Sounds Delicious

 

Day 1: You’re Gonna Break a Sweat

 

Today I started walking.  So far, a significant challenge; I said lots of interesting and colorful things like “this shit is heavy”, “uphill is hard”, and what in retrospect must be my favorite: “looks like I’ve still got a little bit of mountain left”.

   I just left my Mother and Father at a clean, quiet mountain inn, constructed entirely of wood, with a state-of-the-art human waste facility at its heart.  Since that must be a tremendous fire risk, they put several large fire hoses around the perimeter.  Then for aesthetic reasons they hid the hoses under enormous plastic rocks.  In case this illusion is too effective, they posted large wooden signs in front of the fake plastic rocks. 

Along with my parents I left Oskar Matzerath, whose saga I am a mere 30 pages away from finishing.  He has just signed a contract with a wealthy man named Dösch, who wants him to manipulate crowds to tears in Düsseldorf with his evocative drumming.

It is getting chilly.

Someone has left me a prepared fire.  Thank you.

 

Day 2: You Need a Cold Lunch on Top of Mount Justice.

 

This morning I awoke with the sun next to a pair of lesbians from Boston.  The howling wind and creaking trees that fueled my anxious insomnia last night had died completely, and all was incredibly calm.  And also balls-to-ass cold.

The friendly couple I shared the shelter with had a thermometer, and they confirmed my suspicion that I was really quite seriously freezing.  The older of these two ladies is a jolly woman with a chuckle for everything and a steady flow of charming, self-depreciating complaints.  The younger woman is quiet, intense and determined.  I imagine she gets a lot done.

A guy at the top of my first major summit today asked me what my “handle” was.  At least 92% of the people out here use a “trail name” (or nickname).  This is a unique and colorful tradition that, as far as I know, is only found in these woods, the military, fraternities, high school, varsity and junior varsity sports, tabloid newspapers, among truckers, within families and friends, often at work and occasionally at hospitals and nursing homes.  I am hesitant to jump on this bandwagon because I already have (and have long had) a nickname (”trail name”): “Alex”.  Which isn’t repugnant or irritating, mind you.  But my name is Alexander.  Note the four-syllable length and elegant construction.  Unlike “Alex”, which is just another front-loaded, two-syllable grunt, Alexander is classically balanced, with an exaggerated emphasis on the third syllable.  In pronouncing “Alex”, even I choke the distinguishing X in the back of my throat, but with Alexander the X leaps out of your mouth as if pulled by a string tied to a doorknob.  

Thus I told the old man to call me Alexander, which is me but not what most choose to call me.  So I think it counts.  It may come off as a little pretentious, but a fellow who started the trail two days before me gave himself the name Falcon, which I can only presume means he sees himself as a predatory bird.

 

Day 3:  Silence on the Dark Side of the Gooch

 

I need to break a habit: I trust paths long after they have started to look suspicious.  Yesterday I took an hour detour on an antiquated trail that had fading markers and that ultimately ditched me at an old cemetery for turn-of-the-twentieth-century mountain farmers.  This morning, in another example, I climbed a mountain looking for a privy that was 50 feet from my tent.

Just before my detour yesterday, I helped save a lost wilderness group consisting of 4 coed pre-adolescents and a middle-aged woman.  They were tied together with a 4″ diameter heavy duty rope, the surplus carried by a boy of roughly 13.  I assume he was a devout  Christian, because he kept saying “word” when I would have said “hot damn”.  I found out last night that I ultimately led them astray as well; other hikers informed me that the group had hiked straight into the mouth of a giant mountain lion, who ate them each in a single bite, as they struggled to free themselves from their enormous trust-tether.  After he was finished, the lion pulled the rope from his belly out his mouth, scraping it through his teeth like a huge, limp chicken bone.

 

PS: Is the Diggity in “No Diggity” the same Diggity as the Diggity in “Hot Diggity”?  And who do I ask?

 

Day 4: Wood Soul

 

Last night I chose to walk a little further to escape the inevitable crowd at the shelter.  I camped out alone in a clearing and waited for bears to come eat me.  What I ultimately realized was that distancing yourself from all other people leaves just you and whatever the woods choose to do to you.  I couldn’t sleep two nights back because of snoring, pillow-talk and recreational marijuana giggles, but last night I was kept awake by utter silence.

Me: “This is scary.  What was that?”

Me: “You want to do this on your own, you should be able to be alone in the woods.”

Me: “I’m trying to read, asshole.”

 

I was only able to read ten pages of my novel, after which I drifted off into a sort of alert paralysis, clutching a knife and a loud whistle.  But then…

 

This morning.  Silent, peaceful; a grand pause.  I got up before the sun came up in order to make the most of the day, but still managed to not really start walking until an hour after sunrise.  I have no idea why I can climb a mountain in less than an hour, but not eat a bowl of oatmeal and tear down a tent in the same time.

I thank mother invention at every step for my sweet, sweet trekking poles.  I imagine myself at the end of this voyage flying down the north face of some boreal mountain, lightly bouncing off of my poles with my legs straight back behind me.  Currently I look more like an elderly woman with a walker who has found herself on a steep hill.

The sun that was welcome only as a lunchtime companion yesterday (then quickly wore out her welcome by hanging about my neck and ears like a child over hill after hill) must have taken the hint today, as I am about to sleep wall to wall with six strange men in a small shelter.  I could not ask for a lousier set-up for an evening, but there is a storm coming.

 

Day 5:  I Forgot My Blood Skis

 

The overall pattern of this experience seems to be awful, sleepless nights followed by sublime, miraculous mornings.  Today was no exception.  I got up early, pooped under the stars, and ate a bowl of oatmeal on top of a mountain called “Blood”.  I would have descended Blood quicker had I not been slowed by a combination of increasingly stunning views and increasingly treacherous terrain. 

Today was super-long, but I met my scheduled mileage.  I was in no way aided by the infant walrus that stowed away in my food bag at this morning’s resupply stop.  Now that I’ve carried her 7 miles I’m a little fond of her.  If she keeps eating my granola, however, I’m afraid I might have to throw her at a passing motorcyclist.

 

Day 6:   Welcome to the Clubbed Knees

Last night I ventured a little over a mile off the path to find a secluded shelter, which I recognized immediately as haunted.  It is significantly older than most other shelters and was covered by the markings and drawings of adolescent children.  The sight of it brought images to mind from every teen horror film I’ve ever seen, and I believe these young people die a horrible, macabre death in the mind of every passing hiker.

 

Curtis Bean (”sucks butt”): decapitated in a privy

Lori (”was here”): gutted, obviously.

Heath and Dede (one can only imagine “4-eva”): Him, perhaps a pitchfork; her, I think burned.

David and Quilla (seems a little unromantic): buried alive.

Randy ‘05 (”Live simply so others my simply live”): stuffed full of pine cones.

 

These and all the other tortured souls are doomed to suffer as long as the walls of the shelter still bear their mark.

 

Nevertheless I slept really well.  My only real disturbance was at exactly midnight, when I awoke to find the souls of the tormented teens swarming around inside my sleeping bag.  I was lathered in sweat, and the aroma from inside the bag was like a hot pie filled with the backs of people’s knees.  I quickly removed my long-johns and unzipped my sleeping bag, releasing the tortured souls into the night sky.  They dissipated into freedom, soaking up so much moisture from the ground that I spent most of today hiking through an incredibly dense fog.

Not to name-drop, but with the weather I felt a bit like Luke Skywalker in the Dagobah system.  Except I didn’t do any of the sweet flips or one-handed handstands.  And instead of Yoda on my back I had the tiny she-walrus, who try as I  did, I could not train to speak in backwards syntax. “Your fear must be named before you can banish it”, she cooed into my ear, and then slipped back down into my food bag to munch on the trail mix and dry ramen crumbles that are freely mingling in the bottom of the sack.  

 

Day 7: Between Kelly’s Knobs

 

On the first day of this trip I woke up in a hotel room.  I took a terrifically long shower, donned the very apparel I am wearing now, and headed into the lobby.  I was amazed to find an episode of “Saved by the Bell” on the lobby television.  Even more amazing: it was the episode where Jessie gets hooked on caffeine pills while trying to balance her all-girl singing group with a difficult upcoming math exam.  In fact, their music video -you know, the one where they jump around on exercise equipment- began at the precise moment that I entered the lobby.  The song goes like this:

 

Put your mind to it

Go for it - You’re gonna break a sweat

rock and roll 

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

You know, that song illustrates a trademark characteristic of early nineties culture: the failure to distinguish between music and body-toning.  I took it as a good sign.  I’m not superstitious, but I needed at least one good sign to cancel out the bad one I got the morning before:  I knocked a scythe off my parent’s garage wall while loading my pack in the car (”why do you own a fucking scythe?”)

 

Anyway, “Go For It” or whatever it’s called and a few other songs have supported me as I walk (I owe at least one full day to the “Do Re Mi” song from The Sound of Music), though they seem to lose tempo as my pace slows going uphill.  I decided to write a song for amateur hikers and climbers that is both supportive and mindless but also slow enough for inching up a 40 degree incline.

 

It’s okay to go 

really slow  

just as long as you don’t

turn around

It’s okay to go 

really slow

because slow______________

is_______________________

as fast as you can go.

Day 8: In Your Final Hour It is Too Late to Watch a Movie.

 

I have a chip on my shoulder, a bone to pick, an axe to grind, a confession to make.  There is a culture out here, and it has its own codes and games and secret names, all of which sounds like prattling gibberish to anyone unfamiliar.  It’s impossible to simply ignore, but the more I notice people expecting me to buy into it all, the more I want to step out of a log cabin with a shotgun and yell, “GIT OFFA MA LAND!”

 

Day 9: As Knobby as a Plumber’s Kid

I wore earplugs last night in the shelter to muffle the snoring of 25 or so other folks.  At some point in the night a mouse took a bite out of the left plug, leaving the spit out crumbs in my camp-sandals.  He must have detested the taste; if he could have stomached the whole plug I’m sure he would have yelled into my empty ear, “GIT OFFA MA LAND!”

I took the hint anyway.  Before sunrise I was on the road, and by 10:30 am I was in North Carolina (home of James K. Polk, Roberta Flack, Thelonious Monk, and Krispy Kreme Doughnuts).  The border was marked by a lead tube protruding from a tree, and it was immediately followed by an enormous, elegant staircase carved into the side of a steep mound.  Once up the stairs I spent the rest of the day coasting across the top of a 4,000 ft. tall ridge, protected from the raging, early spring winds by a steady tunnel of rhododendron.  “North Carolina’s got class,” I thought to myself.

 

Day 10: Lower Southwest North Carol-Hina

I ended my last entry with a mention of class.  I’d like to add to that a penchant for drama.  Today was like an epic movie.  I felt like Chuck Heston, Frodo, and Dennis Quaid wrapped up in one little dude with trekking poles and convertible pants.

I woke up this morning to find that the night air had been freezing my breath, and the falling crystals had formed a thick layer of snow inside my tent and across my sleeping bag.  The wind outside resounded like an 80 ft. gong, so I stayed in my igloo out of fear of what such a force would do to my pretty face and helping hands.  Once the sun was up and the ice had melted, I packed up my tent and took off.  

For roughly an hour I did battle with the dark side of Standing Indian Mountain, cold wind pounding against my cheeks and the distant, bright sun taunting me from behind the trees and rhododendron on the horizon.  When I finally crossed the threshold to the sunny side, all was perfectly calm, and I was at last  comfortable enough to stop and consume my peaches n’ cream oatmeal with hot tea.  From breakfast forward the day was much like yesterday: high society, high altitude cruising, all that.  And then I found myself at the foot of a rocky cliff called “Big Butt”, with a view across several counties on one side and a lush, wet rock covered in moss and roots on the other.  Those tree roots offered the only way up the side, so for a half mile I tripped and groped my way to the top, fairly conscious of the incredible drop-off immediately to my right.  Once on solid ground again, I stormed forward, expecting to finish the day with more luxurious ridge-running.  So imagine my surprise when I found myself . . . 

. . . under a large blue tarp, listening to the Grateful Dead, drinking a freaking soda.  They call it magic, but it feels like a miracle.  Complementary hot dogs, Little Debbies and doughnut holes.  Chips and fruit.  A humongous suspended grill made of three pieces of rebar and a 3 ft. circular milling saw.  After I’d had my soda and my hot greasy food, I made my way to the finish line.  It wasn’t easy.  I thought that Big Butt had been pretty steep, but the last quarter-mile of the great Albert Mountain is a real climb, with your knees, hands, and occasionally face.   At the summit there’s a observation tower and an indescribable 360-degree view.  I was utterly full, completely amazed, and less than a mile uphill from the nearest shelter.  A perfect day.

 

Day 11: Shake that Laffy Taffy

 

When I woke up at midnight last night, I thought I saw snow on the ground.  I stepped out of the shelter to find that the brightness of the moon had illuminated the clouds, which in turn had coated the surface of the ground with a soft, glowing white.  And then there were the jagged, latticed silhouettes of the trees . . . 

But that’s not what I want to talk about.  I really need to discuss clothing.  More specifically, pants.  Even more specifically, what my pants are doing to me, to my body.  To get to the point, I’ll call this chapter:

 

Intense Groin Chafing

 

I like a tight blue jean.  I like a high crotch seam that splits the boys into teams, if you know what I mean.  But I’ve chosen to hike the length of the Appalachian Trail in these baggy, saggy, weather-proof, quick drying, convertible Rambo cargo pants with a bull’s sack of room in the belly of them.  To make matters worse, my pack drags the waste down, and the crotch seam wanders back and forth with each step, lightly grazing the inside of each thigh.  As a result I took off my trousers the other night to find what looked like the dog-eared page of a first year medical textbook in my crotch.  I’m thinking of fashioning an ointment out of chapstick, sunscreen, and the m&m/trail mix/dry ramen gunk stuck to the bottom of my food sack.  I’ll call it “grointment”.  Till then I’m wearing my long johns.

 

Yesterday’s magic appeared to me atop an enormous Butt.  I had to wait for today’s magic, which took the form of a free shuttle driven by a man with three names: Mr. X, Cubby Carlisle, and Mass Destroyer.  Carlisle was a legend, a detested anti-hero of the Southeastern regional pro-wrestling circuit of the 1970’s.  He made his living shouting insults, racist and sexist slurs to an audience that waited aggressively for him to be put to shame.  His eternal penance is shuttling weary travelers to a town with public toilets and massive AYCE buffets.

On the way back to the trail (I stayed in town just long enough to eat 5 courses at a really good steak-and-potatos buffet), Mr. X revealed himself as a sad clown, not a humbled servant but a tragic and lonely former regional celebrity.  Back in his boot-stomping, profanity-slinging days he had a girlfriend that he could not get close to.  His hectic schedule kept him away for long stretches of time, and when he could find time to see her she would be surrounded by idiot friends who pestered him in an attempt to know the “real” Mass Destroyer.  “I still think about her,” he said in a quiet moment.  I like to think that someday he will pull up in the shuttle and find her standing by the road, alone, in a black bandana with lime-green stars.  

“I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. X,” she’ll say.

“Believe it or not, I’ve been waiting for you too.  And the name’s Carlisle.”

“Well, Cubby, why don’t you take me back to the Sapphire Inn and hug on me till there’s nothing left.”

 

The End.

 

Day 12: We Are Bald           

 

If the past two days have been defined by what many call “Trail Magic”, today was defined by what I’ll call “Trail Innovation”.  At breakfast, I discovered a way to make toast.  It’s a rough process at the moment, but it definitely changes the way this game is played.  A little later, as the incessant squeaking of my overflowing pack grew and grew in volume and frequency, I determined that I had to either fix it or throw it over a cliff.  I found a suitable cliff and got to work with nothing more than a tuner’s ears and duct tape.  In a matter of minutes I found some trouble areas and muted them with the tape.  This left my mind suddenly free to wander (or more accurately, to repeat one line from “Honky-Tonk Women” over and over) for the rest of the day.  Which reminds me:

I had a dream last night that I was at a dinner party and a guy from the Rolling Stones offered me a cigarette.  He looked kind of like a cross between Mick and Ronnie, but he was mostly made of this guy named Atticus who was smoking pot next to the highway yesterday.  Strangely I felt I should call him “Keith” (the guy in the dream, that is), but when I did he looked at me with annoyance.  “Mick . . . Ron,” I stammered.  “Do you even like us?” he demanded.  I tried desperately to prove my knowledge of the Stones but I could not come up with his name.

“Just give me the first letter,” I pleaded.  He looked me over harshly and said, slowly with an even crescendo: 

“Kun-ch.“ 

 

Day 13:  Pockets and Matt

I’ve had the opportunity, in the last few days, to get to know a couple of guys roughly my age from rural Ohio.  They are Matt (no trail name) and Keith (now called “Pockets”).  I first met these guys on Day 4 (”Wood Soul”; both were part of our wall-to-wall dudefest).  That must have been a pretty bad day for them, as they came across as doomed dilettantes to me, and I had been out only a full day more then them.  Keith couldn’t get his stove lit without setting the entire table on fire, and Matt sat outside, back to the group, nursing huge blisters on his feet.  Matt struck me as too grim to truly embrace the wild life, and Keith seemed overwhelmed by constant hunger and sub-par equipment.  In fact it is Matt who is doing the whole trail; Pockets is out for a forty day trip I can only presume is intended to correspond with Lent.  I imagine him waking on Good Friday, wishing his tempters the best, then heading off to do the stations of the cross in the Alps.

Matt is also a devout Christian; prior to the trip he worked as a chaplain at a homeless shelter.  The blisters on his feet caused him to send his shoes home, so he is hiking in sandals (I am way too cool to make a disciple joke here).  Pockets is a somewhat recently born-again with a dark past, at least as dark as one might find in rural, middle-class Ohio (though he hasn’t yet told me any crystal meth stories).  Tonight, as we sit around an enormous and extremely hot blue-flame fire the he skillfully designed, Pockets is telling me stories about the exploded pipe-bombs, demolished mailboxes and crushed groundhog skulls (he dislikes groundhogs extremely) that litter the path of his recent life.  He stops to quietly and remorsefully regret the destruction of a neighbor’s brick mailbox, but plows right through a riotous tale about leaping from a tree to chop off a groundhog’s tail.

The three of us have camped out just outside an old railroad complex that is now the Nantahalia Outdoor Center, a popular riverside retreat for rafters, hikers, and car-to-cabin campers.  I asked a guy at the store where a fellow might camp for free, and he pointed me further down the tracks.  We thought we had found the “secret” spot when we came across a gravel parking space along a service road, complete with a small firepit, but after setting up our tents we walked further down and discovered steps leading to a bank-line trail with a spacious peninsula of dirt campsites just further.  We resolved to carry our erected tents (gear inside) one at a time down the road, though it was almost dark.  A funny exercise, but worth it.  The river rushes past, the air is cool and calm, and as Pockets’ life story becomes a colorful patchwork of brilliance and brutality (now he is singing a song from a musical about horse-racing), Matt’s guarded silence evolves into a clever, observant and thoughtful wit. 

