Free Long Way Home by Bill Barich Page B

paperback thrillers, a cribbage board, and some cooking utentsils, but beggars can’t be choosers.
    On the deck, in a sweet wash of twilight, I returned to Emerson’s jottings about Thoreau. When asked at a dinner party which dish he preferred, Henry David would reply, “The nearest.” He despised such gatherings and said with a sneer, “They make their pride in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost little.”
    I hadn’t lied about Thoreau’s gift. As Emerson attested, he could ascertain “the measures and distances of objects which interested him, the size of trees, the depth and extent of ponds and rivers, the height of mountains and the air-line distance of his favorite summit …” Thoreau’s GPS Ranger came built-in.
    My own dinner cost little except for the pricey Manchego I bought at the market in Sperryville. Otherwise I ate bread and tomatoes, feeding the crumbs to a hungry jay.
    Shortly after dawn, I woke refreshed and set off on a long walk before packing up. The park is almost wholly forest away from the developed areas, with more than a hundred species of trees. Once you’ve gone half a mile or so, you’re alone and wonder if you’ll be lucky and see a white-tailed deer, or unlucky and meet a black bear.
    The bears were still roaming and foraging in late September. They’d continue until a cold snap sent them into their dens, normally in October or November. Given that information, I convinced myself that a bear, if not Bigfoot himself, was stalking me when I heard a racket in the underbrush.
    The racket grew louder. I cocked an ear—two bears at least, I figured, but the commotion died down and resolved itself into a flapping of wings. Spared a hideous mauling, I crept forward until I stood about twenty yards from a flock of wild turkeys feasting on acorns, berries, grasses, or some combination thereof.
    The turkeys were giants. The biggest males must have tipped the scales at thirty pounds or more, powerful enough for me to keep my distance. They didn’t spook and disappear at the sound of my footsteps, either, too preoccupied with their rooting around or perhaps slightly domesticated, since hunting is banned in the park, although poachers do sneak in.
    Benjamin Franklin promoted the wild turkey as a better symbol of the Republic than the bald eagle, “a bird of bad moral character”—a carrion eater, not a raptor—“that does not get his living honestly.” Wild turkeys, albeit vain and silly, were native to America, Franklin argued, and so courageous they’d assault a grenadier of the British Guards should one invade their farmyard with a red coat on.
    VIRGINIA IS A very comely state, I concluded as I crossed the park to Luray. I’d only covered a small section of it, but if I failed to wind up in a cabin on a California river, I’d settle for a bungalow around Flint Hill with a white-faced jockey on the front lawn holding a lantern, or else a ring for hitching up a horse.
    Those lawn jockeys cropped up all over Virginia. In my errant days as a frat boy long ago, I helped to liberate one during a sodden run to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs on a hapless, last-minute search for a date. My pals named the jockey Johnny, and he began to accompany us on such expeditions until he fell to his untimely death from a second-floor window—strictly an accident, everyone claimed.
    This story, though extraordinarily brainless, still amuses me. What’s youth for if not to supply the evidence that you really have matured despite what others might think? People are remarkably various when it comes to what produces a smile. In Virginia, for example, a ride-around mower is a surefire way to generate a grin for their operators.
    Actually, I first noticed the phenomenon in Maryland. The men and women riders always looked supremely content. I never saw anyone frowning or furrowing