The AT in Quinnitukq-ut

Where did all of the Dollar Generals go?

If I had $10M in liquid assets, I’d consider buying a house near the Housatonic River in Connecticut.  Ok, before doing so, I may also want $1M in passive income (post tithe).  I mean, really, folks, this is a different part of Appalachia.

Forget the once-ubiquitous Appalachian Dollar Generals, where did even a standard sub shop go?  I write to you from a trailside boulanger-patissier-poterie-antiquerie-snare&lure shop, where even the laborers stop for a bite (perhaps out of a paucity of options).  Don’t get me wrong: I “love myself” a good boulanger-patisserie… — isn’t café already French enough?  As for this one, the entire bakery display was interesting and mouthwatering and their antique stonework flooring alone could maybe get it an honorable mention in the Michelin guide.  I loved it, not the price of it. I also felt immersed in the real people of the environs. I thoroughly enjoyed overhearing the couple next to me debating whether their friends were pretentious. 

Anyway, this cafe was the perfect mid mourning respite after having set up my tent in the pouring rain the previous night. Just picture yourself in the morning on a backpacking air mattress surrounded by a moat of water, within your tent, putting on wet clothes;…. — it’s the worst!  Then picture the relief of seeing on the map that a chestnut almond croissant is merely two miles down trail?  Yes, pls.

Later, I dried things out by the Housatonic:

The day before I went to the value cafe, named the Mountainside cafe and staffed by the near-graduates of the treatment program there. They went out of their way to treat a hiker with dignity, imploring me to eat inside in the A/C, but the denizens looked a lot more leery of the idea. The food was great, and my generous turkey sandwich, Powerade, & macchiato came at only museum-coffee-shop prices. I loved the place, and it is a hiker favorite. It’s just, you know, in Connecticut, just a few miles down the road from a famous red covered bridge, and that comes at a price.

Ok, perhaps it is my studies into the thought of Dorothy Day that is prompting me to raise this topic (or, that I have family members that once ran rural grocery stores — hi, Aunt Doris—), but a blog about the AT simply must discuss the impact of Dollar General. As an economist, I get it.  It’s fair capitalism, and they are indeed serving the food desert.  As a hiker, they are a welcome sight, so I get the value proposition for the buyer as well.  Yet it seems unfortunate that the presence of a Dollar General may unintentionally at times lessen the food options and food quality for a rural community; here is an interesting video on the topic:

Well, I guess I’ve seen it firsthand that some towns clearly use the Dollar General as their grocery store, and that already pulled on my heart before I saw this video. It raises an interesting rural community planning conundrum.

After I left the boulanger, four traveling missionaries stopped their car to evangelize me.  They asked if I were troubled by anything that seemed off in our world.  “Oh yes,” I said.  Good; they had the answer.  Well, they didn’t have it; it was, perhaps?, somewhere in the brochure they tried to give me.  I invited them to walk with me.  They had other things to do.  I must have disappointed them, for they offered me their brochure at least four times and I never took it.  Ah well.  I wished them well, and they gave me a Kind bar.  That was benevolent of them.  They were simple soldiers for the good, perhaps mistaken ones, but good ones.  Yet it did feel a little as if four roadside brigands passed on the opportunity to take on the wandering ronin.

As I walked down the trail, highly dissatisfied with something Dorothy Day wrote in the Long Loneliness, I thought to myself, “Now if there were only a contemporary Dorothy Day with whom I could discuss such ideas, one who could best me by fashioning some great synthesis out of such a discussion, then that would be like watching a sword match out of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. By the way, I loved Dorothy Day’s comments about priests and some of her comments about churchmanship, so those are not the issue. I’ll put this topic on the back burner for now, until the right Michelle Yeoh appears.

Now for the next providential encounter. I ran into the Connecticut ridge runner, Mary, who worked in ministry to the homeless in NY for seventeen years, was a minister for the Disciples of Christ for ten, and was actually carrying around the most recent copy of the Catholic Worker, which she gave to me. Wow! There are times on the trail when I feel like I’m living out my first computer game, King’s Quest II, a game in which you solve puzzles to unlock and encounter more characters on a more or less unilateral path through the woods, and this encounter had one of those you-are-on-the-right-path kind of feels to it.

Speaking of that, I better read that Oct-Nov 2022 Catholic Worker for my next clue…

Well, wouldn’t you know, in it there is an excerpt from Dorothy Day’s On Pilgrimage, entitled “God’s Beauty and Variety,” in which she speaks of the beauty of the outdoors and in which she quoted Baron von Hugel for noting we need different interests in our lives to relieve the tension in them. Ah, that must have meaning for this journey.

There’s a woodcut of St Benedict, too, but I can’t find the connection to the image in the article in the dark of this shelter. It’s getting late and it’s storming pretty badly outside the shelter. I better throw up some pics and bluegrass, say my prayers, and call it a night.

Oooh, bad memory. I forgot to tell you that story, perhaps because in it I failed to follow my intuition soon enough. It was all my fault, but I got to the right place eventually.

No, it’s not bluegrass this time, but I keep mistakenly thinking of this song each time someone on trail tells me to listen to Tyler Childers, so here it is: