The Croo

White Mountains, NH

The White Mountain huts are operated by "croos" of excited young people with the agreeable arrogance that comes from being in your early twenties and able to haul eighty pounds of provisions over any type of terrain. They are united in their desire to avoid sedentary life for as long as possible, or, usually, for as long as their families will tolerate.

Screw their families, I say. You'll have plenty of time to get your law degree in your forties when your knees are destroyed. It's not like anyone in America is having kids, anyway, which is the only reason to be making serious money. Apart from vice.

Anyway, typical posts at an AMC hut include:

Hutmaster
Asst. Hutmaster
Asst. To the Asst. Hutmaster
Harpooner
C.H.U.D.

I really liked "Harpooner".
They're eccentric, but, heck, up here, who isn't?

Tiger Stripes

Galehead Hut, NH
Mile 1815

The high ridges in this part of the Whites have tiger stripes going over the dorsal, white stripes of blown-down trees wherever the ridge is near the timberline. They look like sand ripples Probably when a blowdown occurs, the open space makes it more likely that more blowdowns occur in that area. The initial blowdown is more likely to occur in the same area, due to the shape of the mountains and the prevailing wind. So you get very consistent shapes. Tiger stripes.

Incomparable

North Woodstock, NH

Mile 1801

 

The Whites are incomparable in every way. They are easily the most scenic mountains I've seen so far, and I have yet to reach the high point of the range at Mt Washington. The descent from Mt Mooselaukee (sp?) followed what was essentially one long waterfall, Beaver Brook cascading almost continuously over four thousand vertical feet.

 

Weather's been good, for the Whites. Temperatures on the peaks are in the twenties and thirties, with winds running around ten knots. In a place where the average wind is hurricane force, a ten knot wind is downright hospitable.

 

Physically, the trail here is more demanding than anything I've ever seen, but I keep underestimating my stamina. I'm doing forteens with plenty of time left in the day, even with nine thousand foot aggregate daily gains.

 

Zeroing out here in Woodstock to wait out this rain and my modest hangover. Some of the guys got me a bottle of my very favorite vodka, Ciroc, and I'm afraid I overindulged. The ol' liver isn't quite as capable as it used to be. It's also probably a lot less cirrhotic.

 

Tomorrow we'll be seeing Franconia Ridge (home of the once Old Man of the Mountain).

Glencliff

Hikers Welcome Hostel, Glencliff NH
Mile 1774

There are no mountains I've ever seen that rear up quite like the Whites. Four thousand feet straight up from the valley floor of a thousand feet, an uninterrupted run in four trail miles. A day in the Whites will see the typical through-hiker gain more than ten thousand feet of altitude. Everest veterans have quit in the middle of the Whites. Needless to say, mileages in this area are not great, with 10-16 miles per day being the maximum for most people.

But the sheer beauty. The tops of the highest mountains of this range are lifeless as the surface of the moon, then you plunge through krummholtz to spruce forest and then to a northern deciduous forest. And back again. I think I'm going to like it here.

I do not know how long it will take me to get through the Whites. If we get bad weather, I could be stuck at an AMC hut for days (which is OK, as they are well-provisioned). On the other side, if I get good weather, the Whites could be done in ten to twelve days. Currently the weather is good, but a little chilly. Chilly is good. Chilly means you walk a lot faster. Walking faster means you get to the next hut faster, and in the hut there is coffee.

Regardless, it looks more and more likely that I will flip up to Katahdin from somewhere in Maine, so that I do not face a closure of the mountain before I finish. As an added benefit, flipping allows me to say goodbye to all the people I have hiked with (as well as allowing me more solitude towards the end of this trip, which is something I need).

For the rest of today, all I have to do is eat, wash, wash, wash, and call home. And eat a few more times. Life can be so simple sometimes.

All Systems Go

Incredibly, this little campsite on the edge of Hanover is in the range of a wireless network. I love college towns.

Funds have been replenished. Hiking the AT does not take place in a logistic vacuum, and I've become more and more aware of this over the past few weeks, blowing days in town moving funds around. It's worth the peace of mind to just keep the necessary funds liquid, a fact of AT life I know now all too well. Lord knows I'm busy enough getting to that damn mountain before 10/15

Now, with enough liquidity to finish the trip, I feel strangely energized, like a Saturn V smoking with condensation on the pad. I've spent too long running this trip like the Soviet space program.

No more days lost in town now. All or nothing.

Burning time

Waiting in Hanover for funds to find their way to checking. Strictly speaking, I'm in Lebanon, NH, a support community of minimum wage earners that make college towns like Hanover possible. It's every bit as bad as it sounds.

With shopping done, full of my first Taco Bell I've had on the entire trail, I am struck by how incredibly ugly strip malls can make a place. They make cars happy, I suppose, but the people inside them seem to live little better than cattle in feed pens, though most dairy cows I've seen seem in better spirits and have superior medical benefits.

The people's spirits are bowed in their labor, but do they realize that they are working for things they do not need, or even want? Why buy a throwaway digital video game for your child when you can have a grocery cart race instead? I love those. Children are a great excuse to act in the way we really want to, i.e., like we have the screaming meemies.

Anyway.

The good point of being stuck in Lebanon is that it has many avenues for escapism, such as a great comic book store. Good comics have been a guilty pleasure of mine for years, and I readily immersed myself in Frank Miller's "300" and "Sin City", Gaiman's "Furies", and the last installation of "Y: The Last Man", which I heard may become an HBO series.

"300" in particular was very stirring, in a manly sort of way, like:

"Come home carrying your shield or come home carried on it"

Hell yeah! Who doesn't love Spartans?
Or:

"Our arrows will blot out the sun!"
"Excellent. Then we shall fight in the shade"

This is the sort of stuff that makes good chest-pounding fun.

