Thirty thousand people had filled these streets the day before. I couldn’t find a single trace of them—no wreckage, no litter, just swept brick and open parking. It took two strangers and a sold-out appetizer to convince me the Street Fair had happened at all.
Vigils is at 3:15 in the morning. Seven offices a day, silence in most of the halls, and Thomas Merton buried out back in a plain row with no marker pointing the way. Several days at a Trappist monastery in central Kentucky.
Sunday morning at Big Bone Lick, a 1974 Volkswagen Westfalia stopped me cold—restored down to the plaid upholstery. The couple who owned it had been driving it for decades. What they said about the mileage wasn’t what I expected.
Weeks of lists, gear videos, and a spreadsheet I kept telling myself was almost done. I finally packed what I actually had instead of what I still meant to buy, and left. I had gloves. I had sanitizing wipes. I did not have pillows.
I could get in the car right now and drive to the Smokies. Nothing and nobody would stop me. What surprised me was my own reaction to that—not exhilaration, not fear, but something a lot flatter.
A guy in a borrowed basement in Cincinnati, eighteen months out from a heart transplant, with a career and a marriage and an address all recently in the past tense. The plan he’d built his life around was designed for conditions that no longer exist.
