Ice and Stone

Mount Katahdin, ME
Mile Last

We get up in the same way we have gotten up for hundreds of mornings. The sky is not yet light. First people up blow puffs of steam, then break out their cigarettes and pipes, filling the shelter with tobacco and pot smoke. Sleeping bags get rolled up first, to destroy the temptation of curling up in them again. Thermorests get rolled. Breakfast is broken out, and after we eat it, we go to the ranger station to fill in the form, under a gray sky of freezing rain.

If we do not return the form by the end of day, they will send Blackhawks to look for us. In this northerly climate, in this time of year at Katahdin's elevation, lightly equipped hikers can not be expected to survive above the treeline after dark. We pack daypacks with essentials, leave our big packs at the ranger station and head up.

The four thousand foot climb up Katahdin is concentrated in a one point five mile boulder scramble. I remember looking at the mountain from the wilderness, all excitement drained from me by wet and an incipient fever. Shouldn't be so bad, I thought, looking at the approach from the totally wrong angle. From the angle the AT actually uses, it is that bad. The day packs save us. We become quadrupeds on the way up, scared apes on the way down. It's a scary ridge. Concentrate too much on how high you are and you'd fall. You have to have a good sense of here-ness. This rock is here. I am here. I am going to the next rock.

After the scramble we are in the Katahdin Tablelands. It's a shockingly civilized climb from this point on, past Thoreau spring, so named for the prissy little bastard who never made it this far up the mountain. It's fantastic, like the Presidentials, but without the AMC presence, and the snackbars. On to the summit.

I break into a run for the last three hundred meters. Sprint to finish! People on the summit cheer. The run is a broken dancing thing, across rocks and scree, but it feels good. My body is so changed that when I summit I do not feel particularly winded. Holy Jesus in Heaven, I think, there's no time on Earth I've been in this shape. I've just run uphill for scores of meters and my lungs don't even notice.

It's freezing up here, literally. I avoid ice patches because they glow like polished stone. Don't step on the shiny bits. The view is incredible. I can see Avery Peak, more than a hundred trail miles back. My hands hurt. My nose really hurts. I don't feel either.

The sign. Katahdin. Northern Terminus of the Appalachian Trail. I feel curiously empty. Another crazy ass mountain. It's done. I'm done.

Coming down it is another matter entirely. It is by far the most treacherous part of the entire trail. The alternate route down Knife Edge looks even worse, not something I'd ever want to tackle without some real climbing gear. Hopping Gautama Buddha, do I have to walk down that?

Yes you do, says the Buddha.

And then I am down. I'm coming home..

Hundred Mile Enron

The Hundred Mile Wilderness, ME
Mile: 2152

Given a certain number of hours bog-hopping, any person will get his or her feet wet. Jet Li may take a thirty hours, Deputy Colchrane of Hazzard County may take thirty seconds. It takes me three hours or so of solid root and rock hopping before it happens. Bog jumping is like dodging bullets: you only need to make the mistake once. One slip, your foot is wet. And what the hell, if one foot is wet, why not both? Then you can just tromp through the bog and stamp out miles, instead of mincing about on rocks and roots and trekking poles.

But then we have a quandary: why not just stomp into the bog at once and make the miles from the get go? Because we do not know where the bog begins and ends. When we start bog jumping, we are doing it in the optimistic hope that the bog will take less time to traverse than we can expect our reflexes to hold out.

This hooks into an interesting study on loss aversion I alluded to a few weeks ago. In it, we see people turning down a 50/50 $100 bet that offers 150 on a win and 0 on a loss. Well, it's easy to criticize people for turning it down, but maybe their intuitive distrust of the situation is a good survival strategy.

For example, the game assumes the odds stay the same throughout the play time. What if they don't? What if the odds improve later, or start bad and get better? Then other players "in the know" get ahead, which brings in a whole lot of other very unscientific feelings.

Or say that one player has 200 to start the game, and another has a grand. The guy with a grand has a much better chance of not being shut down, where the guy with 200 could get shut down after one bad break. This is why you distrust fund managers who advise retirees to take risky investments. The retirees have no more cash coming in- if it's all or nothing and you go broke, you are done.

And if the client is also your employee, you open up a whole other set of risks. Like them wanting to kill you. Slowly.

The Last Town

Somewhere north of Monson

Mile 2070-ish

 

The Hundred Mile Wilderness is not quite so wild as one would expect. "I can drive you anywhere in the Wilderness", said Buddy, a local Trail Angel and all around good guy. So I've taken advantage of the driver to slack me through a few dozen miles. Slackpacking is the practice of hiring a driver to pick you up at the end of the day, so you don't need to carry a heavy pack. Without a pack, you can literally jog down the trail, covering twice the distance normally possible. It's nice. You're a lot more agile when running than you are when walking.

