06)28(05 its 915pm

The humid air of Maryland has cooled a bit, and a gentle breeze blows through the screen porch I’m sitting in, nicely appointed, in Rockville, about 30 minutes North of Washington D.C.

Almost by accident, our sails were allowed to deflate, and the urgency that we had been feeling since the pushy rainstorms in the Smoky Mountains has begun to let up a bit. In fact, today I haven’t accomplished much or seen much at all, and it is a welcome relief.

We left the grand old south and its sturdy cities of Savannah and Charleston in a hurry and immediately met the frustrations of camping out head on. All of our gear was still soaking wet and beginning to carry questionable odors, so we pulled into a campsite north of Charleston to air it out and stay for the night, but only 45 minutes into unpacking everything, the camp hosts approached us and told us that the site was taken, even though it wasn’t reserved and there was no-one currently there. This was strange, but some things you can’t fight, so we headed off on a search for a place to stay that took us through three more extremely grungy campsites that we opted out of and a fourth, almost worse, that caught us as the Summer night was setting in. And so we stayed, in Myrtle Beach, at a horrendous and overpriced state park. This area of the Carolinas is almost shamefully overdeveloped and tacky, lined with mile after mile of oceanfront junk stores, fast food places and overweight vacationers toting golf clubs and oily suntan lotion. The ocean is of course, pleasant and beautiful, but looming cryptically over it there are decidedly socialist housing project style ‘resort’ hotels.

And so, when the morning came, we jetted out of there en route to anywhere but there.

True story: back in the mountains of Asheville we became disconcerted with all the hard times and went out of our way to find a way to entertain ourselves in the back of the truck while the rain sloshed about everything. We decided that it was important to find a dvd of “The Dark Crystal” an epic Lord Of The Rings style movie done with muppets. We scoured every video store we could find, and out of some strange chance found it buried away in an Asheville mall. We also found “Big”, and “Big Fish” for real cheap, and so we grabbed those. Anyways, it has felt sometimes silly, but for a few nights we’ve been able to huddle over my computer (which has a dvd player in it) in the middle of nowhere watching silly movies and loving every minute of it, the convenience and comforts of home so far away, but somehow available to us in a small way.

We found a campsite that sat near a pristine swampland, and sat on a rickety old dock while a crazy songbird attested its territory and a lightning storm slowly rumbled towards us. That night we watched “Big” inside the confines of our screen house while the rain fell all around us.

Our route has taken many twists and turns, and we were having a tough time deciding which way to head up to DC; were we to go through the potentially cool and pleasant Appalachians, or were we to head toward the mysterious, pirate plagued islands of the Outer Banks, off the coast of North Carolina? It was a tough decision, but by this time we decided that adventure was more along our lines than safe. So we drove up to meet the ferry which took us sleepily towards the island of Hatteras, and deposited us and a few seagulls and tourists there to enjoy the salty air.

Since the very first explorers arrived in America, the sandy reefs of the outer banks have spelt trouble for big ships, and yet the currents that wash along them were apparently strong enough to make the risk worth it, were it successful. Not only that, but pirates abounded between coves, and there were very few places to hide from them. In the end, the tiny strip of land that makes up the outer banks is riddled with hundreds of shipwrecks, lots of pretty lighthouses, hearty island types and neat pirate stories.

As we walked over the sandy dunes on the way from our second camp spot to the dazzling bright and wind swept beach, we imagined we had shipwrecked, looking for food and water. In a way we felt that way too, somewhat exhausted, but somewhat free in that, worn and smoothed by the months of travel, able to deal with the passing storms, able to find what we needed, and able to have a really good time doing so.

That second night in our campsite, as the wind blew steadily and littered sand over every single piece of equipment we had anywhere in or out of the truck, we grilled fresh caught tuna over a charcoal fire, and washed it down with cheap beer. It was a perfect kind of moment, the kind of moment that becomes giant in memory, though at the time it just tasted right, with bits of sand in our teeth. We were regaining our health and our happiness, and the ocean and the strangeness of place, and the coolness of the air were all welcome to us again, as the sediments and dust piled up in layers on our clothing and on our truck and on our skin. I remember feeling that easy laugh resurface, we were out of the south, out of everything we had felt or known again, and it was easy to be pretty alright with it all.

Even though there is uncertainty, and yes, the uncertainty hangs over us now more than ever. Where are we to live? What are we to do for a living? Was this trip all a big experiment that would do little more than leave us dangling over a cliff while our future sat on some other route? Were we supposed to be in grad school or in the city or getting married or working in a coffee shop or running errands or making epic albums or making connections and planning retirement funds while we sat there in the dunes under the moonlight and the remnants of a perfect meal sat in our stomachs? What exactly is it that we are supposed to be doing? Is it ok not to know? These are the kind of thoughts that we talk about often, always ending in an optimistic “this is right. THIS is what we’re supposed to be doing.”.

We rolled down sunny gray asphalt between the salty dunes back to the mainland of America, back to land it seemed, and up to a campsite outside of Virginia Beach.

To make a long sad story short, we unpacked a bit at the campsite and left my guitar there and headed into town, saw Norfolk Virginia, and I never saw my guitar again. Someone very cursed now stole it, and though we spent the rest of the night and all the next day looking for it and them, filing police reports and launching our own detective style investigations while trudging the beach in search of any clue, peeking into every single campsite there, judging campers by their looks, trying to decide what we would do when we found it. And yet it disappeared. That guitar that I played hundreds of gigs with, wrote thousands of songs on, worked all summer in a factory for, elated myself anytime with, it is gone for good.

Its been a theme that repeated itself here in Rockville. Kate’s aunt and uncle, as I was saying, very graciously welcomed us into their house. They had just got a little kitty, sweet and timid and quiet. The first night we were here, chatting over wine on the outside porch, the kitty jumped off, escaped through a hole in the screen porch, and has yet to be seen again. I guess I can’t really measure or express the disappointment I feel at this, and I don’t have a place for the loss in my mind or body. It makes me feel a bit numb, and strangely, makes me want to: get a better guitar, save some abandoned kitties, more forward, become brighter, burn brighter, find good things, roll over and get up, and get going again and not let it seem like a wayward curse that settled onto us. I can’t feel sorry for us, and I don’t. But I do feel bad for Andy and Marilyn, and wish I could do more to answer for the loss.

From the trouble of Virginia Beach we headed to a beautiful, perfect start of the summer, green leaves and cool swimming pool, pretty river and lots of deer campground called Westmoreland State Park, about 10 minutes away from the place that George Washington was born. We spent four nights there reading through two books a piece, eating nice food, communing with the foxes, huge and colorful moths, lightning bugs, bald eagles, deer and even a few stray dogs. It was a perfect start to the summer, June 21st feeling long and precious. We baked ourselves by the poolside while kids in bathing suits splashed and played and ran all around us, concentrating on our books and on the sweet smell of the air, the warmth of our skin. We woke up in the mornings and had coffee while listening to NPR and in the evenings east coast baseball games. It was a nice interlude to where we are now, in the orbit of DC.