Walking to Vermont (eBook)

From Times Square into the Green Mountains -- a Homeward Adventure

Christopher S. Wren (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2007 | 1. Auflage
288 Seiten
Simon & Schuster (Verlag)
978-1-4165-8956-3 (ISBN)

Infos

A distinguished former foreign correspondent embraces retirement by setting out alone on foot for nearly four hundred miles, and explores a side of America nearly as exotic as the locales from which he once filed.
Traveling with an unwieldy pack and a keen curiosity, Christopher Wren bids farewell to the New York Times newsroom in midtown Manhattan and saunters up Broadway, through Harlem, the Bronx, and the affluent New York suburbs of Westchester and Putnam Counties. As his trek takes him into the Housatonic River Valley of Connecticut, the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and along a bucolic riverbank in New Hampshire, the strenuous challenges become as much emotional as physical.
Wren loses his way in a suburban thicket of million-dollar mansions, dodges speeding motorists, seeks serenity at a convent, shivers through a rainy night among Shaker ruins, camps in a stranger's backyard, panhandles cookies and water from a good samaritan, absorbs the lore of the Appalachian and Long Trails, sweats up and down mountains, and lands in a hospital emergency room.
Struggling under the weight of a fifty-pound pack, he gripes, 'We might grow less addicted to stuff if everything we bought had to be carried on our backs.' He hangs out with fellow wanderers named Old Rabbit, Flash, Gatorman, Stray Dog, and Buzzard, and learns gratitude from the anonymous charity of trail angels. His rite of passage into retirement, with its heat and dust and blisters galore, evokes vivid reminiscences of earlier risks taken, sometimes at gunpoint, during his years spent reporting from Russia, China, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa.
He loses track of time, waking with the sun, stopping to eat when hunger gnaws, and camping under starry skies that transform the nights of solitude. For all the self-inflicted hardship, he reports, 'In fact, I felt pretty good.' Wren has woven an intensely personal story that is candid and often downright hilarious. As Vermont turns from a destination into a state of mind, he concludes, 'I had stumbled upon the secret of how utterly irrelevant chronological age is.'
This book, from the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Cat Who Covered the World, will delight not just hikers, walkers, and other lovers of the outdoors, but also anyone who contemplates retirement, wonders about foreign correspondents, or relishes a lively, off-beat adventure, even when it unfolds close to home.

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A distinguished former foreign correspondent embraces retirement by setting out alone on foot for nearly four hundred miles, and explores a side of America nearly as exotic as the locales from which he once filed. Traveling with an unwieldy pack and a keen curiosity, Christopher Wren bids farewell to the New York Times newsroom in midtown Manhattan and saunters up Broadway, through Harlem, the Bronx, and the affluent New York suburbs of Westchester and Putnam Counties. As his trek takes him into the Housatonic River Valley of Connecticut, the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and along a bucolic riverbank in New Hampshire, the strenuous challenges become as much emotional as physical. Wren loses his way in a suburban thicket of million-dollar mansions, dodges speeding motorists, seeks serenity at a convent, shivers through a rainy night among Shaker ruins, camps in a stranger's backyard, panhandles cookies and water from a good samaritan, absorbs the lore of the Appalachian and Long Trails, sweats up and down mountains, and lands in a hospital emergency room. Struggling under the weight of a fifty-pound pack, he gripes, "e;We might grow less addicted to stuff if everything we bought had to be carried on our backs."e; He hangs out with fellow wanderers named Old Rabbit, Flash, Gatorman, Stray Dog, and Buzzard, and learns gratitude from the anonymous charity of trail angels. His rite of passage into retirement, with its heat and dust and blisters galore, evokes vivid reminiscences of earlier risks taken, sometimes at gunpoint, during his years spent reporting from Russia, China, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa. He loses track of time, waking with the sun, stopping to eat when hunger gnaws, and camping under starry skies that transform the nights of solitude. For all the self-inflicted hardship, he reports, "e;In fact, I felt pretty good."e; Wren has woven an intensely personal story that is candid and often downright hilarious. As Vermont turns from a destination into a state of mind, he concludes, "e;I had stumbled upon the secret of how utterly irrelevant chronological age is."e; This book, from the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Cat Who Covered the World, will delight not just hikers, walkers, and other lovers of the outdoors, but also anyone who contemplates retirement, wonders about foreign correspondents, or relishes a lively, off-beat adventure, even when it unfolds close to home.

Textauszug

Chapter One It was not yet noon and hotter than a July bride in a feather bed when I trudged a half-dozen miles down the wooded northeastern flank of Mount Greylock, which is, at 3,491 feet, about as high as you can go in the state of Massachusetts. The descent, steep and muddy, made my footing precarious under the weight of a pack that felt stuffed with rocks. By the time I emerged from the spruce woods onto Phelps Avenue, a street of tidy wooden houses on the southern fringe of North Adams, I was hurting as hard as I was sweating. Before I got bitten, I had planned to follow the white blazes marking the Appalachian Trail north across a green footbridge over some railroad tracks and the Hoosic River. Instead, I turned east on Main Street and caught a ride to the regional hospital on the other side of town. Within minutes, I found myself stretched out on a white-sheeted bed in the hospital's emergency ward, feeling the soothing chill of saline solution dripping antibiotics into my vein through a long needle taped to the top of my hand. It was not where I expected to be. I had been walking into retirement, from Times Square in the heart of New York City to central Vermont and a house bought eighteen years earlier while I was working in China. My wife and I talked of retiring someday to Vermont, of blending into its crisp mornings and mellow afternoons and worrying no more about fighting Sunday night traffic back to New York City. Someday had finally arrived. Now, a few miles short of the Vermont border, I was stopped by a suspected case of Lyme disease. The ugly red inflammation streaking across my right arm, the consequence of an apparent encounter with a hungry tick, only confirmed the ineffectuality of my wanderings over the previous three weeks. It didn't help that I had passed a restless night on top of Mount Greylock, poring over a worn copy of the Appalachian Trail Guide, which among its earnest descriptions of trailheads, shelters, switchbacks, and sources of drinkable water found room for dire warnings about snake bites, lightning strikes, and maladies like Lyme disease and a pernicious newcomer called hantavirus ('The virus travels from an infected rodent through its evaporating urine, droppings and saliva into the air.'). My guidebook went on to catalogue some effects of Lyme disease for the hiker foolish enough to contract it: 'Severe fatigue, dizziness, shortness of breath, cardiac irregularities, memory and concentration problems, facial paralysis, meningitis, shooting pains in the arms and legs, symptoms resembling multiple sclerosis, brain tumors, stroke, alcoholism, depression, Alzheimer's disease and anorexia nervosa.' I am not a hypochondriac, but none of these sounded conducive to a serene and healthy retirement. The Appalachian Trail Guide left me to infer that the safest place was on a living room couch in front of the television set. 'It may be necessary,' my guidebook nagged, 'to contact a university medical center or other research center if you suspect you have been bitten by an infected tick.' Since my travel preparations hadn't included compiling a list of medical research centers, I headed for the nearest hospital. 'Age?' The admissions lady ran through her repertoire of questions. 'Sixty-five,' I replied, and for the first time believed it. It's been said that inside every older person is a younger one wondering what the hell happened. It was dawning upon me that when Elvis Presley was my age, he had been dead for twenty-three years and Schubert for thirty-four. I pulled from my pack a crisp Medicare card. The hospital admissions lady made a copy and handed the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.11.2007
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber
• Themenwelt: Reisen ► Reiseführer
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Journalistik
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft
• ISBN-10: 1-4165-8956-2 / 1416589562
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8956-3 / 9781416589563