0399175482 (N) by Ken Ilgunas

Author:Ken Ilgunas
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-28T15:55:43+00:00

11.

The Electrician

WHITE RIVER, SOUTH DAKOTA—1,062 MILES TO GO

November 27, 2012

While my legs and hips and back felt strong, and my feet were no longer plagued with cuts and blisters and gashes, the physical toil of walking every day caused a weariness to settle into my muscles and bones, into the very roots of me, a weariness that I knew wouldn’t go away with a day’s, a week’s, or even a month’s rest.

Because of the waning daylight (it was getting dark around four thirty p.m. now) I was limited to walking from six thirty a.m. to three forty-five p.m., making it all the more difficult to reach my twenty-miles-a-day goal. To compensate for the lack of daylight, I pushed myself hard, taking as few breaks as I could, reminding myself—when my feet and shoulders were aching—that I’d have the whole evening for lounging and reading and writing.

In Midland, South Dakota, where I was going to pick up another food package, I spent the evening at a bar, where I ate a double bacon cheeseburger and charged my electronics. The bar also functioned as the town’s gas station, grocery store, and casino, the last of which was located in a small dark room behind old-style saloon doors.

I sat quietly in the corner trying to write, but the bar became rowdy and I wasn’t able to focus, so I entertained myself with the Broncos-Chargers game on the television. The conversations in the room ranged from branding cows to hammering fence posts to Kim Kardashian to a very sincere debate about what it means to be a good son.

Greg, an electrician, was the first of the bunch to befriend me. He told me that when I went to the bathroom the whole bar wondered aloud who I was and what I was doing. “They thought you were a monster,” he said, laughing. What really confused them were my trekking poles.

When the bartender asked me later on what I used my “skiing poles” for, she, clearly unsatisfied with my explanation, gave me a dubious look and seemed even more suspicious. When Greg announced to the crowd what I’d set out to do, the bartender told me I’d get shot if I walked over so-and-so’s property, a warning I dismissed because I’d heard warnings like this one in nearly every bar I stopped in. “Oh, he’ll shoot you!” she said. I gathered that these weren’t so much warnings but rather reaffirming boasts about how rugged their land is and how tough the people who dwell on it are. The men at most all of my stops would warn me about cougars, talking about the big cats with intimate knowledge, as if they had monthly wrestling contests with the animal even though no one had ever even seen one.

“Has he shot anyone before?” I asked the bartender.

“Well, no,” she said.

Greg called himself a black sheep because he was one of the very few people who favored progressive politics in South Dakota. Throughout the night, the bartender screamed

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