A Step of Faith

by Richard Paul Evans

  On one of those long stretches I remembered something Falene had said to me a few months after coming to work at the agency. We were pulling an all-nighter on a campaign for a brand of clothing called Mason-Dixon. Falene’s job was to keep us swimming in coffee. It was probably three or four in the morning, and we were getting pretty punchy when she said to me, “I should have been born a southern girl.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because I’m a rebel.”

  Maybe it was the hour, but I laughed for several minutes.

  Thirty-nine days and seven hundred miles from St. Louis, I crossed the Chattahoochee River at Eufala into Georgia. I walked twenty-three miles along the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway and camped for the night just a mile west of Cuthbert. I was in a dark mood, and it wasn’t until I was making camp that I realized why. It was the one-year anniversary of McKale’s death.

  CHAPTER

  Thirty-three

  I’m beginning to pick up the language down here. “Jeet?” means, “Have you eaten?” A “far truck” is useful in putting out “fars.” “Bard” is past tense of borrow. There are four “tars” on a truck and “did” is the opposite of alive. Shopping carts are “buggies,” buttons are “mashed” not pushed, and “Wal-Mart’n’ ” is a pleasant pastime.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  Cuthbert, Georgia, is famous for three past residents: former world heavyweight boxing champion Larry Holmes, former NFL defensive lineman Rosey Grier (who went on to work as a bodyguard for Robert F. Kennedy and was responsible for subduing Kennedy’s shooter, Sirhan Sirhan), and Lena Baker, the only woman ever executed in the Georgia electric chair. There’s a story there.

  Lena Baker, an African-American woman, was born in 1901 in a slave cabin to a family of sharecroppers. She spent her life in dire poverty. At the age of forty-four she was taking in laundry to help support her mother and three children when a local gristmill owner and heavy drinker named Ernest Knight broke his leg and hired Baker to care for him.

  Soon after taking the job, Knight, twenty-three years older than Baker, began forcing himself on her. When she tried to flee, Knight locked her in his gristmill. Baker escaped but was tracked down by Knight, who beat her and threatened to kill her if she left again. After weeks of living as his slave, she decided she couldn’t take it anymore and one night, when he came for her, they “tussled” over his pistol. A shot was fired and Knight fell dead.

  Baker was brought to trial under Judge William “Two Gun” Worrill, and it took the all-white jury less than a half hour to reach a verdict of murder. Baker was taken to Reidsville State Prison, where she was kept in the men’s section until, less than a month later, she was executed in “Old Sparky,” making her the only woman in Georgia to ever die in an electric chair. Her last words were, “What I done, I did in self-defense. God has forgiven me. I have nothing against anyone. I picked cotton for Mr. Pritchett, and he has been good to me. I am ready to go. I am ready to meet my God.”

  As I approached Cuthbert that morning, the city looked incapable of such a deed. It looked kind and welcoming and today I’m sure it is. Besides, I always liked a town where the first thing you see is a baseball field. I stopped for breakfast at the Ranch House Restaurant, drawn in by their advertised “Buffet Every Day.”

  Cuthbert is an old southern town and had survived the war with some of her colonial homes intact. The city center had a roundabout, a large clock tower, a tea parlor, and the not-so-vintage Dawg House, a hot dog emporium.

  Leaving the town, I saw something I had never seen before, a billboard cautioning travelers of an approaching intersection.

  Dangerous Intersection Ahead

  There must have been more than a few accidents, because, in addition to the billboard, I passed four more warning signs, three with flashing lights, all contributing to my general excitement to cross the “intersection of doom.”

  To my dismay, the crossroad looked identical to any other intersection. I walked through it without even stopping, wondering what all the excitement was about.

  The road from Cuthbert took me along miles of pecan trees intermingled with fields of cotton. Shortly before noon I stopped at a lone, ramshackle roadside store called Bruce’s Country Corner. An A-framed sign out front read:

  Cooking Today:

  Muscadine & Scuppernong Jelly

  From what I could see, I was the store’s only customer, so I lay my pack down on the open porch and walked inside. Just inside the door was a woman sitting near a cash register reading a romance novel. She looked up as I entered. “Mornin’.”

