A Living Magazine - Day 351 - Homecoming - Tyngsborough to Chelmsford

I knew this kind of sunrise--red skies at dawn. It meant stormy weather was a'coming. Sailors know...

Sailors be wahned'...

It was only the tent to pack up. I'd kept the tarps handy in case rain started to fall over night, but didn't need them. When I got back down to the road all that was left in the eastern sky was a dull mauve. I really didn't know how far I'd have to walk down 3-A to find anything resembling a shelter with internet. McDonald's would be good. I saw McDonald's trash occasionally on my side of the road, which meant people coming toward me had stopped there--slobs that they were. This is the Modern Nomad's form of following "animal" tracks.

The road was marked with 1/5th-of-a-mile markers. Sign 95.8 met me right away. As I descended the numbers, just around 93.2 the rain started. It would not stop until 3:00 a.m. the next day...

Just needs an "i" up the middle.

Mercifully, by 92.6 the buildings became more dense. The road 3-A led to Lowell and I figured if I kept walking straight I'd find a McDonald's. Then I saw a Market Basket. Hoping it might have cafe inside I turned off and went in. No cafe. I was pretty wet now.

Just then, I saw a woman checking out with her husband. She had a McDonald's shirt on. I walked up to them in all my soaking vagrant splendor and mustering all the gentility of a desperate dog, asked her if she knew where a McDonald's might be. She looked at me for a moment and then laughed. "Yeah, go back out, go right, and instead of taking 3-A keep following this road. It's about a half a mile." Her husband told me that I needed to bear right as I walked, because there was another road that met this one. I thanked them gratefully and left to find my oasis.

Before heading there, I took a moment to remove the small blue tarp, and wrap it around Saggy, the wonderpack. I'd never done this before (amazingly!). It fit perfectly.

I walked up the road, now perpendicular to 3-A. I noticed from signs that I was in North Chelmsford. Sure enough, after a right-bending curve in the road, the golden arches appeared. I went in. It was a good place, very modern, with outlets at every booth. Nomads need to exploit opportunities in a tricky situation. Rain was the trickiest thing there was. And, I exploited the situation here at McDonald's--perhaps overexploited it.

As  it poured outside, I drank my coffee and worked feverishly to catch the blog up, while vetting hotels for my supposed big last day. Cheapest within 20 miles of Bean Town for June 20 started at $115 (most were over $200, and rose as high as $600) and with 12% (!) tax. It became crystal clear that it wasn't going to happen. All cheaper places were sold out. That week in June was the first week of summer.

I began to get depressed. This meant needing to find a sleep spot close enough to Boston to walk into town early enough to catch the Amtrak Downeaster in the morning at North Station on the 21st. Immediately, my memory was cast back to my very first sleep spot, just below South Boston, near the University of Massachusetts Campus, at the Veteran's Memorial. Would that actually be my last sleep spot?!

What was harder to get used to was the idea of not feeling a kind of celebratory finish while out here on the road. I didn't face what I would eventually come to terms with: The Nomad must remain modest until the end of his Journey. My expectations had flown too high. Without this realization yet, I experienced the complete crash when "the harder they fall" happened.

I thought about it all--over thought it in my typical way. And the dam holding back the uncertainty of my life once I get back to Maine, and the two digits representing my entire fortune, broke, and compounded my despair. I looked up and out the window at the drenching downpour--angel tears...

When I was utterly spent from writing, thinking and worrying, 13 hours had passed. I bought small items throughout the day, so they tolerated my presence. But the hour had toned. Amazingly, the rain stopped--but was due to start again in a half hour. I headed out, splashing along the sidewalk. The spot I'd chosen, shown below was the best I could find.

Then, I made a wrong turn. Walking over the bridge, I thought the right I needed to take was near the middle school. As I approached where I thought the spot should be, the area looked all wrong. So I improvised, walking down a steep embankment to a place that wasn't bad. But it was really leafy, and there was a well-used trail running through. I wasn't happy with it and climbed back out to look for my original place. The drops started to fall. Finally, I realized where I had gone wrong, and got to the original spot right when the pouring began again.

