Warm-up day 1: Rock Gap to Winding Stair and return

I'm not quite sure how to do these entries; I wrote my notes down on paper and I'm going to type them in here, but I don't know whether to put them in as separate days here or to put them all together. I guess I'll opt for separate for now.

I was already behind schedule before even starting out. Being behind in grading papers, as always, kept me from getting away on time, and then I hit nasty traffic in Atlanta, and took waaay too much type buying stuff at REI in Atlanta. By the time I finally got to my destination, The Standing Indian Basin, south of Franklin NC, it was already dark. And upon arrival, I discover that Campground where I was intending to leave the jeep for 4 days, was closed for winter, and most of the Forest Service roads were closed as well.

Well, crap.

I didn't bother to look into this stuff because I'd been here before and knew where I was going. Never even thought about the possibility of roads being closed for winter.

Sitting at closed gate in the middle of a forest at 9 pm, I opted for the easiest solution: I went to bed. I didn't feel like setting up a camp, and the jeep was right there for shelter if need be, so I just "cowboy camped, " which is a pretentious way hikers have of saying "slept out in the open." (e.g. like cowboys do in the movies). It wasn't cold (maybe 45-50 or so), especially with my down quilts, so I had no problem nodding off. Towards dawn, it started sprinkling, so I got back into the car and finished the night there.

After I got up I had to reassess my plan slightly. The trail makes a big bend at this point, so the idea was to park the jeep right in the middle, hike the loop, and then come back. (For those following along at home: look at this map, go down to extreme southern NC, and then find where it crosses Rt. 64. The area I'm talking about runs from Rt. 64 down almost to GA and then back up to Standing Indian Mountain.) This is about 25 miles of trail, and you could add maybe 10 more getting to and from the starting point.

After looking at the map I figured I'd still do as much as I could of my original plan and improvise from there, but I'd have to leave my car somewhere else and do some backtracking. I ended up parking at Rock Gap. There's a small parking area here which is just a few hundred yards from an AT shelter. I'd set up my camp next to the shelter, then spend my first day walking sans backpack, 3.5 miles north to Winding Stair Gap and then back again, and then tomorrow load up the pack and take the AT southbound.

And this I did. The trail was pretty unremarkable throughout. First days are always rough, and this was true even without a pack. Several tough uphill climbs had me panting pretty hard and dreading putting on the pack tomorrow. But I survived it, and threw in a side trip to go see the Wasilik Poplar. A really big tree, though by the time I got to it I was pretty well wiped out after a 9 mile day.

Made it back to the Rock Gap shelter and found out I'd be spending the night with The Unknown Hiker (remind me to explain Trail Names somewhere). He was sleeping inside the shelter, and I was hammocking just few yards away from it. I picked his brain for a while, as he was obviously experienced, but it wasn't until I got home and looked him up that realized out how much: dude's completed three thru-hikes.

Sadly, I didn't make as much of an impression: he referred to me on Trailjournals as a "local hiker," though I'm sure I mentioned being from FL. Feel like I just got dissed ...

As to the weather that night, I'll put that in the next entry.

Heading to NC

Off work for the next 3 weeks, I'm heading up to North Carolina tomorrow to do a section of the AT. I've got my pack list pretty much set, and most all my gear bought, so now I want to get up on the trail and try some of it out, as a fair amount of it is new stuff that I've never actually used before. The biggest thing, by far, is my hammock system; I've never actually hung out in a hammock in temps below about 50, so I'm kind of anxious to see how this goes.

If you don't like it, stop reading

If it's not obvious, the "it" referred to in the title refers to this blog. The "you" refers to you.

This blog will likely not have a large readership, but I do expect a diverse one. I have within my immediate family two Southern Baptist ministers; I also have friends that are agnostics, atheists, Muslims and neopagans. I have people I care about that smoke like chimneys, drink like fish, and fornicate like hotel heiresses, and others that consider champagne at a wedding sinful.

It's my hope to write in such a way as to be interesting, entertaining and relevant to everybody, it's entirely possible that sooner or later I will say something that offends you. Some of you will be offended when I use profanity, some of you will be offended when I get religious; I may end up doing both in the same sentence, and that will really everybody. If so, I'm sorry, but, well ... read the title.

I have a dream

Had it three times now, in fact, which is rare since I seldom remember dreams.

In the dream, I'm walking on a sidewalk near a body of water. Sometimes it's the pond on the the golf course behind my house, sometimes it's Lake Wales. Anyway, I'm walking along the sidewalk when I see a gator in the path a few yards ahead of me. Alarmed, I climb a tree (I think a lamppost in one version).

Looking down at the gator, he's seen me and is looking up with his mouth open. He's making some sort of menacing hissy sound, and it's obvious he means to do me harm. He's not especially big, though -- 3-4 feet or so -- which makes my terror all the more ridiculous. I look around, but there's nobody in sight. I'm sure as hell not going to yell "help." I'm a grown man that's climbed a tree to run away from a three-foot gator. That's embarrassing enough; I don't need to summon the entire community in to witness the humiliation. I'm pretty sure I can easily get down and get away from him (true-life fact: gators are fast, but they tire very quickly on land; you can outrun them if you have a head start). But even though I know this, I can't get the nerve up to do it.

"Of course you can outrun me," the gator says, "but you're gonna have to get out of the tree first. Geez, even if I did catch you, I'm only three feet long. Get a good stick and you could probably beat me off if need be."

"Where am I gonna get a stick?"

"You're in a tree, idiot. No, you probably can't break something off from up there, but look, there's a nice thick piece of dead wood right there on the ground. It's probably strong enough for you to whack me with that a few times. But you are going to have to get out of the tree to grab it."