  “Good morning,” I said. I glanced around a moment, then asked, “What is muscadine and scuppernog?”

  “Scuppernong,” she said. “They’re grapes. They grow wild around here.”

  I surveyed the store, a long, narrow hall of a place stacked with jams, jellies and preserves, handmade wooden knickknacks, pecans, pecan logs, pecan ice cream, and pecan candies.

  “There’s more in back,” the woman said. She pointed toward a narrow door as her eyes returned to her book.

  I went to explore. The items in the back room were as eclectic as those in the front: Christmas decorations, saddles, farm implements, hard candies, boiled peanuts, and, most peculiar, carved walrus tusks and whale teeth. I asked the woman about the latter and she said, “Once a year a man comes by and trades them for pecans.”

  She offered me a sample of pecan brittle that, in all honesty, was the best I had ever had. I purchased a half pound, then, before leaving, doubled it.

  My afternoon walk was pleasant, made more so when a parade of antique and vintage cars drove past me. There were Model A’s, Model T’s, Studebakers, LaSalles, Thunderbirds, Cadillacs—eye candy, all of them. Most of the drivers were men my father’s age or older.

  I reached the town of Dawson around six. I learned something about myself in Dawson. Priding myself, as most Seattleites do, for being racially “color blind,” I realized that it’s easier when you’re in the majority. This was the first town I’d walked through where I hadn’t seen a single other white man. Outside of my foreign travels, for the first time in my life I truly felt like a minority.

  I stopped at a gas station for bottled water and on the way out asked a man idling near the gas pumps in a Dodge pickup truck if he knew of a nearby hotel.

  “You want the cheap one or the special one?” he asked.

  “The cheap one,” I replied.

  “Hop in,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  I put my pack in the truck’s bed and climbed inside.

  As he pulled out of the station he asked, “Where you walking from?”

  “Seattle.”

  He looked at me like I was pulling his leg. “You come all the way from Seattle?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why would you go and do a thing like that?”

  I looked at him for a moment, then said, “I guess I was bored.”

  He laughed the rest of the way to the hotel, a Budget Inn, where he wished me well on my journey. I thanked him, retrieved my pack from the back of his truck, then went inside. The rooms were just $24.99, and I ate a dinner of a T-bone steak and halibut at the Main St. Steak & Seafood restaurant, then went back to my hotel and to bed.

  It took me two days to reach my next destination, the town of Sylvester. Nuts are big business in Sylvester, and the town has proclaimed itself the Peanut Capital of the World, although it was pecan stores and brokerages that lined the main thoroughfare.

  I ate dinner at a Pizza Hut and booked a room at the Worth Inn, a small hotel with Pepto-Bismol pink room doors. The hotel had a Laundromat and I spent most of the night eating pecan brittle while doing my laundry and reading from a paperback book someone had left in the laundry room, The Secret Life of Bees by author Sue Monk Kidd. I thought it curious that the abandoned book was autographed, until I read on the book’s back flap that Sylvester was Kidd’s hometown.

  CHAPTER


  Thirty-four

  I’m not a fan of boiled peanuts. Just because you can boil something doesn’t mean you should.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  The next day I passed through the tiny township of Poulan—a town famous for giving out speeding tickets. Poulan was followed by the peculiarly named town of Ty Ty, where, at a small grocery mart, I tried my first muscadine grape. A muscadine is larger than any grape I’d ever seen; in fact, it looked more like a small plum than a grape, but it didn’t taste as good as either.

  That evening I reached Tifton, a tidy town with all the amenities of home. I ate dinner at the Hog-N-Bones Bar-B-Q & Breakfast and stayed at a Hilton Garden Inn. The hotel had a nice hot tub and swimming pool and I made good use of both.

  I started the day with breakfast at the Waffle House. I decided that if I ended up going back to Seattle, I would think about buying a franchise. Who doesn’t like waffles?

