Here’s a little different Monday morning message, inspired by a totally random sticker I found on a light pole during my walk to the post office a week or two ago. Wytheville is privileged in more ways than one to be the crossroads of the Mountain Empire. We have the New River heading north, essentially unnavigable, though some tried. We have the Indigenous American trails, then the great road towards Cumberland Gap and points west, followed by the railroad, US Route 11 and now the two interstates literally driving our daily lives. These weeks of early spring, we see cyclists pedaling west on the Route 76 Trans-Am bike trail. Thousands of hikers walk the wear-worn Appalachian Trail each year, which skirts Wythe. Settlements and then county courthouses evolved a day’s journey on horse away from each other. Overhead, at the seven o’clock hour each morning, dozens of jet contrails head west. Who knows what the many travelers through these parts think, do, become, from Daniel Boone killing a bear to some Reality TV show star staying at the Holiday Inn? Lately though I’ve stumbled upon a new marker identifying Wytheville as part of another journey, another’s search for something, in the form of some Marcher Arrant Walked Here stickers on light poles along Main Street. When you Google that, an amazing set of journeys pop us—across Europe, the US-- with his seemingly anonymous graffiti art left behind along the way. Apparently, in March, he started hiking the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, (maybe I crossed paths with him in the Smokies when I did a short hike on the AT in March). By the time he marched across North Carolina and into Virginia, he opted to begin walking the Silver Blazes (as akin to the White Blazes of the AT) along the railroad. He’s a prolific poster of pictures of his journey on Instagram, and sure enough, he was walking the rails (admittedly illegally) right through Wytheville about a month ago. Someone, maybe not him, stuck a couple of stickers on those light poles. That means he more than likely strode right by the Open Door Café. Who knows whether he joined us for a lunch, paying it forward to another wandering soul? A bit of a hobo, but also an artist, he posts this as his purpose: I am Marcher Arrant, an all-out walker who wanders in the margins looking for adventure, leaving marks when passing. I have spent my entire life fervently walking, searching, yet never finding. In order to survive being without a telos or identity I had to make walking and wandering itself as my telos and identity. I am now a man obsessed with walking and being lost. He's now wandering around Pittsburgh. Enjoy the journey! Andy |