I'll contribute:

"Death or Maine take me!"

Huzzah!

This is another scatterbrained post, but I'll chalk it up to Spartan blood-madness. And the fact that I really want to get out of here, and into the Whites where I can really crank up the heart rate.

Goodbye Vermont

Hanover, NH
Mile 1733

For a hundred or two miles in VT, the AT shares the trail with the Long Trail or LT. This is some beautiful country. My climb up Killington was as good as any experience I've had on the trail- the peak area reminded me of the six thousand foot spruce forest back South, only the forest was much healthier. Well, except for the weather knocking all the trees down.

Killington and Peru Peak were being blasted by the low pressure zone formerly known as Ernesto, the tropical disturbance turned into driving sleet by altitude and latitude. A thirty knot wind you can feel in your blood. Wildness like that, it throbs where it brushes, like the first touch of a woman.

Vermont is gone now. The AT where it breaks east from the LT becomes boring, steep, and very, very boggy- my hiking poles sank up to the handles in muck (this is no exaggeration), and I gave up on avoiding a mud coating for the last forty miles.

The Whites are now thirty miles away. Way I see it, the Whites are a perfectly flat stretch of trail with a few five thousand foot speed bumps. And the windiest place on Earth. Lowest wind-chill factor on Earth too, incidentally. No problem. Weather looks good, and with a recent cash infusion, I can stay at the huts if I want. The huts in the Whites are basically rustic little inns, strategically placed at convenient intervals, and they won't kick you out if you're in danger of flying off in a hundred knot gust.

Incredibly, less than five hundred miles (440) to Katahdin. It's going to be very close to the October 15 deadline. It's sort of hard to believe I'm this close.

Ideoculture

Hanover, NH
Mile 1733

Over the past decade, I have become something of a materialist. I have not always been so. I used to think that ideas shaped the larger world of human affairs, love and beauty mattered more than steel and concrete. It's a good recipe for a long term drunk. Being an idealist, that is.

On the trail, however, I begin to see that dismissing intellectual history is like rejecting language. Ideas exist because they describe reality particularly well. They are reality, they are the power behind history. Wars are fought to control the place in which the ideas are stored- minds, books, computers. They are ideas waging war on other ideas, by attacking the ground in which ideas can grow. The ideas are the competing organisms, fighting on a battleground of possible futures.

It is somewhat frightening, thinking of things like "The Reformation" and "Communism" as gigantic five-dimensional macrointelligences controlling human affairs. But as our minds become better connected- more like nodes than individuals- these idea forces take on more substance. They rear, monolith, over human affairs of the 21st century. I am not sure if their sudden solidity makes me feel better or worse about the futur

The Ring

Manchester Center, VT
Mile 1636

There's been a scenario that I've played out in my mind, a mental image that has helped me put one foot in front of the other for these hundreds of miles. In it, I meet Monica on Katahdin and ask for her to be my wife. It seemed a suitable action-hero way to propose. The accompanying snow and wind would also provide a useful analogy to matrimony to myself. This mental image was a warm globe that I could rely on to force me up the next thousand, three thousand, six thousand feet.

What actually happened, we decided to go on a day hike during her visit in Sheffield. It was more of a rain hike. We strolled up a moderate grade to a waterfall. As we gently lowered ourselves down a slope to an overlook, Monica turned suddenly around with a tiny box in her hands. She opened it. Inside was a ring. "So- will you marry me?", she asked.

What could I say? She's been with me through my mood swings, my alcoholism, my limitless capacity for fecklessness and God knows what else, not least of which is this trip- an enforced six month absence from which she receives no physical promise of security, except for my word over the phone that I have become the best man I have ever been in my entire life.

For the past five years, she has been the warm, glowing center my life has revolved around. There's nothing I am that would be possible without her. I love her.

For a split second, I wondered how I was going to explain this gender flip to my family- Monica proposing to me, after all. I decided that wasn't that important right now. It's the 21st Century, after all.

All these things flew through my mind in that moment. "Yes . .yes", I said, as I drew her to me.

We hugged for a long time, there in the rain, me whispering, yes, I will marry you, yes. I glow in the remembering of that moment.

It's a moment I will carry with me for the rest of my life. The ring is titanium- a hiker's ring- virtually weightless, but shining on my finger, a reminder of the moment.

As it turned out, my proposal idea couldn't have happened, as Monica has a board meeting to attend on my summit date. We might have otherwise ended up proposing to each other at the same time. Although this would have been sort of humorous, I can't think of a better way for it to have happened than the way it did.

I'll make my own proposal bid later, in the year we have before a marriage date. It'll be a good one, at a random moment (don't let your guard down sweetheart). During a good hurricane maybe. Something powerful, something as unpredictable as it is inevitable. In other words, something like love itself.

Difficulty

Blogger's system is being modified. There might be a bit of a delay before I can post again.

 

Since I was thinking of sending the Palm home with Monica this weekend, this is not too much of a crisis.

Stress

Dalton, MA
Mile 1555

The feeling of suddenly being under a closing deadline is a strange one after so many months of just walking. It's amazing I used to spend every hour of my life under not one or two but scores of closing deadlines, each one flexible in either direction.

To be honest, I miss stress. Not the stress of meetings, but the stress- and reward- of doing a task well, under pressure, in less time than thought possible. It's what I call "good" stress. It makes life red-blooded and fun. In kung-fu movie terms, you start the day with five masked men trying to feed you into a Troy-Bilt chipper/shredder, and you end the day with one guy in a laundry hamper, one in the cement mixer (legs hanging out amusingly), and three on the messy end of the Troy-Bilt. You go home, wipe your pants off and get ready for the next day. Occasionally you have to put one of the masked men in your trunk to work on at home, but that's okay, then it's a revenge-kung-fu movie. You killed my free time! You're gonna die!

