The first real date with my wife Julia was at a Harry Chapin
concert. My college roommate Joe and I were big Chapin fans. It wasn’t
so much Chapin’s voice as his lyrics. The guy had a way with stories.
Joe gave me permission to use his ticket to ask Julia out. When Julia
said yes, Joe gave up his ticket and missed the concert. Unfortunately,
Chapin died a year later at the age of 39. I don’t think Joe ever got
to see him in concert. Thanks, Joe, for making the sacrifice.
One of my favorite Chapin songs is “All my Life’s a Circle.” Part of the song goes like this:
“It seems like I’ve been here before;
I can’t remember when;
But I have this funny feeling;
That we’ll all be together again.
No straight lines make up my life;
And all my roads have bends;
There’s no clear-cut beginnings;
And so far no dead-ends.”
I thought of that song this week when I ran into Jeff, a guy I knew in high school and
played
a lot of sports with–mainly one-on-one basketball. He was much better
than I was in the team sport of basketball and later played college
ball. I could compete with him in one-on-one playground ball. I’ve run
into Jeff every five or ten years–mostly randomly. This week, Jeff
spotted me at a poetry and art presentation at my favorite brewpub,
Working Draft.
I think it’s probably been ten years since I last saw Jeff. We’ve both
aged and it took us each a while to do the recognition thing. We both
have a disabled adult child in college, and we joked a bit about the
challenges of that. I don’t have many friends from high school that
I’ve stayed in touch with. It was good to see Jeff and strange to
reflect how our lives keep circling on back.
I’ve spent the last few days hiking the Ice Age Trail with Callie, my
new border heeler. She loves our hikes, especially when we go fast
downhill. Hiking fast downhill (a/k/a running) was something that I did
a lot of during my Appalachian Trail hike with a fully loaded pack.
With no pack at all, it’s fairly easy although I’m not getting any
younger.
Growing older: I’ve been doing some reflecting on the A.T. hike.
Over the years, different people have asked to borrow my trail journal,
which I gladly loaned out. But due to the miracle of the internet, I
think it would be fairly easy to photograph an entry of the journal and
put it at the end of my posts. Some people might find that interesting,
and those who don’t can just skip over the end. I haven’t read it in
over twenty years, so it might even be interesting to me. There would
be some minor editing to partially preserve family privacy.
The thru-hike represented a huge shift in my life. “No straight
lines make up my life; And all my roads have bends.” I went from being a
fairly well-respected young trial lawyer, practicing on the civil
defense side of things, to an unemployed guy living in the woods putting
one foot ahead of the other for 2159 miles. This all started in the
spring of 1996. The original journal was scrawled in a small spiral
notebook. Pages were ripped out and sent home, where my wife Julia
typed them up, best as she could, because my handwriting isn’t very
good, especially when laying down in a sleeping bag.
Quite a bit of the
journal went into a local weekly newspaper. A few excerpts appeared in
the Wisconsin State Journal in a story entitled “Trail Attorney.” A
customer/psychologist/part time artist borrowed the journal to read at
home and returned it to the coffee shop with an amazing hand-carved
leather cover. The photo inside the cover was taken by Julia near
Front Royal, Virginia, a little less than half-way on the hike.
The first page is my wife’s introduction to the journal:
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