Middle of Nowhere

The trail in Maine is as wild as it gets. Go up on a ridge at night, there's no lights from houses or cars. In the daytime, you rarely see the tracks of roads. It's pretty amazing. Back in Virginia, you could practically read by the light coming off towns at night.

Weariness

Bethel, ME
Mile 1900-ish

I reached some sort of spiritual peak in the Whites, and now, I think, it's done. I'm hiking now just to get home, to be with Monica.

Soon.

Maine and Punishment

Mahoosuc Notch, ME
Mile 1899

"We're not here to protect you from the wilderness," said an annonymous MATC (Maine Appalachian Trail Club) scientist.

That attitude shows.

(My longer post on this topic and conservation was eaten by VersaMail. Sometimes I hate my Palm. A lot.)

The Last State

Gorham, NH
Mile 1878

Entering Maine tomorrow, the last state of this journey. Southern Maine is supposedly even more challenging that New Hampshire, but it is a lot lower, completely below treeline until Katahdin. Staying below treeline makes things a lot less complicated.

New Hampshire has been the most rewarding - and the most challenging- state.

Less than three hundred miles to go, now.

Spin the Black Globe for Me

Somewhere in the Carters, NH
Mile unknown

The usual 2PM nausea had set in. I had not overeaten this time, and I was drinking plenty of water. It was the third three thousand foot climb in six hours. I was at a limit. Frost coated the front of my clothing, a morning's frozen breaths. Face steaming in the air, I went inside.

#####################

"You're not here," I say.
"Of course not. I'm the remembering of a remembering of a remembering of something that was probably not even real in the first place"
"That cinches it. That's something I would say"
She is flickering like a bad DVD. There's virtually no visual memory of something this far back, far back when I was intoxicated on youth, vodka, and methamphetamine. What is it saying?
The pink globe has been spinning now for a while. It's got the Run Lola Run soundtrack in it. It's a good globe, hotter than the green globe but without the fiery oblivion hiding inside the last globe, the black globe. A flickering hand pulls down the spinning pink globe. Another song now. "'So I run faster, and you caught me here' Good choice. There's no more running now, is there?"
"You'll run forever."
"My loyalty has turned, you know. Some time ago. I feel nothing. I'm getting married next year."
"That's good. That's the point. It's almost done."
In the real world, I can tell that I am stumbling, stumbling badly, reeling from rock to rock as if struck by blows, cheek on granite. In this moment I am stuck inside the crook of two downed trees, snowflakes flying from their needles, my head in their branches. I feel terrible. I crane my head at the summit far above, no trees blocking the bitter wind up here. Wind chill coming up on zero now. Inside I move to change globes. A flickering hand offers the hated orb. It spins with malice, it spins with blood.
"Spin the black globe for me"
I take it. The black globe opens, and I am lost.

#####################

There has been a simple melody in my mind since I left Georgia, and it has maddened me that I could not remember where it is from. Now I know. It's from the movie Fargo, one of the incident themes. The main theme melody arises in my mind and I realize that it is a dirge.

I am walking the aisle to a vast funeral barge, but I do not look inside. I sit in the pews. Who is inside the barge, I do not know, and I do not want to know.
A vast, furred shape sits beside me. It is a bear. It is a bear, so much bigger than I could ever imagine a bear could ever be. Vast. Its paws dig into my back, urging, go- go and see. I do not want to, but I go, because the bear is at my back.

It's me. I'm dead. I've been dead for almost a decade now.

Me as I should have been a decade ago. Cold in the embrace of oak and water, ready to float to forever, blooded and dismembered.

The shock brings me back to the real world, where my body is still climbing mountains. The spirit goes back to the bear, deep in fur and filth.
"Oh God. Oh God. What is this? How does it end?"
I climb powerfully, endlessly weeping. Ahuh ahuh ahuh. I blow snot and climb. I climb. I climb. Three miles per hour now.
"This is the Day of Nine Dogs," says the bear, "And this is the time of your trial and initiation. There is strength in despair."

#####################

This is the time to realize that the whole of my being is a hole. It has no bottom. If I turned the Earth into ash and corpses it would not be filled. It turns brutally inside with a black hole's tidal foce, tearing bits off with its spin. It is not filled with vodka, or food, or even whole mountains. It is pain and life and it ends only with my own death.

