Beyond the Setting Sun

North by North-West

It was five o'clock.  Evening.  Rain beat down in driving sheets from a dark, brooding New Jersey sky.  The wind picked up and howled through the trees, throwing rain horizontal, then in biting swirls that lashed me on all sides.  Water rushed over my ankles, as I staggered forward.  The flooded backroad became a brown river that rolled, bubbled and foamed.

With a heart-stopping crack a limb of a tree came crashing down in front of me.  The shock of the sound and the impact of the branch shook me to the core.  Dazed and exhausted, I stood for a few seconds by the huge fallen branch, while the rain beat harder.

I gathered myself together and leant into the wind.  Cold, with my face windbeaten, numb and raw, I pushed on.

The wind lessened, but the dark grey-black clouds reared up, towering skyward.  The dark heart of the sky recoiled, speared by searing orange-yellow forks of light.  I closed my eyes and shuddered as the crack of thunder punched through me.  The sky and land were at war and I was caught between the two, ankle deep in water and between two rows of swaying trees that flanked the road.  Ahead lay the Delaware River, barring the way to Pennsylvania.

The storm raged on as I walked the narrow line of the flooded road.  Fear and the need to find shelter fired my legs, as the sky was torn by light and the ground shook with each blow of thunder.  Air and water, earth and fire... it felt like the elements had taken sides and each sought to destroy the other.

The road curved to the left and a break in the trees appeared.  I hurried for the gap.  The trees thinned out and I saw the dark green-white flow of the Delaware, its surface broken by rain and whipped up by wind.  In the break of the trees, a black steel bridge seemed to hunker down under the assault of the storm, trying to hold its ground.  I made for the dark silhouette of the bridge.

The storm stopped just as I reached the bridge.  It felt as if the battle was over.  I'd survived.  That was enough.  Fine drizzle hung on the air, with the message that the rain would be back, but the sky's dark mass of cloud began to clear.

A sign told of how there used to be twelve covered wooden bridges that had spanned this section of the Delaware.  Rain, wind and time had torn them down and  now steel bridges had taken their place.  I clanked my way across and stopped to look downriver.  Gathering mist hung in the green wooded hills of the Delaware Water Gap.  It was here that George Washington's forces had rowed across  to do battle with the British.  The Delaware, Susquehanna and Chemung: all were ancient waterways that stretched for hundreds of miles, marking the main routes of travel that Native Americans had canoed for thousands of years.  For me now the cities were behind; trees, the foothills of the Appalachians and new adventures lay beyond the mists of the Delaware.

Squelcing, bedraggled and feeling worn down by the storm, I walked overe the bridge and reached Pennsylvania.

A dam lay on a tributary of the river, and close to the dam was an old white house.  Earlier in the day, I had talked to an old man, who sat on his porch smoking his pipe and watching the rain fall.  He had told me about this house... and it was just as he had described it.

I climbed worn wooden stairs to reach the wide porch.  The paint had gone from the boards, but it was dry and clean.  The windows were boarded up and the house looked as if it had been empty for years.

I laid my bivi out on the porch.  Rain began again, but I had shelter now.  Water poured down from some loose guttering to splatter against leaves of overgrown bushes in front of the house.  I set a pan beneath the stream of water.  I picked up the pan and drank the water down.  Cold and fresh... it tasted like heaven.

It was Tuesday, 19th July - five days since I'd left Kennedy Airport.  One hundred miles or more lay behind.  The storms had cooled me off and I had recovered from the sweltering heat of New York.