the condescension that it’s so easy to feel toward these burnt-out people who most “respectable” citizens would classify as bums, I can see that these people, the junkies and the homeless and the lost, are trying to do something similar by hitching themselves to a bus line. You might laugh because it’s ridiculous. And it is. But consider that these people have no structure to their lives. Most don’t have jobs or families or even know where their next meal will come from. They don’t have anywhere so specific as “home” to go to, so they follow the line, they let the bus take them where it will. The only way I’m different is that I do get to go home at the end of the day.

When these people gamble on greyhounds they annie-up with the last twenty bucks they’ve got and, if things don’t go well, the stakes are their lives. They’re the real nomads. The ones with no choice but to play the game of life close to the chest. As a result, they’re taught a valuable lesson: that life is constant risk and nothing is certain. You tend to realize this when there’s no safe pattern to your daily existence and everything is always in flux.

I think there’s great value in that awareness. If we all had that same deep comprehension that stability and permanence are impossible things, perhaps we’d be less inclined to grapple with time and the infinite unspooling events that have, and will forever remain, out of our control. Maybe we’d be more willing to live life fluidly, without conflict or barriers, instead of forcing it into some arbitrarily desirable shape. Maybe.

Off the trail, but still on the path — Nomad