Mile 1000

Hilltop Hotel, Harper's Ferry, West Virginia

June 22, 04

Chef massages the upright piano in this historic hotel, obviously not 

under the best management, and so to our advantage.  I mean, picture

the scene: a handful of thruhiker bums sitting in the lap of luxury

here on the ridge high above the confluence of the Shenandoah & Potomac

rivers where all this crazy Civil War shit went down, cannon fire,

death, betrayal of brothers, mayhem, madness, and what's that? 

Archeopterix is a walking Civil War encyclopedia.  He tells of the

South taking siege of the Union armory RIGHT HERE!  

And Chef takes siege of the hotel bar, empty but for us, takes over the

piano and has us all groovin' to his quiet Zen talent, suddenly

unleashed (there aren't many pianos on the trail) and Party Girl &

Spiceman sitting here and all of us drinking beers bought at the local

drug store and poured into bar glasses (procured by me from behind the

unmanned bar) and used for the purpose of pleasing the management who

won't (naturally) allow us to supply our own alcohol.    

Now the alleged bartender is in, though he has no customers.  He's

trying to explain the hotel policy, and manages to get one of our group

to pay for a drink, but otherwise my "grab your own glass" deal is

working.  In now walk Don't Matter, Don't Mind, and their nephew Don't

Bother.  Very funny group of names.  But with them come a family of

Don't Matter's.. (lost my train of thought there)

The Shining.  That's the comparison everyone is making here as we sit

in this historic hotel and Chef on piano, and then Chef stops and I

say, "Hey, Chef, don't stop, man, we got something going here!"  But

it's hard to translate to these guys the absolute anarchic beauty of

this golden sunlit cliff top hotel moment and say "Keep it going!" and

the bartender who looks suspiciously like Joe Pesci keeps coming in and

diddling around behind the dead bar and saying how we gotta buy our

drinks and that if the owner comes by we're all dead and kicked outa

the place but who cares! 

This is Harper's Ferry and every one of us has walked a thousand miles

to get here and wow! we oughta all be proud as tidal waves and typhoons

and peanut butter tycoons, every one of us, but of course neurosis

abound, starting with Party Girl who ain't feeling too great cause she

thinks she didn't do the right thing, didn't walk the last 12 miles

into town because of a few bad blisters on her feet and had to be

driven into town by the New Hampshire-ite caretakers of the Blackburn

Trail Center, Bill and Sue who fed us a giant spag dinner with green

beans and free sodas all around and bread pudding desert and let us

sleep on the grand screened-in porch -wow!

I go up to the bar and ask the woman now inventorying the booze &

locking up cupboards what her name is and think I hear Genita.  I ask

Genita how she is and she says "No, my name is Lenay."  So I say "Okay,

Lenay, what do you think of this?  You got yourself a free piano

player, it's too bad you have no patrons."  Lenay says she was trying

to ask if I needed a.. she'll be back in a minute. 

 When she returns, Chef has quit the piano for the fifth or sixth time.

Joe Pesci returns, and I talk him up awhile, feeling kind of bad for him

and wanting to include him in our little scene, a kind of way of

thanking him for putting up with us.  I marvel at the view and the

location and the old historic building in general and ask if he knows

what the last selling price for this place was.  Pesci says 3.5

million.  Wow!  You have to see this place to understand.  I would buy

this place at a loss.  It sits atop a pinnacle hill far out and far

above everything here in the eastern tip of West Virginia, the

Shenandoah River churning by in shallow water far, far below in golden

sunlight late afternoon, all of 7:30 pm now in late June.   I would buy

this place for the view. I would buy this place to glue Chef's ass to

the piano seat and make him play for eternity whilst I type endlessly

on my portable keyboard to everyone's annoyance "All work and no play

make Jester a dull boy." Now it's pushups and talk of muscles and Chef is excited because he

finally has an ass and Spiceman says he has to admit that he admires

his calf muscles a lot nowadays.  Me too.  It's me doing the pushups. 

Hell, I'm 37, and it's kinda novel to be able to DO pushups and to be

able to RUN down or up trails like a madman, down especially fun using

my Leki poles to vault three and four feet at a time, hell, maybe more.

I practically leapt into Harper's Ferry around two this afternoon. 

