The morning after my night between the giraffe sheets I woke thinking about something John and Amy (my hosts) had brought up the night before. We had lingered around the kitchen island and talked about all kinds of things until, finally, my eyelids dropped — I thought I had done pretty well keeping them open up to that point and was shocked there wasn’t an audible crash when they came clanging shut. It wasn’t too unlike the warden of some dilapidated old castle deciding to drop the portcullis just to give some tourists a jump. No warning, just thunk.

But my mind had been in the conversation up to that point, and I didn’t forget what we’d talked about. Much of it revolved around life and work and desire and when, if ever, those three things came together.

—————————————

“Things are different now than they used to be,” John says at one point. “What I’m doing now is what I’ve always done. Kids in my day we picked something early, put our heads down, and worked for it.”

I can see the blue collar in him, hear it in way that he talks, step by step towards the next point. Listening to John is like watching a Tyson fight, he doesn’t dance around the topic at hand but goes right at it. His is the kind of manner you see from people who do their own work. The points he raises are clear and heavy, knockout punches.

“I started my company when I was younger than you. Knew irrigation, had done some landscaping. It was enough to get something going.” He waves his hand in the air, no big deal, then grins. “Your generation isn’t the same as mine though. The world’s bigger for you. Travel is easier. But you could work from home just as easy too, if you wanted. Opportunity is everywhere…”

A pause. A breath.

“…but if you’re one of those people who can’t make up their minds it’s all a big distraction. You can do anything. If you have trouble choosing you’ll drift.”

That earns a grin from me.

“Now a little drifting can be good for a person. A lot can be bad. Still, it’s what you make it at the end of the day. May help you in the long run or it may hurt you. My kid’s still looking for that next thing same as you. Maybe this is what the future looks like. Kids creating their own jobs, whatever that may be, rather than how things used to be with the whole start-small-work-your-way-up-the-totem-pole thing.”

Amy smiles knowingly from the table’s opposite corner.

Somewhere back down the line she chose to drop what she was doing and become a teacher. Not a lot of people that would do that these days. (Sheesh, who am I kidding with the “these days”? I drove a 70 year old teacher home while I worked Uber early 2017, and she mentioned with a straight face that the average salary of public school instructors hasn’t varied by more than $0.10 for the past 20 years. I’m no whiz kid but it seems pretty dumb to lowball the people who quite literally teach us how to think.)

I respect Amy immensely for her choice. It’s a battle royale, organized education. There’s a constant demand for good teachers. I imagine that if they’re anything like the rest of us the good ones will be hard to find, but easy to spot. Paradoxes. Paradoxes in this crazy world that Hemingway once said, “kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.”

Amy is one of those. An independent thinker who values individualism and has a good heart. She’s taught children, teens, and is working with fifth graders now, if I remember right.

I wonder what she sees when she looks at them. I wonder if she can tell who will commit to the totem pole. I wonder if she can tell who is destined to pinball.

——————————————

I set up my tent at Lake Fort Smith Campgrounds in Arkansas ten hours later. Pulled a foldout lawn chair from the back seat of my car and splayed out in the last of a fading sun.

I had no plan to camp here when I left this morning. I meant to hit another campground two hours south. We’ll chalk it up to direct karmic retribution for not calling in a reservation a week ago.

That said, no biggie. Just another day in the life of a pinball. And what’s to complain about when you wake up to this? Lakefront property at a sliver the price. All in all not a bad deal.

Coincidentally enough Missouri’s Ozark Highland trail winds straight through this little campground I might have passed by. By eight I was walking the dusty path, a day-pack slung across my back. Of the 350 miles of maintained trail I aimed for a modest six.

My AT memories come flooding back as the noise of the world slips away.

The rhythm of endless measured steps and forward motion brings the past back into play: my first steps in the Virginian woods, my last a few hundred miles south of there. Those cold nights in April that kept you in your tent even when you needed to pee. Hail during summer that bounced off my rain jacket. Lunch breaks with strangers someplace somehow outside the world. Instant coffee on bitter mornings and peanut butter tortillas on sunny mountaintops.

Strange, that. Out here for a few hours and I walk straight into a slipstream of memory.

Proof, maybe, that not everything fades with time.

I AM THE PINBALL

— Nomad