Christopher S. Wren - Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure

I T 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 hospitals 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 didnt 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, Alzheimers 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 hadnt 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. Its 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 red-white-and-blue card back.

I looked like a vagrant, but my motley appearance raised no alarms among the nurses. They hooked me to an intravenous drip and, glancing over my unkempt appearance and muddy boots, were solicitous enough to ask if I wanted something to eat. I allowed as how I was hungry. Walking for three weeks had given me a ravenous appetite that even a nasty infection could not diminish.

For the first time, hospital foodthe plat du jour was a turkey sandwich accompanied by a Coketasted scrumptious. By the time I polished off the strawberry Jell-O, all but licking the little plastic cup clean, one of the nurses marveled, Weve never had a patient in emergency who cleaned his plate.

C ALL MY walk, interrupted, a rite of passage. After forty years as a working journalist, I had collided with the life change that is the stuff of which dreams and nightmares are fashioned. Once the fizz is gone from the goodbye champagne, how do you enter this next stage of your life with any semblance of style or self-respect? You can press ahead, or you can cling to the past while time keeps stomping on your fingers.

As a scared young paratrooper, I had it screamed over and over at me by foul-mouthed instructors that an exit from an aircraft in flight had to be vigorous to clear the propeller blast. Otherwise, the jumper risked being slammed back into the metal fuselage by the screaming wind with such hurricane force as to leave him unconscious or dead.

My career at the New York Times , which took me to a half-dozen news bureaus in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa, Johannesburg, and the United Nations, was winding down after nearly three decades as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor. It was time to collect what I had paid into Social Security and claim the perquisites with which America honors its senior citizens train and movie discounts and dinner bargains at hours early enough to get you home in bed before sundown.

The prospect left me restless and a little apprehensive. I no longer needed to chase deadline news, but there had to be better times ahead than falling back on golf and gated retirement communities. T. S. Eliots observation that old men ought to be explorers was finally making sense.