 

Day 14: Cassandra

Today I met the most beautiful gorilla I have ever seen.  I was stumbling down the north side of a hill with the skill of a crocodile on stilts, attempting to both cushion my knees and pace myself with the steady planting and shuffling of my walking sticks.  Hard as I fought gravity, it ultimately won, and I found myself speeding downhill on four useless legs instead of two.  I came to a large, blown-down tree trunk, and my sticks, instead of clearing the log, crossed each other and wedged against it, so that I was hurled by my own momentum as if through a giant slingshot.   I flew over the side of the hill, deftly readjusting myself mid-flight so as to land on my pack instead of my face.  When I landed my food sack exploded with a tremendous noise, and as I rolled head over foot through the trees and thorns, it rained rice, oats, granola, dried fruit, and instant coffee.  Finally I came to a halt in a clearing, my head smacking the ground a mere inches from a cottonwood tree.

I do not know how long I stayed there, motionless, but at some point I was awakened by a crunchy, plastic-y tapping on my forehead.  I opened my eyes to see a small, female gorilla looking over my face, smacking me with a half-opened package of ramen noodles.  She was a dream, an artist’s rendering of the idealized primate.  Her eyes, charcoal black and tablespoon deep.  Her hair seemed to burst out from her center uniformly, forcefully thick but soft.  Hands, hairless and wrinkled but like a newborn infant’s, glowing pink without a hint of callous.  Most startling of all were the plump, high, white hairless breasts that jutted out from her otherwise ubiquitous fur:  the most perfect breasts a human could hope to have or hold, hidden deep and unexplored in the mysterious wild.  

I followed the ape back to her cave, where she traced out epic, complicated stories onto the floor in soot.  I noticed that none of her stories included mention of love or companionship, and my apparent pity was recognized and immediately resented.  Before she sent me away with an elegant, detached motion of her hand, she crumpled the now empty package of ramen into a flower, and affixed it to my shirt with a sticky substance from the corner that smelled a little more than suspicious.  I traced out a brief parable on the concept of gratitude and left smelling of cave-murk and ape-shit, foodless without a clue where I might be.

 

Day 15: Carl’s House is Bleeding

 

They say that hypothermia starts with a lapse of reason.  You go crazy.  If that is the case, my bout of hypothermia began soon after I left my tent this morning.  For five hours today I boldly and ignorantly clamored through the freezing rain, climbing higher and higher, as it got colder and colder, knowing full well that it would continue to get colder the higher I climbed.  A sorry, sad, miserable, cussing bastard.  Soaked, with icicles literally hanging from my pack.

Last night I decided to take action with my groin situation.  As I think of it, perhaps my hypothermia began then.  You see, I had heard that a good way to prevent blisters and “hot-spots” was to put duct tape on whatever sore areas began to emerge.  I figured, naturally, that the same technique could help prevent further chafing of my inner thighs.  So last night as I got ready for bed I curled into a little ball and went to work taping my private region (note: I wasn’t worried about hair removal, as all the hair down there had long been rubbed off).  Unfortunately, when I straightened my legs out and shoved them into my sleeping bag, I took in a quick lesson about how much your thigh muscles shift when you close your legs.  Also in how little I truly know about pain.  The muscle mass shifted, crumpling up and stretching the duct tape, creating a sensation not unlike a million microscopic Indian burns.  I laid motionless for entirely too long, biting my tongue, before I reached down with both hands and ripped the tape off of my inner legs.

After that point I could not touch the sore spots at all, or even put my legs together.  Today’s freezing rain eased the pain a little by soaking and subsequently numbing my entire body.  I have made a number of mistakes in the past 24 hours, and if I had to do it all over again, I would not have given myself a duct tape bikini wax, nor would I have challenged this frozen rock to a stubborn head-butting competition.  Rather I would be sitting in restaurant by a river, with creamy balm dripping down into my dry socks.

 

Day 16: There isn’t Going To Be Any Baroness

 

Today didn’t have to be so nice, I would have loved it anyway.  I would have settled for not shitty, not painful, and gone about my quiet way.  At around noon the fog lifted magnificently and I hiked the next several miles with a grateful regard for the warm, low, late winter sun.  My clothes dried quickly, and I made terrific time for the rest of the day.  I owe much of this success to the Sound of Music.  I watched the entire movie this morning in my head while there was little to see but the damp, grey fog.  I sang along with each verse and spoke each word as best as I could remember;  no small feat considering that I’ve had “I Hope You Dance” stuck in my head for three days and haven’t made it past the first line.

I took the best roles:  Maria, of course; the somewhat sharp-faced naysayer nun in “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria”; Georg in most all of his scenes (including the best scene in the movie, when he unexpectedly joins the children in singing the title song); Maria and Georg simultaneously in the for “Something Good”; but I refused to play Ralph.  In the telegram scene I played the butler; in his and Liesl’s gazebo scene I simply superimposed myself; in his final backstabbing, heartless betrayal scene I chose to play the children’s protective tombstone.  

Anyways, by the time it started raining again this afternoon, I was too wrapped up in my favorite things to begrudge it the least.

 

Day 18: Fantastic, Damn.

 

Last night I stayed in the finest shelter, I’m told, on the entire trail.  It has clean running water, hot showers, heated bathrooms (when I hit a giant silver button on the hand dryer and was struck by a forceful gust of hot wind, I laughed aloud), and it is perched on the side of a massive man-made lake.  In the background, behind the lake, sat the mountains I am climbing now.  The Great Smokies: the biggest, the meanest.  As I ate dinner last night, I stared at these guys and measured myself against them.  They seemed harder, more solid I mean; darker as well, as if carved from heavier minerals.  A bluish-blackish color, while the mountains  in the foreground maintained a dull brown with green freckles.  The big boys had snow blanketing their peaks, and they emitted a constant plume of fog about their perimeter, like steam from a boiling cauldron.  

I had options.  One was to use the free phone and call the shuttle for a ride to town, where I could rent movies and eat hot slices of beef.  I chose, instead, to confront the enormous iron cauldron.  Up close they appear to be made entirely of mud, though the snow wasn’t an illusion.  I am alone in a stone shelter with a fireplace and a chain-link bear fence.  I realize that I am so unused to genuine solitude that I find it as distracting as being surrounded by people.

 

Day 19: Wachet Auf

 

My only companion this morning was a brave little brown bird named Paul.  As I debated whether or not to venture out into the 4 inches of snow, Paul hopped around and pecked at the floor and sleeping platform of the shelter.  Meanwhile I wasted about half of the pages of this journal trying in vain to light a fire.  Ultimately I resigned myself to sitting in silence, keeping track of the decreasing feeling in my toes, too cold and bored to commit to any activity, especially hiking. 

Around 10:30 am Brian showed up and convinced me that I would be warmer if I started moving.  He was right.  I had to accept that there are no snow days when you live outside.  I ended up at a shelter just brimming with folks, one of whom has a radio.

 

Day 20: Trust the Beaver

 

One of the guys at the shelter last night was a ridge-runner (sort of a drifting camp-counselor) named Shatter.  This morning he crept up behind me on the trail and humbly asked if I would like to hear a poem.  For the next mile and a half Shatter walked behind me, reciting works by Saul Williams (I recognized one of the poems from the second Blackalicious record).  It was a magical gesture, and I won’t soon forget the combination of the poems, the winter landscape, and the cold, silent air.

After lunch I tried to conquer a mountain, or a dome, as it’s called.  Clingman’s Dome, the tallest hill of the whole trip.  It was (and is) still snowing, so I had to blaze my way through knee-high snowdrifts and virgin powder.  At the top I found a desolate parking lot, an icy, deserted observation tower, and roughly fifty total feet of visibility in any direction.  

The way down was a little bit worse; I had very little idea how deep the snow in front of me was, so my feet and ankles took a severe beating.  I got to the shelter just after dark, where I found Bugs, Orangeman, and Brian, all of whom had avoided the top of the Dome.

I’d like to note the surroundings for a second.  For much of this journey I’ve been zigzagging up and down the barren, winter faces of steep mountains.  The Great Smokies are distinct in that the trail follows the more gradual sloping of a single ridge, while the forest around and above me is comprised almost entirely of thick masses of fir trees.  In the snow, I feel as though I’m in the idealized winter wilderness of Robert Frost and Jack London. 

It is also cold.  All the time.

 

Day 21: Ms. Tennessee 1978

 

I was high on a ridge late one Sunday

all my hopes eroding into fear

when a woman in a floral summer dress

floated down from the sky.

She kissed me one time on each cheek

(both of which stung from the frost for a week)

told me her name was Caroline

and offered me some advice:

“Don’t make your life too hard,” she said

“Some things do come easy.

You can’t build a tree but you can 

be glad that it’s there.

“And if I had to choose

between butterscotch and the blues,

why I’d hire up the devil

to go and build me some stairs.”

Day 22: Do Tee Do

This morning, just like yesterday and the day before, my socks, boots, pant and jacket were frozen solid.  Tomorrow I leave this elevation, and exit this experience.  I will:

 

-use a heated, plumbed bathroom

-eat an enormous cheeseburger

-wash my socks

-dry out my boots

-read all afternoon

-sit for a prolonged period without shivering

-expose my bare feet to the sun 

-remove, if only briefly, the shirt and underwear I’ve had on for over a week. 

 

Day 23: Zingers

I am on a mattress.  Tonight I sleep on a mattress.  In a tiny pink cabin next to a creek.  The “Honeymoon Shack”, though it has 5 beds.  Outside are two friendly dogs, a John Deere tractor, a van, two tow trucks, a flatbed Dodge Ram (message on the rear window: “Jesus gave his life’s blood even for me”), a Model T Ford, a Harley, a Chevelle, a Mustang, a Firebird, a Barracuda, golf cart, boat, several trailers and an antique wagon filled with woodworking supplies.  I’m at Mountain Momma’s, a restaurant/cigarette outlet that specializes in greasy food for hikers.  The walls inside are covered with pictures of two local heroes: Dolly Parton and Jesus Christ.  Profanity is not allowed.

 

I am nourished, I am warm, the world is soft, and I will always love you.

 

Day 24: Try the Best You Can

Today I did 7 or so leisurely miles in warm, sunny weather with an occasional perfect breeze.  I couldn’t have had a better day if Id been at home watching Swiss Family Robinson with a 12-pack of Coors Light and a bucket of Indi’s fried chicken.  At the moment, in this climate, I feel as though I could drag a potato sack full of bowling balls to the top of a hill for a few stale ritz cracker crumbs.  I’m on vacation, basically.

Last night I had an extremely vivid dream (perhaps a result of the mattress) involving several of my female friends’ breasts, an indoor pool, and, at center stage, an obscene amount of New York style flat-pan pepperoni pizza.  Not a very complicated plot, really.  Perhaps the more you simplify your life and deprive yourself, the more rewarding your dreams become.  Or perhaps there are simply more rewards to dream of.

I’m alone in the woods tonight, determined to find a comfortable peace while accepting the obvious vulnerability of solitude in the wild.  I chose this spot because it is just beneath a cleared summit; I intend to enjoy the sunset and maybe some stars.

 

Day 25: Maximillian’s Favorite Patch

The past two nights I’ve chosen campsites near large, flat, bald mountain tops, so I’ve been able to enjoy a couple of wide open sunsets.  Tonight’s was anticlimactic and largely obscured by clouds, but last night I stood alone on a hill with a harmonica, puffing out “Amazing Grace” until the sun tapped the very top of the horizon.  From that point on I simply watched.  I had zero anxiety about being miles from other people, and I may have experienced true blankness for the first time.  I mean, I thought about nothing without trying to think about nothing.  And nothing interrupted me from thinking about nothing.  No Kids in the Hall quotes, not even that brass part from Outkast’s “Spottieotiedopaliciousangel”.  I did not consider what to tell others about that sunset, nor did I imagine what another person, being with me, might have said about it.  I simply relaxed my shoulders and watched.  It wasn’t spectacular, actually.  It was just there, peaceful and happening.

Maybe I’m just kind of tired or something.

 

Day 26:  I’ve Got Things Filled with Hot Wings

 

The choice not to cough up money for hotel or hostel has landed me in a local “campground”, which is more like a parking lot next to the train tracks with RV hookups and a junkyard.  There are kids yelling, roosters crowing, trains blowing, dudes toking, rain coming, and a store that sells pizza, ice cream and Coors Light 24-ounce cans 100 yards away.  It occurs to me that, for some people, this is camping.  Then it occurs to me that I’m being elitist.  Then it occurs to me that if the whole trip had daily spots like this, I might sleep better.

 

Day 27: Don’t Cross the French Broad

I was robbed by a band of thieves today.  They overtook me in a thick grove of rhododendron with their rusty machetes and laminated boomerangs.  The leader, a rounded, aging hippy named “Salt-Tooth”, was menacing but fair; he ordered the smallest member of the gang (a half-cherokee, half-mongolian dwarf named “Slippers”) to take 20% of my food (portioned carefully with a portable scale and measuring cup) and divide it evenly among the merry band.  Once they had eaten, they picked over all of my gear, trading out their less-than-satisfactory equipment with my newer stuff.  Salt-Tooth insisted that I be left “somethin’ for everythin’”, but as they marched cheerfully away I found myself standing there in tight pink Keds with no laces, knee high socks, an old fashioned gentleman’s “bathing suit”, a corduroy miniskirt wrapped around my head, with all of my food (now 2 days worth) in a wet paper bag.

They were nice enough guys, I guess, but I hatched a retaliatory plan nonetheless.  

I hitched to the nearest town in the guise of a friendly, bearded transvestite named Sue.  Once there, I became fast friends with the owner of the local army surplus store (a large, elderly Belgian inexplicably called “Go-seph”).  When I revealed my intentions to him, I saw 20 years of aging evaporate from his face, and he led me into the back room.

Armed with 26 WWII-era grenades, 3 feet of piano wire, a Walther pistol, a pack of cigarettes, several throwing stars and an enormous, pointy rasp.  I was dropped off near the incident, now dressed in such effective camouflage that Go-seph almost ran me over pulling away in his van.

I ventured into the woods, footsteps soft on the leaves like a rustling wind.  I was invisible to the animals; I passed squirrels, deer, 2 sloths and a pygmy marmoset without rousing any suspicion.  I soon found the bandits’ base.  To my surprise, they operated out of an old railroad car on a remaining bit of track.  “Too easy,” I said aloud, startling a robin.

I surrounded the railcar with lit cigarettes, and stealthily climbed up onto the roof.  When one of the men noticed the smoke and stepped outside to investigate, he shouted “Trail Magic! Free smokes!” and the group poured out into the night to enjoy the pre-lit satisfaction.  I knew I had no more than 4 and a half minutes to ream a small ventilation hole large enough to fit through, but when the fearsome pirates returned to their cabin they found me, seated in Salt-Tooth’s La-Z-Boy, holding the Sega Genesis system in one hand and an armed grenade in the other.

“Boy, you got some balls,” Salt-Tooth said to me before shaking my hand sending me off with my gear and all of my food supply.  

I was made an honorary bandit, not for my surprise attack but because afterwards I sold out a bunch of other hikers by giving the thieves a list of their names and what gear they were carrying.

 

Day 28: The Devil and a Diet Coke

I am parked at the end of a long, dull, often humid and entirely exhausting day.  Even my supporting cast of harmless, dim-witted gnats (who dance about me, oohing and aahing my every move; sometimes, as any diabolical overlord does, I kill one for no reason whatsoever) were annoying me more than usual today.  The flowers bloomed their first bloom this morning, the bees were suddenly out in abundance, spiders had set up their cameras to catch my face as I stroll through their webs, and it was ungodly hot.  It didn’t help that I stopped to feed my baby walrus yesterday.

In the midst of all this misery I did receive a bit of fantastic luck, though be warned that the payoff will not be as good for you.  You see I recently finished my first novel of the trip, a five pound, large-print edition of Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (to my mind, worth the weight, and a relatively quick read at 24 days).  For the sake of context I will mention a girl out here named Jules  who gave away a five pound block of excellent cheese because it lasted longer than a few days.  And that was food.  Anyways, my next book is waiting for me at a post office over 70 miles from here.  I’ve been kind of a glum chum the past two days, knowing that my nightly routine of making up utter bullshit to put in this journal followed by escaping into a world of mystical ambiguity had already been interrupted.  Last night I simply perused a guide book for mention of zoos and vending machines.  Tonight I was considering finger-painting with colors derived from grass and rodent droppings.  But fate sent me an answer: this afternoon I found a torn up, abridged copy of Moby Dick in a shelter.  I told you the punchline wouldn’t be that great secondhand, but If you’ll excuse me, I get to drift off to a world of seascapes and bizarrely impassioned whale-hunting.

 

Day 29:  Alexander Will Sleep Here Tonight.

 

Last night several thunderstorms blew through the area; someone had warned me so I stayed in a cozy little shelter tucked into the side of a hill.  Just after sundown I noticed a few flashes of light off toward the south, and in a matter of moments a tremendous, loud wind shook the forest and a dense blast of water poured from the sky.  It was intense, and then it was gone.  The exact same thing happened at least three more times that night.  This morning, by contrast, was calm and cool.

500 million years ago there was a beach on the east coast of this continent, a beach on an ocean not unlike the Atlantic.  The sand on that beach was fine and white, having been cleaved and torn from rocks millions of years old.  I danced on that beach today; I raced across dune after dune of white quartzite, which has in the meantime been shoved deep into the Earth’s surface and then lifted, slowly, to the sky.

 

Day 30: There is Nothing Easier on Earth than to Appear as if One Has a Secret.

I was visited by greatness last night, and by that I mean I met a real, live superhero.  I was sitting in the shelter with Bugs (not the flies and gnats, but a young woman and future entomologist known out here as “Bugs”.  In another example of how desperate people are to give and receive these nicknames, Bugs’ name comes not from the fact that she studies insects, but rather the fact that she started her trip with a pound of carrots in her bag), when a huge frickin’ deal named “SIr Hawk” swooped down from the sky and started inflating his portable mattress.  “Sir Hawk” (or “Soeur Hawk” which he pointed out means “sister hawk” in french - finally a superhero with a healthy gender identity!)  Swiftly he removed this layer of dress which consisted of a t-shirt and a pair of short, flimsy, thin but loose synthetic shorts, and donned his dark night-gear for the cool evening ahead.  He took charge, of course, of our complicated and convoluted attempt to hang our food up for the night, and in the morning he awoke early and got our food down before Bugs and I got out of our sleeping bags.

(In reference to my bear bag rope, now knotted in a tree) “I think getting your chord back is going to take a daring rescue,” he said to me as I arose.  Without deliberation, Sir Hawk climbed the tree (which was thin, like a lamppost, with no branches at all until about twenty feet up) and pulled my chord down, saving me five dollars.  Rescuing my rope made him a hero, videotaping himself doing it on his digital camera made him an absolute star.  Before he left he irrigated his sinuses with a little plastic teapot called a “Neti”.

I later found traces of Sir Hawk at a another shelter; specifically I found a note he had written extolling the virtues of not wearing underwear, and a trail of Gold Bond medicated powder on the ground (no doubt his calling card).

 

Day 31: At the Big Balled Lagoon

Said I to a sea-goat

one cool April morn,

“If you knew your birth-sign,

I’d wager it were Capricorn.”

 

He replied softly, slowly,

To my disbelief

(not at the speaking he spoke,

but manner and substance of speech),

“Capricorn I am;

I saw the stars thusly formed, 

for I can recall not just the date

but hour and minute that I was born.”

