I don't want that last post to be the last thing on here -- it really is a downer, and I'm really not that depressed. Everyone has post-hike blues, and I'm no exception. I did want to put on here, though, some of the things I've tried to take away from the hike.
1) Hike Your Own Hike.
This is the single biggest cliche you hear among hikers. But like most cliches, it is a cliche because it's true. The point of it is that there's no "right" way to hike: you have to decide for yourself whether you want to hike fast or slow, alone or in a group, etc. You can get advice; but ultimately you're the one who has to do the miles. The life applications are, I suppose, obvious.
2) Keep Your Pack Light.
When I was taking all my stuff out of storage after I got back, it amazed me how much crap I own. And not possessions: I mean crap. Useless stuff that I don't need. I've also started to think about what else I've been carrying that I don't need: habits, ideas, beliefs ...
3) Enjoy Every Sandwich.
You don't appreciate warmth until you've been cold, and you don't appreciate getting a ride into town until you've spent the last three days walking on a foot that feels like someone jabbed an icepick in it. Life really is simple. You're warm, dry, fed and safe? Be happy.
4) Embrace the Suck.
I learned to accept the fatigue and the hunger, not merely because they made sleeping and being fed that much nicer, but on their own terms. Life is not all about the great moments, and for every ten minutes I spent on a mountaintop, I spent ten hours walking through boring forest. For every cool mountain stream I could dip my feet into, there were miles and miles where I was soaked to the skin in my own sweat. For every time I had a really cool human experience, I spent an afternoon trudging alone, wondering why I don't have more friends, or a hiking partner, or a girl.
You can deny those realities, pretending you don't think what you think or feel what you feel, or you can accept that this also is life, and take pride in the fact that as miserable as you are, you're still in the game -- that indeed, your misery is something to be proud of, because it's a misery so many others proved unable to face.
So there you go: I spend six months walking through the forest, and I come back with four trite, schlocky slogans.
It was worth it.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Three Months Later
A lot of people (by "a lot" I mean, like, three) have asked me why I never put a summary posting for my hike, a sort of valedictory summation of the whole thing. What grand insights into life have I gotten from the hike?
I wanted to write that up. I meant to. But every time I even though about it, it was just profoundly depressing.
When I was heading back to the trail out of Gatlinburg, I caught a ride with a guy I met at the outfitter. He’d done a thru-hike several years ago, so we swapped stories. As the truck was getting up to Newfound Gap, where he’d be letting me off, he started talking about how much he envied me. “Man, enjoy your hike, ‘cause after you’re done, life just sucks in comparison. I’m not complaining about life – I’ve got a girlfriend and a good job and all, but nothing you ever do is going to be this awesome. You’re gonna finish, and be depressed for a year.”
He pissed me off ... mostly because I knew that he was right.
Real life does suck in comparison, and I have been depressed for the last three months.
I’ve told a lot of people that during the last two months of the hike, I wanted nothing more than to be finished with the damn trail; but that after two weeks, I wanted nothing more than to be back. Of course, if I did go back, that enthusiasm would last about three days, and I’d again be pining for a refrigerator.
What I want to go back to is not the trail itself, but the summer of 2008. I want to go back to the handful of moments on the trail that will be forever burned in my memory: Mt. Moosilauke; walking into Damascus for the first time; Cool Breeze pulling up in that SUV; Raffle Queen and Lipstick showing up, repeatedly, just when I needed them to; hearing my name called out as I summitted Katahdin. Those were some of the best moments of my life, and I want to live in those moments, the way other people would, if they could, live forever in their honeymoon or at the birth of their children. When I was a kid, I would reread my favorite books again and again.
The problem is, of course, that while you can read those stories again, you can never read them again for the first time. And I can never again climb Clingman’s Dome for the first time.
Shit, this is gotta be a downer to read. But there it is.
I wanted to write that up. I meant to. But every time I even though about it, it was just profoundly depressing.
When I was heading back to the trail out of Gatlinburg, I caught a ride with a guy I met at the outfitter. He’d done a thru-hike several years ago, so we swapped stories. As the truck was getting up to Newfound Gap, where he’d be letting me off, he started talking about how much he envied me. “Man, enjoy your hike, ‘cause after you’re done, life just sucks in comparison. I’m not complaining about life – I’ve got a girlfriend and a good job and all, but nothing you ever do is going to be this awesome. You’re gonna finish, and be depressed for a year.”
He pissed me off ... mostly because I knew that he was right.
Real life does suck in comparison, and I have been depressed for the last three months.
I’ve told a lot of people that during the last two months of the hike, I wanted nothing more than to be finished with the damn trail; but that after two weeks, I wanted nothing more than to be back. Of course, if I did go back, that enthusiasm would last about three days, and I’d again be pining for a refrigerator.
What I want to go back to is not the trail itself, but the summer of 2008. I want to go back to the handful of moments on the trail that will be forever burned in my memory: Mt. Moosilauke; walking into Damascus for the first time; Cool Breeze pulling up in that SUV; Raffle Queen and Lipstick showing up, repeatedly, just when I needed them to; hearing my name called out as I summitted Katahdin. Those were some of the best moments of my life, and I want to live in those moments, the way other people would, if they could, live forever in their honeymoon or at the birth of their children. When I was a kid, I would reread my favorite books again and again.
The problem is, of course, that while you can read those stories again, you can never read them again for the first time. And I can never again climb Clingman’s Dome for the first time.
Shit, this is gotta be a downer to read. But there it is.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
okay, sorry ...
I've been seriously lame about updating this; my apologies. I've been back for three weeks now, and have been ridiculously lazy about .
Photos are up at trailjournals: http://www.trailjournals.com/photos.cfm?id=395668
Journals entries from the last week of the hike follow below, and I'll have something up later about the re-adjustment to "real" life.
Photos are up at trailjournals: http://www.trailjournals.com/photos.cfm?id=395668
Journals entries from the last week of the hike follow below, and I'll have something up later about the re-adjustment to "real" life.
September 20-30
9/20Spent most of the day in Monson, running a couple errands and watching some college football on the TV at Shaw's. Stopped in a little gallery for local artists and crafts-types. Sure sign you're in a small town: the key is still in the galley door as you walk in.
Finally got out of town around 5ish, and I just make about 2 miles into the 100-mile wilderness before setting up camp. It's really become noticeable how much earlier it's getting dark. It just seems like yesterday that I could put in full days hiking, going until 7 or 8 at night, with dark not falling until 9. Now, it's getting dark much earlier; really cutting into walking time. I packed a calzone out of town to eat for my first night's dinner. It was awesome ... except for the fact that since I'm now in the 100-mile wilderness, I'll be packing a wad of used tinfoil for the next 98 miles.
9/21
First full day in the 100-mile, and I see a moose! A huge bull about 20 yards away. An amazing sight; it's an absolute privilege to be in the presence of an animal like that. Unfortunately, he ran as soon as he saw me, so I didn't get a decent photo at all. Still, a huge thrill.Also unfortunately, I took a nasty fall late on in the afternoon. I'll blame my heavy pack (7 days' food) for throwing me my balance off. I have a really sore hip, from where I fell right onto a rock, which will no doubt be sporting a lovely bruise for several days. Sore, I stop after only doing 7 miles; this is not a good thing to be doing when I'm still 91 miles from resupply.
9/22
Lots of uphill today, about 3000 feet of climbing. some really beautiful country, though, and the weather has been perfect: sunny, highs of about 62, cold but not frigid nights. I'm loving Maine. Sorry, fuller description later.
9/23
In a lot of places up here, especially above about 1500-2,000 feet or so, you're walking through extremely dense and very mossy pine forest. Except for the trail itself, which is only about 3 or 4 feet wide in places, the moss just covers everything; the ground, the boulders, the dead trees lying on the ground. It's like someone dropped a green shag carpet over the whole mountain. just cutting holes where the trees stick through. And the trees are so thick in these sections of the forest that walking off the trail is impossible. I can't imagine how they got up here to make the trail; visibility looking into the woods is only about 20 feet, and you'd have to be cutting down a tree for every foot of new trail.
It's also remarkable in two other ways. First is the smell -- an overwhelming pine scent, combined with the earthy moss. It's pleasant, but very, very strong. Pour Pine-sol into a bag of peat, and stick your head inside to simulate it, I suppose. the other thing I notice is the sound, or lack thereof. Especially when there's no wind, it's just amazingly quiet. There are no leaves to rustle, on the trees or on the ground, and the moss seems to soak up all sound. You can yell, and it sounds like you're in a room covered with acoustical tile on the walls. It's actually kind of eerie.
Late in the day, I ford the Pleasant River. This is one of the other things about the AT in Maine; there is water everywhere. Ponds, creeks and rivers everywhere. In some places, you have no choice but to get wet fording across a stream/river. The Pleasant River is about 30 yards wide, and about 2-4 feet deep. That may not sound like much, but when you're already carrying a pack, when the rocks on the bottom are mossy and slippery, when the water is running fast, even a knee-high stream can be very dicey. Oh, and it's so cold that your feet will be nearly numb after just a couple of minutes. In some places, there's a rope strung across the river so you can hang on to it with one hand to get your balance; though truthfully, they don't help much. Just gotta go slow and be careful.
9/24Spent half a day on a side-trip to a place called Gulf Hagas. It's essentially a gorge (more accurately, a series of gorges) cut deep into a mountain of slate. In some places it's gotta be 150 feet deep or more. Very beautiful, though I'm not sure if it was worth the 5 miles of extra walking to see it, plus all the time taking photos.
After that, it's a long uphill slog. WhiteCap mountain at 3500 feet is the next-to-last mountain on the trail -- the last being Katahdin at the end. In between is about 70 miles of mostly flat ground (at least in terms of no major elevation gains; I'm sure it ain't no parking lot).
I camp a bit short of Whitecap tonight, with a crowd. This is the first time in a while I've camped with anyone -- I've basically been setting up by myself wherever I am when it starts getting towards dark. There's about ten people here at a campsite, several of them good friends that I haven't seen in awhile; Hoot and Sundance, Brahma and Sweet Potato, Gonzo and Mike. Guess that was the upside of taking the sidetrip -- all of these people caught up to me in the last hour of the day. We get a campfire going and hang out well after dark.
9/ 25Summit White Cap Mountain this morning, and on yet another gorgeous clear day I get my first view of Katahdin, resting 70 trail miles away (Maybe only 40 by air). It's an exhilarating moment. After that, the trail descends the rest of the day. As always, a change in altitude brings about a change in climate. Down under 3000 feet or so, the forest is not conifers, but beech, birch, oak, aspen and maple. And it has all gone to glory. The leaves have been turning slowly over the last few weeks, but it seems like this week nature has really hit her stride. The birch leaves are a dusky yellow when fully turned, but an ethereal chartreuse when still in the process. The oaks turn various shades of orange, from almost-yellow to almost-red. Other trees are maroon and brown. And then there are the sugar maples, the exhibitionists of the forest, who put on a bright red so shameless that if it were a lipstick no decent woman would wear it. All this is under a cloudless powder blue sky.
At night, the sky continues clear, and the stars are children hiding in a dark closet, their faces shining with joy when they are finally found. Miles and miles away from any road or human habitation, there is no background noise or light. even most of the birds have flown south for the winter. A jet flying by, tens of thousands of feet above, is clearly visible and audible. A loon calling across the lake sounds like a roaring lion.9/26
Alas, the perfect weather is coming to an end. Have heard word through the grapevine in the last couple of days that there is heavy rain a-comin', supposedly a hurricane or something. I'm pretty skeptical of weather warnings on the trail; you're usually getting someone telling you what someone else heard on the radio three days ago. But for what it's worth, this is supposed to be bad. More tellingly, the sky is clouded over this morning.
So I decide to head for White House Landing. WHL is the only bit of civilization near the trail in the 100 mile wilderness. It's a place that is mostly geared to the hunting & fishing types (some of whom will lay in here via floatplane), and has a bunkhouse, cabins, and best of all, food. They serve a one-pound cheeseburger that's supposed to be fantastic. It's over a mile off the trail to get to it, which is never fun, but after 5 days, with bad weather supposedly hitting tonight, I'm ready to walk an extra 1.2 for a warm bed and a cheeseburger.
Of course, that 1.2 comes at the end of 16 AT miles. Luckily, though, the terrain here is the easiest I've had since ... geez, Vermont, at least. It's rocky and rooty, but no big uphills or downhills, so I can really make time. Starting early, I kill the 17 miles by 5:30 in the afternoon. Had to make it early, because the only way to reach WHL is by boat, and the boat stops running at dark (which is bout 6:30). The way it works is that you follow the trail from the AT down to Pemadumcook Lake, across which you can see a few small buildings. There's an airhorn tied to a tree; you give it blast, and they come across in a boat to pick you up. Cool.