And lest I not get the V-shape upper torso thing going too  

As though in payment for the sin of bringing up that scary movie, I am

now transported to some weird fuckin sports bar with giant screen TV

sporting horse races and video games of golf, all the usual bad and

tacky MGD and Bud sports mirrors and on the big screen we have scores

for "Tank Grrrl" and "Midway Girl"  and I'm thinking, man, if we could

unleash the lioness in PG, it'd be Party Girl all the way winning 1000

to 1!  Here in this bad-taste bar or back in that great old historic

bar, either way ,we are all one thousand to one.  Each of us, to a man

or woman, has stomped on the terra, in the sense that Lord Buckley

meant it, I am sure, and far, far beyond that.  We  have all walked a

thousand miles, and though I remain alone a man, a man alone on the

testosterone trail and Elly discovered today so very far ahead of me

and tonight PG will curse me, jealous perhaps of my long call, such fun

sharing my joy with Mary in Texas, and they two, PG & Spice will be

together tonight, and I will rise in morning sick in wake of manic high

and leave them both and go.  

Go!  "Go roll your bones, alone!"  Kerouac said.  It is nonetheless a

grand occasion I will never forget. -RSM 

June 26, 04

Somewhere in Maryland just south of PA

Early in the day I write: "I'm halfway thru Maryland, `charging the

light brigade' to get over the state line into PA by tonight.  I'm

fucking hatin' the trail right now, but sssshhh.  Don't tell anyone,

including me.  I'm  doing my best to fool myself.  This is feeling more

and more like a job and no fun.  I just hump it over rocks all day,

pushpushpush, stare at my watch anxious for lunch break, etc."

Following 19-year old Big Stick through the darkening evening woods of

Pennsylvania, it occurs to me that I've been humping it over every

boulder and jamming along at the tireless gate of this 19-year for days

now.  Willard's words as he reads through Kurtz's top-secret file in

"Apocalypse" comes to mind.  Kurtz dropping out of the brass and

applying for a transfer to airborne, back to boot camp basically, and

Willard saying something like, "Man, those young marines must have had

quite a shock watching this thirty-five year old man hump it over the

obstacle course with them."  And then, "They must have thought he was

one far out cat."

I feel like that far out cat tonight.  The molten gold light of last

sun sets fire to the tops of trees to the east and all is North for us.

Ever and always North.

Mile 1054

Deer Lick Shelters, PA

June 27, 04

Pulled a 23-mile day yesterday, 18 to make it out of Maryland into PA,

and another 5 miles to get to the next nearest shelter.  Day before

that was another 19 or so, to about the middle of Maryland and some

shitty shelter in the rain, half a mile from a roaring freeway.  Kind of

a drag.  Going back one-day still, that was Thursday, spent the day

varnishing ancient windows in some historic building on the Potomac,

evicting spiders as I went.  Seems like my days are filled with spiders

out here on the trail.  Seven hours painting, then, pack hefted, I set

out on the footbridge over the river, out of West Virginia and into

Maryland for a whopping 7 miles in the early evening.  

Beautiful shelter that night with wonderful company.  Which was a damn

good thing cuz I needed it.  Foul mood.  Lonesome.  Bad foot pain from

continually hiking on my now-1000 mile old shoes, light distance

runners not meant for such endurance.  Met Nayber, Phlegm, El Paso and

a Mark that night.  The former three were (in fact) former thruhikers,

from two years ago I think they said.  Nice guys.  Loaded with groovy

foodstuffs from Trader Joes, some for their personal consumption that

night but most of meant to be given out to whatever thruhikers they met

on their one night "angel hike" out.  Well, guess who was their only

thruhike customer?  

Man, those guys were happy to see me.  Neighbor busted out a little

bottle of Cuervo and we toasted to present, past and future hikes. 

Perhaps thanks to all the residual varnish fumes, I was high as a kite

in no time.  Mark, a section hiker from Annapolis, either arrived after

or was already there when I arrived, I can't recall.  But in either

case, not being a thruhiker, the poor guy didn't get the goodies like I

did, nor the adulation.  Unfortunately from the day's labors, I crashed

fast, crawling up into the Swiss alpine lodge-like loft of the

gigantor-beamed log cabin shelter.  I must have slept like the dead,

because the guys made a fire and Phlegm played flute and I never heard

a single blue note.  

I left Friday morning with a promise from Nayber of replacement shoes

which he said he'd send me to my next mail drop.  I told him I couldn't

accept a gift of new shoes, but he assured me he had tons of used

hiking shoes.  If I never hear from him, twas at least a sweet gesture.

My poor zapatos are destroyed.

Called Lowa shoes after damn near two months since talking to the Lowa

sales rep at Trail Daze.  My procrastination owed entirely to the way

the rep dissed me.  Guy named Mike says, "We get thousands of AT hikers

callin' us every year (bullshit).. we KNOW what YOU guys DO to our

shoes out there on the trail."  What?  