He paused.  And continued:

“Was it my sullen quiet nature,

my frequent rigidity, 

that made you to propose that I,

a Capricorn, could be?”

I answered falsely blithe, quick

(in fact to hide my shame)

“I suggested so simply ’cause

goat and Capricorn are the same.”

He eyed me suspiciously, 

No doubt he pondered out,

“This literalist pedestrian

must be a libra, no doubt!”

Another pause.  Then:

“Do YOU recall, then, the pattern

the stars were up, contrived,

at the moment you first took breath

and your first thought arrived?”

“I do not recall the moment,” I said,

“but it matters not to me,

for I was born a Christian and find these

Pagan categories mere curiosity.”

“Christianity, eh, I’ve heard of that,

seems of a rather broad scheme-

It matters not when one is born or dead,

but what happens in between?”

“Yes, we live on principles, not

schedules and such,” said I,

“if I live the way my good Lord did

I intend, in fact, NEVER to  die.

Yet another pause.  He thus concluded:

“I suppose if I could not recall arriving

and did not intend to leave,

I, too, might believe myself to be

In the midst of an eternity.”

Day 32: Stubb’s Sperm Steak

I came out of the woods yesterday evening to find a sign on a nearby building that said “40¢ Snickers”.  “Oh My God,” I said aloud, startling myself with a tone that was more alarmed than joyful.  I stocked up on snacks (limit 4, damn), then headed upriver on the road to find a good campsite.  I ended up at a slightly overpriced commercial site that had showers and vending machines.  The manager was clearly surprised to see a walk-up camper, as all of the other patrons were RV people, some of whom seemed to have been there a good long time.  The sweetest tentsite on the grounds was available, though, so I slept 5 feet from the river on sandy ground in the shadow of mountains behind and in front of me.  I braved the possibility of rain and left my rain cover off of my tent, and the moon and stars shone directly above me as I read about Ishmael’s first great whale chase.

This morning one of the RV guys offered me a cup of coffee, which I eagerly accepted.  He was a long term resident who had been doing safety inspections for a local nuclear waste disposal company.  He was leaving soon, having just sent in a scathing report of the reckless and unsafe practices of the company that brought him in.  

His dog was a a curious breed that I didn’t immediately recognize, yet struck me as vaguely familiar.  “Pembroke Corgy, ” he said, “Queen’s dog.  Queen’s have ‘em.”  And suddenly something clicked.  You see, I’ve long operated on the assumption that many of history’s court portrait artists were hacks when it came to dimensions and bodily proportions.  In many of the depictions of royalty found in museums and castles, the children appear as if their large, intricately drawn heads were pasted onto sketchy, quarter-sized adult bodies.  Same with the dogs.  But here was a breed of dog found in many of those paintings, and it had a large, intricately detailed head and a non-desript, freakishly ill-proportioned body.  Perhaps the children of nobility in pre-Enlightenment days actually were shaped that way too, no doubt as a result of their repressed lives and the unavoidable deaths of more than half of their siblings.

Chester (as the Corgy was called) later chewed through his leash to come down to the river bank and hang out with me.  As I ate a bowl of hot oatmeal and something undistinguished and sweet called a “breakfast claw”, Chester sniffed and dug in the sand, no doubt hunting instinctively for washed up Spanish gold.

 

Day 33: You Can Drive Up Here, Actually

 

Okay, no time for musings or cute embellishments tonight, I just got my new books and therefore have tonight to finish Moby Dick.  Let me just say that I climbed 2200 feet in 3 miles over two hours while carrying a heavy new batch of food, then ate a stirred-up combination of a Lipton Rice Side and an Idahoan mashed potato pack, a banana, a stroopwaffle sent from home, and now I am nestled in the attic of a former fire warden’s cabin on top of a very large hill.

 

Day 34: A Universal Condiment

So today is an easy win for worst day so far.  Unlike my earlier experiences with freezing rain and snow, which were terrible in a more acceptable, homogenous way, today had a fine set-up and a wonderful conclusion.  The middle, however, reeked of tragedy and farce in a woefully inappropriate way.  We had several thunderstorms last night, which ultimately made me regret sleeping directly under a tin a roof - it was sort of like trying to sleep under the bleachers at a basketball game.  The rain that was supposed to disappear by noon got substantially worse after lunch, and temperature dropped suddenly to near freezing at the higher altitudes.  An hour after I ate lunch I said to myself, “screw it, I have nowhere to be, I don’t need to walk through this crap today, I’m ahead of schedule, I’ve got plenty of Moby Dick still to finish, this has to be the ideal day to sit in a shelter and read and eat and sleep and rest my feet.” I also knew that an old barn was coming up in less than a mile.  I found it occupied only by one other hiker, a large middle aged guy named “Coach” (good name).  I unraveled my pad and stripped my wet gear and prepared to be in for the night.  As I headed toward a nearby stream for some water, I saw a frightening apparition: two trekking poles emerged from the fog, then two more, then more, then arms and legs, then. . . a dozen or so teenage boys out for the weekend.

An hour and a half later, as I climbed a fresh hill with the intense rain and chill pounding me with a newfound ferocity, I couldn’t help but think about what jerks those guys were.  They had five miles to go to get picked up, and it was two in the afternoon.  Five miles and you could be at home in Jerksville, eating Dorritos and watching the Simpsons.  Then again, I’m kind of a jerk for forcing myself back into these conditions because I didn’t want to hang out with a dozen boy scouts.

 

Day 35: Toasted Almond Alexander

Today I tried my hand at vagrantry - not real, old-fashioned vagrantry, but a sweet-and-low vagrantry, do-y’all-take-credit-cards kind of vagrantry.  In dire need of peanut butter and bread, I decided to walk into a strange town with zero cash in my plastic wallet.  First priority was a bottomless cup of coffee and a pancake breakfast, during which I might finally finish my hunt for Moby Dick (”Aye, the white fiend!”).  I came upon the outskirts of the town, unaware that the outskirts was the town, and that I was in some sort of medieval oz that didn’t take credit cards and had no ATM.  I entered the diner with the intention of asking where the nearest place to get cash might be, and out of the blue, a fellow who had seen and commented on my pack outside offered to buy me breakfast.  “Anyone who’d walk here from Georgia,” he said, “gets breakfast on me.”  The guy turned out to be Jimmie O’Dell Carroll; not a movie star, but a guy with a movie about him (October Sky, based on the book Rocket Boys).  He was passing through town either for the trout fishing or to speak at a science fair, I didn’t catch which.  

I enjoyed a huge breakfast of pancakes, hashbrowns, and a perfect country ham: tough as wood and salty as old Ahab himself.  I did get some reading in, though it occurred between conversations with Jimmie and a guy from around here who claimed to frequently (seriously, frequently) see mountain lions.  Full-sized, deadly panthers.  There are supposedly no confirmed reports of panthers in the region, but just the idea of it, even if the guy is full of shit, even if he is crazy or whatever, the idea of hiking all hours of the day in a forest populated by lions is terrifying.  Anyhow, back to my story.  

After breakfast I walked through the rest of the town trying to locate a food mart or something opened on Sundays, still unaware of how financially unprepared I was.  I waited outside a liquor store (which opened just after church let out), and as one of the first customers I gathered up a fine assortment of snickers, peanut butter, combos, fritos, a small notebook, a diet coke, hot dog buns and cheese, and several little debbie type things.  I waited until I was at the register, half the store’s food stock in a pile in front of me, to ask the guy if they take credit cards.  When I found out the awful truth, I almost felt as if the incredible amount of food I had gathered merited some kind of special treatment or compensation.  But no.  I considered offering myself as an indentured servant to pay for the goods, but the decision to enter into under-the-table dealings with small town liquor stores is not one to be made lightly or in haste, so I moved on.  Back to the trail.  With no food, along a highway with no sidewalk.

On my way back to the trail a guy in a pickup honked at me and flicked me off.  Some might just accept this as a juvenile prank, but after I laughed at its gratuitousness, I found myself analyzing it.  There we were, two travelers headed the same direction along the same road, and he chose as his only communication to me a expression of anger and hostility.  Because I’m walking.  In the back of the truck he had an old pink sofa, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he refurbishes furniture for a living, and thus resents time spent outside, erect.

 

Day 36: Clean as an Epistle

There seem to be two types of folks around here: older, slightly withdrawn but genuinely friendly Christians; and younger, rebellious, litterbug, honk-and-flip-the-bird, spray graffiti all over everything Christians.  Seriously, the vandalism and litter on the townie side of these woods is disturbing.  Yesterday, while walking back from my trip to town I saw some graffiti sprayed on an enormous boulder on the side of the road.  It said, “Obay Acts 2:38″.    

 

Day 37: A Latticed Moon

I began reading Robert Wilder’s Written on the Wind yesterday; I took a break at a picturesque turn along a wide, cascading stream so that I could read on a rock and, every twenty minutes or so, explain to the other hikers walking by that I was wrapped up in the exposition of a romance novel.

And what a story.  So far the impossibly rich Whitfield family does nothing but eat breakfast, drink liquor and smoke dramatic cigarettes.  Every once in a while someone will stand in outrage or drop a fork in surprise, but for the most part they just eat breakfast.  It’s terrific.

I felt like a rich, sassy, idle Whitfield today when I awoke on a mattress in a $4 hostel to the sound of bacon frying.  An older guy that stayed there last night (”Sundancer” - so far the closest I’ve found to someone being named after a Transformer) decided to cook way too much breakfast for 10 people.  I filled four plates with pancakes, eggs, hash browns and bacon before being told (ordered, even) to finish off the leftovers.  Pot after pot of coffee was brewed.

After breakfast I got a ride into town to visit the post office and pick up candy and a diet coke.  When I returned I opened up half a pizza brought back to me by Bugs and Orangeman, and I ate it followed by one of those apple pie things, like from Mcdonalds.  

Finished, I turned to face the mountain, and I wished I had a cigarette, just for the way it can represent utter satisfaction for those of us surrounded completely by good fortune and wealthy, handsome men.

 

Day 38: Morningstar Wielder

 

Hey.  Hey there.  No, down here on the floor.  Yes, me.  Good.  I, I have your attention.  Now, I suppose that you’ve noticed my tiny, grey, furry form, my round, pink ears, and diminutive manner of speaking, and you have come to the conclusion that I, down here on the floor, that I am a mouse.  That is the proper conclusion, and also somewhat of a matter of personal pride for me.  I am, in fact, a mouse.

A name?  No, no; we mice don’t bother with names.  We get laid far too easily to waste time with names.  I’m just a mouse.  You may find it easier to address us by location; for example, right now I’m the mouse on the floor of the barn, tonight I’ll probably be the mouse in the wall, or even, for a brief period, the mouse burrowing through your backpack.  That will do well to distinguish me.

I imagine another question you may have - though it is doubtful you would ask me - would be - you may be in fact asking yourself, “I wonder if that mouse, that mouse on the floor, would like a little morsel of the cheese I’ve got stuffed in my foodsack.  I’ll bet that he would.” You naturally assume, “I’ll bet he would love a bite, however small, of the extra sharp cheddar cheese that I purchased at my last stop.”  That assumption, however it was come to, is in fact true.  I would love a bit of your cheese.  But I would like to state, as a matter of pride, that that is not because I am a mouse.  That is because we are talking about cheese, a substance loved and enjoyed by all intelligent and civilized mammals.  Cheese is delicious; there is no sense in arguing that.  

So here we stand, sir, face to face, whiskers to beard, two true lovers of cheese.  So why, if I may assume that you in some way speak for the interests and tendencies of your species (forgive me if that is a false assumption), why then is a mouse regarded as some kind of dairy fiend, driven mad with his obsession with cheese?  If you were at a social gathering, and someone you’d known your whole life rejected an hors d’oeuvre on the grounds that they didn’t like cheese, you would undoubtedly stare at them as if they had just asked, “And who might this Santa Claus fellow be?”  and perhaps refuse to invite them over again.  But we mice are linked to cheese as if it therefore makes us clowns or buffoons, blind monomaniacs; what are the expressions?  Like a mouse to cheese, lead a mouse to cheese?  I don’t know if those are real expressions, but I’m sure there are some.  Yet imagine the view from down here: we mice, you see, preferring to live in human populated areas, spend our entire pantry and attic-kept lives watching you - and by you I mean the formal, plural you - consume almost nothing but cheese.  We observe you making, selling, buying, eating, and discussing cheese nonstop, and then we are called fiends?  Let me ask you this: have you ever heard of a pest control official exposing a secret, mouse-operated cheese factory in a crawl space somewhere?  No, you haven’t.  And that is the hilarious irony of all this: mice have received the entirety of their cheese from one source.  Humans.  And from the way you talk, one would think that we consume it all.  But no, a nibble here and there of the large blocks you eat, and we have a problem controlling ourselves around cheese.  You put it in your sadistic traps and at the end of mazes, as if wouldn’t show up for a peanut or a cornflake or even a pat of butter.

So enjoy your cheese, sir.  I know you will.  I’ve seen you look at it while you eat it, consuming it in slow, methodical bites, observing the pattern your teeth make, attempting to make the bite-marks as symmetrical as possible, all the while eying it with the undiminishing glow of fictional or mythological love.  Enjoy your cheese, sir, I know how you need it.

 

Day 39: Other People

 

I stopped to look at a curious ruin this morning: a hermit’s chimney, left over from the turn of the century, turned into a tomb and monument and left on the top of a mountain.  Nick  Grindstaff was the hermit’s name, and he chose the life of solitude on the back of Iron Mountain after losing his parents at the age of 3 and being robbed, beaten, and left for dead at the age of 26.  His tombstone read “Lived alone, suffered alone, died alone.”

The crazy thing was, on the other side of the chimney, someone had hung a small souvenir windchime that bore the phrase, “a gentle heart finds many friends.”  In short, a crappy gesture to devote to a hermit.  You can reject all company and companionship, but when you die, you can bet they’ll hang something inappropriate and hurtful on your grave.  There may be a song in there somewhere.  Lord knows it’s musical.

 

Day 40: Hallelujah

Yesterday I encountered two young men (didn’t look a day over 14, but they had a car) dressed ball-cap to shoe in camouflage, both carrying shotguns.  They eyed me with the same suspicion I imagine I granted them.  There seems to be a mutual tension between hikers and hunters, and I believe it must come from the fact that hikers don’t want to be shot by hunters, and that hunters actually find hiker meat to be a little gamey and tough to salt.  But they didn’t shoot me outright, so I took that as a good sign.  Before they disappeared over some hill to go make widows of some turkeywives, they stopped to talk to me, surprisingly impressed and interested in my overall journey.  They asked the usual questions: how far, how heavy, what do you eat, when did you start, when will it end.  I’ve gotten decent at fielding these questions by now, so I maintained an easy, nonchalant character while the two of them responded with increasing incredulity, marked by an animated, wide-eyed expression, a frequent “gal-dag” followed by a tremor of a chuckle as they turned to look at each other.  Finally everyone’s favorite question: “You gotta gun?”  I wasn’t surprised to hear that from two young boys who were, in fact, carrying guns, but it struck me then how often that question is tossed out by everyone else.  “No,” I said.

“What’ll you do if a bear come after you?”

“I don’t know; I suppose I’ll try to fight it off.”

I was still playing like I was super-cool, but the two of them looked at me like they just realized they’d spent the last five minutes talking to a retarded bag-boy at the grocery store.  I had a moment to think to myself: what the hell am I doing out here without a gun?  Okay so there is little or no chance that I will be randomly attacked by a bear or some manner of wild cat, but doesn’t that just speak to how tame, how un-wild this wilderness has become?  What does it say when a young man can enter the wilds of the New World unarmed and come back with little more than a tan and a protein deficiency?  I’ll bet old Nick Grindstaff took a shotgun with him to go take a leak.  You see, if I carried a gun, I would at least be taking nature on, not just silently hoping it doesn’t choose to maul me.

“I’d try to jab him with one of them sticks, ” the shorter, skinnier guy said, pointing to my trekking poles.  Sage advice, my invisible friend.

 

Day 41: Heaven and Hell

I strolled into town on a Friday afternoon with an ache in the shoulder and a sharp pain in my shoes.  As I passed through the park on the south side of town, I saw folks hanging banners, setting up spotlights, and assembling a large wooden platform.  It must have been for some sort of weekend festival, celebrating the coming of spring.  

That night after several pounds of food and two liters of beer I headed back down to the park to see the festivities; multiple grey haired old ladies in official looking dress suits had, in the course of the afternoon, offered me pamphlets advertising the main attraction of the festival: “The Return of the Bear.”  Needless to say, I was excited.

At 7:00 pm sharp the crowd clustered expectantly in the center of the park, and the distant sound of a coal-powered train engine gradually filled the cool evening air.  With hushed anticipation we all followed the billowing grey smoke as it appeared from behind the tops of the trees.  The crowd struck me as absurdly reverential, until I realized that the miniature, antique train that emerged from the woods was in fact being conducted by a full-sized, male black bear.  His head bobbed back and forth as his eyes gazed adoringly at the children in the crowd, and parents attempted vainly to restrain the young from getting too close to the bear.  I half-expected him to wave.  But this was not a tamed animal or a circus act.

The train brought the bear to the center of the park, where he clumsily dismounted and made his way onto the elevated wooden stage.  I gathered from the various hysterical cries of the crowd that the bear went by several different names in the local culture: he was Gus to the smallest of the children, Sesgus to the elderly, and the young adults and middle-aged called him Mister Kit.  

Gus turned to face the crowd from center stage and the cheering abruptly stopped.  Somewhere, someone began a sustained moan that swelled until the entire community hummed in unison.  Gus took his cue and began pounding out a steady rhythm on the stage floor with his left foot.  Maintaining this solid pulse, the rest of his body jerked and spasmed its way into an awkward dance.  This went on for several minutes before any correlation appeared between the rhythm and the bizarre head bobbing, arm twirling and twitching shoulders of the dance.  Once it melded the humming stopped and the bear exploded into a savage, powerful fandango unlike anything I’ve ever seen.  It was amazing.  I was so mesmerized by the intensity and spectacle of the performance that I didn’t notice the oversized noose that dropped from rafters behind the bear.

Far too quickly for me to process it the crowd’s attitude had shifted from reverence to mock outrage to pure, sadistic spite.  A large group of teenagers rushed onto the stage and forced the noose around Mister Kit’s neck and gleefully pulled the rope until his jerking body hung several feet up in the air, pelted with insults and ridicule.

Once the bear stopped convulsing they brought it down and laid it sideways on the stage.  An old man with a knife drove the blade deep into Gus’ belly, forcing it up toward his ribcage.  I expected to see guts pour from the incision, but inexplicably and miraculously a child’s smiling face emerged from the belly of the bear.  Completely dry and wearing a spotless white gown a young, brown haired girl stepped away from the corpse and shouted, “Welcome back Mister Kit!”

 

Day 42: ClusterChuck.

I went through a mild transformation this morning.  Dripping with sweat in the mid-morning sun, I knew I could not survive the day as I was.  I swallowed my pride and donned some sunglasses, and I wrapped my water-filtering bandana around my head, Rambo-style.  Then I took off my cargo shorts, peeled off the underwear I’ve worn every day for the entire Lenten season (hallelujah), and replaced them with some tiny, blue, polyester running shorts.  The effect was immediate and magical; I suppose I’e never truly appreciated a simple wardrobe change.  Of course I’ve been wearing the same thing day and night for over a month.