There are 4 hikers here. One of them is Ravon, who I first met right after the Smokies, way back in Tennessee, but who got ahead of me when I went off the trail for a week near Erwin, and who stayed ahead of me all the way until Monson. When I met her the first time, she was with her husband, who was hiking with her for a few days. Now she's with her daughter, who's along for the 100-mile wilderness. It's always cool to see how you never know who you're going to run into. Someone falls ahead or behind, and you say "see you up the trail." You might see them again tomorrow and every day for a week; or you might not see them for three months; or never again at all.
Within half an hour of reaching the Landing, I'm plowing into my one-pound burger. I also take care of the potato chips, plus two slices of pizza, two apples, and a full pint of Ben and Jerry's. I get the weather report; there is a hurricane coming through, and we're going to get at least some of it.
9/27
Get up this morning to rain. Not heavy, but cold drizzle most of last night, and low, heavy clouds. The forecast is for heavy rains starting this afternoon and continuing all night. So my choices are to hike out into what will soon by heavy rain, or stay here, in front of a woodburning stove on the shores of a lake, reading a paperback, eating apples picked straight from the orchard. Yeah, it's a zero day.
9/28Alas, I think I may have taken the wrong day to zero. After drizzling yesterday morning, it stopped raining in the afternoon and didn't start again until well after dark. It wouldn't have been a terrible day to hike at all. But this morning, it's raining steadily, and looks to keep doing so all day. Oh, well. There are five of us that take the boat back across the lake, and hike back to the trail.
It rains all day. Lets up a few times, but never really stops until very late in the day. By midafternoon, I'm pretty much soaked all the way through. Slippery going in all the mud and on the rocks, but fairly easy hiking nonetheless. Cover 17 miles before stopping at Rainbow Stream Lean-to. It's actually kind of cool, though, when you can be soaked to skin in your clothes, to the point where you can literally pour the water out of your shoes, but then go into your pack and find that you've succeeded in keeping your gear dry, and that you'll be be warm and snug all night. Makes you wanna look at the sky and taunt nature. "That all you got?"
9/29
Oooof course ... the next morning when you get up and realize that you gotta put on all the same wet clothes you took off yesterday. Nasty. But it's all ok, because this is the day I make it out of the wilderness. Pretty uneventful day, really. A little bit more rain in the morning, and cloudy all day, I still make great time, and by 4:30, I've done 16 miles, and I finally see the sign, facing north ... "you are now entering the 100-mile wilderness. There is no resupply until Monson..." Sweet.
From there it's a few hundred yards to Golden Road, and from there another few hundred yards to Abol Bridge. Golden Road which is just a dirt road running through the woods, mostly used by logging trucks, and Abol Bridge is nothing but a bridge and a campground -- the latter of which, though, has a camp store, and that's pretty damn golden right now. I spend an hour here, eating two sandwiches and a bag of doritos (a full-sized one, not one of those wimpy little things), and drinking soda, coffee and beer.
But I've gotta make a choice now. I get a weather forecast for the next few days, and I find out that tomorrow (Tuesday) is supposed to be partly sunny, but that they're calling for more rain Wednesday and Thursday. When it's raining, they can and often do close the trails up Katahdin. even when the trails aren't closed, rock climbing in the rain is dicey, and summitting of a big mountain with no view is anticlimactic, anyway. If I don't summit tomorrow, I might be stuck around here for two or three days waiting for the weather.
So, an hour before dark falls, I start walking towards Katahdin. Via the AT it's ten miles to the campground at the base of the mountain, but there's a shortcut that's only five. I've been blue-blazing since May, so why stop now. Unfortunately, the shortcut turns out to be pretty much all tangled roots. With everything still wet from three days of rain, and with almost no light (new moon + clouds), it's not fun hiking, and I wonder several times if the official route might not have been easier. In the end, I make it to the last shelter on the AT after 10 p.m. at night, having done 21 miles. I'm actually not very tired; it's all adrenaline, I guess. I summit tomorrow.
9/30
Slate gray cloudy this morning. Absolutely no view of the mountain from the bottom. But it's not raining, and it looks to be another cool-but-not cold day. I'll take it, and hope the clouds on the peak blow away.
There is a crowd here. Because of the rain the last few days, there are several people who were ahead of me who have been hanging around Millinocket (the nearest town) for a few days waiting to summit. Very cool to be around good friends on a day like this.
