July 14 - July 17

Finished off Pennsylvania, and good riddance. Visiting with family and spending a whole week slackpacking was great, but walking on sharp rocks every day sucked. I turned an ankle multiple times each day, and the pointy rocks jabbed at the bottom of my feet. (Did you know that Northeastern PA was once known as "the slate belt?" I didn't but I'll never forget it.) Some highlights of the last few days:

--Finally saw my first rattlesnake. Disappointingly, he didn't rattle at me. He was sunning himself in the center of the trail, and I threw rocks at him to get him to move. I thought about using my poles to pick him up, all Steve Irwin-style, but then I remembered that Steve Irwin was killed by an animal.

--The Lehigh Gap was a pretty depressing place. Decades of zinc smelting in the town of Palmerton led to the mountains above the town being completely devoid of vegetation. Pollution killed everything, leaving a moonscape of barren rock. Years of cleanup has improved it, I'm told, but vegetation is still sparse and patchy, and even the good spots look more like Mexico than Pennsylvania. The 1000 foot climb out of the gap - on bare, shadeless rock on a 90 degree day - was as hard a climb as any on the trail so far.

--My last night in Pennsylvania, I had a view across the river into New Jersey. A rain shower ended my day earlier than I was planning, but then rewarded me with a rainbow pretty much directly over the Delaware River with Jersey as my pot of gold. I'll take it.


July 18

I wake up at 5 am, and I'm hiking by 6. Early stop the day before means I have to get going today as I have an appointment - a couple of old college friends are coming up to meet me on the trail. So I hurry out of camp, knock off a fairly easy 6 miles before 10 am, then finish a few town errands in Delaware Water Gap, PA, before walking another mile over to the Jersey side.

A dozen years out of college, my friend Rachel is one of the very few people I've kept up more than cursory contact with. I don't think I'd have expected that, but I'm very glad for it. She's one of the very few friends I've ever had willing to engage in the sort of rambling, contentious philosophical and theological conversations/arguments I enjoy. To my chagrin, I must confess that over time, I've moved in her direction more than she's moved in mine. I suppose I'm asking for it when I debate an Ivy League Seminary graduate. (And as she reads this, she's no doubt rolling her eyes and saying, "It's not a contest with winners and losers." She's right there, too, so score another for her.)

Anyway, I have a great afternoon picnicking and catching up with Rachel and Andrew, and meeting their two adorable daughters, Heather and Hannah. They graciously invite me to go down the shore with them for a day or so, and I am enormously tempted; but I've just barely begun to get my rhythm back after my Pennsylvania break, and more time off would just make it that much harder.

By early evening, they drop me off where we met, just on the Jersey side of the river. I walk about a mile before making camp.

From Harper's Ferry to the Delaware Water Gap, this hike's been about meeting up with family and friends; now it's back to the grind. I still have 900 miles to go, including the hardest sections of the entire trail, in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. At one time, I imangined that the trail got easier as you went along, but that isn't true. At best, you just become used to it being hard; at worst, it's like being in a sports playoff, where winning one match up only means you move on to play someone even tougher.

I am already more tired, in more ways, than I have ever been in my life. And now I have to walk the last 900 miles in 2/3 the time it took me to walk the first 900, and over tougher terrain, and likely in worse weather.


July 19 - 21

First three days in New Jersey are hot, humid and very rocky. Altogether unpleasant, really. The humidity just sucks the life right out of you; I've been trying to get up early in the mornings to avoid the worst of the heat, but the humidity is such that I'm still dripping sweat at 9 am. Adding to that has been loneliness - for three days, I've been almost always alone, occasionally meeting section-hikers and only seeing a couple thru-hikers. I can read the registers and see a whole bunch of people just a few days ahead, but in the heat and humidity, still getting back in shape after so much taking it easy in Pennsylvania, I have no chance of catching up.

There have been a few highlights. My first night camping in Jersey was at an absolutely beautiful, and sort of illegal spot right next to a creek. I woke up the next morning at about 6:30, rolled out of the hammock, and began to stretch out. I'd only gone a few paces when I found myself about fifteen feet away from an adult male bear. He was big - 6 feet tall and 250 pounds. We scared the snot out of each other - each of us running about 20 yards back before stopping to eye one another, and slowly regaining our nerve. He walked back down to the creek, finished his drink, then walked off, clearly not happy with my campsite.


July 22

The day started as another grim slog in miserable conditions - once more hitting 90+ degrees, once more smotheringly humid the same miserable conditions I've been in for what seems like forever. But around noon, things start to change.