  It was a hot day, and I stopped at noon for a swim in Hardy Creek, then walked on to a town called Enigma, where I stopped for lunch at the Corner Café. I thought the town’s name curious, so I asked my server about it. Even though she didn’t live in the town, it wasn’t the first time she’d been asked and she was prepared.

  Originally the town was called Gunn and Weston, until the city’s founder, a man named John Ball, decided that wasn’t a real name, so he presented two new names to state officials—Lax and Enigma. Astonishingly, Lax, Ball’s first choice, was already taken, so the town was named Enigma. When he was asked why he chose the name Enigma, Ball replied, “I guess because it was a puzzle what to name it.”

  That night, as I began looking for a place to camp along the highway, I found an old, abandoned building hung with a faded sign:

  C&C Woodcraft

  The front door was slightly ajar, so I pulled it open and went inside. The building had a large front room with several smaller rooms in back. Surprisingly, the interior of the shop was partially intact, with hanging blinds, chairs and bookshelves. Most peculiarly, there was an upright piano in the corner.

  The windows were almost all broken out and the place was full of garbage, which was true of every abandoned property I had passed through since Seattle. What it is that possesses people to throw garbage in these buildings I can’t figure out. Were they just carrying their garbage around with them, saw a building and thought, There’s an old building. I think I’ll throw my garbage in there! Then again, back in Wyoming, people went out of their way to throw garbage into the beautiful Morning Glory Pool in Yellowstone National Park, so maybe people are just crazy with their garbage.

  I cleared an area on the floor next to the piano, laid out my mat and sleeping bag and went to sleep.

  Physically, I was getting better. It had been more than a week since I’d had a headache of any concern and my legs and ankles didn’t hurt anymore. I still tired more easily than I had pre-surgery, but even that was manageable. The next two days I averaged twenty-two miles and camped out both nights, nearly depleting my food and water. Fortunately, I was just a half day from the town of Waycross and the famous Okefenokee Swamp.

  The swamp presented a problem. The Okefenokee is the largest “black water” swamp in North America, covering nearly a half million acres, or six hundred square miles. Waycross marked the beginning of the north border of the swamp and was the last major town along the highway until Folkston, which was more than thirty miles south. I wouldn’t reach Waycross until noon. But even if I had started my day in town, I’d be hard-pressed to make Folkston by nightfall and I had no desire to camp outdoors near the critter-infested swamp. I would have to stop in Waycross and start early the next morning for one of the longest walking days of my entire journey.

  I reached Waycross by twelve-thirty, booked a room at a Quality Inn, then walked to the neighboring Walmart for food, supplies and bug spray. I took everything back to my room, where I ate a club sandwich and Caesar salad for lunch.

  I hadn’t always known that the Okefenokee Swamp was a real place. I first heard of the swamp from the Pogo cartoons my dad loved and in the contraband issues of MAD magazine I used to smuggle home and hide under my bed. (My mother said the magazine was “perverted” and banned me from reading it, which, of course, made it much more desirable. It wasn’t until I was sixteen, eight years after my mother’s death, that my dad found one of my hidden magazines. He picked it up, took it to his den and read it without saying a word. As it turned out, he had no objection to the magazine at all, which, for me, had two effects. First, it made me feel stupid for hiding them for all those years. And second, I lost interest in reading them.)

  With a name as absurd-sounding as Okefenokee, I had always assumed that it was just a made-up place, like Shangri La or El Dorado. Okefenokee is a Native American Hitchiti tribe word meaning “shaking waters.”

  With most of my day left, I had the hotel call a cab to take me the eight miles to the Okefenokee Swamp Park. The road from the park’s entrance to the visitor center was five more miles. There were fewer than a dozen cars in the park’s parking lot.

  The visitor center had a gift shop featuring shelves of alligators, and alligator parts, fashioned into bizarre novelties: alligator-claw key rings, necklaces and back-scratchers; gator-skinned wallets, business card holders, and iPhone covers; lacquered alligator heads, stuffed baby alligators dressed as golfers or brides and grooms, and full-grown stuffed alligators guaranteed to keep the neighbors’ dog off your lawn.

