Walking on Water: A Novel (19 page)

Where will I go when I die?

My mind went back to the conversation I’d had with my father about the afterlife. I couldn’t help but smile. I took a pen from the nightstand and wrote beneath the query:

Toledo

I remembered a story one of my former employees, a graphic artist named Charles, told me. He said that when he was young he’d had a cousin with leukemia. He said that one night he woke in the middle of the night to see her standing next to his bed. When he asked her what she was doing in his room she said, “Tell my mother and father that all is well.” Then she was gone. The next morning his parents told him that his cousin had died in the night.

I don’t know if Charles had really seen the girl or not, but I’m certain that he believed he had.

Toledo. I wondered where my father was—physically—if the word still applied. Was he walking with me? Would I even know it if he was? I thought of his dream about sitting in the garden with my mother and McKale. I hoped he was there. The thought made me feel peaceful.

I dressed, then sat down on the thinly padded carpet and again stretched my back and legs. When I felt sufficiently limber I grabbed my pack and set off for the day. It had rained during the night, and the sky was still overcast. All around me the ground and roadway were pooled
with water.
Walking on water,
I thought. A mile and a half into town I reached a Huddle House restaurant. I stopped for a breakfast of blueberry pancakes.

Shortly after I left the restaurant the highway speed limit rose to sixty-five again, which affected me only because of the danger of speeding cars on wet roads. An hour later I entered Duval County and reached the Jacksonville city limit. Peculiarly, someone had hung the hoods of a dozen cars along a fence. I had no idea why. Maybe it was art.

Thirteen miles into the day I climbed the on-ramp to Interstate 295. The freeway traffic was dense and fast, at least in comparison to where I had been walking, but there were also a wide emergency lane and broad, grassy shoulders.

My legs were still not a hundred percent, so I exited the freeway short of twenty miles at Commonwealth Avenue. The shoulder was under repair, and I had to hike around barricades to get to the bottom of the off-ramp and the Comfort Suites.

There was a Wendy’s drive-in adjacent to the hotel’s parking lot, and I had a chicken salad, a bowl of chili, and a baked potato for dinner, then went back to my room and soaked in the last of my Epsom salts before going to bed.

The next day was stressful going. As I’d been warned back in Folkston, the expressway was “tore up” in myriad places, making it difficult to walk. At one point I was forced to climb over barricades because of road construction.

Around noon I took the Roosevelt Boulevard exit and ate lunch at one of my favorite stops, the Waffle House. I was in no hurry to return to the 95, so after lunch I tried to keep to local roads, but after an hour I could see the freeway was the only sensible route. I walked nearly five miles more, then got off on the Old St. Augustine Road.

As I descended the off-ramp I saw a sign for a Holiday Inn Express. I turned left, crossing beneath the overpass and into a well-groomed business district not a quarter mile from the exit. I had again walked less than twenty miles, but it felt like more.

The hotel shared a parking lot with a steak and seafood restaurant called LeGrand’s. I lay down on my bed for about a half hour; then I got up, washed my face, and walked across the parking lot to the restaurant.

The restaurant was crowded, but, being a party of one, I was seated quickly. I had the best meal I’d had since I left California: skillet corn bread, a wedge salad, sweet potato pecan soufflé, and a twelve-ounce rib eye steak garnished with sautéed mushrooms.

There was a couple sitting just two tables away from me that I guessed to be about my age. They had a toddler, a boy, who was celebrating a birthday. The family looked so remarkably happy that I couldn’t help but watch them. I surprised myself by laughing out loud when their boy smashed his hands into his piece of birthday cake. As they got up to leave, the young mother glanced over at me. I smiled. She smiled back, then turned away and pulled her child close. Suddenly, all the reasons I’d given McKale for putting off having a child seemed petty.

When I got back to the Holiday Inn I went for a
long swim, then relaxed in the hot tub until it closed around eleven.

The hotel provided a free breakfast. I ate a cheese omelet with bacon and sausage, biscuits and gravy, and sticky cinnamon rolls. I went back to my room for my pack, then walked back out to the freeway.

I had walked about an hour when I exited onto the 1, which, at this part of the state, was called Philips Highway. (I was to learn that Highway 1 has more name changes than Zsa Zsa Gabor.) An hour later I passed through the town of Bayard. The skies were clearing a little, but I noticed that the shoulder to my right was filled with water, so, likely in unwarranted paranoia, I kept an eye open for gators.

Since passing the Okefenokee Swamp I’d thought a lot about alligators. There’s a myth that the best way to outrun an alligator is to run zigzags, the rationale being that the reptile cannot easily adjust its path. This is wrong on two counts. First, the fastest an alligator has been recorded running is ten miles an hour, half the speed of a human sprinter and still considerably slower than any average adult can run. Second, an alligator has little endurance on land and rarely chases anything more than fifteen feet away from it. So the fastest way to put distance between you and a gator is to run in a straight line. While I realize that this information is probably useless, it does make for good conversation.

As evening fell I turned off on Palencia Village Drive and stopped at a small strip mall restaurant called Pacific Asian Bistro, where I ate edamame, miso soup, and unagi
don—eel over sushi rice. After finishing my meal, I asked the proprietor, a middle-aged Chinese man, if there was a hotel in the area. He replied, “Yeah, it’s close. Just keep driving another ten minutes.”