This does seem like a good plan. And the more I look at the gator, I start to think that maybe he's not what he seems.

"Of course I'm not. For one thing, gators don't talk."

Again, he's making sense. Then I look closer, and I start to realize that he's actually one of these.

"A garden gator? You're not even alive?"

"Nope. Ceramic. Don't even have legs."

"So if I climb down from this tree and run away, you won't be able to bite me."

"No guarantees."


And thus the conversation proceeds. I am soon convinced that the gator cannot harm me, and he in fact confirms that I am correct and that he is physically incapable of even moving from the spot on the sidewalk where he has been placed, let alone attacking me. And yet he will not promise not to try. We have long conversations in which we go round and round these same points repeatedly, never really getting anywhere.

Thus, we have a parallel. (And this is real me speaking now, not dreaming-me.) I'm up in the tree, knowing what I could, should do and can do, knowing with a mortal certainty that there is no way that the gator is going to be able to attack ... but I won't do it. The gator, on the other hand, is fully aware that attacking me is a physical impossibility -- he has no legs, his teeth are small and not especially sharp, and since he is in fact only 3 bits of ceramic, his mouth is not actually capable of closing on my leg, let alone exerting any leverage if he did. And yet, though he easily concedes that he can do nothing, he repeatedly refuses to (pardon the lit-speak) relinquish his agency and give me any reassurance that he will do nothing.

(I suppose I should put in here that in my memories of the dreams I don't recall the reason that the gator was considering attacking me anyway, though in the notes I scribbled down after waking one time there is the line "I ate his wife." I suppose that explains it, but in truth he never really seemed personally angry at me, even as he so implacably insisted that he might well attack me should I climb down from the tree. I imagine that if he were here, he'd sensibly point out that as a manifestation of my id, threatening me was pretty much his raison d'etre and the whole wife thing was just a distraction, which is why it was edited out in later drafts. He was logical that way.)

I wish I could end the story with a rousing conclusion, but the truth of the matter is that every single time, the dream has ended with me still up in the tree and the gator still on the sidewalk. I wake up and feel like I just walked out of Waiting for Godot. More accurately, like I just starred in it, I suppose. It's all very unresolved.

The only other thing worth mentioning is that every time I woke from the dream I thought it obvious that the dream was about hiking the AT. And so it gets written down and put here.

An introduction to hiking.

Just looking for something to post on here to get this going. This is a passage from "A walk in the woods" that I like; I think it gives a pretty good idea about how starting out on a hike feels to the relative novice (like he was, and like I still pretty much am).

Seven miles seems so little, but it's not, believe me. With a pack, even for fit people it is not easy. You know what it's like when you're at a zoo or an amusement park with a small child who won't walk another step? You hoist him lightly onto your shoulders and for a while -- for a couple minutes -- it's actually kind of fun to have him up there, pretending like you're going to tip him off or cruising his head towards some low projection before veering off (all being well) at the last instant. But then it starts to get uncomfortable. You feel a twinge in your neck, a tightening between your shoulder blades, and the sensation seeps and spreads until it is decidedly uncomfortable, and you announce to little Jimmy that you're going to have to put him down for awhile.
...
OK, now imagine two little Jimmies in a pack on your back, or, better still, something inert but weighty, something that doesn't want to be lifted, that makes it abundantly clear to you as soon as you pick it up that what it wants is to sit heavily on the ground -- say, a bag of cement or a box of medical textbooks -- in any case, forty pounds of profound heaviness. Imagine the jerk of the pack going on, like the pull of a down elevator. Imagine walking with that weight for hours, for days, and not along level asphalt paths with benches and refreshment stands at thoughtful intervals but over a rough trail, full of sharp rocks and unyielding roots and staggering ascents that transfer enormous amounts of strain to your pale, shaking thighs. Now tilt your head back until your neck is taut, and fix your gaze on a point two miles away. That's your first climb. It's 4,682 steep feet to the top, and there are lots more just like it. Don't tell me that seven miles is not far. Oh, and here's the other thing. You don't have to do this. You're not in the army. You can quit right now. Go home. See your family. Sleep in a bed.

Alternatively, you poor, sad, schmuck. you can walk 2,169 miles through mountain and wilderness to Maine.

First toe in

Then how should I begin
to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

How should I begin? Why, with a pretentious quotation, of course.

Greetings, initial-blog-post readers, whoever you are. Since I haven't told anyone this blog even exists, you're reading this either because you surfed onto this blog randomly, or else because it's been so utterly fascinating you had to go back all the way to the beginning and read the whole thing.

Yeah, I'm betting on random surfing.


I appear to be creating a blog for my hike of the Appalachian Trail. Why I would do such a thing, I'm not sure.

Partly, I suppose, to keep friends and family appraised of what I'm doing on the hike; but that would be much easier to do with the occasional phone call and forwarded emails. Partly to dispense whatever profoundly wise reflections occur to me while doing the hike; but I am altogether uncertain I will have any. Partly to share the adventure with the whole wide world; but frankly, I'm doing the hike in part to get away from you people.

I guess, in the end, I'm trying out a blog for some of the same reasons I'm doing the hike. A couple of people have asked me about the hike "have you done this sort of thing before?" The answer I ought to give is "Not really, and that's sort of the point." I don't actually say that, of course: that would be much too revealing. But the truth of the thing is that I needed to do something enormous, something that would not fit into the coffeespoons I am used to living by, and the AT seemed as good as anything. And if the idea of writing a blog seems remarkably weird to me, so much more reason to do it.

I'm disturbing the universe, eating a peach, and putting on a snorkel to get a mermaid. And making whatever pretentious references I damn well please along the way.

Let us go then, you and I.