"Mike," I said, in a very honest, Charlie Bucket

meek-shall-inherit-dog-dick tone, 

"All I did to your shoes was walk in them."  -RSM

Mile 1070

Quarry Gap Shelter, PA

June 27

It's The Bluegrass Show on 107.7 Great Country Radio!  It's Big Stick

and Austin and Mousebait and White Patch and Dutch and me around a

little fire with the light fading in the western sky and the forest a

neon green all around rhododendron blossoms perfuming the air and a

spring popping water right outa the ground and trickling through this

Japanese garden-like landscape out front the shelter and me on a park

bench writing on my little pack pillow and drinking a Bud.  And no,

this ISN'T a normal shelter environment.  It's like some kind of country

club version of the typical run down spider-infested lean-tos we sleep

in.  And I'm lifting the little red, white and blue can of beer skyward

and thanking God for the McCleary Clan, all twenty or so of `em down

there in Caledonia State Park.  

Now how we came to meet Grandma and Grandpa McCleary and their

wonderful kin went kind of like this.

This morning around 11, I twisted my ankle bad.  In seconds, my pace

dropped from about Mach 5 to zero.  I was screaming'.  But I had it

coming.  I thought to myself, "Now see, there you go!  Thinking about

your troubles 3000 miles away and loves long lost and other worries

far, far away from the right here and now.  And whammo!  My body says,

`Take that!  Wanna worry about shit that don't matter?  Well, here,

lemme twist your ankle and drop you like a stone and voila!  Now you're

here!  Now you're present, aren't Buddy?!  Think about this for

awhile!''  

And that was that.  I thought about that.  I thought about my ankle for

hours thereafter, grimacing with every step yet sending healing power

to the ankle and leg that had given me so much trouble back before

Trail Daze but had been so good to me since.  I walked chanting, "White

light to the right," over and over on some subliminal level.  On a more

audible level, one might have heard me from a mile away as I shouted,

"MY ANKLE NEEDS A BEER!"

Ask and you shall receive.  I tell you, I have seen that adage

evidenced more out here on the Appalachian Trail than ever in my life. 

Most often I don't even have to ask.

Big Stick is not your typical 19-year old.  He listens.  And he really

wants to know about life and art and following one's passion and the

books I've read and films I like.  As we hike together, he stays with

me and listens to everything I say.  I feel as though I sound like a

crackpot.  But still he listens.  

Although I can't swap movie dialogue with him like Python skits or damn

near anything as he seems to have lived in some kinda cultural vacuum

his 19 years, he will chime in now and again with something brilliant. 

Like Wu-Wei .  

Wu-Wei, according to Big Stick, is conscious inaction.  It's about

being an observer of life right up to the point where your role is

needed or wanted.  Kinda like timing.  I suppose perhaps it's having

perfect timing, and knowing that good will prevail.  And not butting in

or forcing things.

Well, when Big Stick and I made our mid-afternoon arrival at Caledonia

amidst all the picnic splendor of a Sunday summer in America, we were

hungry and tired and dirty and thirsty.  By now my whole right leg was

screaming at me to stop.  It really needed a beer, but I didn't see any

trail angels and Wu-wei was far from my mind.  

Now there's this talent in thruhiker circles for improving one's diet

via social barbecue interaction called "yogi-ing."  Wingfoot's

"Thruhiker Handbook" defines Yogi-ing as the "good natured art of

letting food be offered cheerfully by strangers without actually

asking them directly."  And Wingnut adds, "if you ask, it's begging." 

No, duh, Wingnut.

Now whether this term comes from Yogi the bear or yogis and sufis and

dharma bums and such, I don't know.  But I do recall that when I first

came across the idea in Robert Rubin's tale of the AT, it terrified me.

I feared that no matter how I might yogi, I would feel like a beggar. 

Well, thanks to so many, many trail angels these past three months and

damn-near 1100 miles, I haven't had to yogi.  

In fact I've never felt less like a beggar and more like the baby

Jesus.  I have been fed and beered and supplied and transported and

gifted and graced befitting a king, not a jester.  All of us thruhikers

have been so kindly treated.  We are all kings and through the grace

afforded us on our journeys North, we should all reach the end new

women and men, benefactors and altruists all..

But I'm rambling!  On to the McCleary Clan.

Big Stick and I just parked near them on accident.  Sorta.  I mean, we

followed the white blazes through the maze of picnic benches and

people, keeping our eyes on the trees.  And when we came to the last

free picnic tables before the trail disappeared back into the woods, we

plopped down and resolved to rest awhile.  Me, I slung my pack up on

the table, climbed up on the table myself, laid back and put my feet up

high.  Big STick just sat.  We were pooped. 