But suddenly there I stood with nothing between me and the slight, sparse breeze but a thin layer of porous fabric.  I felt as though I could glide across the earth, nudging it down instead of forcing myself up.  I resolved to take my shirt off after lunch and spend more time barefoot in general.  I think tomorrow I my simply fashion a loin cloth out of moss and collected berry stems.

 

Day 43: Jellylegs.

Unfortunately my earthen loincloth proved itself unfit for rainy weather.  When the clouds burst at around noon and washed the moss off of me I was a mere .2 of a mile from the nearest shelter, so I ran without concern for appearances and arrived all but naked to find a cabin full of husbands, wives, sons, fathers, boyfriends, girlfriends, weekenders out for the day; in all a pretty mixed crowd to show up wearing nothing but mud and boots.  But I ate some lunch, changed into my rain gear, and left the crowd shivering over their Yahtzee.

I spent the next couple blustering and patchy hours in the Grayson Highlands, an area that sustains a breathtaking, rugged beauty over several open miles.  A unique island, isolated only by its height and the surrounding woods, made up of rolling hills - I can’t really describe it without access to better references; I was, until now, completely unaware that a place in this world could look anything like this.  The terrain underfoot is equal parts rock and patchy, pale grass, and the landscape is punctuated messily by tall pine trees and massive granite figures.  Stubby rhododendron patches freckle the surface in between.  With little in bloom and much of the grass still yellowed, The Highlands manage a rich and chaotic blend of colors, shadowed by frequent low-flying clouds; a dense, scribbly picture.  And who are the groundskeepers of this radical, abstract paradise?  Wild ponies.  Well, not entirely wild, but they are free to roam and pepper the landscape with droppings, and contribute to an atmosphere of unbridled liberation.

 

Day 44: Fish Sandwich

This is turning out to be a downright gluttonous experience.  Two nights ago, in town, I ate two cups of rice with chicken and peanuts, five buffalo wings, a slice of pizza, two apples, two granola bars, a couple Hostess thingies, a kit-kat and two chocolate milkshakes.  Last night, my second night out of town, I came down the north side of a mountain to find a man standing next to a sign at a clearing.  Ed, from North Carolina.  He made polite conversation as I greedily attacked one of my granola bars, and then he said, “I have a proposition for you.”  

“Bring it on, Ed,” I thought to myself without hesitation (perhaps not the best response in all situations).  He humbly offered me a place to stay and a few hot meals, mentioning that the last two hikers had turned him down.  I knew of whom he spoke, a father and son pair named Tins and Trooper.  I used to not trust them because they always seemed way too clean.  Now I don’t trust them because they turned down beef stew, fresh salad, pancakes, and a cot to sleep on so that they could be 3 miles further in the morning.

Ed’s cabin was nice for a one-room hut with no plumbing.  They (Ed and his co-caretaker, Mississippi) had gas heat and light and a rechargeable battery that powered the television and the CD player.  We watched the news with dinner and listened to some Doc Watson with dessert.  I had a cold beer, 2 cups of root beer, decaffeinated coffee, and hot chocolate.  I slept on a cot in a shed with a gas lantern.  The privy was made of fiberglass and reminded me of being in an airplane, except I had to save my toilet paper.

The next morning I ate about 50 pancakes, which they kept slapping onto my plate.  “We know you need the calories.”  Now this is interesting.  I’ve eaten more food in the last two weeks than ever in my life.  If I feel even a moment’s slightest hunger, my pack is off and I’m devouring something made of sugar and often coated in chocolate.  Yet these guys acted like I’ve been in Siberia for 12 years.  And I kept eating the pancakes because, in my mind, I may never eat pancakes again.

Anyways, later today as I got into some guy’s truck (he offered me a ride to town) I considered how much people enjoy helping out folks who are walking the trail.  You could never convince them that they might be feeding you too much.  That guy ended up offering me free dinner at his sister’s place; I claimed I couldn’t because of my schedule, but really I just felt it was too much after the night before.  I immediately regretted saying no.  He looked genuinely disappointed.

 

PS: In the way that life imitates fiction and thus, life with fiction imitates life with life, I just finished a short book called Winter Count by Barry Lopez, which is about personal, magical experiences with history and nature had by an otherwise intellectual and (to varying degrees) rational man.  I had to travel only as far as the next shelter to magically receive my next book: J.D. Salinger’s 9 Stories (or at least four of them, the last five are ripped out) which seems to focus on disillusionment in the midst of prosperity.

 

Day 45: Take a Load Off Fanny.

Of all the pleasures I’ve experienced in my life (and I mean all the pleasures), none (and I mean none) compare to the ritualistic rubbing of the balls and toes of my feet after a long day of walking with 40 pounds on my back.  I used to not rub my feet at all, now I do it 3 times a day.  I’m a chronic foot massager.  

Understand, this is not simply the relieving of tension or working out of aches and pains in sore muscles and tendons.  There is much more to it.  For one thing your foot spends the entire day inside a wool sock inside a waterproof boot.  When you remove it from this pressure chamber it is hypersensitive, and more than a bit ticklish.  Also there is something in the steady, violent treatment of the feet that screws up the circulation so that they itch all day.  Not surface itches, but deep, dull, irritation that requires you to dig in with your fingernails and really tear at the foot with force.  In essence, it’s the combination of these issues that makes their mutual method of relief (what I call a ‘foot-sation’) so sustained yet climactic.  It is like someone tickling your bottom with a feather while licking the inside of your arm.  Or beating Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out with a mouthful of grape slushee.  Or having a chinchilla as a bathtub buddy.  It’s like driving a Rascal naked through an M&M storm.

 

Day 46: Taken the Very Best

I’ve taken to putting honey roasted peanuts into the pot before I boil water for my dinner rice or noodles.  They add a crunchy, meaty texture, but moreover their seasoning and oils add a subtle sweetness that enriches the meal.  Last night’s recipe:

 

dried chicken

white rice

1 ramen flavor packet (chicken)

honey roasted peanuts

1 packet of Kroger’s Szechuan seasoning mix

 

Enjoy on a dirt patio overlooking a stream as Coach attempts to build a fire with wet sticks.  Finish the meal with two Little Debbie snacks: coffee cake and marshmallow treat.  Awake just before midnight to strong cigar smell, mice must be smokers.

 

Tonight’s recipe:

 

2 ramen noodle packages

1 ramen flavor packet (chicken) 

honey roasted peanuts

Can of Dinty Moore beef stew (excellent choice)

 

Eat earlier than usual to avoid cooking in a potential rainstorm.  Finish the meal with a Little Debbie: Cosmic Brownie.  Enjoy the parade of Junior High coeds, figure out “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” on the harmonica.  After dinner, meet Overflow, a young lady from Oregon, who tells you that she doesn’t lie and then informs you that you are scary.

 

Day 51: I Can Very Appreciate a Dope

 

Okay, so I skipped some entries.  Call it a vacation, because that’s what it was.  Last Friday my father came down and picked me up in a vehicle and took me to a hotel.  We spent a week doing day trips with little more than lunch and water, staying in towns and with my cousin’s family.  It was terrific and amazing and certainly chock full of incident, but the sudden addition of stimuli such as conversation, NPR, newspapers, real coffee, restaurants, long drives, television, and hot showers left me with neither the time nor the motivation to write stuff down.

I attacked this new lifestyle with such incredible vigor my first day that I made myself sick, so I spent most the second shivering under suspiciously stained sheets at a crappy hotel in a town called Bland.  It took me two days to get my appetite back.  Meanwhile I managed to impress the old man with my physical shape; it only took 50 days in the woods with 40 pounds on on my back for 600 miles for me to be able to take on my father.

 

Day 52: Empire Falls

This morning I put on my pack (laden with eight days of food) and attempted to get back into my regular routine while somewhat preoccupied by the soda and conversation that was driving away from me, back to Louisville.  The day had some nice climbs and good views.  I came, just before lunch, to a rock outcrop that had a magnificent look into a deep, green valley.  The sky had been clear, but the large clouds of discontent and homesickness floated toward me from the west.  I ate lunch in a funk, the clouds hanging just overhead, but in the mid-afternoon the sun burst through the clouds momentarily to shout: “Hey shit-bag!  Buck up!  Haven’t you noticed the leaves on the trees?  And you passed 650 miles today!  You’re a new American hero!”

You are correct, Sunny Day.  Where there once was only sky there is now a light green canopy that glows, even under clouds.  And I am now officially a states-born legend, like John Wayne and Mohammed Ali.

 

Day 53: You Don’t Know Me.

I just gave myself a lazy, 12-mile Saturday on account of the weather.  I slept in until 8 this morning after spending the entire night shivering in my new summer sleeping bag, which is a thoroughly breathable fleece blanket.  The old one, comfortable down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, is sealed tight in a garbage bag awaiting the unfortunate soul that has to open and clean it.  But a cold night yet again turned into clear, beautiful day by the time I managed to pack my tent and boil my cheese-encrusted pot for coffee.  This morning’s walk took me through a cluster of hilly pastures and farms separated by tufts of trees.  I was tempted to carry out a long-standing fantasy of mine: for whatever reason grassy fields dotted with those big rolls of hay always make me want to frolic naked, stopping to kiss each bale as if it were a pile of pure gold, then smacking my hands together in satisfaction before skipping merrily off to the next bale.  I recognize that this fantasy makes no sense and would probably accomplish nothing more than getting me shot.

I distracted myself from the temptation by stopping to check what sights and scenery lay ahead of me.  An oak tree, largest in the region, 300 years old, 18 and something feet around, coming up in a mile.  I spent that mile making up exclamations that I could shout in surprise upon seeing the tree, which would likely be isolated in a small clearing and visible only when one passed though a thick wall of huckleberry blossoms.  Expression’s like: 

 

“Heaven’s Graveyard!” 

“Well, Bust My Battle-Axe!”

“Pamela Pigeon’s Pony!”

“Humping Alligators!” 

“Cheap Champagne in a Thermos!”     

 

Alas, it was just a tree.  It prompted no extra response.  Silly of me to think otherwise; A tree’s power is not to shock or amaze you.  Trees are impressive and humbling, but in a way that slowly reaches out to you over a great deal of time.

 

Day 54: Dragon’s Toof

I sent my warmer sleeping bag home too soon.  Last night I shivered all night, despite the fact that I was wearing every scrap of clothing I own.  Tonight I will throw in a hypothermia blanket.

Even though I was sleep-deprived and cold, I managed to get back down to business and do around 18 miles.  My pack is back near a reasonable weight (the tendency is to leave civilization loaded down with food, move slowly and consume like a champ for a few days) and the miles, though mostly uphill, went by quickly.  Lunch, which included an anonymous gift of a diet coke and a Krispy Kreme donut, was had leisurely next to a stream brimming with trout and crayfish; I took my shoes off and massaged my feet as the sun emerged and the clouds dissipated.

The afternoon was spent high on a jagged, rocky ridge and in between sharp peaks, with some of the hardest climbing I have ever done.  But nature was out and exposed and seemed even too plentiful or even crowded to be surprised or affected by my presence.  I passed within 10 feet of a deer that simply stood and stared and me, sniffing the air with more curiosity that caution.  Butterflies flanked me on both sides throughout the day, and I spent several minutes perched on the side of a cliff watching a nearby cluster of turkey buzzards.  I ended the day with a trip to a gas station, where I bought five pounds of Little Debbie snacks and the headed back into the woods.  I’m camping with Tins and Trooper in a pine stand littered with shotgun shells and cow patties.

 

Day 55: Catch Up.

A few jokes encountered today:

 

How do you catch a unique bunny?

 

Unique up on it.

Why don’t hippos play cards at the zoo?

 

Because of all the cheetahs.

 

I’ll also mention that Bugs drew a picture of me in a logbook that had my head the shape and color of an almond.  It struck me as alarmingly accurate.  My attempts to draw myself usually fail to take into account the pointyness of my head.

I ate lunch today beneath a small pine tree on Mcafee Knob, possibly the greatest view anywhere.  Not super high, but you look directly out over a smaller mountain range with valleys on either side; Roanoke to your right, close enough to see detail and far enough away to maintain the scope of it all.  Sort of like a massive train set.  The trail stayed up on a ridge that carried me off to Tinker Cliffs, a half mile of exposed rock that looks back across the valley to the Knob.  It was a magnificent day and one of my favorites so far.

 

Day 56: The Queen of England

There is nothing quite like leaping out from the woods and running smack into Pizza Hut at 12:30 in the afternoon.  I approached it confidently, threw my pack down at the door, and made my way inside.

“There’s no buffet,” said the middle-aged guy behind the counter.  He knew my game.  I swallowed my obvious heartbreak and prepared to move the conversation along.

“. . . And I have no idea where a nearby buffet might be.”  Preempted.  That wasn’t even my question, but I couldn’t prove that now.  What a pathetic sucker.

“Where’s the Kroger?”

On my way down the hill to the grocery store, I put what some might call a ‘hurtin’ on the Wendy’s Dollar Value Menu.  I ate two bacon cheeseburgers, a five-piece chicken nugget, a caesar side salad, some fries, and then I ate a half-pint of Ben and Jerry’s (’The Gobfather’).  It didn’t even phase me.  I didn’t even sit back and go, “Oh. . . man-” and that’s my favorite part of most meals.  I had to buy a new spork (I threw mine out accidentally and was given a stainless steal replacement by a preacher I met the next day), some olive oil, sugar, and a silk liner for my sleeping bag.

Now I’m the only long distance hiker at a shelter full of kids from a residential campus for juvenile delinquents.  The kids disappeared while one of their counselors was giving me tips on refinancing with 0% interest credit cards.  They came back an hour later, having found a water source.  Derrick threw me a quart of water.

“You’re going a thousand miles, dude.”  Another kid brought out a violet and asked the counselor what it was.

“Is it edible?” Derrick asked.

“I don’t know.”  

Derrick was prompted by the others to try it.

“Man, I ain’t eatin’ no grass.  I don’t care if it is edible.  Hell, everything is edible.  You just don’t know if it’ll kill you.”

 

Day 57: A Fight

 

Another night, another group of troubled kids.  They were here all of 10 minutes before they had to have a meeting to discuss who first threw a rock at who, and who then lied about throwing the rock.  I walked far today, and I’m looking forward to some big climbs tomorrow.  I go home in a week.

 

Day 58: Shall We Dance

This morning I awoke to an unknown call; it turned out to be some kind of rallying cry or wake-up call of the grey squirrel.  We have the same squirrels at home, yet I’ve never heard this sound, which is sort of like a group of barking parrots.  I stepped out of the shelter and scared off the screaming rodents, who may have been excited by the pan of chicken fajitas left out by my delinquent friends.  As I was making my oatmeal I saw one of the counselors emerge from his hammock and head to the privy with a clothing bag.  He changed his clothes in the goddamn privy.  He got undressed and redressed in a big wooden box filled with shit.

 

Day 59: Gentlemen.

Today was its own sort of journey.  I’ll start with the end of my walk, which featured great weather and a gradual downhill slope.  I crossed a footbridge over a wide, shallow river and came to a road crossing.  A guy named ‘Thumper’ was sitting against the guardrail.  He had hitched a ride up the road in both directions and found little in terms of food or supplies.  Nevertheless he hitched back with me into Big Island, where I had a package waiting.  We made small talk while we waited for a ride, learning nothing about each other under the loud noise of all the traffic that wasn’t picking us up.  Eventually we scored a ride in the back of a pickup with two wave-runnners hitched to it.  The driver had also filled the back with rough-cut boards and two large cans of gasoline.  The only way that Thumper and I could ride was with our backs to the cab, leaning against the gas cans with our packs on, propping our feet against the tailgate since the wood was stacked higher than the sides of the truck.  I was not even in position when the driver took off, almost knocking me back onto the road.  As Thumper and I sped down the road at what was easily 80 miles an hour, knowing full well that any slight bump could kill us both, we discussed the fact that we could have simply ridden the wave runners.  Oh well.  My first experience hitchhiking.  There must be a learning curve.

Day 60: On Sleeping By Rivers (fragment)

Ignoring risk of a flood in the rain

I’ll sleep

ten yards from a river and, like the river, 

fast and deep.

 

Some say the sound soothes us

but I believe the current pulls us.

By the time we splash awake our blood

has flowed across the face of five states.

Day 61: Virginia’s Alright (fragment)

Virginia’s alright

but that doesn’t mean

we should throw out all our

methamphetamines.

Day 64: I Guess I’ll Be Leaving

I’ve had it.  While waiting for my father to retrieve me for a short vacation, I went to the Radio Shack in Waynesboro to purchase a radio.  Without one I’ve been at the mercy of the rhythm of my footsteps, often combined with some fragment of a song (for the last week it’s been “Cry Me A River” by Justin Timberlake).  What’s worse is that I have nothing to interrupt or distract my brain from this repetition at the end of the day, so I will frequently wake up in the middle of the night to find the song still playing.  The radio I purchased is slightly oversized but durable, with an extending antenna, and it picks up weather service and television stations.  I’m going home tomorrow.

 

Day 65: State of Mind

Back on the trail after a five day hiatus.  I went home to witness a wedding ceremony, and also to watch The Sound of Music and eat Indi’s Fried Chicken.  I thought an extended rest might help my aching feet, which despite frequent rubbing have been reaching a point of intolerable pain earlier and earlier each day.  However I waddled and grunted all weekend, and today I cussed my way up the trail.  The terrain was pretty easy; a good thing, too, since my father and I had to cover over 27 miles.  We had hoped to stop at a campsite with facilities, but it had yet to open for the season.  The woman working in the store refused to sell us any food - which was there, in abundance - since it was not technically open.

Dad and I are ’stealth’ camping on a hill in the closed campground, and we hope to at least catch breakfast at the wayside grill, about a mile down the road.

 

Day 66: A Very Beary Area

We got our pancake breakfast and packed turkey subs for lunch.  Good thing, too, else I may have jumped off of a cliff.  My feet hurt.  Every second I spent walking today was a painful second.  Hard downhill steps, gentle uphill steps, it did not matter.  Each time the balls of my feet touched the ground and stretched that tendon it felt as though rusty barbwire was cutting through my foot at an angle.  I tried to distract myself with the radio, but I seem to be dancing back and forth between two different FCC zones.  Any station I pick will cut out and eventually disappear in less than an hour.  What’s worse is that these different zones all have NPR, all around the same point on the dial.  So I’ll have one station’s programming interrupted by another station’s programming, which could be playing the same thing (slightly or greatly out of sync), something different, or even the same show but a different episode.  Tonight Terri Gross was interviewing an ombudsman from NYT and a poet named Collins at the same time and my radio was randomly jumping back and forth.  If I were in a better mood I might have found it an amusing piece of found art, but I was only interested in what the poet was saying, so it all sounded more or less like me going crazy.  

I did get to hear one song in its entirety: Rosemary Clooney singing “It Isn’t Even Spring” from Rogers and Hammerstein’s State Fair.  I’d never heard it before, and I was impressed with its melancholy beauty and grizzly brass passages.  Herb Alpert’s “This Guy’s in Love WIth You” followed.

