California - Finale

September 29

The last day! Last night, unfortunately, was not restful: I dreamt my death.

I dreamt that I was in a car accident, a head-on collision. I knew that it was too late to survive the second the car fenders touched. I felt the seat belt tighten as I was thrown forward into the windshield. Then, darkness. Was it Peace Pilgrim sending me a message?

I woke shaking. For a long while, I lied there staring up at the stars, waiting for my heartbeat to quiet enough to get back to sleep. It was not a good way to start the day. I know the dream comes from a fear that I won’t finish my walk, or maybe it’s that I don’t want to stop walking. I don’t know, but it was scary.

On this last day’s walk, I passed a sign that read: OPEN RANGE. I hadn’t seen that one before. The sign wasn’t kidding; an environment that I thought couldn’t get any more barren, did. Then, as I neared California, I felt more and more like I was walking into a Steinbeck novel.

I saw my first cotton fields -- Row upon row of brown and then green plants with their white cotton ball “flowers.” I passed another new sign: BLOWING DUST AREA. Then came a row of willows, followed by palm trees. Finally, I crossed the bridge over the Colorado River, the bluest water I have ever seen, and completed my twenty-two-mile day. The entire trip? 2,390 miles: Four months, three weeks, one day!

I might have been in shock; I almost expected some kind of bell to go off or door to open. Instead, I came to a small sign tied to the chain link fence at the other end of the bridge; it declared the Arizona/California border. The Executive Director of the Needles Chamber of Commerce walked out to meet me. A group of citizens waited for me on the other side with a “Welcome” banner. I ran through the banner for one of the many pictures they wanted to take. The Mayor then presented me with a plaque, my first plaque ever. It read:
NIKI KRAUSE
CONGRATULATIONS & WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA
THE CITIZENS OF THE CITY OF NEEDLES
-1998-

There wasn’t much ceremony after that. One of the council members, Linda Starr, whisked me off to her home for an ordinary spaghetti dinner for just the two of us, though she did make an excellent salad dressing. She lives on Schultz Road, just off Spike Road. Needles’ claim to fame is that the Peanuts cartoonist, Charles Schultz, lived here for a few years as a child.

I must be in shock. At 1am I will get on a bus to Vegas to catch a plane to Florida. I am in utter limbo, caught between two drastically different lifestyles (and between diametrically opposed states of being; Earth/walking, air/flying).

I find it hard to believe that I don’t have to walk tomorrow, or the next day..! I don’t miss it yet, but I know I will. I would like to say that the first days were the hardest, what with the shock of daily instead of twice-weekly hikes and the realization that I had 3,000 miles stretching before me. I would like to say that it was a hurdle I faced and successfully cleared, but that is not the case. The fact is, this kind of physical and emotional strain is something you almost never get used to. Those who can, face the danger of never wanting to go back to the “normal” way of life. I came very close to the latter attitude; it’s a dangerous edge to walk between not needing anyone and needing everyone.

So, what have I learned? What of this adventure will I take with me for the rest of my life’s journey? Well, I have learned that I can achieve whatever goal I give myself; if I can walk across the country, I can do anything. What is there to fear of a job interview compared to this? The most difficult thing will probably be finding an occupation that will keep me as interested as this journey. I want to get my story out to the people who helped me along the way. I want to reconnect with my family and friends. First, though, I’ll take a vacation.

Another thing I’ve learned is that there is a lot more to education than can ever be learned in a classroom. I don’t regret my college education; that path led to this one. I asked my mother once to remind me why I’d gone to college. I was in the eleventh hour of term paper madness and I couldn’t figure out what Robinson Crusoe had to do with anything.

She said, “You didn’t go to college to learn about Robinson Crusoe. You went to college to learn how to manage stress and to deal with deadlines. That’s what people do in the real world - They deal with deadlines.”

She was right. College is very good at teaching you how to get a paper in on time. College is also good at teaching you how to learn things while sitting at a desk. Otherwise, college is mostly just a four-year vacation from “real” life. Granted, this does not apply to all courses of study; if you want to be a doctor, you should probably go to college. Colleges have access to things like chemistry laboratories and high-tech equipment; you can understand just about anything if you have the right resources. Professors are resources. So are books. So are mountains. So is kindness, and good will. Everything can teach you something if you let it.
What college should do is teach people how to teach themselves. The best way to know you have learned something is if you can teach it to someone else. I want to teach someone something every day for the rest of my life.

Most of all, though, I’ve learned that many of the things people warn you about the “real world” are wrong. America is not a treacherous place. You can trust people nowadays. A woman can be safe alone.

If anyone asks me if I think that they should do what I have done, I’ll tell them to ask themselves some questions. Do you need to learn the things I learned? Do you want to see the things I saw? But you wouldn’t. You would see and understand a hundred things, all different from what I experienced. If anything, you'd have one up on me because you've already experienced one cross-country journey vicariously (as I did in my youth by reading Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie. However, traveling is really about expanding your own horizons, be they just west of town, on the other side of the world, or on the page in front of you. I could have taken pictures from every conceivable angle at the top of Monarch Pass, but they wouldn’t have communicated the glee of accomplishment I felt climbing up there. Some things must be experienced first-hand.

The thing I learned most from this walk was how to walk. The most important thing I learned from this walk is how to keep going, day after day, and to expect wonderful things from every moment. I only hope that the rest of my life is filled with such lessons.

 :)