As everyone learns, however, doing things successfully under deadline leads to unpleasantness. In the surreal corporate world, if you are doing things quickly, you don't have much to do. Your tasklist quickly grows off the monthly calender and onto the multi-year calender. You have to decide which tasks to do half-ass, and which tasks to be done seventy-percent ass, and which ones to ignore completely. You have to decide which boss sits higher on the totem pole, and which boss everyone ignores. To do this, you get involved politically, to determine whose horse to tie yourself to. This is what I call "bad stress".

No matter how rewarding the job is, if there is too much bad stress in it, the job stops becoming rewarding very fast. This is because dealing with bad stress is something usually called "management". It's why managers make that mad money. When you are doing a job and find too much bad stress puddled around your feet, you start asking yourself, "Where in the hell are those high-priced janitors to clean this crap up?". Seven times out of ten you can see it's a lot less trouble to just stop working and wait for management to eat itself, since you'll get in trouble working on anything any one person assigns you.

In a lot of ways, an employee wants to work at a task just like he or she wants to work at an email application. The employee does not want to craft MIME, or hard code IP addresses, or solder wires, just to send an email. Similarly, an employee does not want to go to management meetings, finance meetings, operational meetings, and work Project Plans just so he can write ten lines of SQL. He just wants to do the job. Like a good email application, good management hides all the bad stress and lets an employee get on with his kung fu ass-kicking.

Making a good manager, however, is a lot more complicated than making a good email client. Being a good manager is probably something a lot more like being a good athlete than being a good coder, or artist, or writer. It's confidence, moxie. It's panache. It's some unquantifiable quality that we don't have a lot of these days, something no software can replicate, and which is detectable only by others with some of that same quality.

Leadership.

Prelude

Near Mt Greylock, MA
Mile 1572

When I think of mountains, I think of the southern Appalachians, where steeper generally means higher, and flowing water slows as it gets lower. This sense of the land is no longer applicable. This far north, deep inside the old icesheet, swamps and bogs can appear on mountaintops, and the lower slope of a mountain can be a sheer cliff. Ridges run helter skelter, completely unaware of the streams running around them. It is an environment shaped not by the running water of the present but by forces of the distant past. I sometimes yearn for the stream-shaped mountains of my childhood vacationland, but reject the cowardice this implies, the infantility. This place is new, it holds a mystery, and the mystery is growing stronger, as the mountains again begin reaching for the sky. It is the labyrinth that dreams.

The past- the invisible, implacable past- is what shapes these northern lands. I wrestle with both the ghosts of the land and the ghosts inside my own mind. They know each other, they work together. These are what frighten me about this place: the dead powers. The north is their place.

At the end of this thing I must pass inside myself and emerge whole, shaman and scholar. This thing is big. I don't know if I can do this. I am so frightened I can taste iron on the back of my throat. Season of ghouls.

The closing months are upon us. Summer is over. Fall is coming, and in Maine, winter is on its very heels. A golden time, then the day of trial. It is almost here. They are coming. It's time to meet them.

"There is only ever one day, and that is the Day of Nine Dogs."

Cabin of Rest

Upper Goose Pond Cabin, MA
Mile 1535

JoAnne, the caretaker of the Upper Goose Pond Cabin, is a quiet, kindly schooteacher who is somewhat older than my parents. She rows to the cabin to take care of the place and of the various hikers.

I can't get over the physical shape of her and the various older people I've met on the trail. I always thought, hell, sixty and you're done. But she's got shoulders big as mine, lifts forty or fifty gallons of water up a couple of hundred feet from the pond each day. She looks ten, twenty years younger than her age.

I am incredibly grateful to Joanne and AMC for keeping up Goose Pond Cabin. I have been hiking with a pretty light food bag, and the summer sleep system I have been using since Sugar Grove VA is just not warm enough to let me sleep well. The cabin has piles of warm comforters, and mattresses, a big fireplace with a chimney that passes through the bunkroom, and a pancake breakfast. It seems as good a place as any to hold on a day for Monica to get to Dalton. Besides, if I hurried into town I'd be stuck there, anyway, bleeding money, sharing a motel room with six other people. Here in the cabin it's a bit more like home.

Oh, and now complete with hollering children. They're busy tying each other into the hammock. Oh God, I haven't laughed like this in years. Better than cable.

Bear Dance

Connecticut has turned out to have some of the more "friendly" bears I've seen on the trail. Looks like the infamous Jersey Death Bears are migrating north.

At Pine Swamp, I heard something jostling my food bag, tied in a remote branch near the shelter (I was tenting because of the bugs). Went outside, surprised the bear off the tree, where it was hanging upside down trying to figure out how to reach the food bag. Returned to bed, only to be awakened hours later by the TWANG of one of the tent lines springing free, and a furry moonlit sillouette on the tent wall. "WAAUUUGGHH!", I said. "Snurt!", said my would-be tent mate, followed by the sound of something very big running off a cliff. Crunch, run, crash . . . . CRASH! Thump thump thump. I slept like hell the rest of the night. "Not again", I said to myself. Do I give off some kind of smell that attracts these things?

A few days later, I saw a bear on the trail near Great Falls of the Housatonic. I did the usual, maybe still a little jumpy from the Pine Swamp of Horrors episode. "RAAAAUUGH!", I yelled, waving my poles around. He sauntered off the trail thirty yards, allowing me to pass. He gets promptly back on, and Mother of God, starts following me. "WAAURRRR!", I yell, a nice spurt of adrenaline allowing me to heft a torso size rock and blast it against a rock face. It shattered into a million tiny pieces with a very satisfying crash, which did the trick. The bear turned tail and ran away very quickly. Terrified, I hurried into town.

