The Susquehanna River is the setting for one of Sal Paradise’s most haunting episodes on his 1947 return east: a night walk with a penniless old wanderer who says he is bound for Canada. Its threatening riverbanks make wilderness seem not exclusively western but present in the eastern backcountry as well, and the encounter ends with the old man still lost on the road.

Setting and Encounter

On a rainy night after leaving Harrisburg, Sal falls in with a small, shriveled man carrying a paper satchel. The wanderer talks incessantly about meals and charity, recounting a warm bath at a Maryland home, extra bread and butter with pancakes, a new hat found by the roadside in Virginia, and visits to Red Cross offices where he presents his First World War credentials. Sal sees him as a semi-respectable hobo who crosses the Eastern Wilderness on foot, sometimes asking passersby for a dime.

The two walk seven miles beside the Susquehanna, travelling together as fellow bums. The river is rendered as terrifying: bushy cliffs lean over unknown waters, while the night is broken by red locomotive flares from railway yards across the river. Its landscape is not an open, inviting road but a dark passage whose scale and obscurity sharpen Sal’s unease.

A Lost Traveller

The wanderer says a bridge lies ahead, but they never find it. At one point he stops to search his satchel for a fine belt, unsure whether he left it at a counter in Frederick, Maryland, or Fredericksburg, Virginia. The muddled place names give the walk a disoriented quality. He also strides directly into traffic several times, while Sal keeps to the ditch, fearing the old man may be struck and killed.

Sal eventually leaves him at a railroad underpass. After changing his sweat-soaked shirt and putting on two sweaters, Sal gets a ride back toward Harrisburg in hard rain. He spots the wanderer again beneath a streetlamp, his thumb out. The driver stops to hear Sal’s account, then tells the old man that he is headed west, not east, and that the road leads toward Pittsburgh and Chicago rather than Canada. The wanderer rejects the correction, insisting that he knows the country and is going to Canada. He walks away, and Sal’s last sight of him is his little white bag bobbing into the darkness of the Alleghenies.

Eastern Wilderness and the Road

The episode overturns Sal’s assumption that wilderness belongs to the West. He recognizes an eastern wilderness in the wooded backroads of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, along rivers including the Susquehanna, the Monongahela, the Potomac, and the Monocacy. The setting evokes older histories of travel and settlement: Sal imagines the eastern landscape as the country of Benjamin Franklin’s journeys, George Washington’s frontier exploits, Daniel Boone’s stories, and early roads and log cabins.

The river’s importance is therefore both geographical and imaginative. The wanderer’s uncertain destination and repeated misidentifications resist the idea that a road necessarily leads somewhere meaningful. Beside the Susquehanna, Sal encounters an American wilderness that is not a distant western frontier but a nearby, shadowed landscape of poverty, wandering, and uncertain direction.