 

Day 67: Peed Away an Acorn

My father woke me up this morning asking to borrow my lighter.  I’d slept on top of it for the better part of the night so I had no trouble locating it for him without opening my eyes.  After a moment he made a disappointed noise and said, “I can’t seem to make it . . .”  

Worried about my lighter, I opened my eyes and grabbed it from him.  I gave it a quick flick and it ignited, so I handed it back and rolled back over, but he still couldn’t make it light.  When I finally saw the problem I had to laugh out loud; he was pressing the lever without flicking the wheel.  I realized that my father had never in his life had need to use a pocket lighter.  He’s never smoked, and he’s not exactly Danny Boone out here in the woods.  Still, I would think that mere curiosity would cause one to flick a lighter at least once in 50-plus years.  I know I devoted no less that a year of my adolescence to exploring objects that make fire.

I had to give him credit, though, for grabbing the thing and expecting it to work.  Most of the time my father holds onto an unfamiliar object (say a remote, or a cell phone, or trekking poles) and stares at it helplessly as if he’s waiting for it to tell him what to do.  I think you have to grab and shake and twist and push things to figure out how they work.  But then I’ve probably broken a lot more stuff than my dad has.  We make a pretty funny couple out here; I’m too stubborn to turn around even if all evidence implies I’m headed the wrong way, and my father is incapable of taking a step without two sets of instructions, a map, and a contingency plan since he is absolutely convinced he will get lost as soon as he starts walking.

We stayed last night and tonight in private, rented cabins with woodburning stoves, mattresses, and blankets.  So far this evening’s been idyllic; we played cards on a stone patio, listening to NPR and watching the sun go down over some town in the valley.  We picked up some freeze dried meals, which taste like real food.

 

Day 68: Hijacked a Rainbow and Fell Into a Pot of Gold

Today was sort of a riches-to-rags tale; my father and I went from scrambled eggs and bacon in a private cabin to begging cheese sandwiches from a guy in a Camero and waiting in the dark for a park ranger to pick us up.  Our plan was to hike the Shenandoahs without any extra food weighing us down, and this has more than backfired.  There were two convenient places to stop and eat on the map, and they were both closed, so we ended up faced with a night camping out with nothing to eat but Dad’s last bit of trail mix.  Our first disappointment was lunch: we stopped at a large, conveniently located store that, despite being mentioned in this year’s guidebook, has been closed for three years.  After that we tore off over a couple of mountains, trying to reach the next wayside and store before the 7:30 closing time.  I got there at 6:55, a full half hour after my father did, my right boot suffering a gap-tooth, gortex half-smile and a busted shoelace.  The sign on the door of the grill read “9 am to 5:30 pm”, and the new closing time had been carved into a wooden black and pasted over the old time.  While waiting for me my father had approached a creepy guy in black gloves with a cooler in the back of his sports car.  He scored a couple of cheese sandwiches and some hershey’s kisses.  We ate in a defeated gloom, watching numerous people drive up and attempt to use the public bathrooms, which were locked.  After a half hour or so of silent disappointment, I said, “screw it; let’s get out of here.”  We called around until we managed to convince a park ranger to pick us up and take us to a hotel in town, where I took a bath.

 

Day 69: And F#%k the Unicorn

 

Well, we did it.  After 5 days, 107 miles, my father and I accomplished our goal and reached the other end of the park with an average of over 20 miles a day while never carrying more than a half day of food.  The frequent tragedies and and sporadic, poorly documented accommodations could not hold off our victory.  We celebrated with pints of Anchor Steam and steaks with lobster tail and crab cakes.  I discovered a dessert that is made of a hershey bar wrapped in a flour tortilla, fried and covered in ice cream.  A chocolate chimichanga.

 

Day 70: Sing a Sad Song and Turn It Around

For the first time in over a month, I have nowhere to be.  I can move at whatever pace, without a schedule or deadline.  It feels nice; the possibility of a lazy start or a long break or a short day more than make up for the 10 extra pounds of food and water I departed with this morning.  Dad and I ate an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast, then went to the grocery for Little Debbie cakes before he dropped me on the side of the road.  I decided that the radio might  be a helpful distraction from the weight and that dull disappointment that comes from leaving behind a loved one for no good reason.  Right when I turned it on I found Casey Kasem, Ol’ Cliff-Jumper himself, still offering up the hits of today in arbitrary order with frequent, bizarre digressions to 1992.  Casey might be the only person in the entertainment industry with an ounce of integrity.  Sure, his job requires him to peddle whatever crap is in fashion, but he always does it in the exact same way.  Since the dawn of time he has spoken in the same voice, telling the same sort of mildly amusing behind-the-scenes stories, regardless of whether he is talking about Richard Marx or Slipknot.  He has no image to maintain, has no need of reinvention, and best of all, he hasn’t resorted to the smug, mindlessly sarcastic celeb-worship disguised as social commentary that you see on E! or VH1 or read in entertainment columns.  This morning, as I flipped in vain like an old person trying to find the Weather Channel, I saw for the first time the video for Gwen Stefani’s “Holla Back Girl”.  Stefani, who hit the charts back in the mid-nineties as a plaid-skirted ska queen, seems quite at home in a yellow jogging suit, big hoop earrings and a pimped-out low rider.  But you won’t hear Kasem bitch about that, because it doesn’t matter how ridiculous it is.  What matters is that people ate it up.  They bought it.

 

Day 71: And I Love You.

This is an incredibly non-descript section of trail.  They call it the ‘roller coaster’ because you climb a series of smallish hills in succession.  But you don’t see anything, there’s no sense of achievement, no views to make the climb worthwhile, and at no point do you put your arms up and yell, “aaaaaaaahhhh” because you are having too much fun for your heart condition.  Nevertheless I suffered 20 miles of this monotonous green tunnel and ended up at a marvelous castle in the woods called ‘Bear’s Den Hostel’.  Here, $25 gets you a pizza, ice cream, a bunk, a shower, laundry, internet access, breakfast and free long distance phone service.  The place is run by a cheerful and outgoing middle-aged woman and her husband, a soft spoken singer with an excellent white mustache.  I’ve decided to stay here for a while, at least until the restaurant a mile up the road opens tomorrow.

 

Day 72: I Don’t Wanna Sleep, I Just Wanna Keep On Lovin’ You.

 

I hung around the castle until about noon, and then I went to the restaurant and ate a big, spicy fish sandwich with a heap of cajun french fries on the side (editor’s note: I apparently ate a whole bunch of food on this trip.  Please consider, however, that it is much easier to describe a specific meal than it is to come up with 72 different ways to talk about walking in the woods).  I drank two Coors Lights before 2:30, at which time I put my pack on and started back up the trail.  I flicked on my radio and heard Brahms’ Concerto for Violin and ‘Cello in A minor coming in crystal clear for its full duration.  The slow movement in concert with the mild weather, steady breeze, and my mild beer-buzz made me feel like like I was swimming in a large bowl of cool milk and warm cashmere.

I did about 7 easy miles, and at roughly 6 pm I left the top of the ridge to find another hostel.  This one is just a cabin with hard bunks and a wood burning stove, but it’s free and is located next to a retreat center with a kitchen and a porch.  The caretaker, named ‘Redwing’, made me a free pancake dinner.  

I’m looking forward to sunrise.

 

Day 73: Nick and Jessica’s Post-Divorce Rendezvous

I had a second lunch today at a pub called the Secret Six, named for John Brown’s raiders.  My grilled turkey sandwich with bacon and swiss and two pints of Blue Moon were financed by a sweet middle-aged couple from Maryland named Paul and Brenda, who were visiting Harper’s Ferry for the afternoon.  They grilled me on the details of the trip so far, and they ended up treating me with the concerned and supportive attitude of sudden parents. 

“Call us if you get stranded!” Brenda shouted at me as I walked away with the chocolate milkshake they bought me.  It occurs to me that I would never have become so quickly and effortlessly acquainted with someone if I weren’t basically homeless.

As I write I’m celebrating the completion of 1000 big miles.  A guy named Nokia and I are drinking Coke mixed with vanilla Smirnoff at a hostel that has a piano.  I tried to plunk out a Gershwin song called “Deli-shi-ous”, and then I found a tune in the Stephen Foster songbook called “If You Only Have A Moustache”.

On an unrelated note, I had a dream last night that I strangled Donald Rumsfeld with my windbreaker.  A good time, you say, but it was one of those dreams that keeps going into the consequences and you have just enough time to regret destroying your life.  I awoke and experienced the great feeling and freedom that comes from not being a murderer.  A gift from my own psyche.  A delicious gift.  “Delicious”, by the way, is my new moniker.  Every bit as substantial and elegant as Alexander, yet I love the way saying, “I’m Delicious” raises the eyebrows.  Delicious: the Greek god of turkey sandwiches.

 

Day 74: Bigger Than My Body

 

I was a full half-mile straight downhill from the hostel this morning when I realized I had forgotten my spoon and bowl on the kitchen counter.  The third time in as many weeks I had lost a spoon.  My thoughts jumped to the recent memories of accepting a dirty metal spoon from a complete stranger and to carving my own chopsticks from twigs found on the ground.  I looked briefly through my guidebook for a good place to buy a spoon (Harper’s Ferry being 3 or so miles behind me)  before deciding to just spend another day at the hostel.  I wandered around town, ate funnel cake and cheesecake and frozen treats; I drank a million sodas and checked my email a dozen times.  I went to the library and read the Wall Street Journal; I bought the only magazine I could find (National Geographic’s “Adventure”), explored the endlessly historic and picturesque town which seems impossibly carved from the rocks it sits on, as if certain buildings could have appeared naturally from falling rocks and cementation.  The cultural highlight of my day was the John Brown Wax Museum, which was so equally shitty in concept, design, and execution that it had a surreal and inappropriately entertaining effect.  The story was patchy, jumping from Brown as a young boy to Brown as an old man without mention of what professions or background he had.  The wax figures are terrible; in fact some of the characters, including the prosecuting attorney in Brown’s trial and occasionally Brown himself, appear to be black.  There were two special effects: a strobe light used to make the raid tableaux more intense, and a single, unsettling bit of animatronics: in the final scene, as Brown climbs the steps to the gallows and a recorded narrator speculates whether Brown was a hero or a murderer, Brown’s head slowly and awkwardly lifts until he is looking directly at you, or in this case, me.  Unsettling.

I also spent some more time at the local outfitters, where I finally remembered to pick up some supportive insoles for my aching feet.  I described my symptoms to the owner, and she was immediately concerned that I may have stress fractures.  “Just say no to 20-mile days,” she warned.  Hmm.  I’m pretty sure my feet will have time to heal when I’m dead.  Or crippled.

 

Day 75: Slam Dunk

 

Not much to say except that my feet still hurt.  I’ve made the decision to take it easy for a few more days.  Tomorrow I will do 2 miles to the next campsite and see how long I want to stay there.  I’ve heard there are showers.

Right now I’ve got a shelter to myself.  It has a great spring, a privy, two decks with chairs and a porch swing.  I’m tempted to just stay here, but it’s Memorial Day weekend so loads of people will be about eventually.  Also I’ve reached the point in the trip where most people do upwards of 20 miles a day, so I’ll probably get passed by hundreds of people in the next few days.  I’m trying to not let that bother me.

 

Day 76: Little Red Pony

 

I spent the morning at the shelter under a canopy of gently swaying trees, lounging on deck furniture and listening to NPR.  At 11 or so I packed up and walked an easy 2 miles to a free campground next to a pricey and historic restaurant.  I ate an $8 burger and a $5 piece of pie, both worth every penny.  There was a wedding reception taking place at the restaurant, so they seated me in a back corner by the stairs.  I would occasionally look up from Robert Wilder’s Affair of Honor - a world of rich, assertive men and well-dressed, idle ladies - to find similarly rich men and elegant young women coming down the stairs to join the party.  Unlike Wilder’s characters, however, these men and women were not sharp, cynical, self-aware, but rather wide-eyed, panicked, and clearly uncomfortable in their bridesmaid’s gowns.  It was I, Alexander Delicious, who remained calm, smug, and dignified: the handsome, sweaty, hair-covered man in the corner sipping diet coke, eating a burger with a fork, and casually perusing the dessert menu for a dish that suited my distinguished pallete.

After lunch I headed back to the campsite, which was fast filling up with weekend campers and townies.  I shared my picnic table with a weekend couple from Philadelphia (Mark and Kelly) and a ridge-runner named Will.  Mark and Kelly and I mainly just listened to Will’s hilarious outdoor-living anecdotes.  Now, usually a ridge-runner, by the very nature of the profession, is outgoing if not overbearing.  Will has informed me that talking to strangers makes him feel like a douchebag.  I can relate.

The most memorable story, which he shared over a six-pack of rolling rock in the dark after dinner, was about a night spent driving from Oregon to Idaho with a pair of smelly hitchhikers.  He had picked them up out of pity; the young couple (man and woman) were clearly homeless and a little sketchy.  They camped out in the desert by the side of the road, and Will was kept awake most of the night by what he could only imagine were footsteps outside his tent.  After a while he began to suspect that the couple was screwing around or possibly trying to rip him off, so he turned on the dome light in his truck using his remote key.  The sound persisted.  Eventually he heard hands scraping at his tent around the zipper.  He leapt up and scrambled out of his tent, unable to find anyone or anything around him for miles.  Will shouted at the hitchhikers, threatening that if they didn’t stop messing with him he would leave them to die in the desert.  After apologizing for waking them up, he pulled his tent over next to them for security.

He got back into his sleeping bag and listened to the couple settle in next to him.  Suddenly two hands reached out and grabbed his feet through his tent.  Needless to say, he freaked out and jumped out of the tent again, still not finding anyone around.  The next morning there was an empty Mountain Dew can sitting on his tailgate.  

 

I was really hoping for a happy - or even funny - ending to that story.  But no, that was it.

 

Day 77: Tiny Dancer

 

I tore up a quick, easy eight miles today with Curly Rambo, who is no longer curly after spending after spending two days in town with a hot girl who gave him a lame mohawk.  Rambo and I got into Mark and Kelly’s car - oh yeah, I forgot to mention that in the course of  our time together, both Will and Mark offered to let me borrow their cars so that I could get back to Harper’s Ferry and catch a train to D.C. for a My Morning Jacket concert.  Will offered out of pure generosity, but I ended up doing Mark and Kelly a favor by taking their car, as they were hiking to Harper’s Ferry and would ultimately need a ride back to their car.  Anyway, we got into Mark and Kelly’s car and I drove him to the grocery store.  I want to say that again: I drove him to the grocery store.  Mark and Kelly had some good music in their car, including the new Flaming Lips and that LCD Sound System record.  

After I dropped C-Ram back at the trail I drove back to Harper’s Ferry.  It was fabulous; I felt like every restaurant and shitty gas station in the world  was suddenly within my reach.  The experience was only marred by the fact that a state trooper followed me for a few miles, which had me convinced I was definitely going to jail.  I imagine he would have had a hard time believing that I borrowed the car from a couple I met at a public campground.  

Mark and Kelly were sitting beneath a tree in a churchyard, enjoying a bottle of water when I found them.  They drove me to the hostel, where an awkward collection of newbie park rangers was having a Memorial Day cookout with croquet and badminton.  I did my laundry and spent much of the event wearing a bath towel (actually I think it was a shower mat; they had run out of clean towels).  After the majority of people left, myself and Nokia had some beers around the fire with the hostel manager, a large, single-expressioned jokester named Lisa who seems to genuinely relate herself to characters on Reno 911; a pretty young mountain biker named Faith (”Delicious”, I replied, prompting a look that made me feel like a pervert); and two high-strung college boys out here to bitch about the wilderness and spend their homophobic nights hilariously packed together in a tiny one-man tent.  I told them that they would probably get to know each other pretty well, and one of the guys said, “whatever, asshole, you probably want to join us.”

 

Day 78: Billy Rouge Pequaine’s Al-Turtle-tive Creature Circus Featuring the Painted Flyers

The train to D.C. was two and a half hours late, so I had plenty of time this morning to self diagnose a case of Plantar Fasciitis and enjoy a wonderful gyro with Nokia.  After the train dumped me right into the middle of our nation’s capital I had but a moment to adjust myself to everyone’s indifference, casual impoliteness, and assertive body language.  It didn’t help that I look like a hobo.  Or even a weird, athletic hobo.  Either case, outside the train station, a black dude in a red jogging suit flicked a half-smoked Swisher Sweet onto the ground next to me and said “hey, don’t smoke that, it’s my last one.”  

I went to the venue to find that the Jacket was tied up in promo stuff and couldn’t let guests in until an hour before the concert.  So I went to a movie, X-men: Last Stand.  It was okay; it left me feeling a little soggy.

The concert was great, and it was good to see some familiar faces, though none of them recognized me.  They have a day-use room rented at the nearby Hampton Inn that they are going to let me sleep in tonight.  Sweet.

 

Day 79: I Love You Jean.

 

I woke at 8:30 am in the hotel room and stole down to the breakfast area, where I ate two bowls of cereal, a sausage-egg bagel, a chocolate chip muffin and a cheese danish.  I also took some fruit and some tea bags back to the room.  Around 10:00 am I headed to the train station.  I’m guessing that this is prime 8th-grade class trip season because there were thousands of adolescents in matching t-shirts crowding the escalators and food court, as well as moving pornographic magazines over to the music section of the bookstore.  I escaped this crowd into a near-deserted movie theatre, and I watched Mission Impossible III while I waited for my train.  Say what you will about this Tom Cruise character, but he’s handy with an elbow punch and won’t stand to see his wife shot in the head.

At 5:00 pm I was back on the train among a group of commuters who had all been riding together long enough to develop a relationship similar to what you would find at a high school lunch table.  I got immense satisfaction from hearing a mid-50’s paralegal dressed like my grade school principal say the word “blow-job” a number of times.

After I got off of the train I walked to the highway and stuck my thumb out.  I hoped to get at least halfway back to where I found Mark and Kelly’s car (about 30 miles north of Harper’s Ferry).  I waited less than 15 minutes before someone stopped.  Usually a hitchhiker can expect a ride from a younger guy with a truck or a SUV, most often a guy with some experience hiking or hitching.  Rarely will a woman stop, and sports cars are an absolute loss.  I, however, looked over to the shoulder in front of me to see a 2-door coupe with an attractive young lady clearing off her passenger seat.  Brittany.  She was working at a white-water rafting company for the summer, and she knew little to nothing about the trail.  She initially offered to take me as far as the first highway crossing, since she was going the other way.  I must have either charmed her or simply talked enough to get her to drive me the whole way.  I offered to buy her dinner, but she had to get home.  She dropped me at the trail crossing, probably 25 miles out of her way.

“This is an adventure for me,” she said.  So I suppose she got something out of it.  Then again, perhaps I should be discouraging pretty young girls from picking up random, hungry-looking men on the side of the road.  I’d feel bad if she decided, based on our experience, to pick up an equally rough looking guy and something serious happened.  I should have responded, “Well, it’s about to get even more interesting,” and just stared.

 

Day 80: Power Lines

 

Tired (so tired) and moving slowly.  It is hot as pure hellfire, with an invisible steamy net of humidity.  I dragged myself awake at 8, and didn’t get walking until 10 or so.  The terrain and the climbs were easy enough, but the air seemed to syphon sweat out of you with every motion.  I am so wet.  I stumbled clumsily for 14 miles and hit a shelter as a storm cloud was just about to burst.  It is incredible how a cloud can linger for a whole day, then suddenly turn two shades darker as a single wide, brisk breeze sweeps across the ground signaling a downpour.