Bluffing bears is a show-act, but when it's following you on the trail there's some very real fear and anger there (let me sleep you furry clown from hell!). It's still all a show. Aside from the pepper spray, there isn't the least thing I could do against the speed and power of these animals. I can pretend, and that's about it. Thank God bears are horribly nearsighted. It makes me wonder how many tribal costumes and dances are based on scaring away predators. Maybe I should get a big shaman's wig and mask, until I get through Connecticut anyway, and dance the Bear Dance before I go to bed.

Damn Yuppies

Salisbury, CT
Mile 1485

Salisbury CT is an evil cash-sucking vampire of a town, but it's the first place since Vernon NJ where I could get a shower for less than a hundred dollars.

Isopropyl alcohol is five dollars. A loaf of bread is four. This is insane. What do all these people do, making this kind of money in the middle of nowhere? More importantly, how do you get rich in the first place if you are willing to spend four dollars for a loaf of bread? If I was a multi-millionaire I'd be damned if I would set foot in a store that charges those kind of prices and STILL doesn't have a cheese selection worth a damn. Not only are they yuppies, but they are uncultured yuppies.

Blasting off this morning for the Birdcage in Dalton MA, 75 miles up the trail. The Birdcage is a "hostel" run out of the house of one very nice Ron Bird, who also runs the Shell station. I will be meeting up with Monica again around then, for a good visit to see me off into the endgame of this thing.

Between here and there we are finally going over the 2000 foot contour, for the first time in a couple of hundred miles. The mountains of Massachusetts loom impressively, unlike the tame hills we've been zooming over.

LOOM!

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.

Landgeist

Telephone Pioneers Shelter, NY
Mile 1430

New Jersey was as far south as the glaciers managed to come. The two thousand foot thick sheet of ice parked there, scraping out Sunfish Pond and God knows what else, while the freeze and thaw cycle turned Pennsylvania into rubble (which it remains to this day).

Here in New York, the ice sheet was more robust, and the differential torque between the area under the ice and the area over the ice sheared off the mountaintops over the two thousand foot contour. As the sheet retreated, the wandering tops and associated rubble ground their way to a halt on the remains of the mountains, like Noah on Mt. Ararat. These geological formations have an assortment of amusing names like "erratic" and "drumlin", but they are caused by the same underlying phenomenon, ice grinding, lifting.

It's worth noting that ice ages can come and go with incredible rapidity; from a geological point of view, climactic changes are practically instantaneous- ice cores in Greenland indicate that the planet once went from glacial to interglacial in five years. Seven meters of sea level in five years . . . thoughts to keep you warm at night. But then again, so does the thought of a greater trans-Caucasus war. Or, if you are a real cold sleeper, both.

Anyway, in terms of hiking, all this means that from north Jersey on through, you have a bunch of very smooth, easy hills topped with hundred foot boulder piles that apparently dropped from the sky. The AT, laid out by consummate sadists, wanders through this zone gleefully. One formation was known to us only as "The Lemon Squeezer". No more information was provided until we "walked" through it.

Moving north into New York the trail grows more mild, however, probably because we have entered an area where the trail maintainers are not quite so mischievous. Soon it won't matter how mischievous the trail maintainers are, because we will be above the timberline, and everything will be sere and wild.

The weather is quite cool, and I take my time to enjoy the rolling climbs and steady pace. Not many town stops (that anyone can afford) in this area, and I miss Monica a great deal, more than I can say in this limited and rather public space.

But if I rush too much, all I will remember is missing and torment and sweat and blood. Lifting my head and seeing the wild reminds me that hiking the AT is something that is only done once. Life outside.

Southbounders

Passing an increasing number of southbounders (or sobos) on the trail. They started in early or mid-June at Katahdin, which means I should be able to finish in two months or so. Possibly faster, since the sobos were on fresh legs when they started, while I will be entering the challenging north with two thousand miles on these legs.

It's heartening- I might not have to flip up. I can make it straight through.

Here we go.

Garden State

Vernon, NJ
Mile 1348

Incredibly, New Jersey is gorgeous. The trail is well-graded and comparatively rock-free, with a few exciting climbs thrown in to keep the daydreaming hiker awake and focused. Views from the ridgeline are like the best of Virginia, but without the endless subdivisions (which are, for the most part, unoccupied, according to the laments of a local real estate agent). This part of NJ seems almost entirely undeveloped, more wild than anything since the far South. It's peculiar. I expected mountains lost in an ocean of urbanism.

The people are also surprisingly friendly. Folks in PA were . . . Odd. It didn't take much to remind you that you walked through the home state of the Aryan Brotherhood.

Flavoring all these observations, of course, is the fact that the weather has suddeny turned Olympian. Highs are down in the eighties, with colder weather rolling in over the course of the next week. Cooler temps mean fewer stops and a faster pace. With luck, I can get into some higher mountains by the time this cool snap is done with.

Water Bottles

Delaware Water Gap PA
Mile 1280

There's a finality in filling up the water bottles. It's the first stage of departure. It represents the most crucial of my supplies, the one thing I need out there. With water I could make it to the next town, though hungrily. Filling the bottles is the definitive statement to myself: I am filling up this most precious commodity and walking on. It's hard when a town has been so generous.

The church hostel potluck was everything I imagined. It was held in the fine old Christian tradition of "if we act really nicely, the heathen will get curious". They were wonderful people, and we talked about the Presbyter movement for hours, and whether or not the people of northern England and Wales were ever truly Catholicized. They were probably Presbyters from the get go, considering that the Arian missions frequently converted congregations to have elected clergy. Then we talked about Arius and Fox and all sorts of good things, and snorted at some of the people that pass for Christians these days. I wished them good luck in their mission. They wished me good luck to God.