I tried desperately to find a level spot. The area was good but the time constraint was tightening my options in a vice grip, steadily diminishing them toward zero. I settled on a place under two small maple trees. Their leaves were not much of an umbrella, but they did channel the drops into more reliable channels, until all rainy hell broke loose. I thought it couldn't get worse, but the drops became like cups of water thrown down onto my back as I stooped over Saggy. If I hadn't had a little bit of experience with this in the past, I think I would have just sat down and given up, frankly. But the priorities arranged themselves out of pure habit.

First, out came the tent and poles. Sliding the spine (longest) pole through, I stood the flat tent up so it would have the least amount of surface area exposed, while I worked to get the other two poles through their sleeves. They kept snagging as the the  sleeves became saturated, wasting valuable time.

Rain, once it covers nylon surfaces like I dealt with, becomes a kind of double-sided scotch tape. Everything was sticking to everything else. I was now sweating profusely under my clothes while the rain was soaking through them from the outside. My shoes were also saturated, and I felt my feet squishing around in them.

Now that the naked tent was up, it was time for the fly to be attached. The formerly dry surface of the tent now had bullet-like marks of wetness filling in like rapid fire. This storm was not semi-automatic. In pulling out the bag I keep all my tarps in, I necessarily left the pack exposed. The green tarp and the red fly came out as a gnarled-up ball of spongy-flat noodles.

After separating them, and getting the now sopping wet blue tarp over the pack again, I turned to look at the tent. Water had filling up the floor on the inside with about a dozen 1/4 inch deep pools. The waterproof material that was so useful in keeping water from coming in through the bottom, was now holding it from draining out. I was pounding out expletives like a drunk jealous sailor below a cheating wife's window.

In my attempt to toss the fly over the tent, most it stuck on the side I was standing by. So,  I walked around to the other side, with leaves sticking to my legs, and a squadron of mosquitoes who had just arrived from their base in a swamp below hovering and landing. What is it about those little suckers? Nothing deters them! They are utterly suicidal Kamikazes, even in the hard rain.

I turned the fly, worked it back and forth, tried pulling it off and putting it back on. It stuck to itself. It stuck to the tent. It stuck to me. Somehow, after running around the tent several times, pulling each quadrant down, I had it hooked. But its sides sagged directly on the tent. I hadn't staked it yet (stakes pull it away from the tent, separating the the two layers--allowing a space for airflow).

I went back to Saggy. It was a dripping mess. In the second back pocket were the stakes.  By now I was wondering why I was even doing any of this. I supposed that it was so that I wouldn't be rained on all night, but it certainly was no longer to stay dry. I walked around the tent pulling the fly out and then staking it. This pulled the sides away from the tent. It held further rain from entering the tent, but wouldn't last long. That's why I have the green waterproof tarp.

Before getting the green tarp on, I ran back to Saggy, picked it up ran back to the entrance of the tent unzipped the flaps and put it inside--noticing that the puddles had grown into pools on the floor.

Upon turning around I noticed my clean clothes bag had fallen into the wet leaves. Shit! I picked it up and stuffed it into the pack. As much as the futility of it all became abundantly clear, instinct alone kept me going through the motions of assembly. Zipping the flaps to close up the tent while I got the last tarp on, the zipper got snagged on the wet material. It took another half minute to unsnag it.

When I walked back over to the bag that held the tarps, it rested in a leafy puddle, along with the empty tent and stakes' bags. Still I pulled it out and went through the same bullshit as the fly. It stuck to everything, and I had to keep going from side to side to fix it. I'd put all the empty bags under the canopy (the stretched out vault) of the fly. The last order of assembly was the little blue tarp. I went back to it, lying forlornly in it's own puddle. I snatched it up and then draped it over the head end of the tent, on top of the green tarp in order to extend protection down further on the head end.

