8/6 – 8/9

I’m definitely in New England now. The woods are increasingly full of white-barked birch trees, along with lots of hemlock. The towns all have houses and churches that are a century or two old.

Lots of rain lately. Lots of walking in wet socks. In places, the Berkshires are almost more like a plateau than a mountain range. This leads to a lot of ponds, which are nice, but also to a lot of muddy, swampy spots. Mosquitoes have been pretty nasty.

Hitching back into town from a re-supply, I get picked up by none other that Lipstick, out once again playing taxi driver for her husband Raccoon. The AT continues to be a small world…

Before I left, I put virtually my entire CD collection onto a handful of memory cards that I could put into my MP3 player. The music has been a huge, huge, huge help in keeping myself motivated and staving off boredom from the last 1500 miles. But the last few days I’ve been listening to some audio books that I’d recorded instead. When I decided to go back to the music today, I realized that I lost the canister containing the memory cards. Considering that this is the one item in my pack that can’t possibly be replaced, this is pretty much a disaster. Since I could have lost them any number of places in the last week, there’s no chance of finding them (and, no, I didn’t put my name on the canister; that would have been intelligent of me.) This is a serious bummer going into the last 650 miles

Visited one of the trail institutions, “The cookie Lady.” For over twenty years, Roy and Marilyn Wiley have given free homemade cookies to hikers that stop by their blueberry farm a few hundred yards off the trail. Alas, the cookie Lady is out when I come by, but the Cookie Man hooks me up with some Raisin and Chocolate Chip cookies.

More ridiculous hospitality. Going into Dalton, MA, I’m told by some southbound thru-hikers (who I’ve been running into almost daily for the last 2 weeks.) to go to the Shell station and ask about “The Birdcage.” I do, and get directions to the house of Rob Bird. Rob is the manager of the couple gas stations, and in his spare time, he, like Mayor Dick Ludwick, has turned his house into hikers central. The front porch has several cats, and there’s about a dozen mattresses in the loft of the garage. Like the Mayor, Rob invites you to take a shower (actually, he requires it, which is pretty darn understandable), do your laundry, and hang out in his living room. By this point, it should make sense when I say that it’s both amazing and unsurprising. I probably shouldn’t, but I give into temptation and take a zero day in Dalton. (did I mention that the congregational church was having a $5 blueberry pancake breakfast? Well, they were.)