A Changing World

Delaware Water Gap, PA
Mile 1280

A week of record temperatures has afficted this area of Pennsylvania near the NJ state line. In a few generations this forest will die, in fact has already started dying, as the interglacial period continues into its warming period. Whether or not the warming is human-related, it (and the impending energy crisis) will be a test of how well we have built our culture. Can we adapt in a changing world? Can people live and do without, or will they savage each other for the last pint of Ben & Jerry's? I like to think that people are generally nice, but I'm pragmatic enough to steer clear of the freezer section.

In any case, this is the hardest part of the trail so far. The grade is gradual (although the chaotic landsape of sofa-sized boulders makes things interesting), but hundred degree temperatures combined with Florida-esque humidity makes walking a torment, and dangerous. Pouring sweat, even when sitting, combined with very sparse watering holes, means you have to slow down, or risk suffering through a voluminous textbook of heat-related maladies. The heat is much worse for you than the cold, it seems.

Well, that's not quite true, but death by cold is quicker, more merciful. The heat toys with you like a physical interrogation. It makes you think that YOU are the weak one, YOU are the one so out of shape that you need to stop every hour. I'm not making you lie down on that cold rock, says the heat. You're the one that's stopping. Like a prisoner, the hiker must always remind himself that the heat is responsible, not himself. The heat is what makes him weak and nauseated- the heat makes it necessary to cool the body core against a rock. The heat is the enemy. It is trying to trick me. It will not defeat me.

In spots the mosquitoes are as bad as anything in the Everglades. We are not even in the serious bug country yet, the swamps of New Jersey and New York. Staying in shelters is no longer an option; sleep would be impossible without bug netting. Between the bugs and the awesome heat, I feel like I am doing a dramatic interpretation of At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Any moment I expect curious Yanomamo to peer through the tent door, speaking strange words and asking for cargo.

Tonight the heat is supposedly going to break a little bit. Until then, I will be at the DWG's hiker potluck, sponsored by the local Church, where locals bring vats of food and watch in horrified fascination as we eat. We eat a lot. There's no polite way to say just how much is a lot, but I'd like to say that I have never before seen "horrified fascination" so clearly expressed in people's faces.

Speaking of which, the Sycamore Grill here in town has a hamburger that has knocked the current #1 trail burger, the Hillbilly Burger at the Barn Restaurant in Sugar Grove, VA. The current top three trail burgers are now:

1) The Bar Angus at the Sycamore Grill, DWG PA
2) The Hillbilly Burger at The Barn in Sugar Grove VA
3) The Wesser Burger at the NOC in Wesser NC

Congratulations to the Bar Angus!

Pardon this somewhat scattered log entry, but I daresay that the heat is affecting my concentration as an essayist. Time to loiter somewhere air-conditioned!

The Capitol Ltd

Another post from the past that didn't get published.

Lesson learned with Blogger's email-to-post function: wait a while between posts. It takes the blogspot software a bit of time to publish, and there's no queueing. Posts coming in between are lost to the ether.

EDIT: Another lesson learned: this function is worthless. Either that or blogger's email server is ridiculously overwhelmed. It's probably an aging MMX sitting under the water cooler.

Date: Sun Jul 23, 2006 7:24 pm

AMTRAK Capitol Ltd
en route to Harper's Ferry

Coming into Washington DC as a native Floridian and AT hiker was shocking in a number of ways. One was the public transit system. We Floridians eschew things like public transit, emergency rooms, and schools as being part of the global communist conspiracy, so Metrorail seemed like Great Stalin's Ghost himself. It's amazing getting from point A to point B without having to sell your firstborn children to insurance companies.

Second was the fact that, in spite of all the warnings about DC, the bad areas just didn't look that bad, at least as I sped above them on Metrorail. By "that bad" I am thinking of 14th Street in Bradenton. The only place I've seen that looks like 14th Street is currently being blown all to hell by the Israelis. I've only seen Beirut on the news, so I do not know if the bombing is an improvement or not, but in the case of upper B-town, I can say that intelligent munition is just what the area needs.

As a tourist destination, the museums in DC could eat up a week. Monica and I literally raced through three museums, but the American Museum of Art alone would take days to digest fully. Add to that the various monuments, the National Archive, and God knows what else, and you could have a very tiring, very rewarding weeklong family outing. I am pro-tiring and pro-rewarding, and if I had kids, I would be especially pro-tiring when it comes to vacations. Wear earplugs during the day to drown out their exhausted cries, conk those little suckers out.

If you do not care to have a family with you and don't care about things like private bathrooms or air conditioning, I'd also strongly recommend a hostel for the stay in the downtown area. Hilltop Hostel, booked by my fantastic girlfriend Monica, was a very handy 22 dollars per person, and a hundred feet from a Metrorail station.

I am glad to return to the woods. The city was, at times, almost overwhelming, both in the sheer number of people and the annonymity. On the trail, you generally don't pass a single person without having a little chat. It took some conscious thought to not chat up every person I bumped into on the Metro. "Oh, sorry bout that. Say, heard what the weather's going to be doing for the next few days?"

I am also sad to return to the woods. Having been with Monica for five years, it's been difficult being away from her. Reunited, it was astonishing how it felt as though I had never been away. Now, parted again, it is doubly difficult, without even the woods around me. I will see her again in four weeks. During those four weeks I will be flying across the relatively flat mid-Atlantic, twenty mile days being the rule rather than the exception. First I have to get away from the city.