The hike up Katahdin is the hardest extended climb on the AT. Over five miles of trail, you go up 4000 feet; the better part of a vertical mile. Lots of steep rock climbs, hand-over-hand boulder scrambles. In several places, there's rebar drilled into the mountain to give you handholds; there probably could stand to be a few more. As always, the rock climbs are especially tough for shorter people. At one point, I come up on Vigil Auntie and Y, two women hikers, struggling up a smooth rock face. We make it up only when I provide them a foothold (my hand) to get ahead, and they return the favor by giving me a tug up. One nice thing that helps a lot, though is that I'm not carrying my full pack. The Ranger station at the base of the mountain very graciously offers loaner daypacks to thru-hikers. I leave my full pack at the station, and I'm just carrying lunch, water, and camera. 8 pounds instead of 30 sounds great when you're going straight up.
The weather never does turn. The sun peeks out a couple of times, but it's mostly just a long walk up into the clouds. Part of the effect of that is that I never really get a sense of how far I am from the top. On a couple of occasions, I think I've almost made it, only to realize I'm nowhere near. But close to noon, I start hearing whooping and shouting up ahead in the mist, and I know I've made it. It's a huge crowd up here; people who have been stuck waiting for the rain to stop, and several who have skipped ahead to get the summit in before the rain coming tomorrow.
It's a cool feeling to see the summit of the last mountain. It's cool to finally see that sign you've seen in so many other people's photos. When you get there and you've got two dozen people shouting your name as you walk the last few hundred yards ... well, that's pretty special.We all hang out for awhile, taking photos, exchanging email addresses, passing around scotch and champagne, talking about what we'll be doing next week, next month, next year.
Slowly, the crowd thins as people start heading down the mountain via different routes. I stay for awhile, and am rewarded by seeing more people come up. Ravon and her daughter make it up, as well as Bogey and Bacall, two sixty-somethings who are among the most popular hikers on the trail. True to personality and their trail names, they bring costumes to the summit for the photo -- he puts on a dinner jacket and fedora, she a purple dress and a boa. Alas, I am not nearly so creative. I just get a couple pictures leaning against the sign, and that's enough.
I walk down slowly; around 2:30, the sun finally comes out for a bit. The idea of running back to the peak comes to me, briefly, before I discard it. I'm done.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Sunday, September 28, 2008
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.
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.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Why I hike so slow:
I'm not the slowest hiker on the Appalachian Trail, but I'm definitely on the slow side of things. There's several reasons for this, starting with the fact that I'm still basically a lazy person who doesn't push himself to go longer or harder even when I could. Another reason is that when I am walking, I tend to amble or stroll more than really hike. Those aren't really good things, and I wish I had a bit more of an athlete's mentality. But part of why I'm slow is that I stop and sit still so much, and I don't regret that at all.
In the springtime, in Tennessee and Virginia, the woods were full of butterflies. I kept trying to get pictures of them, but they never were still enough, and they fly so elliptically that all I succeeded in doing was looking like an idiot as I chased them from down the trail, pack on, camera in hand, hoping to get one good picture. This went on for a couple of weeks. One day in May, I stopped at a shelter to take a break. I sat down on the picnic table, and laid my sweat-soaked yellow bandanna in the sun to dry, while I sat still, catching my breath. After a few minutes, a yellow butterfly came down and landed directly on the bandanna, yellow on yellow in a bright afternoon sun. He stayed there long enough for me to get a few pictures, but then I made a sudden move and he was gone.
Chipmunks are probably my favorite animal in the forest; I'd love to someday have a tame pet chipmunk. Unfortunately, they also are pretty hard to get a good look at, as they tend to suspect that anything larger than they wants to eat them. But are day in Vermont, as I sat still on a rock, a chipmunk started walking around my feet. Every time I moved so much as a muscle, he seemed disposed to run away, but so long as I was totally motionless, I could watch him.
In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I summitted a mountain around noon only to find it soaked by the clouds, with absolutely no visibility at all. I started to go down, but something told me to stop. "Wait. Just wait," it seemed to say. I did. A minute or two later, I felt the wind from the west pick up. I set my face to it, and it blew stronger. Suddenly, the clouds opened (more accurately, the cloud moved off the mountain), and I was leaking down on the deep valleys and sister mountains, a choppy sea of granite and pine. I looked back east and for a few moments that direction was still in the clouds; but as the cloud kept moving, soon all was clear in that direction as well, and I had my first view of the summit of Mount Washington then still several days walk away. With the cloud gone, I found myself on top of a mountain and warm in the sun.