Big Stick pulled out the companion book and noted that there was a

concession stand far across the park by the pool.  Did I want to go

there?  Hell, no.  My ankle was killing.  There appeared to be no angels

in Pennsylvania.  And I was more tired and in pain than hungry.  Was I

thinking about yogi-ing?  Sure.  But I wasn't movin.  Far as I was

concerned, I didn't have it in me to yogi, and now with my leg killin'

me, I was doubly unprepared.

Then over walked Hunter and asked if we were thirsty.  Hunter isn't his

real name.  I wish I could recall his name, but shortly thereafter I

was meeting the whole family and my head got so fulla names that I just

lost em all.  Except one.  There was Grandpa McCleary's grand-daughter,

the nurse.  Wow.  It was love at first sight for me.  But then I heard

the boyfriend word, and remembered where I was, and who I was, and how

far I had to go.  What ever could be the chance of this beauty and I

hooking up?  Forget it.

But Wu-wei worked.  We didn't do a thing, and the McCleary's came to

us.  First Hunter (I call him this cuz he talked a lot of hunting)

supplied us with a coupla Cokes on ice, real nice.  We thanked him,

sipped our drinks and continued our entirely unplanned regimen of

wu-wei.  Then sure enough, one of the sweet ladies of the McCleary clan

offered us food.  Well, all right, said I.  We surely wouldn't turn

that down.  Thank you.

[And now it is days later and I never finished this story.  The

McClearys were good people and they fed not just Big Stick and me, but

half a dozen of our smelly cohort hikers as they came down the white

blazed path behind us.  I'll never forget pointing out to the ladies in

the group that their chosen picnic sight was in fact right on the famed

thruhiker highway.  I pointed out the white blazes on trees just to the

north and south of them.  To me, they were clear as day.  Naturally, to

the untrained eye, not so.  But when they finally saw them, and

understood me when I explained that such marks ran all the way from

Georgia to Maine and were how we found our way, they were amazed. 

White Patch, Austin, Mousebait and others devoured the remainder of the

McCleary picnic offerings.  We said our goodbyes and thank yous and

headed off into the woods again.  But not without a little treat for

later.  A six-pack of beer (for medicinal purposes of course, for my

ankle) that I packed out, on ice, inside my dry bag in my pack and then

shared (painfully but with a smile) with all my friends that night. 

The one beer I got tasted better than pussy.  –RSM

Mile 1091

Gonzo Stealth Camp Alpha Bravo

June 28, 04

Much to my surprise this evening, I realized that today is my one

hundredth day.  One hundred days of living in the forest.  Big deal? 

Yeah, I think so.  Even more remarkable than passing the 1000-mile mark

last week.  Because what with aqua-blazing the Shenandoah’s and a dozen

or so miles lost to emergency car rides for some medical purpose, it's

hard to say exactly how many miles I have hiked.  I can say with

assurance that when I finish this "round" in Duncannon, PA on Thursday

at the Doyle Hotel, I will most certainly have hiked 1000 miles, as I

will then be at mile mark 1133.  But today, tonight rather, this is Day

100.  Pretty exciting, really.  And what a strange day it was, too.  

Awaking this morning to the loud and monotone jabber-jabber of a female

hiker who shall remain nameless.  She's nice, but for my tastes she

talks too much.   Grumpy thus, I set out on addled right ankle into a

morning of exponentially increasing pain, worse with every step.  At

the end of this 20-mile day, which would be about 4000 paces.  I think?

Then the shorn-head gang-banger looking guy with the cool Japanese

letters inked into his neck gives me four 800 mg ibuprofens, a Godsend

as I hobbled near tears at noon.  Then just flying in and out of Birch

run Shelter although Big Stick wanted to (and did) stay awhile and wait

out the coming rain.  I was in too much pain.  Just wanted to "get

there," wherever there was.  

Today "there" was Pine Grove Furnace, some old historic site with an

upper-class International Youth Hostel and a State Park with more rules

than there are words in the book of Proverbs (they were posted, every

frikken word, in agate type tiny print on a giant poster all over the

park).  It had been my intension to overnight there.  But when I was

there, the vibe was just all wrong.  I watched with mild amusement as

three of my fellow thruhikers made themselves sick on Hershey's ice

cream whilst engaged in the "Half-gallon challenge," a long-standing AT

tradition that for some reason takes place right there, at the tiny

general store at Pine Grove Furnace.  The rules for that are simple:

show up, buy ice cream, eat the whole damn thing and voila!  You're a

winner!  And dead dog sick tonight, I'm betting.  

