Dispatch #20
Saturday, September 21
Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Thanne left yesterday forenoon, after having walked with me from my first crutch-steps down hospital halls even to the time I could walk a mile without significant pause.

Early this morning it rained and grew cold. I shivered in bed--but getting another cover is impossible for me.

In Alexandria, Thanne and I spent nearly three days together, walking in sunshine parks and alone. I don't recall when last we spoke with such intimacy, such a complete sense each of the other. Not even when we took a week in Stratford, Canada, watching plays and doing little else did we so fully seek and find each other. I am beginning to think the difference has not been in us, but in me. Crippled, focused altogether on the single step before me, unable to care about anything else except the moment and the healing, I must finally have lost my tendency to distractions, always seeing past a present conversation to some duty awaiting my return.

Why, in some of us, must the slow expression of an abiding love come only when protected--when other considerations have been shut out by some external hand?

+ + +

We've seen, personally, between 1500 and 1600 people to date on this tour--both at the rallies and at lunches and the smaller meetings with clergy, friends, donors, cyclists. We missed 1000 people gathered on the Concordia, Moorehead, campus--who heard, instead of my immediate voice, a tape of the program I cut for the anniversary of 9-11. Fergus Falls and Grand Forks had to be canceled--though Naomi Dunovan drove all the way south from Grand Forks (about 300 miles one way) to meet us in Marshal, MN. I have known this woman over the telephone ever since I began to write about my childhood experiences in Grand Forks. I had never met her before--but there she was in the audience, preparing after the rally to drive all the way back again, and so free to come up at my invitation, that I might grant her a gift and embrace her both on her own account and for all the memories with which our common town still enriches my life. A handsome woman, a reporter for the Grand Forks Herald, gracious emissary of my tender past and of the present city distant still from me.

I had not expected this tour through the midwest also to become a tour through the past, through memories, heritage, legacies, the lands of family.

+ + +

And that we began in a Chicago heat; that I began with a renewed sense of youth and strength and a limitless hope, adding miles to the length of every day's travel, 50 and 70 and 80; but that the wind and the rains have now brought the first stings of autumn, and the trees are changing and pumpkins fill the fields like a scattering of orange stones on a flat land; and that I am bound to crutches, moving with an enforced patience, dressing with an interminable patience, exercising an injury rather than a sunny fitness--all this makes of this tour also a template of our lives: so swiftly is the summer past and autumn present in our bones, and evenings alone can cause a quiet melancholy, and at night the bed grows cold.

Walt