We are told that the shame we feel at our nakedness is a consequence of the fall from Eden. We are also told that when mankind fell, all of creation shared in that fall. Logic, then, seems to suggest that the rest of creation would feel some of the fear of nakedness that we do. And I think it does. It seems like nature is a shy bride, waiting for our patience and stillness before she will show herself.
September 8 - 15
Heading North from Gorham, NH is sort of a good-news/bad-news sort of deal.
The good news is that, especially now in the fall, it's beautiful. The woods are tremendously thick with close-growing trees and dense undergrowth of ferns making bushwhacking for off the trail impossible in most places. At the lower elevations, it's a mixed forest, and the leaves are starting to change, the birches turning yellow, the maples red. As you go higher, the forests are deep green, with moss covering nearly everything, and thick spruce and pine creating a heavy scent. Finally on the very high elevations - above 3800 or so, the trees are shrunken or non-existent, and alpine grasses and mosses dominate. It's not all ridge-walking, and when you get down to the notches, as often as not there's a stream or a creek running through the woods.
The bad news is, as beautiful as it is, it's also very tough walking. The trail is really rugged, with lots of places where you're using your hands to pull yourself up, or dropping to your butt to slide down on a smooth stone face, and others where you're climbing over, and around and occasionally even under huge boulders (I tore out the butt of my pants this week - have to find news ones). It's the hardest section of the entire trail.
The climax of this is Mahoosuc Notch, pretty much universally regarded as the toughest mile on the entire trail. It's got cliffs on both sides, so you're funnelled into this narrow gap in the mountains, where you climb across boulders ranging in size from refrigerators to mini-vans, to bedroom-sized. In a few places, you're obliged to crawl through openings so narrow you need to pull your pack off and push it ahead of you. It's especially dicey when you go through it as I did, on a rainy day. It's actually a lot of fun, but as you can imagine it kills your chances of making good time; really, you could say that about the whole stretch from Gorham, NH to Andover, Maine.
Which has left me with a real problem. As I write this I have 246 miles of trail left to go. Unfortunately, I'm due back at work in about a month. I'm definitely going to need at least a couple of weeks of R&R before I'm in shape to go back to work, so that really only leaves me about 2 weeks to cover the rest of the trail. That's not going to happen, especially given that conditions around Mt. Katahdin at the end make it necessary to allow several days in case of weather. So, I'm going to have to skip about 100 miles of trail. It kind of bothers me in that I can easily think of lots of places I'd rather skip than Maine in September. But it is what it is, and frankly, after 6 months, I'm very tired. I already knew that my hike would be short of the full 2,175; this just means I'll end up with something like 1900 miles instead of 2000. And it gives me a section to look forward to doing in the future. I'm not sure where, exactly, I'll be skipping to; at this point I'm guessing Manson, at the start of the "100 mile wilderness." After that Katahdin, and home.
UPDATE: I've been having camera problems, and the disposable I ended up having to use in Mahoosuc Notch got some water in it and was ruined. So unfortunately I have no pics of the Mahoosuc Notch. But I'm sure you can do a Google image search and find scads. (Actually I did a youtube search and found some interesting videos. - Dee)
I'm not the slowest hiker on the Appalachian Trail, but I'm definitely on the slow side of things. There's several reasons for this, starting with the fact that I'm still basically a lazy person who doesn't push himself to go longer or harder even when I could. Another reason is that when I am walking, I tend to amble or stroll more than really hike. Those aren't really good things, and I wish I had a bit more of an athlete's mentality. But part of why I'm slow is that I stop and sit still so much, and I don't regret that at all.
In the springtime, in Tennessee and Virginia, the woods were full of butterflies. I kept trying to get pictures of them, but they never were still enough, and they fly so elliptically that all I succeeded in doing was looking like an idiot as I chased them from down the trail, pack on, camera in hand, hoping to get one good picture. This went on for a couple of weeks. One day in May, I stopped at a shelter to take a break. I sat down on the picnic table, and laid my sweat-soaked yellow bandanna in the sun to dry, while I sat still, catching my breath. After a few minutes, a yellow butterfly came down and landed directly on the bandanna, yellow on yellow in a bright afternoon sun. He stayed there long enough for me to get a few pictures, but then I made a sudden move and he was gone.
