June 9, 1998 - We're seven hundred miles into a journey for which we're interrupting some stressy times at home, for me, the way-too-much of Comfest and for Andy, increased pressures at work, and this rainy evening in our bunk beds at the Virginia Beach hostel it's hard to shake what we've left and are coming back to so soon, but here at the shore we can at least take a few hours, we can at least try. I hear the rain and young voices; we came across flat farmlands and crossed the bay twice to be here, and walked along the concrete boardwalk and laughed at our own small jokes.

June 10 - A solid night's sleep, loud young people in the dark early morning hours, and we are up into the changing beach day, rain at night by which to sleep well, sunshine and clouds and haze today we get started slowly and walk on the sand, seven broad-winged birds fly overhead and we watch their elegant mindful W-formation and become delighted - they are pelicans! Andy says the seagulls are laughing. My whole life I have heard them squawking and complaining. Later - I wonder how far out to sea I am looking when I look straight out from this beach, between 25th and 26th on the Virginia Beach boardwalk, cloudy and cool and breezy, very few people on the beach, a few more shuffling along the hard boardwalk. The breaking sea is always loud, nature loud, sometimes nature makes a lot of noise. I don't care how many miles out I can see -- I wonder how long it would take me to walk to the horizon, if I could walk on the water and stop when I came to where the horizon is here, where I can see it now, gray sea to gray sky, and as I walk the horizon would move ahead of me anyway, and I cannot walk on the water but it is too cold to swim.

In the installation of beds at the art museum was one wooden crib inlaid with 400 white taper candles and the story on the wall says all is well, an illness overcome, a baby born. I notice about people trying for a long time to bear a baby. A military helicopter flies overhead like a large boxy dead beast uplifted by two propellers and exhibited for all to gaze upon and remark whether or not they so desire. Pleasure boats cross nearby on the water. A young couple hand-in-hand. Two men jogging past, and a small family of two children in helmets and rollerblades, a blonde woman carrying everything. Close by are 300 stores selling all manner of junk and seashells and hermit crabs and bikinis and plastic things. Here in the velocity of the waves and the grayness and the noise it is much more quiet. I love them both, and I wonder should I be living at the beach; it smells like millennia of truth, of water coursing in to land, meeting, crashing, long before man and if we're not all that powerful, perhaps afterward too.

June 11 - Today I am 33 years old and nearly as crabby as if I were 3. Waking up at 3:30 in the morning it is dark and still out, too nighttime to go out, troubletime, so I went back to bed and slept fitfully until full light at 6:00, ready to be up and out, to hear and smell the beach once again before turning inland, to what becomes a hazy sunny day in black northeastern North Carolina, flat land above sea and dusty falling-down towns like Rich Square and George. In George, Andy noticed that both sides of the municipality sign read "George", and we spotted George Dead End Road - that is the name on the sign. We're off the interesting highways now and on 64 between Rocky Mount and Raleigh, and now in Wake County est. 1771 (where did the county system come from and how do they determine the borders?), these limited-access divided highways I'd so like to avoid but we gain 10-15 miles an hour and don't get stuck behind tractors, and just now we feel in a bit of a rush. We've the rest of the length of North Carolina tomorrow, plus Spartanburg, and Andy's interested in doing some of that driving tonight.

June 12 - In Raleigh we walked through part of the old neighborhood of Victorian homes, Historic Oakwood I believe it is called, with our walking tour guide noting the details, one home with flower-shaped painted glass windows and fascinating odd details that appeared a mishmash really captivated us. I thought of how I'd told Andy that I wanted to be an architect when I was younger and now I still don't know the names of the elements of a house and cannot identify a style, maybe I would rather be able to identify trees but I guess it should be enough to appreciate whatever it is I do see.

June 13 - Asheville is pretty complicated to get to and from, from Sevierville (pronounced severe-ville) as we have been finding last night and today but now we are seated, soon eating, and beauty-sunny out again and almost no rain all week, for all the "sevier" thunderstorms predicted. We eat at a vegetarian place on what turns out to be the young hip block, a street down a hill, filled with secondhand shops and places to buy hip clothing - one called Interplanet Janet - fronted on one side by what I think was called Chicken Alley. Between sleeping in and moving pretty slowly in the morning, though up and down the side of a mountain, filling with summer homes, plus a beautiful but caravanesque tedious drive through Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and a side-trip to little Sylva where, it turns out, the solar store we're seeking is only open a few hours a week not including our Saturday afternoon, we didn't get back to Asheville till mid-afternoon and I felt the day slipping and responded in typical unhelpful fashion, causing a tense brouhaha between Andy and me in the parking lot of church, of all inappropriate places, a hard walk indoors yet there is a blessing in it for us somehow. I have been talking with God while watching the mountains but still preoccupied with what God must think of me.

June 14 - Early evening, north toward Cincinnati after stops in Knoxville and Lexington, two awful traffic tie-ups on I-75, one of which seems to have been merely construction but the other was an accident, car down in the ditch and a gurney rolling downhill as we finally pass. I haven't been worrying about dying so much the past few days. I think to stopping for the Gaffney Peach however many days ago and finding our way into Spartanburg, frustrated that I no longer just know how but it has been seven years, I'd been there for a bit. Andy was glad to see Spartanburg, to put sights to the slivers of stories I've told - the empty library and my old house, magnolia trees, Converse campus, the harsh hot busyness of Pine Street. We ate at the Beacon, a most fun lunch, the wacky way the kitchen works where the guy takes your order and calls it out to the world in a garbled voice and there may be 30 orders he's calling out all in a row but somehow out of that mess and the bunch of kitchen people with huge, huge amounts of food, yours shows up on the counter just right - tomato lettuce sandwich on toast, pimiento cheese sandwich, hush puppies, onion rings, potato salad, cole slaw. We bought a gallon of the immensely sweet tea and ate a lunch we couldn't repeat the likes of too often, like ever.

June 15 - and another day back again, the least scenic highway of the trip, now we are on the road to Columbus, warm humid afternoon sleepy and a bit raggy and uncertain of our readiness but homeward Andy and me, who trust, and are home to home after 2,150 miles, so many inches of sight and thought and now we are nearly, safely home. Let us be comfortable and right, home.

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