But it is also a dynamo. Its magnetic field is fantastically powerful, so long as I orbit at the right distance. This is the thing to do- orbit the dynamo inside at the right distance. Don't wander out of it on your own inertia. Don't plunge inside and burst into flame. Dance with your inner singularity, orbit. Use it. Ride it.

The barge has not gone on its way yet. I hide my dead face with another piece of brush. Sometime, sometime soon, I will set this barge alight. Or perhaps I will never come back to this place, this room inside my mind.

"Can I come back here after today?", I ask.
"There is no after today," said the bear. "Everywhere is today. Today is a facet of all your tomorrows. This is the day of shamans, the day that is not a time but a place." The animal raises itself on its hind paws, to its full height of twenty feet. "Now . . . It's time to start running."

I return to light, to the outside world, and pick up speed. The rock face flies past me. I feel very strong. It is one of the best days of my entire life. This is what they mean when they say "peak experience".

Awe and Presidents

Mt Washington, NH
Mile 1843

Most of the trail in the White Mountains looks like the kind of grade that made my mother say things like, "Get back from the edge". It's the sort of playful trail that makes us want to meet trail planners and slowly choke them to death with a topo map. "Does the phrase 'contour line' mean anything to you? What about 'featureless thirty foot cliff we are expected to levitate over'?"

When the serious stuff comes up, though, the trail is all business: big rocks arranged in huge, but manageable steps, careful blazing, and helpful signs. The ascent of Washington was like that, with helpful placards warning "IF THE WEATHER IS AT ALL DUBIOUS, GET OFF THIS MOUNTAIN OR YOU WILL DIE. SERIOUSLY."

It didn't help that, the previous night at Mitzpah Hut, I scared myself silly reading Not Without Peril: 150 Years of Misadventure in the White Mountains. This lovingly annoted volume of human misery documents the many, many souls who came to ignomious ends on the slopes of the Presidentials, people often dying yards away from rescue, blinded by panic, fog, and hypothermia. Needless to say, I had my eye very close on a cold front that was due to hit that afternoon.

"It's got a lot of energy, and you can see there's a twenty degree differential there," said a wilderness first responder at Lake of the Clouds. We rushed up Washington, menaced by the grey- black shape that was the front, zooming in from the western horizon. It was a strangely cheerful climb. The two young gazelles in front of me re-enacted Monty Python and the Holy Grail while I puffed along behind them. We got to the summit feeling quite fine, devouring the daily special meatball subs at the summit cafeteria. Feeling so fine, in fact, that we completely forgot about the front. One minute, it was fifty degrees with a twenty knot wind. Twenty minutes later the temperature had fallen to thirty degrees, and the wind chill bumped down below zero, the wind gusting beyond hurricane force. Mother of Jesus, I thought. I can barely stand in this, and there's still eight miles above treeline.

"Screw that," said one of the gazelles. He showed me an alternate route, which, although it was not the AT, took us down a lot more rapidly to the treeline. Tuck's Ravine, one of the steepest ski slopes on the planet, would take us down to Pinkham Notch, dropping three thousand feet in the first one point two miles. "I'm in," I said. We would chop off six miles from the AT, but in the circumstances (and with my own cold-weather inexperience), I felt that it was justified.

Going down Tuck's proved challenge enough. Visibility decreased steadily. The rock cairns marking the trail appeared and disappeared in the roaring clouds. At one point, out of curiosity, I stuck my pole ahead of me to see if visibility had decreased below a meter. It had. The tip of the pole appeared and disappeared. During those periods I stopped and waited to get a fix on the next cairn, then I started again, down a barely-controlled boulder crawl. When the actual ravine appeared, a relatively sheltered area from the wind and the fog, it literally took my breath away.

Sheer sides fifteen hundred feet tall fell down to a smashing alpine floor, littered with the red crosses of emergency supply caches. Water cascaded down every crevice. Somehow the trail threaded down into this awesome waste. In winter, snow builds up in this ravine up to three hundred feet in thickness, to the point where the snow layer begins acting like a glacier. Daredevils yearly come out to test their downhill skills against the snows in this ravine, their knees meeting the slope. Sometimes they die. Without snow it held the same threat. I moved slowly to the bottom.