Every hurt that the city inflicts is calculated: such-and-such highway system should inflict so many deaths and mutiliations; that train can discomort only so many; medical treatment is available only for so-and-so but not for such-and-such. I am, for the next hour, still a cell in this vast and malevolent machine. I have been once crushed in the workings of this beast, and now, alone, with a great war brewing, with every kind of evil looming over the Republic, I am apprehensive about its workings and its intent.

Already, though, steel and stone have given way to the countryside. From thousands of feet up, the human world looks the way it truly is, as it exists in Creation. It is so very small, so fragile, that peace and spread of knowledge among all peoples seems inevitable. With a few world wars along the way, of course.

Pizza and Convicts

Again, here's another post that didn't make it through Blogger's system. Here it is, somewhat past its freshness date.

Date: Sun Jul 23, 2006 7:24 pm

Pen-Mar Park, MD
Mile 1050

A local pizza joint delivers to Pen-Mar state park, right on the AT, and I couldn't help myself. I ordered a large white pizza and relaxed, chatting with a convict on work crew. He found both my ability and desire to walk a thousand miles ludicrous. I found his desire to perform multiple violent crimes likewise. He was seated at a scenic viewpoint, wilderness and escape not sixty feet away.
"They must trust you guys an awful lot," I said, reminded of the escaped killer in the Senandoahs.
"I'm out pretty soon," he said, "Two months". Looking over his shoulder at the other members of the work crew, he added, "Don't know about them"
I asked him about prison.
"Too many fucking coons", he said, still looking over his shoulder.
I just nodded and tried to look understanding. This was, after all, a violent criminal. But the look on my face must have said something.
"Once you're in, you hook up with the KKK people. It's just what happens. I wasn't prejudiced before I went to prison."
"Same thing happens to public school teachers"
He laughed. Coughing trashy laugh.
If I didn't know this guy had a habit of using his wife as a punching bag and sometime fencing dummy, I might've played a game of pool with him. Hell, I probably have played many, many games of pool with people exactly like him.
My stomach turns, not for the first time, as I realize how much I hate Bradenton. I regret making a joke with the guy.
I saw the pizza car coming, and wished him good day.
"Good luck," he said
"Likewise," I replied.
It was the biggest lie I've told on the trail.

Bulletproof

Palmerton, PA
Mile 1245

What will we miss when we're not through-hikers anymore? According to Hiker X (GA-ME 1996): "You'll miss feeling like you do now. You know. Ten foot tall and bulletproof".

He's right, we do feel bulletproof, but not for the reasons he's remembering. That's a lot of romantic nostalgia in his voice. We feel bulletproof because we aren't afraid of bullets anymore. We aren't afraid of bullets because they would probably hurt less than Pennsylvania. Northern Pennsylvania. I know a few hikers who might actually welcome hot lead over the dawning of a fresh, new, rocky 98 degree day.

I was so wrong when I said the rocks here aren't worse than anywhere else. I hadn't been north of Port Clinton yet. I hadn't gone through BMECC's jurisdiction (BMECC is a "climbing" club, not a hiking club, and they route the trail accordingly), and I hadn't touched the Superfund area, which looks exactly like the area depicted in "Road Runner" cartoons. Complete with electric blue rivers, from the contamination. Luckily, so far it is free of plummeting bodies coming to a messy end, concealed by a tiny white "puff". I loved those cartoons.

It's pretty breathtaking too. It's the first time I've felt daredevilish on the trail- I'm not naturally afraid of heights, but some of these boulder scrambles test my nerve. It's its own place.

And what the hell, leaping from boulder to boulder over endless chasms, we might as well feel just a little adolescence.

Just a little bulletproof.

State of Annoyance

Port Clinton, PA
Mile 1203

People complain about the rocks in PA, but really, they are no worse than a lot of Virginia. What gets you about PA is that this is the state in which all the trail annoyances gather to attack you en masse.

1) It's as hot and buggy as the mid-Atlantic. It's making us kind of crazy.
2) Some of the worst climbs on the entire trail (I'm looking at you, Lehigh Gap)
3) Rocks like New Hampshire (sharp enough to cut deep if you are foolish enough to walk to the privy barefoot . . .ahem)
4) Towns are as mean as New England (no showers)
5) Twenty miles of toxic waste. The forest service has considerately covered the AT Superfund sites with Ecoloam, a product containing real human feces. Mmm!
6) For the love of God it's as boring as Virginia.

Put all those things together and you get a state that kicks out as many would-be through hikers in two hundred miles as Virginia kicked out in five hundred fifty. Yellowblazing (i.e., hitchhiking) has gotten to be very popular.

From here it's seventy-six miles to Delaware Water Gap. Might as well get out of here. DWG has a free hostel, and please, Jesus, let it have a shower.

On the bright side, all the recent rain means there is plenty of water. In addition to rocks, PA is also known for thirst. Not so for the class of '06.

Well, less than a thousand miles (971.4) to Katahdin!

The Doyle

Duncannon, PA
Mile 1141 (the mileage in the post from Boiling Springs is not correct- it was obtained from an out-of-date datasheet)

When I was just starting this hike in Georgia, Monica and I ran into a former through hiker who had completed the trail in 2005. His trail name was Porter. When pumping him for information about the Doyle Hotel, he responded, lugubriously, "Oh. The Doyle. It's a hostel with a bar. That's all you need to know"

He was right. A bar is all it's got going for it. I've had better accomodations at trail shelters, for a lot less money, to say nothing of the wonderful free hostels out there. If I didn't have town errands I'd be out of here. Again, beer and liquor color through-hikers' reflections on what is good and not good.

But there's errands to run and laundry to do, so it's best to make them snappy so I don't spend more time at the Doyle than I absolutely have to.

