We stayed in one more UMC church in Ohio when we reached Chesterfield. Ky as usual made the arrangement with the church, though I had made contact with Lions Stan and Nancy Starling previously. Unfortunately, we arrived too late to speak to the Lions Club that evening, but I did get to interview Stan and Nancy regarding the community projects of the Chesterfield Lions Club. They also brought us breakfast food for the following morning
The main reason we arrived in Chesterfield later than planned was Rick Webb hailing us as we were hiking by his home. We stopped to chat and he brought out soda and candy for us as we listened to him talk about his family. Rick raised four grandkids, part of the demographic that we learned back in Pueblo was becoming increasingly food challenged. He showed us pictures and was proud of them all. He also was proud of his chickens and had them well trained to do “tricks” for us.
He gave me a watch that was one of three his grandsons brought him from Korea. I really did not want the watch, but knew this was one of those times when the kind thing for me to do was to accept. He also wanted to give us supper and stay the night, but our arrangement to stay at the UMC church in Chesterfield called to us.
On the way into Chesterfield we knew we had entered Amish country. I tried not to be too obnoxious taking pictures, having heard that the Amish do not like to be photographed, but I could not resist a few inconspicuous shots. At least no police officers made me erase the photos afterwards, as they did amongst the Monsanto factories south of East St. Louis.
We left the Buckeye Trail behind as we moved on from Chesterfield, yet we had no problem following the route as ADT emblems popped up on telephone poles and other structures frequently. We eventually found out why when we encountered Tim Cowan at Veto Lake Wildlife Area. He lived with his father across the street and came running down to take our picture. When he said “you look like ADT hikers,” we knew he must have something to do with the trail.
Before long we were sipping lemonade with Tim and his father Marvin on their porch. Tim brought out a briefcase with an ADT emblem on it and pulled out artistic sketches he made of the insignia, along with a postcard he received from previous ADT hikers, Dead Man Walking and Love Bug. Like Rick Webb, Tim kept wanting to do things for us, like giving us a Tshirt with the ADT emblem. Unlike the Korean watch, we were ecstatic to receive this present. The ADT still receives sparse thru-hiker traffic on it, only a handful each year, otherwise I have no doubt Tim would become as legendary as Sam Waddle or Bonnie Shipe were for Appalachian Trail thru-hikers.
Both the AT and the Pacific Crest Trail have changed since back in those days. As thru-hiker traffic increased so did the trail angels, but often the same trail angels extending trail magic to a large number of hikers. I got a little taste of this change even back when I thru-hiked the AT a third time in 1983, even more so when I returned to the PCT in 2014. The trail magic is just not the same as meeting a Rick Webb, with less intimacy and uniqueness attached to the meeting. Sometimes, trail angels have become fed up from what has become thru-hiker entitlement and stopped. Sometimes, the trail grapevine suggests that a donation be left with these often visited trail angels, in which case they effectively become hostels. Fortunately, the minimal ADT traffic avoids these problems.
Two motorists stopped to ask if we needed anything, also knowing from looking at us that we were ADT hikers. How ironic then that we spent our one night in between Chesterfield and Parkersburg, WV with a couple who had no idea their property was right on the ADT route, even though an ADT emblem was visible from their home.
Jim Polito was out planting berries for his Redbud Berry Farm when his dogs started barking at us. He hailed us and invited us to stop for a break. He finished planting his berries and we accompanied him up his driveway, where we met his puzzled wife Paula. Since we had no arranged destination, unlike the past few days, a break turned into an overnight stay in their furnished outbuilding.
We had supper and breakfast with the Politos and long conversations throughout. Jim was a chemical engineer by trade but purchased and started the berry farm as his retirement job. Paula and I discovered we might be related, with the Nantucket Coffins in both our heritage. By the time we left we felt like neighbors. They wished we could stay another night, as did we, but the journey beckoned us onward. Stopping short at their place already meant a 25 mile day into Parkersburg for our next arranged stay, our longest day with full packs since coming down the Shelf Road in Colorado.
With the advantage of hindsight, something of great importance happened as I was trying to fall asleep that night at the Politos, filled with the kindness of the day and of the journey. A tune popped into my head, begging for lyrics about kindness to be added someday. That tune eventually became the song “Can Kindness Change the World,” which I incorporated into the Third Movement of the American Discovery Symphony I composed to tell the story of our ADT journey. The Yale School of Music will premiere that symphony with a live orchestra on May 24, the tenth anniversary of when we finished hiking the American Discovery Trail.