Ten minutes by car was four hours by foot. I walked around the area until I finally found a clump of trees big enough to conceal my tent. I felt like I was hiding in plain sight.

I didn’t sleep well. I woke early, broke down my tent, and walked back out to Highway 1. I wasn’t too concerned with my lack of sleep, since I planned to walk for only a few hours anyway. The city of St. Augustine was only seven miles away, and I wanted to spend some time there.

St. Augustine is America’s oldest European-settled city. It was founded more than two centuries before the Declaration of Independence was signed and served as the capital of Spanish Florida for over two hundred years. The town, like most of early America, has a bloody past, and control of the region has changed hands multiple times. It was first colonized by the French, then seized by the Spanish and traded to the British.

A quarter mile into the town was a parking lot and booth with a sign that read:

Old Town Trolley Tours

I purchased a ticket and waited for the next trolley to arrive. Tourism was light that day, and I took an entire bench on the trolley for myself and my pack, behind a family I deduced was from Kansas from their Jayhawks sweatshirts.

It was pleasant sitting on the trolley as it wound through the city’s historic streets accompanied by the driver’s
commentary. The trolley ticket was an all-day pass, so I got off in the old town near Aviles Street, the oldest street in America, walked around awhile, then reboarded and crossed the Bridge of Lions to Anastasia Island, where I took a tour of the St. Augustine Alligator Farm, which, for a reptile lover like myself, was well worth the admission.

The park had all twenty-three living species of crocodilians, the most interesting being the gharial, with its long, toothy snout as narrow as a French baguette.

In the center of the park was a pool filled with some of the largest alligators I had ever seen. They were monsters, motionless as statues. They were obviously well fed, because during a feeding demonstration a dead chicken landed on one of the alligators’ heads and it was still there when I left ten minutes later.

After the farm, I walked over to the St. Augustine Lighthouse, 140 years old and striped white and black like a giant, monochromatic barber pole. I checked my pack at the front registry, then walked through the lighthouse keeper’s house (which had been converted into a museum), then to the lighthouse.

McKale loved lighthouses, and I thought of her as I climbed the 219 steps to the deck on top.

I had been warned by the ticket taker to remove my hat before I reached the top, and the reason became obvious as I walked out on the deck. The sea winds were powerful enough to remove hats and sunglasses.

The deck provided a 360-degree view of St. Augustine, the Intracoastal Waterway, and the Atlantic Ocean.

I climbed back down the lighthouse and caught the trolley to the mainland. I asked the driver about a good restaurant, and he recommended Meehan’s Irish Pub & Seafood House, which was near one of his stops.

Even though it was the town’s off-season, the restaurant was crowded. The hostess, a pretty young blond woman with a (I hoped temporary) shamrock tattoo on her cheek, informed me that there was a twenty-five-minute wait for a table unless I wanted to eat at the bar, which I elected to do.

I sat at the end of the bar, where I could keep an eye on my pack, and perused the menu. The pub’s motto was “Eat, Drink, and be Irish,” so I ordered their Irish specials: a Reuben roll (which was something like an Asian spring roll but was filled with corned beef and sauerkraut), conch chowder, and shepherd’s pie.

I was finishing my meal when a man sat down next to me. He was probably a little older than my father, tan with sun-spotted, leathery skin. His blond hair was streaked with gray and pulled back in a ponytail. He wore a Tommy Bahama flowered shirt and cargo shorts. He glanced over at me and nodded his head a little.

“Evening,” I said.

“Evening,” he replied.

He ordered a beer and shepherd’s pie. He glanced past me at my pack, then asked, “Passing through town?”

I nodded. “I’m headed to Key West.”

“Good place to be headed,” he said. “I’m Gaspar.” He extended his hand.

“Alan,” I replied. “Gaspar. That’s an unusual name.”

“Not so unusual around here,” he said.

“So you’re from here,” I said.

“I was born near Vero, but I’ve lived here for the last twenty-six years. You?”

“Born in Denver, raised in Pasadena. But I moved to Seattle for work.”

“What do you do?”

“I used to be in advertising,” I said. “Now I just walk.”

“There’s a profession. Are you paid by the mile or the hour? Actually, a better question is
who
pays you? And why?”

“It’s pro bono,” I said.

He grinned. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m a treasure hunter.”

“Really. What kind of treasure do you hunt?”

“Buried, mostly.”

“You’ve found buried treasure?”

“Some. The big one’s eluded me, but I’ll find it someday. It’s just a matter of time.”

“There’s a lot of treasure around here?”

“Florida has more lost treasure than anywhere else in the world, and only a fraction of it’s been found. A few years back road crews were building a road in Brevard County and unearthed thirteen chests of coins.

“Every now and then Spanish doubloons and pieces of eight from shipwrecks will wash up on the beaches after heavy storms, but most of the loot was buried on land by pirates.”

“Pirates?”

“These waters were full of them. Captain Morgan, of the rum fame, Calico Jack, Black Caesar, and the most famous, José Gaspar. My namesake.”

“I’ve never heard of Gaspar,” I said. “But I’m not much on piratology.” I wasn’t sure that was a word.