Last Night

[jayfurr]

As anyone who followed my twitter feed last night already knows, I DID NOT SUCCEED in my sixty-mile Canada-to-home walk.

Carole let me off at the Quebec/Vermont border around 8:30 pm. Sunset fell fairly quickly and the moon came up and it looked like a nice evening for a walk. I made very good time -- over 4 miles per hour -- for the first few hours, settling down to a very nice rhythm and listening to an audiobook of Connie Willis short stories. It was a clear, warm night with a half moon in the sky and lots of stars and I couldn't imagine a better night for a long walk.

Mostly, people ignored me and I ignored people. As I passed through Alburgh, Vermont proper in the first hour of darkness some (apparently drunk) yahoos in a nearby house cursed me and my "#!@*&!# FLASHLIGHT" in loud, angry voices, apparently finding my headlamp (which I was wearing to make myself visible to cars and to help illuminate my footsteps) rather offensive, so I flicked it off and left it off until I was safely past their house. In general, I kept my headlamp on a medium-low setting and kept my head down, angling the lamp slightly down as well so I'd see where my feet were landing.

About four and a half hours in I made it to the first major waypoint on my trip, "Hero's Welcome" in North Hero, a legendary local store and site of the North Hero post office. Their parking lot was well lit despite the store being closed so I sat down, checked my feet, had a snack, drank a lot of my water supply, and was feeling very perky about things. Just as I was packing back up to start walking, a Grand Isle County Sheriff's deputy drove by heading north ... and slammed on his brakes and reversed at speed fifty feet back down the road to the store. I thought "Oh damn," envisioning an ugly encounter with a confused local cop who'd want to run me in for trespassing, but quite the opposite happened. He turned out to be looking for "someone in a truck, which you obviously aren't" and showed polite interest in Susan G. Komen For The Cure and what I was trying to do. He didn't even think it odd that I was trying to walk sixty miles in 24 hours.

So it was with a good bit of cheer that I headed on south heading toward my next major waypoint, Keeler's Bay Variety in South Hero, Vermont. I fell back into a rhythm and made reasonably good time, though not quite up to the four-and-a-quarter MPH speed I'd been doing previously. Hardly any cars were out. I was walking on the left side of the road, facing what cars there were, and generally found that each car that came up on me from the south moved ALL THE WAY OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROAD, like I was something that needed LOTS of room. I don't really know why, but I wasn't complaining.

Then "it" happened. I sensed a car approaching from the south and looked up from my slightly-heads-down trudge as I'd done so many times before. This one was different, though: unlike all the others who gave me a WIDE berth, this guy was if anything giving me no extra room at all. No, wait, here he was veering ONTO the shoulder... and approaching fast. With no time to think I sidestepped quickly to the left, off the road, and went plummeting down into rocks and weeds as his lights and engine sounds careened by just up the bank. Where the paved shoulder ended, the bank had eroded away and I must have gone down about three feet, landing hard on my left ankle and then eventually coming to a stop on all fours. My first thought, other than blind panic, was "crap, what if he comes back" but by the time I staggered to my feet and looked around, he was already gone. I was angry and annoyed but thought I was okay, so I climbed back up and checked that I hadn't lost any of my gear -- then started going again.

But it wasn't before too long that I realized that as the shakes wore off I was in a good bit of pain. My left leg and ankle really HURT and seemed to be stiffening up a lot. My speed dropped off a lot, down to barely 3 miles an hour, and I knew I'd be in some serious trouble if I got to feeling any worse. After about a mile, maybe more, of this, I came to the sickening conclusion that I wasn't going to be able to finish... and that I was going to have to call home and wake Carole up.

At about 2 am I made the call. Carole, as it happened, was enjoying a bachelorette's night of having no husband around and was still up, which I ordinarily would have tut-tutted about but worked out well for me this once. She was surprised and I don't think terribly happy to hear about what had happened and that I was asking her to come get me. That being said, she didn't dally and was probably on the road within ten minutes... which meant that from the time I made the call to the time she pulled up and collected me, sitting disconsolately on the bridge between North Hero and Grand Isle towns, it must only have been about an hour.

She had brought a big blue freezer wrap, the kind you use for sports injuries, with her and I spent the ride home with it wrapped around my left ankle, leg elevated, sad and frustrated and a bit humiliated. I took a bath, sweaty and DEET-covered as I was, and then crawled into bed, disgusted and feeling miserable.

In hindsight, it was STUPID to try to walk miles and miles in the dark, headlamp or not. All it took was one total jackass, drunk or otherwise, to wreck the entire evening. Carole asked on the way home why I hadn't started at dawn instead and tried to do as much of the walk in daylight as I could and we both answered her question -- because while it was one thing to ask her to drive me all the way to Canada for a walk home and return home before bedtime, it'd be another thing entirely to ask her to get up at 3:00 am to drop me at the Canadian border at first light. So that's why I started when I did, but perhaps in the end it would have been better not to attempt such a walk at all. Idealism and the belief that making such a lunatic walk successfully would result in lots of people donating toward the fight against breast cancer may be all very well, but when all is said and done, my lifelong principle of "If it's worth doing it's worth OVERDOING" may have been rather conclusively rebutted. :(

I do feel a lot of gratitude toward the many people who followed my progress on Facebook and Twitter and who expressed sorrow when they heard my bad news, and I'm especially grateful to the one person who donated to Susan G. Komen For The Cure on my behalf during the night. I'd like to think that had I successfully finished the walk people would have gone "WOW" and donated $100 here and $100 there and before you knew it I'd have made the $6900 goal that will win me entry into three Susan G Komen 3-Day For The Cure cities' walks. As it is, though, I stand right now $2008 shy of that total (at this writing -- you can view my donation link at http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurr if you want the current total) -- I've raised enough for two cities, and that's wonderful, but I'm far, far short of the amount I need to walk a third city. And I guess that's okay -- I know times are tight all around. But I had really hoped to make a huge difference by doing something really over-the-top, and I failed, failed in part because of a stupid anonymous jackass, but also in large part due to my having come up with such a harebrained scheme in the first place.

But again, I thank everyone who cheered me on and everyone who sent sympathy when the night took a turn for the worse. It's awfully nice to know that there are so many people out there who care.