• Complain

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

Here you can read online Christopher S. Wren - Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2006, publisher: Simon & Schuster, genre: Non-fiction / History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Christopher S. Wren Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure
  • Book:
    Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Simon & Schuster
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2006
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Christopher S. Wren: author's other books


Who wrote Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

SIMON SCHUSTER Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York NY - photo 1

Picture 2
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Copyright 2004 by Christopher S. Wren
Map design copyright 2004 by David Cain
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

S IMON & S CHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wren, Christopher S. (Christopher Sale), date
Walking to Vermont : From Times Square into the Green Mountainsa homeward adventure / Christopher S. Wren.
p. cm.
1. New EnglandDescription and travel. 2. New York (State)Description and travel. 3. WalkingNew England. 4. WalkingNew York (State). 5. Wren, Christopher S. (Christopher Sale), dateTravelNew England. 6. Wren, Christopher S. (Christopher Sale), dateTravelNew York (State). 7. Foreign correspondentsUnited StatesBiography. 8. RetirementUnited StatesPsychological aspects. I. Title.
F10.W74 2004 974Picture 3.044Picture 4092dc21 [B] 2003054303

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8956-3
ISBN-10: 1-4165-8956-2

Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com

For Ginny Wren Moore

My very first travel companion

Contents

New York One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey but I - photo 5

New York

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room but outdoors nature is enough company for me. I am then never less alone than alone.

William Hazlitt

One

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.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure»

Look at similar books to Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure»

Discussion, reviews of the book Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains - a Homeward Adventure and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.