No mice at this shelter, which by this point just seems kind of sad and lonely.

 

Day 81: Pencil Tucky 

 

Today I walked into town to pick up a package; the local gas station/diner/grocery store served me up a terrific sub sandwich of roast beef and sweet pickles.  Delicious.  I had a long conversation with the friendliest postmaster I have ever met (and I’ve met a number) who told me a story of some guy celebrating the summer solstice by hiking into town and entering the post office stark naked, with boots on.  I tried to hitch back to the trail, but no one would give me a ride.  After an hour and a half I started walking.  I stopped eventually at a gorgeous city park with bathrooms and a pool, more or less deserted, and I set my tent up next to the pay phone.  I knew ahead of time that my sister was to get engaged tonight, so I wanted to be able to call and congratulate her.  Unfortunately I had to face the fact that sending my raincoat home - which made perfect sense when it was 80 degrees out - was a bad idea, as the temperature dropped to the low sixties and it started pouring.  The pay phone was in the middle of an open field, so I had to modify a trash bag to cover myself while I listened to Adèle’s description of her new diamond ring.  I spent the rest of the night listening intently to flash flood warnings on my radio.

 

Day 83: Dammies

All I have to say about today is that is that I really wish I still had my raincoat.

 

Day 84: Robert Redford

So I got pretty soaked like a jackass and ended up stopping early at a crappy little shack 4 miles from town, unaware that I would be spending the full next day there as well.  After shivering with a fever all night and running out of the shelter twice to dry-heave in the wet night air, I informed Dead Bear and Orangeman that I would not be joining them for breakfast in Boiling Springs.  I tried to catch up on some of the lost sleep, but the wooden slab was just as uncomfortable as the night before, and I every bit as unwell.  At around 3 in the afternoon I heard some approaching voices: two men, one middle-aged and one in his late sixties, came chattering up to the open fact of the shelter.  I informed them that I wasn’t feeling well, halfway hoping that they would shut the hell up and let me sleep.  No such luck.

 

“You got the shits?” the older guy asked.

 

Okay, who the fuck are you?  Maybe if I was shitting on this guy, or somewhere around this guy, that would maybe be his business.  I’m pretty sure, though, that on the list of friendly, introductory things to say to someone, “you got the shits?” is well below “what’s your name?” and “how are you?” or even “what’s the matter with you?”

Anyway the two men decided to sit at the shelter and talk and ignore my desire for a little quiet time.  They must have stayed for an hour.  I like to play a little game with myself out here when I’m confronted with a pair of male hikers.  I like to try to guess what they are going to talk about.  I create a rough list of choices, off the top of my head.  Will they discuss:

 

A. The state of things (modern politics)

B. Crappy religions

C. Alpacas: friend or foe?

D. The speed of sound

E. Mission Impossible 3: great.

F. That damn woodchuck again

G. Pack weight and gear

 

I went with G: pack weight and gear, and I won.  Always go with gear.

 

Day 85: Friend.

Okay, so I slowly beat 20 miles out of myself today with little or no energy or appetite.  It was tough not because of any real climbs (there was only one) or anything, just because it was so terribly boring.  10 miles of the day was straight along the floor of a flat valley with 3 major highway crossings.  I almost fell asleep while walking.  But I made it and I feel pretty good.  I’m staying in a hotel tomorrow, and doing laundry.  I smell like ripe death.

 

PS: I plan to listen to plenty of Paul McCartney and The Who when I get back (editor’s note: no, I don’t.).

Day 87: Chachie

 

I left the rundown, historic Doyle Hotel at 10:30 this morning and began walking out of town.  I wasn’t sure if I was really leaving, I just wanted to see how it felt to walk.  It felt good.  Three miles went by in a snap.  I stopped for a break in a shelter, where I found an easygoing, retired botanist named ‘Posy Picker’.  When I got up to leave I noticed that the sky had turned a dark grey and there was a distant, persistent rumbling.  I opted to sit back down and wait out the potential storm.  Within minutes the rain came, and as the ground around the picnic table quickly flooded I said to Posy Picker, “I love finding out you were right immediately.”

Well, actually, had I walked through that short shower I may have made it to the next shelter before the real storm came.  And I would likely have dried off in the hot sun between them.  Instead I walked through a rainstorm that lasted well over an hour, and killed the sunlight for the remainder of the day.  I was up on a ridge for the whole afternoon, so with the first flash of lightning I turned off my radio and began counting.  Five seconds till thunder.  About five minutes later there was a second flash, and I began to count again.  I was midway through mentally pronouncing the word “one” when an incredible crash erupted beside me.  I jumped two feet into the air and threw my pack and sticks onto the ground mid-flight.  When I hit the ground, I dove into some nearby brush.  I came upright with catlike  precision, and spent the next few minutes cowering by a rock, trying to find an expletive phrase that suited the situation,  I don’t think that I own one.  I might well have yelled, “marshmallows!”

 

Day 89: Okay, Go.

Because of the recent decline in my average miles-per-day and the ease of this section’s terrain, but most importantly because of my current intense boredom, I have decided to do 30 miles today and tomorrow.  A 60 mile weekend.  Today’s total was more like 31.8, and the last two and a half miles of that was in the dark.  I don’t like walking in the dark.

 

Day 90: Day 90.

Wow, walking forever is not a cure for boredom.  It may eventually cure you of working legs, but it ultimately just leaves you beat-up and pissed off.  Oh, and still bored.  I quit early.  I didn’t want to do the last five miles in the dark.  There is a big awesome breakfast waiting in town tomorrow.

 

Day 91: Tofurkey

 

I walked nine miles this morning on no food and got to breakfast at a roadside diner at around ten am.  They claimed to have the best breakfast in the world, and they weren’t far off.  I had the big big super sampler - I was going for huge or humongous, but I settled for two bigs - which included 2 pancakes, 2 eggs, sausage, ham, bacon, hash browns, toast, and it came on a single, enormous (big big) plate.  After breakfast I hitched into town for resupply.  I called my father from a big big outfitters (think Sam’s Club with a fake mountain in the middle of it) geared toward hunters.  Dad told me that my mail-drop for this town wasn’t coming, so I needed to go to the grocery and get my next 6 days worth of food.

“Yahtzee” and I managed to get a ride from a cop, who ran our IDs and made us put our pocket knives in the trunk.  At the store I bought cereal, taco mix and moonshine.  I made tacos out of chopped up summer sausage, and after dinner I did a crossword on the lawn of the town pavilion, sipping moonshine and 7-up.  “Tiny Dancer” came on the radio.

 

Day 92: Dave  

 

Saw a big, fat, lazy rattler today.  I almost stepped on it as I was listening to Nick Lachey’s “Whats Left of Me” on the radio.  But the snake just casually shrugged its tail as I approached and suddenly stopped, and I watched it slowly slither over the side of the mountain.  I had a great lunch on a cliff, perched over a vista better than anything I’ve seen in well over a month.  I ate an everything bagel with cream cheese, some honey wheat pretzels, beef jerky and an almond Snickers.  I said goodbye to the moment by chasing swigs of moonshine with sour lifesavers.  Then I took off.  L-A-T-E-R today I heard that awesome Len song, and I regretted not being cool or independent enough to like it when it first came out. 

 

Day 94: Running in Circles in my Mind

I broke a shoelace today.  That means I’ve got maybe ten miles left on the other one.  I need new shoes.  I also need to never do 30 miles in a day again.  This morning I climbed up a 1000-foot rock-pile - described by Posy Picker as “a lunar suface” since much of the vegetation has been killed by the adjacent zinc factory (zinc comes from factories?) - and got very lost just before the top.  I climbed to the top regardless and spent a half an hour cutting through and leaping over brush on top of the ridge attempting to find trail markings.  On one patch of gravel I stumbled and one of my trekking poles snapped, causing me to go down like one of those elephants in Return of the King.  I landed on my side and face and slid a solid two feet under the momentum of my body and pack.  I was not seriously damaged, and I eventually found the trail.

 

Day 95: Belly Lyme

 

I hiked six miles into town for an incredible breakfast (spinach, bacon, and cream cheese omelet and french toast with homemade sausage) and met up with the Dooch and Toombsday at a church hostel.  They pulled up in a ridiculous, lipstick red, compact chevy rental car.  We went to Wal-Mart and  Arby’s, and then tried for several hours to come up with a suitable alternative to walking 30 miles out of town and paying a local con-artist/canoe salesman $75 to drive out an pick us up.  Eventually Gene (”Just Gene”; I like his style) offered to drive us up 30 miles and bring the car back to the hostel, so we could simply hike back into town.

The 30-mile drive ended up taking over an hour and a half because of weekend traffic, so we didn’t end up hiking until after six pm.   Luckily it was only 3.4 miles to the nearest shelter.  We still ended up using every last ounce of daylight, and by the time we had dinner cooking at the shelter (a gal-dag mosquito riot, by the way) it was dark.  We sat around and drank whiskey and fought the bugs and listened to the loud sounds of approaching bears, though unfortunately we did not see any.  Highlights of the conversation include Nathan telling me about a package I didn’t pick up at my last stop that contained a wine bottle with a mutilated hot dog in it, and a discussion of the character and psychology of the rare, thought to be mythological beast, the Bearctopus. 

Oh yeah and I got some new shoes, my second pair.  My old boots, besides being thick and heavy, were all but destroyed by the last 1200 miles, and I replaced them with some light but waterproof shoes.  The guy that sold them to me also convinced me to pick up some silver-lined socks, claiming that the silver restricts bacterial growth, dries quicker, and restricts odor.  I just smelled them, and they already smell like the socks I’ve been wearing for the last month.  The silver lining does an excellent job, however, of irritating my ankles.  

 

Day 96: The Long Way Home

Today we walked 14 miles south to a retreat center that sells soda and candy bars.  We are staying in a cool, air conditioned lodge with army issue metal bunks, a kitchen, and hot showers.  We’ve spent much of the evening bickering about the dated, irrelevant pop songs playing on a local radio station.  The lodge has one other occupant: a South Jersey native named Brad who quickly established himself as needy (”You guys sure you don’t want to go into town?”), creepy (”I like girls in the woods”), and strangely uninformed (”What is Ibuprofen?”).

 

Day 97: She Will Be Loved

 

We stopped for lunch by a large glacial pond (I’d call it a lake), and I spent the rest of the day walking on aching feet.  The last several miles into town followed a stream with plenty of swimming holes, but we were urged on by the promise of cold beer and restaurant food.  We still didn’t get into town until six pm, after cutting through countless Puerto Rican cookouts at the town park and then walking for almost a full mile on an interstate bridge.  I ate all but two slices of a 16″ pizza and six beers within two hours of getting into town and taking a shower.  I feel bad because we bought celebratory pies and cigars to cap of the trip, but at 10 sharp I had to go to bed, and I didn’t want to pass out on the churchyard gazebo we were drinking on.

 

Day 98: No Big

Back on the road, traveling solo, which initially is always a bit of a buzzkill.  Fortunately I got rained on severely, and I remembered after Brian and Nathan left that I was supposed to take my rain gear out of their car.  After the first downpour I came to a the top of steep rock face which had a “shelter” symbol and an arrow pointing straight down.  It was not my planned destination, and I couldn’t justify scaling a cliff for a short break, so I headed on.  Two-tenths of a mile later I had second thoughts accompanied by the rumbling of what could have been another storm.  I turned around.  Once I got to the bottom of the cliff, I changed my mind again, thinking my priority should be to do more miles.  I stumbled halfway up the cliff, eventually losing my footing and falling on my face in slick mud.  I stopped to evaluate my current situation, overall mood, and recent luck.  Screw it.

I think the greatest moments of the whole trip have come just after a complete wus-out.  In this case, I ended up sitting here with a nice couple named Deb and Dave while missing out on a fierce thunderstorm.  I ate the last two slices of my pizza and my strawberry rhubarb pie and watched the world get wet.  We set our tents up inside the shelter to keep the bugs off.

 

Day 99: Simply Unresistently

So I’ve reached an important geological marker: the southernmost point from which the glaciers receded at the end of the last ice age.  As a result the hills are steeper, the rocks bolder, and there is water everywhere.  I’m in a swamp, basically.  Even after you climb up 1000 feet, you step directly into a swamp.  And you pretty much have to run through the swamp, since these mosquitos mean business.  Seriously, it doesn’t matter what time of day it is, whether there is a breeze, what elevation you are at, these mosquitos come at you hard.  I honestly do not know why anyone would settle in this part of the world.  It’s very pretty if you keep moving.  It smells awesome, like the refrigerator in a florists, and much of the time I’m walking on boardwalks and puncheon logs.  In the distance at any given point I can see the light reflecting off of the dozens of glacial ponds nestled in between the steep hills.  If only I could stop for a moment, but I would be attacked by little, whining, toxic vampires.  Little shits.

 

Day 100: Dunh Duh Duh Dunh

Last night I turned my stove on to find that I was completely out of gas.  Fortunately some Canadian section hikers were lugging around roast beef and pancake mix, so I got plenty to eat.  They considered throwing the leftover meat juice into the privy, which is a bad idea for so many reasons, so I lent them my poop trowel to dig a hole and dispose of the grease.  

“This is handy,” one of the sisters said.  “Do you use this to dispose of food?” 

“Uh, no.  It’s mainly for waste.”  I felt a little weird describing the tool, since she was holding it.  Oddly enough, when she came back and set everything back down on the table, she casually tossed my trowel into her own pot.  Then I had to store my poop shovel in the bear box with the food.

So I came into town this morning to purchase gas for my stove.  I stopped into the local church hostel to find “Mowgli” and “Covergirl” watching The Thomas Crown Affair remake (specifically one of the scenes with Rene Russo’s bare breasts) on the church’s television set.  I decided to hang around for a bit.

Later, after I had decided to stay the night, we were joined by “Free” and “Travelin’ Mack” (taken from Fraggle Rock).  The two couples had various needs in town, but I had my butane and little else to do besides watch movies.  I watched Dazed and Confused, A Civil Action, and Breakdown.  In between these I managed to socialize a little bit, discovering that both couples lead actively transient lifestyles.  Free and Mack had no reply other than a curious look when I asked where they were from, and they met at a commune specializing in holistic medicines.  Mack has lived on the beach in Hawaii.  Mowgli and Covergirl had recently found work as ‘cultural ambassadors’ from the U.S. to help bridge Hindi and Muslim communities in India.  Before that Mowgli spent some time in Alaska learning how to carve totem poles.  After the trail, Covergirl and Mowgli are planning to live on the beach in Hawaii.

As for me, I have an apartment, a car, I live in my hometown, I eat dinner with my parents once a week.  It’s great.  I have no interest in living in a commune, or on a beach.  But I do like the fact that work and travel can be the same thing, and that you don’t have to be on vacation to see the world.  Oh, and Breakdown is still a really great movie.

 

Day 101: The Masterers

Today I was enjoying a double scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream on a sugar cone at a rural creamery when the site was besieged by a nomadic tribe of part-time cannibals.  In the winter these folks work for a non-profit dairy-product awareness campaign in central Illinois, but come summer they take advantage of rural complacency by consuming entire populations of visitors and tour groups at regional attractions.  They explained all this to a rather defeatist couple that drew the first two numbers and were promptly grilled and eaten.  As the tribe picked the bones of victims 1 and 2 (I was number 3), I attempted to sneak off.  One of the warriors had his crossbow loaded, and he fired a kill-shot directly at my throat.  The arrow lodged in my thick, marvelous and life-saving beard, and as the frustrated champion attempted to untangle his dart, I pleaded my case.

“I could do you guys a favor, or something. . .”  This seemed pathetic and I regretted it immediately.  Nevertheless they all glanced at one another, as if I just uttered a password.  An elder spoke:

“We are obligated to allow a task in exchange for your life, and we do have a task needs done.  We lost one of our warriors in a nearby rattlesnake pit this morning, and there is no way that we could think of to retrieve him.  He is in a deep, dark pit, covered in thousands of rattlesnakes.  That must be very annoying.”

“I imagine so.”

“Silence!  His name is P’tockseecock, which in our secret language means both ‘Monkey Fountain’ and ‘Funky Mountain’”.

“Wow, I wouldn’t think you’d need a word for either of those things.”

“Be quiet!  Now, as in all societies we have a number of irrational and inconvenient rules that make this particular challenge more difficult.  The first is that you must not use rope.  It is an insult to him as a warrior.”

“Can I use a nylon chord with a carabiner tied to it?  I have one handy.”  I received only an impatient stare.

“The next rule is that, in dire situations, our warriors may only use classic rock lyrics to communicate.”

“Man, that is senseless.”

“Thank you.”

They led me up the side of a steep rock and showed me a deep, dark chasm surrounded by three large chimney-like rock pillars.  Emitting from the hole was the sound of thousands of slithering, rattling serpents, with the occasional “Ouch, dammit.”  The elders left me to attempt to save P’tockseecock.  If I could not, they urged me to try to end his life mercifully.  

“Hello,” I shouted; it echoed twice.  “Is there anybody in there?”

The snakes seemed angered by my call and began to bite P’tock more frequently.  In between irritated yelps, he called back:

“Untak leben lowpen loben!”  I took his cue:

“Alright!  I got somethin’ to say!”

“It’s better to burn out!” 

Understanding his message, I thrust my body into one of the rock pillars with the force of an E power chord and screamed:

“Than fade away!”

I intended to send the rock tumbling into the chasm, thus ending the misery of P’tockseecock, but instead the base of the rock gripped a root and it toppled over, creating a perfect ramp for the warrior to limp out of.  It was awesome.  Then he quickly died of snake bites.

I carried his body down to the creamery and bought back my own life and the lives of the other patrons, all of whom then chipped in to get me another cone.

 

Day 103: Double Ought Zebra

I had to stop early yesterday because the post office with my package is only open from 10:30-11:30 in the morning.  My only option was to find my way into Tuxedo, NY and get a cheap hotel room.  It rained the whole walk into town, two miles along a busy highway with no sidewalk.  Hitchhiking is illegal in this area, so I simply tried to look as pathetic as possible in the hope that someone would pick me up.  When the rain let up, I affected a limp.  No one stopped.  I started saying “thank you” to all the cars that passed and sprayed water all over me.  It didn’t work.

More of the same this morning, as I walked back to the post office.  I got back on the trail at about noon.  Not much else happened besides rain.  

 

Day 104: Spoonman

It’s been raining for 2 days.  I’m soaked and all of my stuff is soaked.  I hung my guidebook up on a clothesline because the pages are turning to mush.

I walked through a zoo today and saw many of the animals I anticipated seeing in the woods.  It was kind of depressing.  Bobcats and coyotes look enough like pets that it seems odd to view them through a cage, and an otter by birth deserves more than a 5′ by 5′ block.

Tonight I’m sleeping in the middle of a soccer field.

 

Day 105: Come On In

 

I’m wet and bleeding.  Everything I own is wet.  Parts of me that are not bleeding are either chafed or covered in mosquito bites.  The forecast is more rain.