Sleeping that night in Pinkham Notch, I reassured myself it was not cowardice that forced me off the ridge. "It was really goddamn nasty", said the gazelle that had gone on the AT, coming into the lodge after dark. Prudence is a virtue too.

Stuck

Mt. Webster Cliffs, NH
Mile unknown

Fresh from the AYCE at Crawford Notch, I had cheerfully greeted my bloated belly in the same way that the Blues Brothers greeted a full tank of gas. That was an hour ago. Now I gaze at the next cliff face from my perch on this cliff, and reflect on how awkward ten slices of bacon, five eggs, six sausages, four pancakes, two english muffins, a bagel, a donut, a liter of coffee and a cup of maple syrup can make a man. How in the hell am I going to get over there?

I climb the only way possible in these sorts of boulder scrambles: jump at a point higher than yourself and hope you stick, like one of those octopus toys that came in cereal boxes when I was a kid. As I splat into the next rock, I hug the granite with as much of my body as possible, feeling the breakfast try to come up for a breath of air. Vomit would perilously lubricate the space between my body and this rock, so I swallow and burp, tentatively. Stay down there breakfast. Nurlp. Nurlp. Gurp. My body stays stuck to this rock, my breakfast begins a more civil discussion with my body, and I begin pulling myself up the "trail". I'm averaging just over 1.2 miles per frickin hour.

Some places in the Whites are harder than others. Webster Cliffs is one of those places. Doubtless harder places wait for me tomorrow, and- oh look!- a cold front! Just in time for Mt. Washington tomorrow. You know, the Windiest Place on the Planet.

I think about sedentary life and how it seems strangely attractive, just for a moment, when I'm sure I'm about to throw up my breakfast. For some reason the internet humor site Something Awful comes to mind, specifically its inexplicable Steve Perry fanfiction. Wait wait wait wait wait. Don't think about Steve Perry, I warn myself. Don't think about Steve Perry . . Don't think about Steve Perry . . Don't think about Steve Perry.

Too late. Oh crap in a hat. Now it's stuck.

"Don't Stop!
Believin'!
YayahyallahYAYAYEEEAYAY!

Streetlights!
People!
WoahohOOHHHHHH!"

Say hello to the Whites' new theme song.

Hitchhiking Delights

Crawford Notch, NH
Mile 1829

One of the skills I've picked up over the course of this hike is the art of hitchhiking. In a lot of ways, hitching is like gambling. You start the hitch attempt sort of wanting to get to town, in this case, for an all you can eat breakfast buffet. Time goes by. You wonder if you really want the AYCE buffet, and how wouldn't it be nice to get to the hut early before the forecast heavy weather sets in? But the thing is, the more you think about that AYCE buffet, with its limitless tanks of sausage gravy and eggs and bacon and pancakes and real local maple syrup, the less likely you are to give up the hitch. It begins to look like a big jackpot that you're just around the corner from. A jackpot filled with pork grease and sugar.

And truth be told, hitching is a something-zero game. If you can give up a certain amount of time, you get odds to win the ride. Given enough time, you will win. If there was a casino with this kind of game, people would be knocking each other over to play it, right before the house closed the game.

Then again, maybe they wouldn't. In a New Yorker article on neuroeconomics and loss aversion ("Mind Games"), researchers noted that people often choose not to gamble even when the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor. For example, if they are given a game where they have a 50-50 chance of either winning a hundred fifty dollars or losing a hundred, eighty percent choose not to play, in spite of the fact that if they play it twenty times, they will end up quite a bit ahead. "The brain has a lot of competing systems in it, and they don't always say the same thing," said a researcher in the article. You're telling me, bub.

The gambling analogy is a lot better than the charisma analogy, in which every passing car is an affront to your personal dignity. No sir. It's not a popularity contest. It's just a game.

That said, thanks to all those picking up hikers off lonesome roadways, especially Jocelyn from the AMC Highlands Center. You make us- and our bellies- very, very happy.

EDIT
You make our bellies very happy until we attempt to climb four thousand feet in two miles. Then we get very very sick.

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.