Mile Slave

NY/CT border
Mile 1441

One through hiker- I'll call him Freight- is one of those type-A folks cleverly disguised as a hippie. He's very Deadhead laid back, but push the right buttons, and watch the hell out. I saw this in person in an exchange with a not terribly friendly local.

LOCAL (leering at hiker girls): I bet it's like a big party up in the woods, right? Like Woodstock.
FREIGHT: Yeah, it's just like Woodstock, except you pull twenty miles every day in the snow, rain, heat, mud, over these goddamn mountains, and rest maybe one day in fourteen. You want to hike this hill today? (Freight offers the local his hiking poles)
LOCAL: (looks appalled) No!
ME: But it's still a lot of fun! Ha ha! Boy!

My attempt to break the tension proved futile. But Freight was missing the idea that this whole thing is a voluntary endeavor. It doesn't feel like it sometimes, but when it stops being fun it's time to slow down.

Unfortunately, you can only slow down so much. They do close the mountain at the end of this thing on October 15. At some point, every through hiker becomes a mile slave, and it's just something you have to accept. It takes grit, but by now we have plenty of that, mixed with the various foul effluvia coating our bodies.