First, I run in to Brahma Bull and Sweet Potato, a couple that I've met several times along the trail, starting waaaay back near Damascus. With them is The Thinker, who I've met as well as Cayenne and Tailgate, two women who have been ahead of me for months and who somehow I passed in the last few days. (These kind of encounters happen a lot; if you read the hiker registers in the shelters, hostels and so on, you see the same names again and again, until you finally meet them after weeks or months.) Soon, I'm walking in one of the biggest groups I've been in.

Second, we hit the ironically-famous "Secret Shelter." It has the name because it does not appear on any maps; it is not an officially-sanctioned AT shelter. Instead, it is on private property, owned by a farmer AT thru-hiker who makes it available to hikers. There's not much of a sign, but it's mentioned in the guidebooks long-distance hikers use, so you have to be in the know. You get there, and it's a cabin with electricity (and a fan) hot running water (and a shower). Definitely a great place to spend the night, if I'd gotten here later than 2:30. Even so, it was a nice place to take a break before heading on, and wonderful to see someone opening up their private property this way.

Which leads me to the Mayor of the village of Unionville, NY, population 500 and change (the trail here is still in NJ, but essentially runs parallel and just over the border for some thirty miles or so; Unionville is only .4 off the trail, but across the state line). What the Mayor does is another sort of mystery. As far back as Tennessee, I was told to get here and look up the Mayor. The last couple shelter registers have included notes from southbounders praising the Mayor, but not saying exactly what for. My guidebook only says that Unionville allows hikers to camp on the town park.

So the seven of us roll into Unionville not really knowing what to expect. We reach the general store, and shortly afterwards an SUV arrives. (I'm guessing someone had a number and called it, but I really don't know.) Is this the Mayor?
"No, I'm Butch. I got room for five, and I'll come back for the rest of youse. Put your packs in the back."

This is the sort of thing you really get used to on the trail. You have no real idea where you're going or what's going to happen; you just go with it.

As it happens, we're taken to the house of Dick Ludwick. Dick's been the village Mayor for the last 12 years (he says it's his last term), after careers in insurance and as a teacher. He's a widower, his wife having passed several years ago. One son lives upstate, the other in London. As Mayor, he's always been hiker-friendly, but in the last two years, he's taken things to a whole new level. He started offering showers and laundry; then it was letting people camp in his yard; this year he's turned his basement into a bunkhouse and is serving up dinner every night to however many hikers show up. So far the high night has been 26.

This is not a hostel; this is Dick's home. He's cooking you dinner in his kitchen, doing your laundry in his washer and dryer, inviting you to sit around his dining room table. When the bunkroom downstairs fills up, you can sleep on his living room floor.

Of course, this is New York, so the hospitality isn't sugar-coated; Dick, his housemate Bill, Ralph (a village employee; maybe THE village employee) and whatever other locals he's corralled into helping out will welcome you with sarcasm and put-downs. But it is unmistakably a welcome nonetheless. Dick makes a point to show an inspirational video to every single hiker that comes through (Google the name "Paul Potts") and offer up heartfelt encouragement. He's done this for several hundred hikers this year.

I wrote a long entry before I left where I explained Trail Magic. That's a shame as I now do not think I understood it at the time. The physical gifts that Trail Angels provide are terrific - the drinks, the rides, the hospitality - but for me at least, they pale next to the spiritual sustenance.

One of my two favorite moments from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings comes right at the very end. Sam Gamgee has journeyed a thousand miles, crossed mountains and rivers and endured epic hardships. In the last chapter of the book, he must say goodbye to Frodo. But the last paragraph of the last chapter finds him alone, at the end of all his adventures, walking to his house his wife and daughter await. The sentence reads something to the effect of "...and there was a fire, and light in the windows, and he was expected." That sentence, the last four words especially, has always crushed me. It is one thing to be welcomed upon one's arrival; it's something else to know you were expected, your arrival prepared for.

I have not slain any dragons on this trip, and yet again and again I have found myself expected, not by anyone with any obligation to me, but by complete strangers. When I look back on this trip, I will remember the mountaintops and the rivers and the bears. But more than any of that, I will remember the human experiences. Foremost among those will be what's happened so much now, in ten states, that it becomes a commonplace: You arrive at a place you've never been, tired, hungry and filthy, only to find that you have been expected, and a place saved for you in the Mayor's house.

I take a zero day in Unionville, on the 23rd, partly just to enjoy the crowd here, partly to catch up on journaling, partly because a forecast of heavy rains, that naturally, end up not arriving until late in the day. Rains continue into the morning of the 24th, and I hike out into the wet.