An Interesting Encounter

Sunday, May 7…

Travel day. Slow start when we discovered the new MH-to-BMW electronics cable Greg bought yesterday is 6” too short. Fortunately, Greg knows how to fix that, but it required half an hour of tediously splicing wires and re-casing them. Fortunately, we only had an hour’s drive to reach our new site in Boonesborough State Park near Lexington, KY. I think we’re actually going to check out some regional landmarks here. Tomorrow (based on the discussion I just had with Greg), we’re going to visit Pleasant Hill, a restoration of what was once the 3rd largest Shaker community in the U.S.

So, generally speaking, it’s been a very ordinary day. With one somewhat significant (I think) exception. When we stopped for gas just before getting on the freeway, I noticed Greg chatting with a very animated fellow. A few minutes later Greg’s introducing me to James Shepherd Allen, who’s a writer and needs a ride to Lexington (or at least the exit we’ll take to the campground near Lexington). Okay.  He introduced himself and we shook hands. “Hi, James. What kind of writing do you do?” I lost track of his answer quickly, as it rambled from a religious adaptation of Romeo & Juliet to “interpreting news articles” (which, he assured me, he did flawlessly). He went on to explain that, once he picked up his debit card from an uncle in Lexington, he was taking a Greyhound bus to New York where his family’s company had a big construction project. He talked about Einstein and Freud (and how they worked together), about the Holy Land in L.A. (religious references came up frequently), about reading hieroglyphs and turning seaweed into an energy source for ships. About how he loved science, about the unlimited debit cards he had through the CIA…

Twenty minutes later, when we dropped James at a gas station, my brain was frazzled and I was exhausted. He was clean and well dressed, and he obviously had a lot of information in his head, but he was either high on something or just simply delusional. Like most of us, I’ve seen/heard various folks ramble incoherently, but they also usually look homeless or stoned. This guy looked like a Google or Amazon employee (and even though the facts didn’t add up, he was well-spoken and it took a while to realize that he was, in fact, incoherent).

I don’t know if anything he said was true. I also know he wasn’t lying. What really hit me, though, was the fact that, b/c he was a clean, pleasant, well dressed guy who just needed a lift, Greg agreed to help him out. I was never worried, but this guy might have had some kind of weapon (although he was in jeans & a shirt – no backpack or anything extra) or maybe gone totally berserk on us. I don’t know what conclusion I should draw from all of this.

No pictures today, so I'll close with this shot I took in Charlottesville:

Evening Still Life
(Greg calls it "Cloud Hook")