What brought you to Scranton in the first place?
(My friend) Michael Paulukonis was doing a performance series up here and went down to Philadelphia to check out a performing series I was with down there. He invited me to Scranton to do my one-man performance, "The Life of Tupac Shakur." I did and it was just fantastic. It seemed like a really nice city and the people I met were great and the stuff they were doing was great. And I was impressed with how casual and informal things were. I've been lucky to come back and I've probably done a dozen different kind performances.

Why are you giving this talk?
Part of what I want to get across is you don't have to be Superman to do this kind of hike. The perfect example is One Foot Phil. Whenever people would say, "Phil how did you get started on the Appalachian trail?" He would always start off the story by saying, "When I started on the trail I was a fat loser." When Phil came out of Pittsburgh, he had almost no support from his family and was just totally carrying way too much stuff. And the first thing that you have to do if you're hiking the Appalachian trail from North to South is get to the top the highest mountain in Maine. So he went out and hiked up a few miles and it was getting dark and he was getting tired and he went back to the bottom and was dejected. He said, "I am a failure. I can't even do the first part of the trail" And he met these guys - the switchback boys, Dr. Feelgood and Firefly - at a campsite at the bottom of Katahdin. And Dr. Feelgood said, "You can't quit now, man. You've got to do it, you can do it." He gave Phil a lot of encouragement and some advice and Phil got motivated again. The next day he got up and it's kind of a stormy day but he gets up higher than before. He's up above the trees and he's hiking along. He stops and he takes a pen out of his pocket and just at that moment there's this flash of light and suddenly Phil's laying on the ground ten feet away from his hiking poles and ten feet away from that pen. He realizes he's been splashed by lightening and struck to the ground.

Ouch.
So he went back down again, but he didn't give up. And along the trail there are these little shelters that people can stay in and inside there are these notebooks that people leave messages in. Well, in every notebook for the first hundred miles of the Appalachian Trial, Phil found a note from Dr. Feelgood that said, "Phil, I know you made it this far. Keep going up man."

And why do they call him One Foot Phil?
Well, when he was in that first hundred miles of Maine - they call it the hundred-mile wilderness. There aren't a lot of roads, it's pretty swampy and very mountainous - he was hiking in marine combat boots because he thought they would be durable but really, they're a bad idea because they're heavy and they're not very flexible and they're not very comfortable. But one of his heels fell off and he couldn't hike anymore in this boot. Well, one of the guys he was hiking with had a pair of Birkenstocks that he would use as a pair of more comfortable shoes when he was at camp, and this guy loaned him one. So he finished that hundred-mile stretch with one combat boot and one Birkenstock.

Do you have a name?
My trail name is Nameless Mike. I was maybe a 150 miles into the hike in Maine and I hadn't thought of a name and nobody had given me one. I and some other people pitched our tents for the night a few miles before the Carrabassett River, which was totally flooded. This one older guy from Kansas City suggested we all get up and go down to the river together and maybe with ropes or something we get across this raging torrent of a river. And as he's introducing us to each other it's, "I'm Wakarusa - which in Indian dialect from Kansas meant hip, deep river - and this is my wife Cottonwood. This is our friend One Foot Phil. This is River - that's the guy I was hiking with at the time - and then over here we have Mike. Nameless Mike." And I thought, "Well, that's just about as good a name as Wakarusa."

Did you meet creepy people on the trail?
There's this girl Yogi who has done a lot of hiking and she puts her journals on the Internet and they're very popular with people. And she had a problem on the Pacific Crest Trail with somebody who was reading her journal and figured out where she was and went to a road crossing and met her there. She was completely freaked out by this guy and called him a stalker. So she started delaying when she would put the journals on the Internet so people wouldn't be able to know exactly where she was.

But you were never creeped out?
I always thought the people who were helpful are good. A lot of people who were really involved with the trail and helped hikers out were called Trail Angels. Most of them are incredible. Maybe some are weirdos but for every weirdo there is are a hundred people who are great. Some of them are absolutely fantastic. There are people in California and North Carolina and New Mexico who give every hiker a place to stay and do laundry, and food. Everything. And they refuse to take any donations.

Did you find it difficult to accept that charity?
It was a great learning experience to live more or less like a bum. Or as somebody who is dependent on the kindness of strangers. I think it was St. Francis who said, "That the poor will only forgive charity that you give them because of the love with which you give it to them." People are naturally resentful of having to accept charity. This goes for homeless people, people on welfare - anyone who can't pay you back. When I'm out there, people giving me rides, they open their homes to you or buy you dinner or a drink, and it's impossible to pay them back because you don't have any resources. You're just a guy on foot in the middle of nowhere. But people want to do favors for other people. So I learned to swallow my pride and accept charity from people.