I’m on a section of trail that is poorly designed, unnecessarily difficult, oppressively unexciting and tragically unmanaged.  Any part of the route that is not simply a slick, bald rock is overgrown with thorn bushes (”Bearberries,” says Posy Picker, “a glacial transplant.”), tall grass, and low-hanging trees.  The trail maintainers have had time, however, to hang up signs warning you to avoid bushes, trees, and tall grass because of the risk of Lyme Disease.

On top of that, the trail stays a consistent two miles from any accommodations, and it is impossible to obtain a ride anywhere.  I wouldn’t mind so much if the lining in my socks had not detereorated from the moisture to the point that the inside of my wet shoes scratch the tops of my wet toes and grinds them into a bloody frickin’ mess.  Plus my metabolism has gone haywire, and I’ve been crashing at about 11:00 every morning.  Anywhere else on the trail I’ve had a choice, but here I have to keep walking.  There aren’t even camping options less that 15 miles apart.

 

Day 106: I’m Going On Vacation

 

I just called a taxi to take me into town, where I will catch a train to the city.  When I get back, I will torture these people with my optimism and good nature.

 

Day 1 - 0 - something (July 4th)

Made it back to the trail despite the wonderful time I had in the city among friends, good food, art, movies galore, and the single greatest place in the universe: Coney Island.  Leaving was not something that I wanted to do.  

Nevertheless I returned today to exactly where I left off, and found the trail in much the same shape as when I left it: wet, poorly maintained, too close to roads and too far from towns, and absolutely swarming with mosquitos (mosquitos, by the way, are the only thing that has brought me to the verge of quitting.  I don’t even mind the bites; after a hundred or so they don’t even itch that bad.  It’s their manner that I don’t like.  If you have the nerve to slow down or stop for a moment (among my favorite things to do) they crowd you, each with a high-pitched whine, land on your body and stick their goddamn tweeter inside of you.  Then they take something of yours and replace it with toxic saliva.  I hate them).

Despite all this being the same, I find myself in a completely different world in terms of luck and the people around me.  I had barely stepped off the train last night when some guy offered me a ride to the park, and I was able to get back to the spot that I had left without calling a taxi.

The 19 miles I did today went by pretty fast, even with a side trip to a mini-mart where I waited out a storm reading about online identity theft and eating ice cream.  Two miles before my destination I came across some chairs and tables and a cooler filled with bagels, juice, and a load of other things.  Tomorrow is a whole new state.

 

July 5: Connecticut

Met a nice guy named Dharma, who showed up this morning in a red pickup and a Scottish kilt and offered me a soda.  I ran into him again around 5:00 this evening; he had a cooler full of beer and grape soda and was offering rides into town.  It was my second stop in town today, and I still left feeling like I needed more stuff.  Looking at my options for campgrounds and hostels it appears as though I will have very few chances for showers and mattresses from here on out.  Loads of towns, but nowhere to stay.  Also, keeping stocked on fuel may be difficult, but there are restaurants and gas stations every few miles for a while.  So no options for a zero mile day, but tons of things to distract me from getting in real miles.

The shelter I stayed at last night was called “The Gates of Paradise”.  I wasn’t sure what that meant until I found myself in a new state with a wide, soft, exquisitely maintained trail, enormous pine trees everywhere, several extended riverside pathways, frequent switchbacks; little or no sign of the rugged, macho, across-every-hill-for-no-reason mentality that guides the New York trail.  Heaven.  Got to camp a half hour after sundown.  Orangeman showed up again today.

 

July 7: Sharing

 

Two trips to town again today, once to pick up a mail drop, another time to get peanut butter, cheese and bug repellent.  Still managed a leisurely 17.5 miles, with some of the most beautiful vistas and wooded scenery since the first couple months of the trail.  Saw some dramatic waterfalls (supposedly much greater before the nearby hydroelectric plant), walked for a piece along a the Housatonic River, and found myself at the top of a massive, sloping field, which extends downward for perhaps a mile until the stand of trees at the base of it seem miniscule in the shadow of the mountains.  Hard to explain, sorry.

 

July 8: Even Better.

 

Long climbs, wide summits with 360 degree views.  Three of them today, big stuff, fun with actual views.  Between two of these I walked down into a deep ravine with a clear brook and several fantastic swimming holes, surrounded by hemlocks and striking rock formations. 

I apologize for all these boring entries and all the gushing adjectives.  This must be what love is like.

 

July 9: Fame is

Midway through this morning I realized I had not yet seen the worst of the mosquitos, which suddenly came at me with the intensity of a kamikaze shark frenzy.  This mob was unfazed by deet, so I just ran through the swamp.  I eventually came to a busy highway and found a nursery (flowers, not babies) that sold fruit and ice cream.  I came down from my adrenaline rush with a carton of strawberries, a Stewart’s Grape Soda, and a huge Oreo ice cream cookie.

While I relaxed and consumed on a small gazebo, I read about 25 pages of Robert Wilder’s The Wine of Youth, which, by the way, is a cyclone novel of a brash adventurer whose appetite for conquest was as big as all Texas!

I hitched a ride into town to purchase fuel and perhaps catch some of the World Cup Final.  After resupply I stepped into a vaguely British-style pub and watched the entire game over a fantastic Monte Cristo sandwich, some key lime pie and several draft beers.  After France lost in PKs I hitched back to the trail and walked the longest five miles I’ve ever experienced.

 

July 11: Up the Goose

 

Last night I slept on a mattress in a cabin by a large, crystal clear pond.  Before dinner I soaked in the water, and I laughed out loud at the joy of being alone and submerged in the cool, peaceful water.  I realize now that this trip has involved far too much physical abuse and too little soaking.

Little bit of rain at the lake this morning, but it cleared up by midday and I managed the 20 miles into town before 6:00 pm.  Myself and a middle-aged English teacher from North Carolina named Daedalus arrived at the same time at the house of a retired do-gooder named Tom, who offered us showers and space on his floor to sleep.  Skunk, a woman my age from Minnesota, an actor, was already at the house and the four of us went for a terrific dinner at a Tavern down the street.  I had a salad and a burger and a raspberry daiquiri.  Over dinner we paused in between Daedalus’ stories of traveling in Africa, the Himalayas, and the Middle East, to joke about how all of his stories start with things like “I was biking across Ghana,” and, “On my descent from Everest,” or, “While riding a shark across the Atlantic Ocean,” and so on.  He’s a real bore, obviously.  But at least he’s cute and funny and ridiculously well-groomed.  Meanwhile Skunk and I share a very similar sense of humor and the tendency to order the exact same food everywhere we eat.  I’m so in love, but then she’s the cutest thing to walk into my life in the last 1500 miles (editor’s note: Skunk is married).

After dinner we went back to Tom’s for ice cream (with peaches and cream in a metal bowl, far better than it had to be) and watched The Big Lebowski.

 

July 12: Castle Greyskull

Last night I had a dream in which I was trying to prove the existence of a river monster in upper Manhattan, but my broken glasses ruined every attempt.  I seem to have vivid dreams now only when I sleep comfortably and indoors.  The other night in the cabin my dream involved proving I was psychic by standing with my back to a basketball goal and predicting the outcome of someone’s shots.

Guess what, I had an incredible breakfast in town (Skunk and I ordered the same thing, mmm).  I started walking at around 10:45.  The first nine miles were pretty easy, with a light, cooling drizzle, and by 1:00 I was over the hill and at an ice cream shop.  As I ate lunch the rain gathered in intensity, so I waited for two hours for a good window to walk in.  Eventually I made my way to a Shell Station where I called Tony.  He sounded a little depressed, but it was good to talk to him, and I left the station completely ready to catch a ride to the airport and go home.

Instead, I climbed the tallest and steepest mountain of the last 800 miles in the rain.  It was cold as balls and I slipped on a root and landed with both knees against a jagged rock.  I yelled some nasty things.  When I finish this trip I plan to never leave the house at all on even slightly rainy days.  I mean it.

 

July 14: William and Clark

Two women walking up

to the entrance

of an art museum

in New England

share a story they both know

“about the penguins”

“uh huh,” nodding

“in the Central Park Zoo.”

Two males, companions

tried to raise a baby

“uh, huh,” “it was a rock”

“and the zookeeper,”

holding open the door

“gave them an egg.”

“Wonderful.”

July 15: I’m Batman

 

Today marks my biggest ever wus-out.  I intended to walk 21 miles and skip going into town for the first time in over a week.  11 miles later I’m in a hotel watching “The Girls Next Door” on E!.

July 16: Thousands of Girl Scouts and Flies

Imagine that you are at the nastiest McDonald’s in the world, on the hottest day of summer.  They have the doors and windows open, and on one of the tables someone recently spilled a coke and left some ketchup residue.  The coke has mostly dried, and there are maybe 20-30 flies hopping around randomly on the table.  I have now been sitting at that table for almost 2 days, and it looks like I will continue to sit there for at least another week.

When the gnats kicked in 1100 miles ago, I was surprised by the volume and ferocity.  Same with the mosquitos.  But I soldiered on, confident that gnats would only be a problem in some areas, and then mosquitos for a while, and so on.  

Enter the flies.  There is no reason on Earth that there should ever be this many flies around.  They haven’t replaced the gnats or mosquitos either, just moved in next door, so while you’re batting at the flies around your head the gnats bite your ankles while the mosquitos take on your shoulders.  One brand of fly (I think they’re called deer flies) will catch wind of you, attack your head, then fly an obscure, intermittent pattern of loops and dives around your eyes and ears for as long as you allow them to keep landing on your head.  They will literally follow you for 20 miles if you do not stop and kill them.

The bitterest bit of this situation is that I am finally back in the woods, the real woods, miles and miles from any truck stop or highway.  I’ve been looking forward to this for 1200 miles.  Alas, the forest I left and have since missed for its serenity is now an obnoxious disco of shit-eating pests.

It is as if I met a beautiful lady over a summer holiday and grew to love her deeply for the peace and comfort she offered me.  She leaves to take a job for the school year, so I only get to see her in short bits and talk to her on the phone.  But I miss her greatly and think about often about the wonderful times we will have upon her return.  Unfortunately, when she gets back, she’s covered in goddamn flies.  She can’t talk anymore, she just whispers “buzz” in my ear all day, until all I can do is constantly pray that she will die.

So I quit.  I’m done.  I’m going home.  Why the hell should I persist if I’ve been robbed of the best part of this journey?  Today I had lunch time and a delicious sunset ruined by a swarm of bugs the size of Ohio.  I walk all day through ankle-deep mud, and when I try to take a break, I spend the whole thing trying to kill flies.  It’s stressful.  Why continue?

 

PS: All of my vivd dreams lately have involved shit - I’m either covered in it or cleaning it up.  I wish I had one of those dream guides to interpret the subtle message behind being subconsciously covered in shit.  Could I be unhappy?

 

July 17: Home at Last

Okay, so I didn’t quit.  Not because I had the slightest change of heart.  I’m still stuck in a hell built on disappointment and minor torture.  I couldn’t quit because I’m a stubborn jerk that ruins every good whim I have by overthinking.

Instead, I climbed a mountain and swam in a lake.  Both were beautiful enterprises that distracted briefly from my torment.  I could have soaked in that lake for hours, but at the end I wouldn’t be any closer to being away from the mud and bugs. 

In the ten minutes before I got to the shelter tonight I rolled both ankles, fell on my ass and slid down a slippery rock face.

 

July 18: Good Question

I left the trail briefly for an alternate route (called a ‘blue-blaze’) along a gravel road leading to a lake with campsites.  Leaving the trail felt good; I was motivated by the wide road and reasonable grade, the complete lack of mud.  I swam in the lake before dinner.  Chilly.

 

July 19: Here We Go.

The terrain got fairly rocky today, but no less muddy, and the combination of wet rocks, mud pits, slick roots, and my desperate need to get to the post office by 5:00 meant that I stumbled and cursed my way up over hills, never truly finding a good place to put my feet.  But you build momentum regardless and simply exchange walking for almost falling all the time.  Until you actually fall, which I did tremendously today.  My foot slipped sideways on a rock and I fell face-forward into the mud.  I stopped myself partially by dropping a pole and planting my hand into elbow deep mud; the other arm caught the rock that I slipped off of and dragged across it, leaving a really nice system of scratches and bruises on my left arm.  “Bzz, bzz,” in stereo, went the deer flies around my head as I got back on my feet and brushed off some of the mud.

I feel I may no longer be fit for self-governance.  Had I the power, I would flatten these mountains and flood the world with ice cold soda.  I need a break.  I need to be done.

“Man, think about when you’re 35, man, and you’re gonna regret quitting with only 500 miles left to go.”

People trying to talk me out of quitting makes me want to quit even more, because it makes me realize that this isn’t my trip.  I didn’t create it; I don’t get to decide when I’m done.  There is an official ending point, and getting there puts me into a special club that apparently just means I don’t have to listen when other people talk about their wilderness experiences, because I’ll have a story for that ready to go.  This is quite a rant, Delicious. 

So the point: I’ve made a compromise.  I have totally finished.  This is the end of my journey.  From here on out, I’m headed home.  The best way to get home, however, is to go to Maine.  From here on is simply the Epilogue.

 

August 12: Epilogue Part I

I quit writing so long ago I can’t recall where I left off.  It was somewhere around the time that I rolled from the warm, rushing waters of Clarendon Gorge to an Irish Pub on a hill with a group of merry slackers.  I kept the mileage under 10 for two hot, ice-cream and swimming filled days, then rushed off to Lowell, Mass. in Bill Hickey’s brand new car.  Bill and I spent an evening drinking Light Coors and watching movies in his apartment, which is decorated with large paper-mache letters spelling out the lyrics to his roommate’s forthcoming solo album.  We watched Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, Bring It On, and reprised our old college favorite, Don’t Tell Her It’s Me, starring Steve Guttenburg and Shelley Long.  It’s a marvelously stupid film, full of over-the-top gags, ambitiously quirky dialogue, and unnecessarily farcical situations, rendered almost surreal by a cast ill-suited for both slapstick and satire.  Bill and I agreed to acquire copies of the film and script so that we can include Stu in semi-annual live performances of scenes from the film.  I get to be Shelley Long.

Anyway, I tried to get back on the trail two days later and found myself crippled and in tears from the worst pain I have ever felt.  My calves cramped up until the slightest vibration caused searing pain, and no matter how long I sat and waited for the pain to subside it would return as soon as I started walking again.  A doctor informed me that I’d probably just gotten dehydrated in the recent heat wave.  I need electrolytes.

For a number of days I attempted to hydrate myself and get back on the trail, but the same damn thing kept happening.  It was awful.  The doctor recommended a physical therapist, so I spent the next four days in Rutland, Vermont, doing exercises and hanging out with a band of semi-Amish new-age Christian hippies that have built their communal lives around Grateful Dead-style caravanning, herbal maté manufacturing, and dancing to a sort of klezmer/bluegrass music.  The next time I want unnecessarily isolate myself from my family and friends, I think I’ll join the Twelve Tribes.

After a full week of not walking, I decided to just go home.  My folks were in upstate New York, so they swung by and picked me up on their way home.  I spent two weeks at home watching television on the couch and staying out until 6:30 am.  Time wasted and loved.

I flew back yesterday, arriving at the airport two hours after my flight because I misread my itinerary.  They still managed to get me to my last transfer in time, though when that plane took off (Boston to Rutland) I was calmly seated in the terminal, wondering where it was going.  The woman at the counter must have thought I was on the next flight, though I showed her my ticket, and she told me to sit down and wait for the announcement.  Thus I watched them start up and launch my plane.

I had to get a room for the night in Boston, but before I could get out of the airport I was stopped by two plainclothes police officers.  They wanted to know why they had seen me “hangin’ around” the B Terminal earlier, and now here I was outside the C Terminal.  I had no bags (my pack was on its way to Rutland) and I suppose in my cargo pants, thick beard, and black shirt I look a little like a guerrilla.  I still would not have described my behavior as “hangin’ around” the terminals, more like transferring to a different flight.  I explained my situation, and for the next 10 minutes they asked me tons of questions about my life and background, accepting each answer with the same cold suspicion regardless of how trivial or mundane the information:

 

“What’s that?”

“A book I’m reading.”

“What’s it about?”

“Uh, it’s sort of a pulp thing, sort of melodramatic. . .”

“What’s pulp?”

 

This morning I flew into Rutland, resupplied at a Price-Chopper and caught the bus to the trailhead.  Half expecting my legs to cramp up again, I moved pretty slowly, but I got in 10 miles before sundown and felt pretty good.  The weather has turned filthy incredible since I left: mid-70s, dry, with a cool wind from the north.  It feels like fall.  Walking is a breeze; I hadn’t realized how much of my misery and lack of motivation must have been related to how hot it was.  The bugs are not nearly as bad; I haven’t seen a deer fly all day. 

August 13: Oh Holy Night

It took me eight hours to walk ten miles today.  It was a pretty pathetic scene.  I guess restarting is harder than starting initially; my metabolism couldn’t keep up and I had to stop frequently for food.  Even still, I was exhausted all day, and the feeling that I could close my eyes and immediately fall asleep never left me.  The weather is still nice, but I’ve already fallen behind the very loose, very reasonable mileage plan for this week.  My next big town is 22 miles away, at this rate a full two days.  I’m camped just off the trail at a snowmobile/ATV junction.  This 19 year old kid named ‘Eggshells’ picked the spot.  We met up at an farmer’s market a mile back, where he bought some sausages, a frozen cow liver and some pie.  We’re cooking the sausages over the fire.

 

August 14: Authority

Another slow day.  I wrestled with 11 measly miles, and they took me down.  It is remarkably scenic around here though: there are frequent clearings on top of the hills and the woods are comprised of tall maple and birch trees.  Frequently the only sound is the wind, and I’m almost always walking on soft pine needles.  I reached a road at 7:00 pm (four miles to my planned destination) and began asking about places to stay or camp nearby.  Finally a dude named ‘Homeward’ shouted to me from a small house by the river.

“This guy will let you sleep at his place.  He’s real cool.  You should see the fire.”

I had seen the fire.  In fact, I could see the fire from a mile back.  Randy has a burn permit and loves to take care of his neighbors yard waste.  There were also fragments of furniture, a full 32′ ladder, and a mattress melting in the 20′ tall blaze.  You could feel the heat inside Randy’s house.  He had about 60 Bud Lights for the three of us, and Homeward and I caught a ride from his neighbors into town to get dinner at the KFC.  Back at the house I watched the final minutes of Aqua Maria while being fed gummy worms by Randy’s granddaughter, Barb.  Barb is four and she prefers the name Josie.  She called me simply ‘Hiker’ until our relationship developed a little and she chose to name me Nick.

Randy stayed up with us until 1:00 am telling army stories.  He was stationed in Panama and Korea, doing ‘tactical communications’.  Most of his stories involved fights, though he claimed he had only been in two fights in his life.  He must not count kicking an MP in the face, choking a superior officer while threatening to kill him, or throwing a Sergeant Major from another company over a table in a bar.  Other stories dealt with Panamanian strippers (apparently a good bunch) and drinking formaldehyde.

 

August 15: Ol’ Podunk Run

 

Randy’s wife cooked us breakfast this morning, and Homeward and I spent a couple of hours on the back porch hanging out with two of Randy’s daughters (Bobby and Chelsea) and little Josie.  Around my third cup of coffee Randy’s parent’s showed up, so I got to hear about the origin of the large crop circle in the backyard next to the smoldering mound left over from Randy’s fire.  Randy’s father at some point drove a boat trailer over one of the sides of their outdoor pool.  Now all that is left is a ring of dirt with an inflated raft sitting in the middle of it.

