Jeanette will post this week, reader. It’s just going to have to wait for tomorrow after work. Adama went and crazied out her whole Tuesday evening (lots of wrist-chewing, garbage-raiding, and park-escaping, apparently), so she didn’t get a chance to finish up the blog set for yesterday. Feel free to hold your breath, though, because it’s coming.

Meanwhile, thanks to the holiday weekend (and general laziness), the things I intend to write about today are a little outdated. Today is, what, Wednesday? So I guess my story happened exactly one week ago, June 30th.

First, a little background. Picture Sean Penn. Now, picture Sean Penn at the age of 22. More specifically, picture a 22-year-old Sean Penn in the act of playing teenage burnout Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Here’s an actual picture, if you’re having trouble recalling the film. Okay. Now picture a random 41-year-old whitewater rafting guide with the good fortune of looking more like the 22-year-old Penn/Spicoli than does the real-live 49-year-old Sean Penn. Got him? Cool.

I met exactly this man at the headquarters of a rafting/camping company called Songer Whitewater Rafting. And when I say “headquarters,” I use the term loosely. More specifically, we met in the bar above the storage house for the company’s rafts. This 41-year-old Jeff Spicoli lookalike took an immediate shine to me, for some reason. Maybe it was my downtrodden carriage at having walked fifteen miles already that day. Maybe it was the way I housed the $1 PBR draft so recently set in front of me by the bartender/owner of Songer Whitewater. Maybe it was my giant backpack. Whatever the case, Jeff Spicoli most assuredly took a shine to me. I know this because he proceeded to buy me beer after beer for the next ninety minutes.

Now I’m not going to say that I’m not a man who enjoys a beer or two every now and then. Yes, I have indeed been drunk before. But it’s been a long time, reader. My life since April 14th hasn’t exactly been conducive to boozing, after all. So when I say that Jeff Spicoli managed to get me suddenly, unexpectedly, and overwhelmingly tipsy, you know that I mean it. The fact that I hadn’t eaten since 10am probably helped, as well.

So now you’ve got the background. Imagine me wobbling on my barstool, smiling and laughing through the conversations of the kinds of people who spend all summer every summer enjoying exhilarating outdoor adventures on the New River. I spoke to art teachers, construction workers on hiatus, college students with nothing better to do, and yes, burnout professional outdoorsmen like Jeff Spicoli – and all of this while surrounded by a bar with a grand view and low, low prices. Having trudged across the American Southeast for eleven weeks, feeling very much like I’d been on the job the whole time, I had stumbled into a downright enviable environment of vacation. Some of the people in the bar and tooling around the surrounding campground were indeed enjoying a week of carefree bliss in and about the New River. Others had made it a lifestyle. Jeff Spicoli was a member of the latter group.

Round about Beer #5, the art teacher began recruiting me to forego my next-day’s walk in favor of a free trip up the river with her rafting group. She had room, she explained, and what kind of walk would this be if I didn’t take the time to have a little adventure once in a while?

That’s true, I thought, my head swirling and my stomach burning with hunger.

“The tour starts at eight,” she said. “We’ll be done by two. And I can drive you up to Summersville after that, if you need.”

This sweetened the pot. See, I would have accepted the rafting offer (sans the ride) without a second thought if I hadn’t been on a short-term schedule. I would’ve skipped a day of walking, spent a day on rafting, and slept a second night at the campground. But unfortunately, I had to be in Summersville by Thursday afternoon because my Dad and Renee were scheduled to arrive at our prearranged hotel later that evening.

“Here, man,” Spicoli said, sliding a sixth beer in front of me, my fifth beer still only halfway finished.

I laughed. The art teacher laughed. Spicoli laughed. I found myself agreeing with the plan to trade a day of walking for a day of rafting. There was much rejoicing from the Songer staff.

“You know, man,” Spicoli said, leaning in to blast me with beer breath, “you’re gonna get eddied out here.”

I must have looked confused, because Spicoli then launched into an explanation, beginning with a rather dictionary-like definition.