Chipmunks are probably my favorite animal in the forest; I'd love to someday have a tame pet chipmunk. Unfortunately, they also are pretty hard to get a good look at, as they tend to suspect that anything larger than they wants to eat them. But are day in Vermont, as I sat still on a rock, a chipmunk started walking around my feet. Every time I moved so much as a muscle, he seemed disposed to run away, but so long as I was totally motionless, I could watch him.
In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I summitted a mountain around noon only to find it soaked by the clouds, with absolutely no visibility at all. I started to go down, but something told me to stop. "Wait. Just wait," it seemed to say. I did. A minute or two later, I felt the wind from the west pick up. I set my face to it, and it blew stronger. Suddenly, the clouds opened (more accurately, the cloud moved off the mountain), and I was leaking down on the deep valleys and sister mountains, a choppy sea of granite and pine. I looked back east and for a few moments that direction was still in the clouds; but as the cloud kept moving, soon all was clear in that direction as well, and I had my first view of the summit of Mount Washington then still several days walk away. With the cloud gone, I found myself on top of a mountain and warm in the sun.
We are told that the shame we feel at our nakedness is a consequence of the fall from Eden. We are also told that when mankind fell, all of creation shared in that fall. Logic, then, seems to suggest that the rest of creation would feel some of the fear of nakedness that we do. And I think it does. It seems like nature is a shy bride, waiting for our patience and stillness before she will show herself.
September 8 - 15
Heading North from Gorham, NH is sort of a good-news/bad-news sort of deal.
The good news is that, especially now in the fall, it's beautiful. The woods are tremendously thick with close-growing trees and dense undergrowth of ferns making bushwhacking for off the trail impossible in most places. At the lower elevations, it's a mixed forest, and the leaves are starting to change, the birches turning yellow, the maples red. As you go higher, the forests are deep green, with moss covering nearly everything, and thick spruce and pine creating a heavy scent. Finally on the very high elevations - above 3800 or so, the trees are shrunken or non-existent, and alpine grasses and mosses dominate. It's not all ridge-walking, and when you get down to the notches, as often as not there's a stream or a creek running through the woods.
The bad news is, as beautiful as it is, it's also very tough walking. The trail is really rugged, with lots of places where you're using your hands to pull yourself up, or dropping to your butt to slide down on a smooth stone face, and others where you're climbing over, and around and occasionally even under huge boulders (I tore out the butt of my pants this week - have to find news ones). It's the hardest section of the entire trail.
The climax of this is Mahoosuc Notch, pretty much universally regarded as the toughest mile on the entire trail. It's got cliffs on both sides, so you're funnelled into this narrow gap in the mountains, where you climb across boulders ranging in size from refrigerators to mini-vans, to bedroom-sized. In a few places, you're obliged to crawl through openings so narrow you need to pull your pack off and push it ahead of you. It's especially dicey when you go through it as I did, on a rainy day. It's actually a lot of fun, but as you can imagine it kills your chances of making good time; really, you could say that about the whole stretch from Gorham, NH to Andover, Maine.
Which has left me with a real problem. As I write this I have 246 miles of trail left to go. Unfortunately, I'm due back at work in about a month. I'm definitely going to need at least a couple of weeks of R&R before I'm in shape to go back to work, so that really only leaves me about 2 weeks to cover the rest of the trail. That's not going to happen, especially given that conditions around Mt. Katahdin at the end make it necessary to allow several days in case of weather. So, I'm going to have to skip about 100 miles of trail. It kind of bothers me in that I can easily think of lots of places I'd rather skip than Maine in September. But it is what it is, and frankly, after 6 months, I'm very tired. I already knew that my hike would be short of the full 2,175; this just means I'll end up with something like 1900 miles instead of 2000. And it gives me a section to look forward to doing in the future. I'm not sure where, exactly, I'll be skipping to; at this point I'm guessing Manson, at the start of the "100 mile wilderness." After that Katahdin, and home.
UPDATE: I've been having camera problems, and the disposable I ended up having to use in Mahoosuc Notch got some water in it and was ruined. So unfortunately I have no pics of the Mahoosuc Notch. But I'm sure you can do a Google image search and find scads. (Actually I did a youtube search and found some interesting videos. - Dee)
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