Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (12 page)

“Good morning, Dan. Did you find any hay?”

He whirled around with a scowl on his face. “No! And I can’t bother with it now!”

I was shocked. He had been so hospitable and eager to help before. What had I done –or not done–to upset him? “Is something wrong?”

He snapped back, “Is something wrong?”

The employee put a hand on Dan’s shoulder. “Bud probably doesn’t know.”

I asked, “Know what?”

Dan’s expression melted into one of despair. “I’m sorry. It’s been one hell of a morning. Two passenger jets crashed into the World Trade Center in New York this morning. And another one hit the Pentagon.”

His employee added, “They think it’s terrorists. And may not be over, yet.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Suddenly everything seemed surreal. They led me to the employee break-room where a TV was on. When I saw the smoking trade towers on the screen, and listened to the commentators, I came to grips with the fact that this was real. And I wasn’t the only one trying to understand.

A couple of minutes later Dan escorted Patricia into the room. He obviously had been explaining to her what happened. She stopped next to me, in front of the TV, just as the first tower collapsed. While I watched it crumble, it reminded me of footage I had seen of vacant buildings being imploded. But this one was not vacant.

We watched TV for an hour, then we headed back to camp. I needed to give Della her medicine and ice down her ankle. Patricia and I were silent while we walked back to the lot. I was filling a plastic bag with ice when my wife asked, “Where’s the big flag?”

When we started this journey, we had a small American flag displayed on the back of the cart. We also had a bigger flag for special occasions, like the Fourth of July. I took one of the bamboo poles that I used for the stage lights and stood it up with the big flag attached. It just seemed like the thing to do. We spent the rest of the day in the shade, under the flag, listening to the radio.

That evening, we bicycled into the heart of town to find a place with a TV. We wanted to watch President Bush address the nation. Paducah’s streets were nearly devoid of traffic. The sidewalks had nobody on them, and most of the shops were closed. The restaurant/bar we chose had only a couple of customers. Everything had come to a stand still. America had been put on pause.

But there was one thing that didn’t stop. The delivery and slaughter of hogs. That night while I listened to them being prodded into the slaughter house, I began to think of the people on those jet liners–the ones that hit the towers in New York. Did the hijackers tell them what they were about to do? Or did they sit in their seats bewildered and afraid? Did they know they were about to die? Or were they clueless, until the planes turned and aimed at the buildings.

And what about the hijackers? In the last moments of their mission did they have second thoughts? Or were they so filled with hatred, so consumed with their mission, so sure they were doing Allah’s work that nothing else mattered?

While I laid in the tent and listened to the slaughter house, my heart was astir with anguish and anger. And like every other American, I was worried.

From across the street, I heard the squeals of the last piggy in the parlor. Then, through the dark, came that final pop. In the silence that followed,
I wondered how this day would affect us as a nation.
How will this affect us on the road?

By Friday, Della was fit to travel. So that morning we walked out of Paducah headed east on US 62. Around noon, we stopped for lunch in the parking lot of a small Baptist church on the east side of town. Patricia handed me one of our plastic plates with a turkey sandwich on it. “Have you noticed the difference?”

“What?”

“Since this terrorist thing, being on the road is a lot different.”

The difference I had noticed were the flags. Before September 11
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we would see an occasional red, white and blue flying on a car antenna or a yard pole. But now, every vehicle and every lawn had a flag, or several. It was like America had gone flag crazy. But Patricia and I had already discussed that. So I wasn’t sure what she was talking about.

She said, “People aren’t smiling and waving at us like they did before.”

Patricia was more cognizant of those things than me. Sometimes I got so caught up in where we were, that I forgot about the people driving by us. But not my wife. She always watched the windshields. Many times she said to me, “Those people just waved at us, and you didn’t wave back. You need to be more friendly.”

In the church parking lot, she said, “You know why people aren’t being as friendly as before? It’s because we aren’t. We’ve let those terrorists get to us.”

I had to admit, I didn’t feel the joy walking out of Paducah that I did when we walked into it. Even though our trek in town had been a soggy affair, I was still filled with the thrill of being on the road in America. But on this sunny September 14
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, I felt almost numb. Probably from a combination of the attacks and five days of the slaughter house.

Patricia agreed. “But we can’t let it get to us. Now, more than ever, people need to see smiling faces. The news these days is all doom and
destruction. It’s overwhelmed everybody. We need to rise above it. Let’s be a distraction for these people. Show them someone living their dream. America needs that right now. And we’re the ones to do it!”