The rest of PA is a hot, rocky, and mean hundred miles, and it won't be punched through as easily.

Stars and Bars

Harper's Ferry, WV
Mile 1008

Harper's Ferry is the most beautiful trail town I've seen yet, largely because it is an historic artifact preserved by the Park Service. Mighty rivers join right at the foot of a commanding church steeple, and cliffs loom like the ghost of history itself from three sides.

I ran into Cud at the Outfitter where we shared some good-natured Southern guffaws. "We're about to enter enemy territory," I said
"Hell yeah," Cud replied, "Comin up out of Virginia they got this big flag, Lincoln all over it, all kinds of stuff like that. Shee-it." Even in his wicking fabrics and lightweight backpack, he looks like he is wearing a gray wool uniform. Cud's southern Georgia accent and overall courtliness overrides the Johnny Reb in him, but it's always there for a true son of the confederacy. Which Cud really is not, thankfully (he's a Good Guy through and through), but it did get me thinking.

On the surface it is peculiar that folks emblazon their homes and vehicles with the flag of America's most dire enemy, the Confederate States of America. It's not so peculiar when you reflect on the fact that the Confederacy, in the minds of many, never really lost. The state song of Maryland ("Maryland, my Maryland") quotes Maryland son John Wilkes Booth- specifically, the words he cried out on shooting Lincoln. Sic semper tyrannis. Virginia should not call in vain.

Then you have a particular Missouri senator who remarked, in an interview with the laid-back white supremecists of Southern Partisan magazine, that we need to fight the idea that "Southern patriots" were "defending a perverted lifestyle". Slavery seems pretty perverted to me, but apparently former Senator and Attorney General John Ashcroft disagrees. If only he could keep his kinky slave fetish in the closet, because it's sort of disturbing reading about public officials being into this kind of thing. It's like finding a vibrator on your grandparents' bedstand. School voucher programs, preposterous drug sentencing (compared with sentencing rules for violent offenders), and pants-height laws all efficiently spell out what John Ashcroft, Trent Lott, and countless others so very much want to say: we don't like the Negroes very much.

So, as Osama bin Laden once observed in a 1998 interview, America is still a nation very much divided. Heaven help us if the Bad Guys get their ministry into the hideous US prison system. Actually, heaven won't help us, but maybe the Aryan Brotherhood will. When I left for the trail, an investigation into AB "stacking" of Florida state prison guards was underway. A federal attorney apparently began wondering why all the guards at Sanford had shamrock tattoos and carried nooses on their keychains. Hey Mr. Fancy Pants Federal Attorney, you ever consider that the AB may be our front line against terrorism?

This divided state . . we haven't even gotten into the sex thing yet, largely because feminists don't know how to point a gun or mix up plastic explosives. Which is a shame, because they're about to repeal the Enlightenment. So long marriage for love. Say hello to marriage for reproduction and, oh, needing a spouse's signed letter to buy condoms or birth control. Or going to jail for selling same. All of which will be revisited by newly sworn reactionaries, courts in power for the next few decades. It'll be a jolly old time when all those Lakewood Ranch soccer moms need a letter from hubby to go to the gynecologist.

But those fair ladies need not worry. They have enough money to hire their own doctors, doctors who won't give a damn about some cockamamie law saying what they can and can't treat. Seventy percent of the country consistently polls as against abortion, but eighty percent of the country wants the choice available to them when their teenage daughter gets knocked up. Instead of being anti-abortion, how about being "anti-letting-your-daughter-go-out-drunk-until-3AM"?

So Harper's Ferry sent my head spinning until I began unconsciously looking for the nearest liquor store. I came back to my senses and headed again into the woods, away from history and those accursed cliffs, at least for the time being. The town was a deathtrap for any force trying to hold it. It is a deathtrap for any hiker who gets too caught up in what it represents. I must focus. Defending the American Way is not what I am doing today. Today I walk.

Tomorrow I visit Monica in Washington, DC.

The Last Mighty

Terrapin Station Hiker Hostel, VA
Mile 950

I am looking ever more forward to three days with my lovely girlfriend Monica in Washington DC. I have put the mighty Shenandoahs (aka 'Shennies' or 'Doahs') behind me with a brace of twenty-plus mile days, the mileage made easier by the Shennies' gentle terrain and the unseasonable cold front we've had come through the area. And, of course, by the fact that Monica waits on the other side.

The Shennies are the last string of 3,000ft+ ridges I will be mounting for some time. There are prominences between here and the Whites that will rise above this altitude, but no sustained ridges. I'm about to enter the dreaded "Deli Country", with its spiralling costs, lack of water, bugs, and Jersey Death Bears. The Shenandoahs are the last mighty, until the Whites rear their feared peaks above my head. Those mountains will present challenges I've never faced, but on the plus side, they're still five hundred miles away.

Shennies Overview
The southern half of the Shenandoahs are pretty darn boring, but very easy hiking. The second half is a bit more difficult, but has some of the best views in Virginia. Why are the Shennies supposedly the most popular stretch of trail among thru-hikers? The answer is beer. Well, beer, restaurants, road access, and honest-to-God trailside full-liquor bars. You can't hike seven miles without coming near a store, and the road is never more than a mile off. Too much civilization for me. I felt a bit like a piece of the wilderness myself. "Look at this guy honey! He's walked all the way from Georgia! Get the camera!"