We took a couple of rest days at the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Parkersburg, a fitting bookend to our first rest days and stay in Ohio, at an Episcopalian convent. The church hosted a St. Patrick’s Day party for a Narcotics Anonymous group that we attended on the first evening of our arrival. The next morning we attended our first Episcopal church service of the journey, followed by a talk I gave about kindness and community that was well attended and enthusiastically received. Gwen Justice and her daughters, Abbey and Whitney, were particularly enthused and I still keep in touch with Gwen via Facebook.
This was another “give and receive” stop for the kindness mission. In the afternoon I interviewed Mother Marjorie Bevans about her experiences with Inuits in Alaska. We were preconditioned for the lesson learned from these experiences of how the oil boom brought material wealth and cultural destruction to the Inuits. A similar story occurred in many boom and bust mining towns out west, or with a power plant automating in the midwest.
We were beginning to hear these stories in regards to fracking in the east, first from Pastor Rick in Glouster, then from Pastor Phil Thomas in Chesterhill, about a “gold rush” for the new millenia in the form of fracking, with some landowners making a bundle from the lease of their land, and the economy “growing” with transient workers associated with the fracking. Eventually, the transient workers leave for the next boom opportunity and the wealth does not trickle down from the few landowners who benefit not from their labor, but by being lucky. Depending on an anonymous, corporate “cash cow,” rather than independently earning a living in diverse ways, does not provide for a resilient community.
The rest days were well timed, as often occurred for us, to avoid fierce thunderstorms that led to flooding in the area. We headed out again into clear skies on Day 300 of our journey, with abundant signs of spring in Parkersburg and beyond. We also noticed the sign for Marilyn’s award-winning Corner Cafe and stopped to use their restroom. Before leaving Marilyn insisted we have sweet tea and some of her famous pie.
Of course we needed to take a photo of our benefactor. As I now look back at that photo I see something that may have missed my attention at the time. Not knowing how else to put this, Cindy was the alpha in that photo with Marilyn. The way she puts her arm around Marilyn’s shoulder suggests the person vibrantly in charge of the photo opportunity. People in cognitive decline do not become alphas.
Five miles outside of Parkersburg we began hiking on the North Bend Rail Trail. Gone now were the rolling farmlands and woods of Ohio. Instead we hiked along a wide, level grade near a river, as we did on the Katy Rail Trail in Missouri, with the river again swelling beyond the banks from recent thunderstorms. Instead of winter evergreen and red berries there were spring buds of various colors. Instead of hiking along cliffs looming above the Missouri River, we often entered long tunnels through mountains.
The NBRT tunnels turned out to be one of my favorite features along the ADT, often at such a length that the light at the far end of the tunnel could barely be seen even when the tunnel was straight. Without a flashlight we would have hiked in complete darkness at times, which might have been a problem if we believed the stories that the Silver Run tunnel was haunted. The tunnels also provided cool acoustics, which I tested with song, yodeling (at which I am bad) and evil laughs (at which I am pretty good).
I also recorded most of the narratives that would end up in my symphony slideshow through these tunnels. Through the Silver Run tunnel I narrated the legend abiut the tunnel being haunted by a woman being murdered and hidden under the porch at a now dilapidated house near the tunnel. I also narrated about our experiences with railroads throughout our journey. This narration became the introduction to the second movement of the symphony, about culture.
I knew about Silver Run’s alleged haunting from meeting two Division of Natural Resource workers responsible for maintaining the rail trail. Dave Richards called us over to sit with him and his uncle Ray at a picnic table, where we had lunch. Ray also provided more feedback about the fracking boom.
The gas company offered Ray a generous sum to put a well on his land but he refused. They called him crazy for refusing their offer but he countered that the only thing that mattered was living right. Ray was quick to note that kindness also was a big part of living right.
Colorful buds were not the only spring arrival. On our first night camping along the NBRT I pitched our tent near a stagnant water source. Never having thru-hiked during the advent of spring before, with past journeys starting late spring, I did not know how annoyingly sonic the spring peepers would be throughout the night. With over twenty thousand miles of backpacking behind me, I was still learning subtleties about pitching a tent.
