Fykes laughs. Porter chucks the whistle into a discard pile.
"You got poles?" Porter asks. "Hike with poles, brother. You take 15 percent of your weight off your skeleton." Fykes selects some $180 poles.
"Dude," says Porter, "if you need Band-Aids any bigger than this one here, you're going to the hospital." Discarded. "And now," he says, "what's this here?" Porter picks up a small, light metal box, and for a second, Fykes desperately tries to claw it away. It seems possible that the box contains a flammable substance other than pipe tobacco.
Porter smirks. "All right," he says, "that's cool. I'm not here to see if you have illegal contraband. And what about rain gear?"
In the end, Fykes does get some rain pants and a rain jacket, a hiking shirt, a food sack, and some body powder, to prevent chafing. He has cut his pack weight from 60 pounds to 36.6, and he's ecstatic, as though he has had a brush with celebrity or magic. "This is so cool," he says. "This is awesome! I figured maybe I'd get down to 50."
The total charge is $503.31, but Fykes doesn't even bother getting a receipt. He simply shoulders his pack and makes for the door. "I'm gonna run all day long with this thing on!" he says.
"Call me if you need anything," Porter says. "Gear, bail bond, whatever. And learn the flute, dude. Flutes are light."
It's hard to tell when, exactly, the Blaze of Glory party is officially in session, for the gala is really just more low-key milling around, plus beer. Porter himself straggles into the bash late. He has spent the afternoon back at his house, distracted. His new girlfriend is visiting. Nancy Boddy, 45, is a tenant services coordinator for a real estate company in Atlanta. She and Porter began dating last year, and it's an unlikely match. Boddy never hikes. "I do some walking in my gated community," she tells me. "I live in a golf and country club community, and there's a huge mall less than five minutes from my home, with all these nice restaurants. Winton's daughters love it."
Boddy tells me that she is helping Porter through a difficult episode in his life. "I help him organize," she says. "I send him daily reminders. And I've been there since the birth of his book, every step of the way. At book signings, I open to the right page for him; it's me who hands him the Sharpie. I'm his right hand in everything. He's amazing. He's nothing like my ex-husband. Whatever life throws him, he just rolls with it. He's so upbeat. And so funny." Boddy lets slip that Porter has given her a trail name -- City Girl.
Porter, meanwhile, is standing by the store's woodstove, listening to one of the party's more colorful guests. Ron Haven is a North Carolina innkeeper who once wrestled professionally, as a villain with the ring name Wrestler Number 2. Haven is now rotund, with a slight toothbrush mustache. He is telling jokes of a gynecological nature, rapid fire and deadpan, in an exaggerated, twangy accent, and Porter is rolling his head back and howling with laughter. "That's awesome, brother," he says.
Watching, I remember that the water service at Mountain Crossings is still on the fritz, and that Porter still has money trouble. A few months earlier, he borrowed $5,500 from his father and stepmother and asked them to monitor his personal credit card statements. The bank will, it turns out, kick him out of his house in June, forcing him to move his kids into a vacation home owned by his dad.
"I'll be the first to admit that organization is not my strong suit," Porter says. "I'm not a hardnose. At REI, they had other people playing the hardnose. Those guys would come in and fire a whole staff, and then I'd come along and build the team back up and improve morale -- get teams talking to each other. There's a method to my madness, dude: I manage the customers' experience, and I keep smiling. The other day, I spent three hours advising some guy on gear, and at the end he said, 'OK; now I'll go buy it at REI, because it's cheaper there.' I just let him go, because the next person will probably come in and spend $5,000."
The approach is arguably naive, and Porter's handling of his finances has, let's face it, been egregious and dumb. But he doesn't get rattled when things go awry. He remains cool, even as the debts and the pizza boxes pile around him, and somehow, just before he hits bottom, he finds a way to swim to the surface. A suspicious, brooding person probably couldn't pull off the self-righting tricks he does. But Porter is happy. He trusts people. He makes them feel at ease and as though life is a grand, shining adventure. In the karmic ledger, he's deep in the black, and things work out for him.
Eventually, a few months after my visit, Porter and Nancy Boddy will get engaged. She will quit her real estate job and devote herself to Mountain Crossings full time, as a 50-50 owner. The store's books will quickly become airtight. The business will climb out of debt and flourish. In September, Porter will tell me Mountain Crossings is on pace to make a record $860,000 in 2010.
And I'm not surprised, because I remember the last view I had of him. I was leaving the party, and I came over to say goodbye. Porter and Boddy were sitting side by side, next to the woodstove. His arm was around her. Her legs were draped over his, and they were talking about their future together. "We're just painting the picture of our dreams here," Porter says, "and it's looking pretty bright. Actually, it's looking real bright, brother."
Bill Donahue is a regular contributor to Inc. He wrote about Youngstown, Ohio, for the May issue.