“An eddy is a current that runs opposite the main current of a river or stream.” He brushed his greasy blonde hair behind his left ear. “It’s like a whirlpool, man. And what we do—” he offered a broad, straight-armed wave to the other guides among us “—is we sometimes use the eddies to let our groups rest for a while. An eddy can hold you in place, see.” He then leaned into my personal space, looking much like a pirate sniffing his booty. “But sometimes – and this is mostly because we’re dealing with amateur rafting customers here – we get stuck in an eddy by accident. We call this eddying out.”

I nodded, wanting nothing to do with this sixth beer.

“You get it, man?” Spicoli said, slapping me on the shoulder.

I shook my head, drunk.

“People come in to this place, man, and they just, they just—” he passed a flat hand in the air above the bar “—they just eddy out. They might feel like they should leave, but they get… stuck.”

I gulped as he cackled with laughter. He was right, of course. As long as a man didn’t have any real-life obligations to attend to, this place was paradise. I could completely understand how someone might get sucked in, stuck, eddied out. I don’t know. Maybe it was the booze. But I felt a strong connection to Songer Whitewater and its crew, and I felt absolutely no compulsion against the idea of rafting the following morning. Screw walking. Screw the walk. I as going to raft. For free.

The rest of the night passed in much the same way. Spicoli dragged me to one of the luxury cabins, where a cookout was in progress. There, I was offered more free beers and fed more food than I knew what to do with. Chicken, steak, kabobs – bliss, dear reader. Bliss. Before I knew it, the clock had crept up on 9pm, the sun traced near the uneven West Virginian horizon, and I still hadn’t pitched my tent.

I explained myself to Spicoli, who was by this point too drunk to protest my departure. I promised I’d see him in the morning, and said my goodbyes to the hosts of the cookout. I staggered to the “party field,” – which stood in opposition to the other camping locale, the “family camping area” – an obviously intentional misnomer tantamount to Greenland and Iceland. The family camping area proved chock-full of young people drinking and telling stories over a roaring bonfire. The party field, meanwhile, was interrupted by only one other tent, its occupants already snoring away. There, on the banks of a meek little creek, I tossed up my tent in inebriated fashion. There, I slept.

The next morning, I awoke feeling surprisingly healthy. I’d expected a raging hangover, or at least an array of sore muscles, my legs never having received a chance to heal, owed to the booze. But no. I felt great. Refreshed. Like for the first time in a while, I’d had a truly memorable experience on the road.

I did awake with another feeling, though, and that was a strong rejection to the idea of rafting/riding in lieu of walking. I knew guilt, yes, but I also knew that my only choice – my only chance of escaping the eddy that is Songer Whitewater – was to pack my gear, buy some water at the canteen, and be on my way without explaining myself to Spicoli or the art teacher.

Fortunately, I got an early start. The teacher hadn’t arrived yet from wherever she lived and Spicoli hadn’t yet scraped himself off the luxury cabin’s kitchen floor (that’s where I imagine he slept, given the strong suspicion that he was only mildly welcome at the cookout in the first place). So I managed to stride away from Songer with my spirits renewed and all my limbs intact. A part of me regrets not taking the free rafting trip and ride to Summersville, but a larger part of me knows that such a thing would have betrayed the point of this walk. Adventures are cool and all, but I’m supposed to be putting these miles in on foot. And to this point, I’m delighted to say that I can still say that (with a pair of short, police-oriented exceptions).

One week later, I’m now in Bridgeport, WV, which is exactly 99 miles from Pittsburgh as the crow flies (or as the Fager might walk, as it were). As the Fager actually intends to walk, though, I still have 112 miles to go. That is a sweet, sweet thing to know, reader. And it also makes it easier for me to predict my return to Pittsburgh.

You heard it here first, reader: barring any unforeseen disasters or setbacks, my long journey will conclude on Thursday, July 15th. That’s 93 days after I first set out; three days later than my least conservative projection. Not too shabby, reader. I guess I owe my success to a strict focus on the road, to a staunch determination to keep putting one foot in front of the other every three days out of four. But it helps that I never once eddied out.