The waterproof floor of a tent is called a tub. Well, this tub was more like a bath tub. When I climbed in it actually splashed! I was beyond distraught. I couldn't sit down--or didn't want to, because my shorts were the only piece of clothing not yet complete wet. So I stood on my hands and knees for two hours just thinking about solutions to an unsolvable problem.

I bowed my head, mostly because it was more comfortable that way, shut my eyes and asked the swirling, soft brown stillness there, "Is this what I get? Was I becoming too proud of doing so much? Am I just too confident...needed to be taken down a few notches?" The rain slammed the outside of the tent as if someone had turned on a hose above it.

I felt a mosquito biting my cheek, and wiped it away. I'd stuffed Saggy up into the driest part of the tent--the foot end. Looking around me, as the light was almost gone outside, I noticed that if I pushed my fingers down along the sides of the tent, channels would form, pulling the water away from the middle. When there were no more pools in the center, I relented and just sat down. That was much more comfortable, even as the cold water soaked up into my shorts and underwear.

I was tired; tired physically, but exhausted psychologically, and spiritually...I was bordering on being angry. No hotel room on this night, no great final night to the Journey in Boston, no money, no prospects for Maine, not even a dry tent... Was there truly nothing left? I've said something like this before in the blog: If there were a hell for me it would be me sitting in the cold rain of my own doing, feeling like a failure, with the "if onlys..." looping over and over again, endlessly, forevermore.

But, there isn't a hell, aside from the ones in this world.

It was at this point things slowly started to move upward. And, by "slowly," I mean over the course of the next nine hours. Now that I had the center part of the tent cleared of puddles there were square inch sections here and there that began to dry. At the head end of the tent, it was much better than it had been. I was sleepy. And, I went from contemplating about lying down, to just giving into it. I  lay on my side with my shoulder under my head for a pillow, and checked my watch. It was 9:30 p.m.

The next thing I knew, a siren rushed by on the street below. I checked my watch. It was 12:30 a.m. The rain had lightened a bit. Under my right side, where I'd been lying it was warm. But the rest of my body was cold, and I began shivering. I sat up and pulled out my small flashlight to look around. There were no leaks. Somehow I'd finally gotten the tarps on properly. The head end of the floor of the tent was nearly dry. My body heat and constant breathing had done quite a bit to facilitate this.

The center of the tent was damp, but no longer glistening with moisture. Even the small channels I'd  made along the sides had about half the water that had originally drained into them. Once again, this tent was proving itself to be extraordinary. I had taken a huge handful of napkins from McDonald's. If I had used them earlier it would have been a waste. But now that my body heat was warming the inside of the tent, the differential of having cooler air outside, was allowing moisture to slowly condense and blow out through the screen vents. This was a hopeful sign.

I pulled the backpack up and unzipped the sleeping bag pocket. The sleeping bag had a definite wet feel to the outside of it, while inside it was actually dry. I decided to use half of the napkins to wipe around the floor. This should speed up the evaporation. Judiciously, using each napkin like a precious possession, I looked for the places where I could get the surface completely dry. I wiped each spot and then blew on it, then repeated the process, until half the napkins (about 20) were saturated. This helped tremendously. Not only did it provide a better place the lay out the sleeping bag, but when dry spots were present water touching their edges was more likely to evaporate, similar to reverse osmosis.

With this meager plan succeeding, lacking as it might have been, I pulled the sleeping bag all the way out and stretched it the length of the tent. I could now move ole' Saggy up to the wider side. It was still quite wet. I vowed not to even think about opening the laptop pocket. That would have to wait. Pulling out the clean clothes bag again (which I always use as a pillow), I stuffed it into the hood of the sleeping bag. Then I removed my shoes and worked my way into the bag. Now I had the chance to sleep in earnest.

The situation was so far from ideal as to be laughable, but with an uncharacteristic optimism, I held on to the improvement of the situation like a rock climber holds on to the only hold he can find. The moment I shut my eyes I was asleep.