MARK SMITH MORE COLUMNS Advertisement

Never felt so relieved to get back from a vacation as I did a couple of weeks ago.

Maybe I'm finally acclimating to the Desert Southwest, but for the first time I really felt as if I were getting back home.

Good feeling.

There's a heck of a lot of differentiated country between here and the New England coast, from the Kaibab plateau around Flagstaff to the flat emptiness of the Llano Estacado in northern Texas around Amarillo to the sudden realization in Arkansas that you have reached the Southeast, all dense forest and Mississippi River bottomland and crop-dusting aircraft, and finally to the long stretch of the Appalachians north from Knoxville through the Shenandoah Valley and into Pennsylvania.

Much of my visit back east was wet. Wet and chilly. The first three days in New Hampshire, it rained, and I was busy sizing up the trees to build an ark.

What really surprised me right off was stopping at Fox Run Mall outside Portsmouth, where I used to go shopping for hiking gear and shirts and books and suchlike. And all I could think of was, "Where is everyone?" The place was virtually deserted. Now there was some real emptiness, and I think I realized for the first time how seriously the recession has affected business.

When the weather did clear, I went for a hike on a portion of the Appalachian Trail I had first traversed in 1965, all birches and firs and tiny trillium blossoms and granite boulders and hobblebush. It was warm and terribly humid and cloudy, and I remembered the difference between hiking out here and hiking back there. Back there, you could hike all day, sweat like a pig and maybe enjoy one good view; out here, it's all view from the word go.

And five paces from my car on the way back down ... the rain started falling again.

So it was a disappointing visit to what was my home for almost two decades, but there were some fine moments:

A steak and pepper sub at Huck's Hoagies, which sets the bar pretty high ... Maine lobster with corn on the cob and drawn butter and a fine Alsatian riesling ... sleeping with the cats, O.T. and Prrple and Foolio ... recovering my little seven-foot, three-weight fly rod ... getting back in touch with one of my reporters from around 2001 (she had no training but tremendous desire, and the week before she started had already turned in several photos and two fine articles, and later was runner-up in New England for "rookie of the year") ... visiting Gettysburg, Pa., my personal lodestone, both on the way there and then coming back ... but I never did feel at home there, not any more.

About the only thing I really anticipated and didn't achieve was a hot ham and cheese at Hardee's, the eastern version of Carl's Jr. (which by way of digression reminds me of my first visit to the Whataburger in Kingman, Ariz., and my friend's response to all the build-up we had heard about it: "They should call it "So-What?-aburger.")

Getting back was another wet prospect, with the added fun of having to take two antibiotics for an abscess -- not the sort of thing that inclines one toward a Christian frame of mind. It rained all the way to Wheeling, and then there were terrific thunderstorms in Grand Island, Neb. The next day it was dense fog through most of the rest of Nebraska, which somehow didn't distress me. I mean, really, after the eastern part of that state and all of Iowa and Illinois, how much utterly flat land can you really stand?

In Wyoming it got rainy again, and up above Lander I even ran into some thin, wet snow, and all in all, I was delighted to reach Salt Lake City and realize I was almost home.

Between Cedar City and St. George, you find the desert again and feel the dryness in your mouth and see the arid tans and buffs, and when you pop out from the Virgin River gorge, you're back, and it's just a matter of miles on the odometer.

It felt good to be back, even if the antibiotics didn't mix well with my system and it was a week and a half before I felt as if I were getting the requisite hours of sleep.

I have a feeling I won't be going back east any time soon.