A Step of Faith (16 page)

Authors: Richard Paul Evans

When the tour concluded, I tipped my guide, then walked back to the street while she locked her office, then drove away. After she was gone, I returned to the home and pitched my tent on the soft grass beneath the maple, oak, and walnut trees behind the house.

CHAPTER

Twenty-three

You can tell as much about a culture from their diet as from their literature. Sometimes, perhaps, more.

Alan Christoffersen’s diary

My headache and exhaustion returned the next day, and I didn’t walk far, barely sixteen miles, stopping at a hotel called Pattie’s Inn. The first thing I noticed was the large
NO
PETS
ALLOWED
warning on the hotel’s marquee. Then, just in case you missed it, there was another
NO
PETS
sign on the hotel’s front door. I walked into the hotel’s lobby and there was yet another
NO
PETS
sign on the wall behind the check-in counter, with, oddly, a dog lying on the floor beneath it.

The next morning I felt better again. As I walked back to the highway, I came upon a young man standing near the freeway on-ramp with a large handwritten poster-board sign around his neck. As I got closer, I read the board.

I CHEATED ON MY WIFE.

THIS IS MY PUNISHMENT.

I stopped a couple yards from him, read his sign, then looked up at him. He was red-faced with embarrassment and just stood there, avoiding eye contact. After a moment I said, “She made you do that?”

Glancing furtively at me, he said, “Yeah.”

“For how long?”

“Today. And all day tomorrow.”

I shook my head, then continued walking.

Highway 61 South turned into a bigger, busier road with a speed limit of seventy miles per hour. Fortunately it had a wide shoulder. I kept thinking back on the guy with the sign around his neck and chuckling.

I crossed into Pemiscot County and left the highway for a frontage road lined with cotton fields. Four hours into my walk I stopped at Chubby’s BBQ for lunch.

South of the Mason-Dixon line, barbecue restaurants are as plentiful as deviled eggs at a church picnic. In the same vein that the state of Washington prides itself on the creative naming of coffee shops, the South holds the titling of barbecue joints in high regard. I dedicated a page in my journal to writing down some of their names.

Fat Matt’s

Kiss My Ribs

Squat and Gobble

Swett’s

Bubba’s

Porkpies

Birds, Butts and Bones

The Boneyard

The Bonelicker

Barbecutie

Butts

Bubbalous Bodacious Barbeque

Dixie Pig

Bone Daddy

Prissy Polly’s

Pig Pickins Parlor

The Boars’ Butts

The Prancing Pig

Holy Smokes (A bbq joint in a converted Lutheran church)

Sticky Lips

Adam’s Rib

The Rib Cage

The Butt Rub

The Pig Out Inn

Hog Wild

Half Porked

Lord of the Swine

Big D’s Piggy Strut

The Swinery

Some of the restaurants’ slogans were noteworthy as well.

“We shall sell no swine before its time.”

“A waist is a terrible thing to mind.”

“No pig left behind.”

After a lunch of chopped brisket, collard greens and cheesy mashed potatoes, I returned to the interstate. I disliked walking such a busy road. The draft created by semis traveling at seventy-plus miles per hour would hit my pack like wind against a schooner’s sail and almost knock me over. Twice I lost my Akubra hat, chasing it across more than one lane of traffic. Still, I made decent time and after twenty-six miles I took exit 8 off 61 and walked to the Deerfield Inn. For dinner I ate a meatball sandwich and a tuna salad at the local Subway restaurant.

CHAPTER

Twenty-four

Missouri calls itself the “Show Me” state. I’m not sure if they’re claiming skepticism or voyeurism.

Alan Christoffersen’s diary

The next morning I reached the town of Steele in less than an hour. Running parallel to the road was a slow-moving train, and I saw several men clambering onto the outside of one of the cars. The scene reminded me of Israel, the hitchhiker I had met outside Marceline, Missouri, which now seemed like a decade ago. It was hard to believe that after all these months I was still in the same state. But not for much longer. Just before noon I saw a small arch spanning the road in front of me. As I approached, I could see that it had the word
ARKANSAS
written across it.

A hundred yards from the border, I passed a dilapidated white house with a plaque in front of it. I stopped to read it.

E
DGAR
H
AROLD
L
LOYD

MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT FROM WWII

It was a poor monument, but a monument just the same, and the fact that a hero came from such an unassuming locale made me glad.

Like my transcendent experience of crossing from Wyoming to South Dakota, shortly after crossing the Arkansas state line, the landscape and architecture improved
and soon I was walking past country club estates with beautiful manicured lawns and minicolonial mansions. I stopped for lunch in the town of Blytheville, where I ate southern fried chicken.

Unfortunately, not far past the restaurant, the scenery changed from beautiful mini-mansions to pawnshops and boarded-up buildings, making me think the place was only Blytheville for some. I walked another five miles and spent the night at the Best Western Blytheville Inn. That evening I turned on my cell phone to check for messages. No one had called.

CHAPTER

Twenty-five

To challenge the rules of conventionality is to open ourselves to an entirely new universe. One cannot pioneer new worlds from old trails.

Alan Christoffersen’s diary

The next day felt like a rerun of earlier days, with seemingly endless cotton fields and, again, the mysteriously leaning power lines. The tilt of the poles was so perfectly symmetrical that I wondered if they had been purposely set in this manner or if their leaning was caused by some natural phenomenon, like the famed bell tower of Pisa. I vowed to ask someone when I got the chance, which settled my mind on the matter enough that I never actually got around to asking anyone.

I felt physically more able than I had in days and I was eager to get through this lonely stretch, so I walked nearly twenty-five miles until I reached the quaint little town of Wilson. Wilson had once been a thriving logging town, built around a huge sawmill and lumber yard which, decades before, had been closed down, cordoned off by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

What distinguished Wilson from the other towns along that stretch was the architecture—which, peculiarly, was more British than southern. I stopped for dinner at the Wilson Café and my server gave me some of the history. The town was founded by Robert E. Lee Wilson, who, after cutting down the trees, used the land for agricultural purposes. Wilson pretty much owned the town, but he
was a generous public benefactor, and every town resident had use of the company doctor for just $1.25 annually, about $17 in today’s money.

Wilson’s son, Wilson Jr., and his bride, returned from a honeymoon to England fascinated by British architecture. Apparently their excitement was contagious, because shortly thereafter all the town’s buildings were either built or retrofitted with Tudor elements, giving the town a distinct and charming British appearance.

I finished my meal of split-pea soup and pork ribs, then camped the night behind a screen of trees in the park next to the restaurant.

CHAPTER

Twenty-six

For centuries the spiritually seeking have asked God for a sign. Perhaps that’s why there’s so many of them planted out front of southern churches.

Alan Christoffersen’s diary

The next day marked two weeks since I’d resumed my walk. Unremarkably, I passed more cotton fields and walked through a string of small towns: Bassett, Joiner and Frenchmans Bayou (the latter town so named because no one could pronounce the French name the original French settler had given it).

My route led to Highway 77, which I reached just before sunset. I ate fried chicken and Baskin-Robbins ice cream I bought at a gas station, then stopped for the night at the small town of Clarkedale, making camp on the far side of the railroad tracks that ran parallel to the highway. I set my tent too close to the tracks, and when a train whistled in the middle of the night, I woke, all but certain my life was over. I slept fitfully the rest of the night, anticipating the advent of another passing train, which never came.

Early the next morning I reached a town with the biblically inspired name of Jericho. Appropriately, the first street I passed was Praise the Lord Boulevard. Perhaps not so appropriately, the first building I passed was the Jericho Liquor Store. I was always surprised to see more than one church in a town with so few residents, and this town
contained many. I walked by a church sign that seemed especially apropos to my circumstance:

Are you on the right road?

I should write something about church signs. Walking from Seattle—the third-
least
Christian city in America—to the pious southern roads of the Bible Belt, one of the things that stood out to me (in addition to the sheer number of churches) was the phenomenon of church signs. Pretty much all of the churches had signs or marquees. Some were designed to lure people to their meetings, while others were sermons unto themselves. A few of them bordered on the bizarre.

As I had with the Wall Drug signs along Interstate 90 in South Dakota, I decided to dedicate a few pages of my diary to writing down some of these messages.