I felt like I had just been addressed by a motivational speaker. Patricia wasn’t a cheerleader in school, but right then, on the outskirts of Paducah, she was. All she needed was a set of pom-poms as she said, “Let’s wave at everybody that goes by–whether they wave at us or not. If they can go overboard waving their flags, we can go overboard waving our hands. Let’s do it! Let’s have some fun!”

When we set up camp that night, my left arm was worn out from waving. If it takes fewer muscles to smile, then why did my cheeks ache that night? But it was worth it. As soon as we started our little “friendly crusade” people began to reciprocate. And it seemed to gain momentum through the afternoon. Soon, every car had smiling faces behind windshields and arms extended out windows waving, and there were thumbs-up galore.

“It sure was refreshing to see you guys walking down the highway this afternoon.”

Nan Donohoo, with her teenaged son and daughter, walked into our camp just as the sun was about to touch the horizon. We were on a hill above the highway between Paducah and Possum Trot. I had just put some brown rice in our pressure cooker when they stopped to visit. Nan saw us on the road when she took her son to soccer practice. So when it was time to pick him up, her daughter came along in case she passed us again. They had seen us on TV and read our story in the newspaper. “But that was last weekend. I thought you would have been long gone by now.”

After we told her about Della’s ankle, Nan asked, “Is there anything we can do to help you? Can I get you anything?”

People often asked us those questions. Unless we really needed something, like hay or feed for Della, our answer was usually, “No, we’re fine.” But for some reason, this time I said, “I could use some new soles on my shoes.”

When I said that, I meant it more as a joke. Not that I didn’t need new soles. I had worn a hole in the heel of my right boot. In Paducah, we couldn’t find a place to get it fixed. So I filled the hole with silicone caulk to get me by until we found a repair shop.

“Well I don’t know about new soles, but my husband has a few old pairs of boots that he doesn’t wear. Maybe he’ll have something. What size do you wear?”

Immediately I was sorry I’d said anything. It’s funny–I didn’t mind asking for Della, but when I asked for myself, I felt like a bum, or a panhandler. So I said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m all right with what I’ve got.”

About an hour after dark, Nan returned with her husband, Jeff. “My wife said you wear size twelve. I don’t have anything that would fit you. But when we get home I’ll call around and see what I can find.”

“You don’t need to do that. Really, I’m fine.”

It was a cool crisp night–the first since we hit the road. In the morning, a frosty dew was on everything. How great it was to feel that first hint of autumn. Finally, summer and all its steaminess was beginning to slip away.

The coffee had just begun to perk, when a car turned off the highway and pulled part-way up the hill toward our camp. When the door opened, Jeff got out with a large blue Walmart bag in his hand. He walked up to me and pulled out a box with a picture of a hiking boot on it. “They’re cheap, but they ought to get you down the road a ways.”

Speechless, I held the box and stared at the picture of the boot on the top. My emotions ricocheted from gratitude to guilt to humility and back to gratitude. When I looked up at Jeff’s beaming face I stammered, “I don’t know what to say. What I mean is, well, thank you. But I didn’t expect you to buy me new boots.”

“I know you didn’t. But I think you’re doing a really great thing here. This is my way of being a part of it.”

We had just finished eating lunch in a church parking lot near Possum Trot, when John and his chocolate Labrador, Beau, pulled up in a pickup truck. John was in his early thirties, about a head shorter than me, with the physique of someone who worked out in a gym every day. He owned an earth moving business, and had read our story in the paper. After he asked a few questions, the conversation turned to the terrorist attacks. He said, “Did you hear what the Chinese did?”

“No.”

“They held a candle light service in Beijing yesterday for the 9/11 victims.” Then he said, “This morning, I asked a couple of my dozer operators if the attacks had happened in China, would they have gone to a ceremony for those victims? They both said no.”

John paused as he bent over, took a retrieved stick out of Beau’s mouth and turned toward me. “Then I asked them, now that this has happened here, if it happens in China would they go to a ceremony for those people?”

John threw the stick for his dog as he said, “They told me they didn’t know.”

Beau romped toward us with the stick in his mouth as John sighed. “I had hoped this terrorist thing might make America a better neighbor in the world. But I don’t know if it will. I just don’t know.”

CHAPTER 5

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