  I signed up for a boat tour, which I was told would be departing in five minutes. I hurried to the boarding dock. There were already people in the boat, an elderly couple in the back row and a family in the front two rows: mother, father and two teenage boys. I took a seat in the center.

  As we waited for our guide, the man sitting in front of me turned around and said, “We’re the Andersons. I’m Boyd and this is my wife, Dawn.”

  “Like the sunrise, not the Trump,” Dawn said.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “I’m Alan Christoffersen.”

  “Where are you from, Alan?” she asked.

  “Seattle.”

  “You’re a long way from home,” Boyd said. “Where are you headed?”

  “Key West.”

  “So are we,” Dawn said. “Maybe we’ll run into you there.”

  “You’ll probably be long gone by the time I get there,” I said.

  “Oh?” she replied. “Making other stops on the way?”

  “I’m walking.”

  “You’re walking from Seattle to Key West?” Boyd asked.

  “Every step of the way,” I said.

  “Did I hear that right?” the elderly man behind me said. “You walked here all the way from Seattle?”

  I turned around. “Yes.”

  “That’s amazing,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to walk across America and you’ve done it.”

  His wife looked at him quizzically. “You have?”

  “I’ve thought about it many times.”

  “Probably just to get away from me,” she said.

  The man offered his hand. “Pleased to meet you. We’re the Pitts of Montgomery, Alabama. I’m Eric and this is my beautiful wife, Peggy.”

  I shook her hand, then his. “It’s a pleasure,” I said. “I’m Alan Christoffersen. I walked through Montgomery a week or so ago.”

  “What did you think of it?” Peggy asked.

  “It’s a beautiful town,” I said.

  She smiled. “We’re pleased you enjoyed it.”

  Two men walked along the dock and one of them stepped off into the back of the boat, next to the outboard motor. He squeezed a black rubber priming ball, then pushed a button and the motor fired up, sputtering in the water behind us.

  “Good afternoon, y’all.” He was an older gentleman, maybe in his late sixties, thin, with a straw hat and an accent as thick as the swamp water. He wore denim jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt. “My name is Herman and I’d like to welcome y’all to
the world-famous Okefenokee Swamp. Before we set sail, let me tell you a few things. In case we sink, the exit is all around you. Secondly, y’all will want to keep your hands inside the ride at all times. Some of the critters are always looking for a handout.” He laughed at his rehearsed jokes, and we politely laughed.

  Herman untied the boat and his helper shoved us off with his foot, then he put the boat in gear, driving us forward. Thirty feet ahead we passed under a walking bridge and the canal narrowed to about fifteen feet wide.

  “If you fall in, it’s not deep,” Herman said. “But I wouldn’t stay in too long.”

  “The water looks gross,” one of the teenage boys said.

  “Looks like beer,” Eric said.

  Herman took the boat out of gear, then reached a bucket over the side and scooped up a gallon of the water, tilting it slightly forward so we could see it. “You might think there’d be a lot of skeeters in this water but there ain’t. That’s because it’s so filled with tannic acid, it kills them.” He handed the bucket to Eric. “Here, y’all tell me if it tastes like beer.”

  Eric pursed his lips. “I’ll pass, thank you.”

  “It stinks,” Peggy said.

  “That’s methane gas,” Herman said. “Same stuff cows emit from their backsides.”

  She grimaced and Herman laughed. “Every now and then somethin’ will ignite the swamp gas and you’ll hear an explosion out here like a shed o’ dynamite.” He put the motor back in gear and the boat plowed ahead.

  “What kind of trees are these?” Peggy asked.

  “These right here are cypress. I’ll tell y’all somethin’, these cypress trees can live up to six hundred years. Every inch of thickness equals twelve and a half years of growth. So, you can see, some of these trees are hundreds of years old.

  “As you probably know, the swamp’s full of all kind of critters. There are thirty-four different kinds of snakes in the swamp and I seen every one of ’em. Six of ’em are venomous, includin’ the famous water moccasin, or cottonmouth, eastern diamondback rattler and the coral snake.