Monson, Maine

September 16 - 19

Last note from the trail. I ended up skipping about 130 miles of Maine, all the way to Monson. I feel kind of bad about this, for all the obvious reasons - namely that this means my hike will end up only being something like 1900 miles, and that I'm missing some of the most beautiful stuff. But the reasons for skipping are equally obvious - if I hiked all of Maine, I'd be getting home less than a week before I would need to get back to work, and that would have been really bad. Even with two weeks' R&R, I have a feeling it's going to be ugly. The consensus seems to be that it takes a few months after a thru-hike before you're back to whatever approaches normalcy.

It took me two full days to hitchhike up to Monson, and the time has been a reminder that many of the best parts of this experience have come off the trail. Most of my hitches have been from one flyspeck town to the next, ten or so miles at a time, spending a few hours in little places with a store, a post office, and a population well short of four digits.

Monson is the last of these, and it's the last of the trail towns. It's got a main drag running through the center and just a few side streets. I count two small churches, and about a half-dozen businesses. There's an antique/gift shop with a sign that gives you a number to call "If we're closed and you want to come in." There's a gas station (one pump) which is also the convenience store, pizzeria and deli. There's a pub which is also the restaurant, laundromat, and guesthouse, and Shaw's boarding house, which is an AT institution. No crappy hostel linens here; the beds have clean, new sheets and thick comforters. Breakfast is all-you-can-eat eggs, home fries, bacon, sausage and blueberry pancakes. And then there's the Monson General Store, which is about twenty feet wide by sixty feet deep, and where you can pick up some Spaghetti-O's, a garden hose, a tube of toothpaste, a scoop of ice cream, and an egg salad sandwich, while also getting your keys duplicated and renting a DVD. It's sort of like a Wal-Mart supercenter, without all the big-city fuss and pretension.

If you come to Monson, do it on a Friday. The pub has a Fish Fry - all-you-can-eat, of course - and the General Store has bluegrass night. Actually, the music depends on who shows up to play any given Friday. Last night, it was several guitars, a banjo or two, three fiddlers, a dulcimer, and a harmonica, and the music ran from John Denver to Janis Joplin to Gospel to Irish Folk tunes. The audience was mostly seniors with more than a handful of hairy hiker types mixed in. (I'm told they get a lot of families with kids in the summer months). Folks join in singing or clapping along as the mood strikes - the chorus to "Country Roads" brought nearly everyone to full-voice. A glass jar of corn kernels made the rounds as a shaker percussion instrument, and I took a turn. Folks drifted out as the night went along, and things finally wound up around 10:30. I walked out into a cold, clear night, where a half-moon hung in the blackness and a breeze promised that winter was coming but not yet, not yet. And I thought that if someone came down from Pluto, and they wanted to know what human life was supposed to be about, you could do a hell of a lot worse than taking them to Monson, Maine on a Friday night.



But that was last night, and this is today. Today I'm back on the trail, and heading into the Hundred Mile Wilderness. It's a little bit of a misnomer, but north of Monson it's 100 miles to the nearest store; and after that it's only 14 miles to the summit of Mt. Katahdia, and the end of the trail, and the beginning of the trip home - which will take about 2 days, roughly 1/100th of what it took to get here.

Of course, "home" is always a loaded term. I've lived in Florida for eight years, but I still don't always really think of it as "home" in a sense deeper than "it's where I keep my other pair of shoes." I've lived so many places in my life, that it's been hard to ever get that feeling of homeness at any of them.

And now, I'm getting ready to leave another home. In a lot of ways, the trail - especially the trail when experienced along it's length during a season - has a lot in common with these little towns I enjoy so much. Everyone knows everyone else, mostly. Everyone shops at the same stores and drives the same roads and knows the punchlines to all the same jokes. Everyone trusts each other, and occasionally may even need to rely on each other. It's a 2000-mile long village, and I have lived there. When I come back to Monson - or Damascus, or Unionville or Max Patch or Mt. Washington or any of a hundred spots on the trail that I loved - these places won't feel like somewhere I've visited, but like a place I've lived in.

For the last month, as I've gotten more and more worn down by the trail, I've been thinking more and more that "I just want to go home." Only now am I starting to realize that once I'm safely on my couch in Florida, I'll be thinking of the woods and saying the same thing.