Bears
I saw seven bears in the Shennies, one of them being the second-closest bear encounter I've had in my life. It's hard to beat the first closest, as the closest bear encounter I've ever had was the bear's teeth being inside of me (see the entry titled 'Totem'). I suppose if I was partially digested by a black bear that would beat it, but I've lost enough limbs for a lifetime, thank you very much. Anyway, this close encounter involved me rounding an uphill switchback near Jarman Gap and almost colliding with the animal, a big lone male, damn near in arm's reach. We scared the crap out of each other. I said, "Awk!", he said, "Gurk!". In the time it took for my hand to reach my pepper spray holster, the bear was out of sight. He ran with such power that he sprayed me with clay and rocks from thirty feet away.
Coming off Loft Mountain, I saw another notable bear, halfway up a dead tree, rocking violently back and forth in an effort to bring it down (and presumably to eat the grubs inside). I never knew bears of that size could climb. It also indicated a level of planning I didn't think bears posessed. They're a bit smarter than I thought. Overall, bears in the Shennies are also quite a bit bigger than their relatives in the Smokies.

Slashers
An escaped killer made his way to the Shenandoah National Park yesterday, and was attempting to pass through the area disguised as a section hiker. Rangers with assault weapons and helicopters canvassed the area. One well-armed ranger seemed pretty casual about it. "He'll get hungry and come in, they always do after they run in the woods". I complimented his choice of rifle sight. He complimented my choice of hairstyle. "No one's gonna come near you looking like that". I got my head shaved bald in Waynesboro. Explains how I always get so much shelter space. That, and the snoring.

Madkeeper

Waynesboro, VA
Mile 842

DISCLAIMER: Some of this post may contain disturbing material.

There's a fellow I met on the trail a few weeks back, whose name I will be keeping from this account, as he has quite a few aquaintances that are off their freaking rockers. I'll call him Trackless, or Track, for short.

A former through-hiker, Track feels the need (as many former AT hikers do) to help fellow hikers. Lord knows Track's charges need it.

There's Marge, the paranoid schizophrenic who, after hiking the trail, decided that she was the real reason behind Edward's abdication in the middle of the last century. Something about being a lost lovechild or queen of England. The Lindberg baby was also involved, but as I was not writing the whole story down as Track recollected it, I've completely forgotten how that tied in. I regret my decision to not take notes, because the whole thing was incredible. Track has frequently had to rescue other hikers from Marge's . . . Accusations.

MARGE (seemingly normal): Did you see the photo montage on Reagan last night? They must have had that all made up, just waiting for him to pass away. How awful!
HIKER: Actually, one of my best friends works for CNN, and she can . .
MARGE: HOW CAN YOU LET HER LIVE KNOWING WHAT SHE KNOWS!!!??

Track was worried about poor Marge, as she was not in her usual hideyholes. I shared his worry. Given our nation's enlightened attitudes on mental illness, chances are Marge is in jail. It could be worse, I said to Track. At least she's white.

Another guy I'm not even going to try hiding the identity of, because he sounds like a jerk. Leonard something. Bill Bryson featured him under a pseudonym in his AT classic, "A Walk in the Woods", but heaven help me if I can remember the pseudonym.

One of Leonard's standard shenanigans was walking up to people's tents in the middle of the night, unzipping doors and shining his flashlight in their faces, proclaiming, "You're not gonna make it" . . ."You'll make it" . . . "You're not gonna make it". Supposedly, Track said, he was passing judgement on who would or would not complete the trail. I mentioned that it sounded like a good way of getting a few hollowpoints in the chest.

This Leonard character goes by the name "HEELED" now, as he's spent several months in a mental institution after spraying female hikers with his own semen. Unsurprisingly, HEELED is also a former through-hiker.

The good thing is that all these wards of Track were probably terminally unhinged before they made their hike. At least now they can live semi-peacefully in the Virginia woods, watched over by Track.

Mind them well, Madkeeper.

The Missing

Rusty's Hard Time Hollow, VA
Mile 828

Rusty's Hard Time Hollow is run by none other than a man named Rusty, who someow has direct private road access to the Blue Ridge Parkway. He had made noises about selling his land, as he is getting older and poorer, and is less able to maintain the place. It'd probably help if he didn't have a couple score of different livestock scattered around, or if he didn't insist on doing his own welding. God did not intend for molten metal to be used in toilet repair, for example.

Lately he's been trying to send out the message that he's looking for a protege. Young, responsible hard worker to work for room and board and eventual inheritance of an 18 acre estate on the Virginia Blue Ridge. There's no takers. Everyone is either already tied up in the larger world or is so feckless there's no hope in entrusting them with anything more than maintaining the pig trench. From my various employer friends I've talked to, it's a common failing in young men these days. They're not dumb or lazy, they just don't seem to care about what they are doing.

And really, who can blame them for not being interested in participating in this country's economy? With a third of the money supply owned by the Chinese, another quarter by the Sauds, and the American capital manufacturing capacity running at around the same level as the Vatican's, you're left with spending the rest of your life as a stockboy at Wal-Mart. Oh yay. Instead of looking back on a day's work and saying, "I helped build that automobile", or "that plane flew because of me", our young worker can say with pride, "I brought low, low prices to Backofnowheresville, Virginia". Gah.

Unsurprisingly, our young workers say, "No, thank you"- that is, the ones not already sucked into the global marketplace. Perhaps, someday, when the Arabs and the Chinese yank their support for our currency (making the US economy look like Weimar Germany on a bad day), and the shiny happy global capitalism movement is shown to be the farce it truly is (the Chinese don't 'globalize'- the Chinese 'sinofy'), there will be a whole crop of energized Americans, working for their country and other things that matter. As opposed to pumping oceans of money into the festering pieholes of the Saud regime.

I'm betting that on that day there will be some young Rustys in that crew, working the Hard Time Hollow, and slopping that damn pig outside the outhouse. We await our young men, the prodigal, the missing, and we will greet them when they return.