 

This morning we are getting dropped off for real. I probably won't be updating this journal until after I summit Katahdin, from the town of Millinocket. Less than a hundred miles left.

Avian Culture

There's not a lot of birdsong in Maine. It's a largely silent wood, apart from the rut moans of moose. It makes one reflect on the rich birdsong of the woods further south. The texture of the call and reply was something to marvel at. To be honest, the complexity of the calls seemed to indicate that a fairly high degree of information exchange was taking place. It would hint at the existence of culture.

Avian neurons are capable of some amazing feats compared to their mammalian counterparts- bird brains can do a lot more with less. Pepperberg's work with African Grey parrots has, in anecdotal evidence, shown that these amazing birds are capable of manipulating symbols through language, human language at that.

I'm reminded of how Europeans, when exposed to the oceancraft of the Polynesian voyagers, immediately assumed that the human brain was capable of innate directionfinding. Naturally these primitives were incapable of developing skills on their own. As it turned out, the Polynesians simply had incredible cultural tools to find land without compasses or maps, by analyzing wave patterns.

Researchers have been looking for magnetic sense in birds for a very long time. Some evidence has been found, some is lacking. What if the bare spots in this research is filled in with an avian culture? Parents teaching children how to read the lay of the land, how to find their way along a coastline?

It's not too farfetched, After all, we are sitting where we are because a few primates managed the same trick, and so many others.

Who we are

Northern Outdoor Lodge
Caratunk, ME
Mile 2018

Who are through-hikers?

They are:

7 retirees
An airplane mechanic
8 college graduates
An offshore crab fisherman
A data architect
5 software QA staff (plus me, I suppose, although I never really thought of myself as a QA person. I was more like a professional pain in the ass.)
3 sales executives
A restaurant tycoon
An executive at a CRS company
An IT professional at Cendant, my former employer
2 ex-Rangers
1 ex-Recon Marine
A golden retriever
An ordnance loader on an aircraft carrier
A small print shop owner
A real estate entrepreneur
A nuclear engineer on an unnamed nuclear missile submarine
One technical writer (plus me)
An adventure swimmer
A burglar
A gourmand and caterer
A lawyer for the tobacco lobby
A wildcat oilman, swordfighter, and expert in archaic weapons of all varieties (seriously)

And many, many others I did not have the pleasure of meeting. With two exceptions, they are all good people, and a few of them are exceptional people, people I would not mind knowing for a lifetime.

It's who we are.

Deep What?

Little Bigelow Shelter, ME
Mile 2002

Deep Survival endorses, somehow, the fact that survival in extreme situations is the result of the survivors' competence. I take issue with that hypothesis: the primary decider in extreme situations is luck, and lots of it. But given the hypothesis, he makes some interesting assumptions about the nature of a survivor.

If any through-hiker were to follow his rules for survival, for example, they would never, ever finish the trip. "If you're sweating in cool weather, you're working too hard". Horse puckey. You go until you can't go any further, then you find something inside that makes you go beyond that. I've hiked until I felt like the mountain was beating me, extravagantly and at leisure, like the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse beats Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona. No need to squirm or wiggle, I remember thinking. The heavy blows come all the same.

It seems that there are two personae in extreme situations- one is the survivor, and another is the acheiver. The two types have little in common. After all, survivors specialize in getting out of trouble. Acheivers specialize in getting into it.

That said, it's still a pretty good book, with some good real-life lessons in it. Survival is a very important part of acheivement after all.

As a postscript, it turned out to be a good decision to get off Washington when I did- there were three Lifeflights from the Presidentials that evening. I'm glad not to have been on any of them.

Flattening

Harrison's Camp, ME
Mile 2014

Maine is flattening, and will continue to do so until I get to Katahdin. Ten days left now. I'm starting to feel, once again, as if I am on an exceptionally long vacation, rather that a slog across the width of the country. With that comes the realization I will be out of the mountains again. I'm making strategies in my head to adjust to normal life, while keeping up a high level of physical activity.

Harrison's is a paradise. It's an old fashioned wood-heated fish and game camp, with a twelve pancake breakfast. "We only feed this to through-hikers", said Tim Harrison. "It'd kill anyone else." He might be right. But the view from the dining room wouldn't kill anyone. Pierce Pond Creek cascades across a little valley, with Pierce Creek Falls visible up the ravine. Bluegrass plays softly in the background, and I take a break from stuffing my face. The fall colors are peaking too, the valleys look like they're made of stained glass.

It's shocking how little time you have as a through-hiker, to just sit and look. You're either pumping at hills furiously, eating, or sleeping. Stop and look, though, and you see heaven on earth. I remember a piece of dialogue from Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

"I'm not sure if I can take much more of this, but I don't want it to stop"

Near the beginning of this trip I thought of this line often, and now, near the end, it comes to mind again.

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!