Despite my leisurely morning I still made the 11 miles into town before 3:30 pm.  I ran into Superman immediately (Superman was at the Irish pub in Rutland for most of my hiatus there), he had evidently taken 15 days off and hitched back into Hanover, New Hampshire at the precise moment I walked into town.

The two of us found a place to stay just outside of town on several acres of private land surrounded by a nature preserve.  The owner of the land is a carpenter, and also something of a junk collector, so his land looks like some kind of Mad Max encampment surrounded by dense, quiet woods.  It would be a perfect location if not for a tenant named ‘Baltimore Jack’ (as in “Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack” without the comma) ho seems to believe himself a gracious and indulgent host despite the fact that he treats all women as potential hook-ups and all men as potential competition.  He’s somewhere in his late forties, and he seems to have already chosen an absolute answer to every discussion topic, so conversation with him constantly gets manipulated into one of neatly bound efforts to make everyone else appear stupid.  Out of nowhere he questioned why minorities call themselves ‘people of color’ yet reject the word ‘colored’.  Our collective effort to rationalize this was futile, as he hijacked the discussion again and shifted the subject over to his love of Ann Coulter.

 

August 16: Dubs

 

Hung out at the fortress of junk today and went into town a couple of times.  I ate dinner with Eggshells at an Indian Restaurant (Baltimore Jack recommended the ‘Kitten Vindaloo’) and then met up with Superman and a hot little hiker in a short pink skirt with wide-rimmed glasses named ‘Yellow Belly’.  We walked to local ‘frarority’ for an open party, but they were having some kind of bizarre movie reference ritual when we arrived so we quickly ran out. 

We returned to Jack’s, where he was making a midnight breakfast for the three ladies present.  He shot unwelcome glances at myself, Superman, and another male hiker named “Number 2″.  I asked Jack if he had a beer or something.

“Well, let’s see, it’s 11:30, so of course I have plenty of time to go to the store and get you some beer,” he said bitterly as he reached into the refrigerator.  

“Is that sarcasm?  I have no idea what you meant by that.”  He mumbled something about having hikers there for 20 days, then found a beer and gave it to me.

“Yes, you can have a beer, and yes, that was sarcasm.”

“Jack, I’m not trying to put you out.  I simply asked if you had a beer.”

“And the answer is yes.”

Meanwhile, the ladies’ eggs are done.  I decided to stick it out and enjoy the conversation between the girls, who seemed to be having a great time taking advantage of Jack’s pathetic desperation.  That is until a very sweet and unassuming lesbian with a mohawk named ‘She-Bear’ began telling a story about working at an airport in Texas and being treated like shit by then-governor George W. Bush.

“Name your congressman,” Jack interrupted.

“Uh, I don’t know,” she responded.  Jack went into a rant about hiking all over the country and hearing people talk politics when they can’t even name their congressperson.

“And I’m like, fuck you,” he said.  There was a brief pause while we all digested the fact that Jack had just told a very pleasant stranger in his kitchen “fuck you”.  He himself seemed a little stunned by the fact afterward.  At that point I’d had enough and I headed down to our campsite where we sat by the fire and listened to Van Morrison on Superman’s speakers.  I resolved not to talk shit about Jack while on his property.

 

August 17: Coors Noodles

 

Today I hiked out of town with Eggshells and Superman.  We hung out outside of the local co-op food store eating cookies and sushi until 3:30 pm, then slowly walked 6 miles to another store that had grinders and ice cream.  We ended up sleeping outside under the stars on the southern peak of a mountain.  We saw countless shooting stars, and the Milky Way was as clearly defined as I’ve ever seen it.

 

August 18: Feels Like Trail Wednesday

 

The sunrise this morning was a bit of  disappointment, so we all went back to sleep until about 9:00 am.  We didn’t start walking until 10 or so, and even then we stopped a mile in for breakfast at the next shelter.  We are hiking incredibly slowly.  At 5:00 pm today we had done six miles, six miles in seven hours.  We’ll walk for a half an hour and then sit around for an hour.  It’s great.  Mostly we just come up with stupid ideas and try to construct pointless lingo to make the already ridiculous “trail terms” even more silly.  Today we created a new calendar, with years, months, seasons, and a week in which the days are determined by what you do, not by serial order.  It makes no sense.  You can have two Tuesdays in a row, followed by a Friday, though a Tuesday may become a Wednesday depending on how many miles you do.

Superman has his speakers hooked up to an mp3 player, so we attack the big climbs with Led Zepplin albums and then cruise into the valley with a collection of Bob Dylan.  At one point today there were five of us trudging through the woods to “Stairway to Heaven”, and I imagined us all walking with recorders, Robert Plant at the back in a puffy shirt with a tambourine.

 

August 19: Big Business.

Today was our laziest day yet.  I definitely see a pattern with the way these guys hike.  Eggshells just walks until he feels like stopping; I imagine he does about five miles a day on his own.  Superman on the other hand tells himself constantly that he will make up the extra miles tomorrow.  We started off with 43 miles to do in four days, and both days that we have failed to do double digits he has said, “So we’ll do 13 tomorrow,” then we get in eight miles the next day.  Stopping at eight today was a good call, though, as it started to rain right after we got to the shelter.

 

August 21: Pinker and Boots

 

I waited at the hostel for the post office to reopen and the weather to clear.  Weather.com kept pushing back the hour that he clouds would clear, and I was facing my first mountain above treeline.  While I waited I caught a fantastic episode of Walker: Texas Ranger in which Walker starts a boot camp for young, first-time convicts.  The camp was called “Camp Justice”.  At one point, facing resistance from the dozen or so delinquents, Walker beats them all up, and that wins them over.  Except Mad Dog.  Mad Dog wasn’t convinced.

Anyway, I left at 2:00 pm, confident that I would have clear weather for a six mile hike up a 5,000 foot mountain.  I didn’t, but it was still amazing.  Powerful wind and freezing rain assailed me at the summit, and I couldn’t see anything.  I got lost and came a half-mile down the mountain on the wrong trail.  It was awesome though; fierce and dramatic.

 

August 22: Wait Till You Get to the Whites

I came down the other side of Mount Moosilauke this morning; it took me two and a half hours to do the two-mile descent, which was crazy steep.  2,000 feet in .7 of a mile.  The entire trip I was looking for a place to put my feet, trees to brace myself, and notches in rocks to wedge my trekking poles.  I moved so slow that I never broke a sweat, but at the bottom I was mentally and physically exhausted.  I did six more miles and got to the shelter at 5:30.  Nine miles in six hours, and I am beat.

 

August 23: He Heard You

 

Superman’s father, ‘Jorel’ offered myself and Eggshells a free hotel room in town tonight.  So we did nine miles into the notch and caught a shuttle.  We ate at a hideously overpriced “Greek” family restaurant where I had steak and shrimp.  The steak was acceptable, but the shrimp was fried, popcorn-style served with ketchup.  The salad was okay.  Superman, his brother and I went to the movie theatre for a late showing of Snakes on a Plane.  We came back to the hotel to find Eggshells baking in his sleeping bag in our room, watching television in a cloudy haze of the worst, sour, rancid, moist, horrible smell ever contained into such a small room.  Eggshells is a smelly dude.

 

August 24: Lady in the Water

We all (except Jorel) slept in this morning until about 9:30.  Superman needed to go to the outfitters, so I waited for him at the McDonalds, where I had two cheeseburgers and a Mcflurry and read the paper.  We caught the shuttle back to the trail at about 1:00, so we had to rush up the 3,000 feet or so to the ridge while the weather was nice.  We lucked out and the clouds stayed high.  Franconia Ridge was phenomenal, easily the best thing I’ve seen in 1500 miles.  Three miles of jagged rocks on a thin, steep ridge well above the treeline.  At certain points you could see the next mile of trail stretching out ahead of you as clearly as if in a desert, except at 4,500 feet with deep valleys on either side.  The sky was huge, the rocks were huge, but the walk flew by.  Indescribable.

 

August 25: Minge

Eggshells and I did a big four miles to a ‘hut’: basically a big cabin with a full time staff that cooks meals and lectures about leave-no-trace ethics and not throwing pillowcases into the composting toilets.  People pay $80 to sleep in a bunk and get fed dinner and breakfast.  Not handy with the money or a reservation I decided to try the work-for-stay program, which means you sit around while everyone eats and then scarf down cold, half-eaten leftovers.  Then you sleep on the floor.  I’d love to sleep outside, but that’s frowned upon here in the White Mountains.

 

August 26: You Are No Doubt Wondering

 

I did not sleep at all last night.  ‘Old Drum’ kept me up by snoring continually in that way in which  constantly sounds like he has stopped breathing until he lets out an enormous, farty roar that sounds like tigers fighting, followed by a pained, strained exhale after which he again stops breathing for just too long.  Adding insult to injury was the fact that I had agreed to work for the privilege of not sleeping on the floor.  We had to be off of the floor by 5:30 am, but the real guests didn’t finish eating until 9:00, at which point I was allowed a few stale pieces of bacon.

“It’s free,” said ‘Librarian’, who is not a librarian.  Nor is she right.  After that Eggshells and I spent two hours shaking out the hundred or so wool blankets from the bunks, breathing thousand’s of people’s body-dust into our lungs.  I left feeling like I had a cold.

I decided the hut lifestyle is not for me, so at the next one I kept moving.  I walked to the next campsite, and when I got there I found only one platform available, right next to Old Drum.  Two hours later I got to a road just before dark and hitched to a nearby hostel.  It was completely full, but I ran into Superman’s dad and he offered to let me sleep on the floor in their room.

 

August 28: Be Our Guest

 

Another short day, I hiked a few pleasant, sunny miles to a hut called “Lakes of the Clouds”.  I got a good vibe from the crew at this place, so I decided to give work-for-stay one more chance.  Good call, because they let me do my work right away.  I did some dishes and finished off literally 45 strips of bacon that they didn’t want to have to carry out.  When Superman arrived, it turned out that his dad had gone into town, so they gave me his bunk and his spot at breakfast.  I finally won a game of Scrabble.

 

August 29: Pillbox the Otter

 

Breakfast at the hut was scrambled eggs and pumpkin bread with chocolate chips; I got out of there by 8:30 am and headed to the top of the tallest mountain in the Northeast: Mount Washington.  “The worst weather in the world.”  It’s fogged over completely 55% of the time, and it receives snow every month of the year.  I got to the top in a perfect window where I could see mountains for miles in every direction, with low clouds covering the valleys like deep water.

At the very top I was surprised to find myself at what looked like a remote airport, with weather and radio towers and utility vans and a large, concrete terminal.  Inside is a food court, gift shop, post office, museum, and a weather wall with satellite feeds from around the world.  There is also a list of everyone that has died on the mountain in the last 200 years, with cause of death.  Heart failure took a woman this month.  Hypothermia takes a few every couple of years, as do large falls.

 

August 31: Wildcat

 

The forests of the Northeast are rugged and harsh, made up of a thick web of fir trees.  The wind is so strong and the climate so rough that the trees fight an endless battle with the elements; each row slowly dies while protecting the rank behind them.  This cycle goes on and on, so that waves of dead trees (those most recently taking the bulk of the wind) move over time across the face of the mountains.   The living trees have branches only on the side away from the wind, giving them the look of a frozen flag.  The tough arrangements make for a more dignified, hardened forest.  When the atmosphere is not harsh it is peaceful, and the landscape is more unified since few things can grow.

I am hiking in a relatively large group.  Eggshells and Superman and I (we call ourselves ‘Team Justice’) have fallen in with a pair of girls named Pillbox and Jukebox (the ‘Box Twins’) and try as we might, we can’t seem to shake the 10 or more people that show up everywhere we go.  It doesn’t help that we are a extremely lazy group.

Eggshells and Jukebox and I managed to lose Superman and Pillbox yesterday.  I assumed they were dead, but apparently they chose to ride a gondola up the mountain while we suffered the difficult and steep climb.  We caught up to them today, and the Box Twins took the official trail route into town while Team Justice found an amazing blue blaze that skipped down off of the ridge and followed Stony Brook down into the valley.  We got a ride from a former thru-hiker who picked us up despite his distaste for blue-blazers.  He is a member of the local trail conservancy, and was in favor of moving the trail several years ago so that it now passes three miles outside of town instead of coming into town on the path we took.  I figure he owes us a ride regardless.  The tendency to move the trail away from towns in recent years comes from an interest isolating and preserving every section, regardless if the trail is then shifted from a beautiful, scenic brookside path to a swamp.  It also means that hikers, who used to be able to walk straight into Pawling, NY, or Gorham, NH, are now forced to either hitchhike or add six miles to their journey at every road crossing.

We got a hotel in town and I bought some champagne, which I enjoyed while soaking myself in the hot tub.  The Whites are done.  One state to go.

 

September 3: Oh Soggy World

 

Short day to a shelter; we stopped early because of persistent rain.  More and more people kept coming in as the day wore on, and in the end we must have packed 20 people into that little wooden box.  I mainly read some short stories from Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules.  I need to do some miles.

 

September 6: Cleanliness 1-10

Having lost Superman and Eggshells somewhere yesterday, I decided to catch a ride into town with the Box Twins.  We left the trail 20 miles outside of town, the plan being to get dropped off back there this morning without packs so that we can just walk into town.  Tomorrow we will get dropped off (again without packs) 13 miles north of town and walk south.  Three nights sleeping on mattresses, plenty of miles during the day.  

Pillbox and Jukebox were given their names at different times, before they had met, and it is by coincidence that they hike together now.  Jukebox is my age, somewhat shy and withdrawn; Pillbox is 22, loud and bitter with a Boston accent.  She is also easy piss off, so picking on her is extremely rewarding.

 

September 7: What’s the Word?  Burn?

 

Beautiful 13 miles today, easy without packs.  Maine in September is a dream.  It dips just below freezing every night, there are no bugs, the trees are already turning red and orange.  Lakes and rocks and cliffs all over the place.

 

September 8: Monty Moose Club

 

I saw half of a moose today.  The back half.  But it was huge. 

We did eight miles today to a campsite with canoes and a large pond.  As I paddled my way around looking for moose, Pillbox cut Jukebox’s hair in the back of the boat with sewing scissors.  It was dark by the time we got back to camp, and while the full moon rose above the trees and reflected into the still pond, I cooked beef flavored noodles and listened to a bizarre local NPR program in which an old guy plays early jazz music and talks about politics.  In one bit he spoke about the necessity of the death penalty; later he implied that public schools are basically a pyramid scheme.  The music was great.

 

September 9: Frappe

 

Today we made it a total of five miles into Rangeley.  When you hike with people, you always meet the lowest possible goal.  Nevertheless I had a really great bagel sandwich and I stumbled around the IGA store for two hours, too tired to focus on buying food.  We found Superman and Eggshells, the latter having hiked 17 miles to catch up to us despite saying farewell two nights ago because he didn’t want to hike that fast.

I took a nap at the hostel, got some Thai food.  Now I’m kind of drunk.  Pillbox thought that Evan Williams was a knock-off of Jack Daniels.

 

September 10: Red Squirrels

We finally made it to the trail at 10:00 this morning, after arguing for way too long about whether we should take the actual trail or walk up a ski slope that was four miles shorter.  The Boxes and I took the official rout, which had an infinite series of false summits, each more impressive and frustrating than the last.  When I reached the second-to-last top, I encountered Superman, Eggshells, and Superman’s buddy ‘Red-B’, who is hiking with a little black dachshund named ‘L.P.’  They were all waiting to try and convince us to stop there and stay at a warming hut nearby with electricity, a kitchen, and a nearby road leading to town.  Superman’s main point was that we could stay there and do 16 miles tomorrow, and only be ten miles from town on the third day.  My argument was that we weren’t ten miles behind schedule, more like a month and ten miles behind, and I’m never gong to finish this trip if I don’t start doing miles instead of just planning them.  So ended Team Justice.

I marched on alone, thinking of everyone else sitting indoors, eating town food and drinking liquor.  I stopped that evening for a snack, and Jukebox appeared behind me.  She had left the rest and decided to put in some miles.  We are camping on an old railroad bed in the bottom of a narrow ravine.  This is the quietest night I’ve had in a month.  Wonderful.

 

September 11: Don’t Worry Baby

 

Eggshells caught up tonight just before dark at a road crossing leading to Stratton.  I was not expecting him.  He did 26 miles to get to where we were (after saying goodbye for a second time), so now I get to share a bed with him at the hostel.  We ate at a large inn and pub (I had crispy duck and a 700-ounce bottle of Sam Adams).  Eggshells beat my ass at a game of checkers; I double-jumped him, called him a fool, then he triple-jumped me for a king.  He’s pretty good, and I am a sucker.  

 

September 14: Big and Low

 

The Kennebec River is too wide and treacherous to ford safely, so the trail conservancy has a guy with a boat that ferries people across for several hours a day.  I went into Caratunk to pick up a mail drop, and I sent home all of my excess weight (including my radio, which I rarely use anymore) in preparation for the big push to the end.  This evening I informed Jukebox and Eggshells of my plan to do the 100-mile wilderness alone. I need some time to myself before I finish.

 

September 16: I Know We’re Cool

Free, free, free.  I took a nine-mile blue-blaze along a level street to celebrate my liberation, but the cut-over to the trail was on private property, so I ended up doing maybe three extra miles to meet back up to the trail.  I found a white blaze on a tree next to the largest waterfall in Maine, which is neatly cut out of a tetris-y stack of smooth cubes.

 

September 18: Danger Mouse

 

So my first day in this “100-mile wilderness” I walked for almost seven miles on a residential street that runs parallel to the trail.  Today the only other hikers I saw were weekend day-hikers from some school.  I stopped at a scenic vista to admire a speedboat shooting across the lake at the foot of the mountain.  I am nearly thirty miles into the wilderness and I can’t really tell the difference.  In 20 miles there is a lakefront Bed and Breakfast that offers a resupply, and Bill Bryson claims that you can die out here from an infected toenail.  

I ran out of water today on a dry, 13-mile ridge with five peaks.  It made for a long day.  Now I’m camped out with about 20 other people at the first available site.  I have to do 66 miles in the next three days.

 

September 19-25: Epilogue Part II

I made it to the entrance of Baxter State Park on schedule; my mother had ordered me a cab and informed the guy to give me $30 bucks cash when he picked me up.  The remainder of the wilderness was great, though I had to take note of some of the better spots so that I can come back and see them when I’m not trying to do 30 miles in a day.  The trail stays pretty low, with lots of rivers and lakes; a few places it actually followed beaches.  I saw a giant bull moose, which was scared of me for some reason and took off running into the woods.

The final climb up Mt. Katadhin with my father was easily the best day of my life, not just because of the significant achievement it represented, but because the walk and the weather and our timing (We got to the top after the crowds; we had the summit to ourselves) were nothing short of spectacular.  There isn’t another mountain on the trail that even compares to Katahdin.  You pretty much have to see it.  I smoked a cigar at the top and finished off the day by eating an entire lobster.

As I’m typing all this up eight months later, I still don’t really have a simple summary statement of all this, other than ‘worth the walk’.