I got outa there.  I took a look at Austin's topo map, ascertained that

the anal-ass State Park and its police force (one gigantic constipated

looking dyke cop with a gun and the posture of a string puppet being

pulled upward by its nipples came by the store while I was there) ended

within a mile on the trail.  After that, I  knew, would be forest,

forest and more forest.  Unpoliced, unpopulated.  Walk in and vanish. 

I love the forest for that.  So I walked on, much to the disbelief of

the bloated ice cream champions and late-comer Big Stick who all knew I

was walkin' in a world of pain.  But on I went anyway.  And amazingly,

at 6:30 in the evening with ice cream behind me and freedom ahead, I

didn't feel pain.  

Not for a while anyway.  I walked a good 2 or 3 miles as the sun settled

down in the west.  Some crazy over-passionate Italian opera filled my

ears from the local public radio station as I mounted a long, steady

slope of a hill thorough low shrubs and oak and hickory and hemlock and

fir.  And it was during the opera as I half danced up the trail,

forgetting my sprain and feeling good again that I thought of the date

and did the math and realized how far I'd come.  I crested a hill and

rounded a corner where there sat a lovely cleared flat spot to sleep. 

I dropped my pack and walked around, surveying my night's home. 

Several little toads hopped about in the leaves beneath my feet.  I

walked over and sat on a nice mossy green cushion at the foot of a

tree, cooked up a batch of dehydrated lasagna homemade by river angel

Mike and man was that good!  I laid out my army poncho ground cloth,

and using my trekking poles, erected a tiny lean-to rain shelter using

only the sil-nylon rain fly from that dastardly hammock I so hated and

thus sent home, threw down my bag and Thinsulate air mattress and

voila!  I was home.  Then I sat down and wrote these words. –RSM

Pennsylvania-Maryland Border

June 26, 04

Called a West Virginia cousin that I haven't seen in 14 years from the

payphone at Penn-Mar Park, a little patch of grass and picnic tables

marking the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania.  Despite the best

intensions, I intuited the moment Sharon answered that it would be a

weird conversation.  Too much distance, and I never was very close with

anyone on my mother's side of the family.  But I remembered her as

being kind of cool, a little older than me so looked-up to in a way and

pretty with her long blonde hair.  

She had no idea who I was.  It took me about a minute to explain. 

"Beth's son," I said.  "Beth who?"  I rattled off my mother (her

aunt)'s various names from the original Moser to McKinney to her

current Palermo.  And my name, Rick.  When we finally got through all

that, I explained what occasioned this call out of the blue, that I was

hiking the AT.  As soon as she heard the words Appalachian Trail, she

said, "Oh my brother Rick did that a few years ago." 

Really?  I was stunned.  I had never heard about it.  Even as distant

as our families are, surely I would have heard of a cousin completing

the whole trail.  "So, you taking a week or so to do that?" she asked. 

Suddenly I wondered just how much of the trail cousin Rick had done. 

When my estranged cousin Sharon found out I was doing the trail alone,

she was beside herself.  "You  know, people get murdered on that trail

a lot, just so you know."  

Uhuh. 

We chatted a bit more and as the seconds ticked by I could feel my

interest waning exponentially fast in this awkward reach into the past.

Then she let it rip.  "So is this a mid-life crisis thing for you? 

That's what it was for Rick.  All you guy's do something like that."  I

had no idea what to say to that.   

It had always seemed to me that midlife crisis' were for guys on the

corporate, family path who at 50 or so found themselves missing the

freedoms of their youth.  I wanted to tell the blood stranger on the

other end of the line that this was just another adventure for me in

one long string of adventures called Life.  But I said nothing.  Why

bother.  

I could hear Mickey Rourke as Bukowski in "Barfly" saying "There's no

reality here!"  And indeed, there wasn't a pebble-sized piece of common

ground from which to speak anymore.  In Sharon's words I heard her

mother's voice.  I had never much liked her mother.  In her odd,

pessimistic summations of my journey, I heard traces of all my maternal

aunts, all much older than my mother and condescending to her and her

children.  

I was suddenly ten again, a tiny boy Cinderella with three evil

step-sister aunts, and proudly showing one of them my pet gerbil and

her one-upping me about her pet squirrel that was "much more special"

(as though an adult ever need one-up a child).   

I said "Goodbye, Sharon," and she said "Goodbye, Scott."  

I hung up the payphone and shook my head, dizzy with the borders and

vast empty spaces of humankind.

-RSM