Heaven is a decrepit hotel in PA
& The Body of Christ is a pita bread

My pack buddies since the beginning

We pass right by Antietem Park and shelter, a place infamous for being home to the greatest single loss of life in the Civil War. We don't even stop to sign the shelter log, even though two trail volunteers working on a log bridge implore us do so. A little girl of maybe 5 or 6 catches a "froag" and holds him frog-hostage in a 12-pack Mountain Dew box. She says he "hopes." Antietem means nothing to her, so I decide it shall mean nothing to me. I am sorry for all the death and pain man inflicts upon man, but I turn my face from it and walk North.

At the next shelter, a guy sits reading Wildlife and Nature magazines. We saw him hop off his motorcycle back at the road and run up the trail. He gives me the creeps. But Big Stick wants to stop for snacks. There are two small shelters here, each with a gigantic pile of stones-around-a-truck-wheel-well fire pit out front. One shelter is labeled "Snoring," the other "Non-Snoring." After nearly 100 days out here on the trail, I understand this joke very well.

Setting out this morning, I got well ahead of Big Stick in a short space of time. We've been walking together for a few days now and I'm surprised when he comments on my quick pace. It is the pace I always walk at now, with the exception of impossibly steep inclines. It is as fast as you could walk on a flat sidewalk without breaking into a run. It is almost a trot. Perhaps he's right, though. My pack grows ever-lighter as I deplete my food supply, and the effect of a just a pound or two lighter is amazing. This is how Flying Brian makes 35 mile days. No tent, just a half-pound sil-nylon tarp. No change of clothes. Three day's food tops.

Back at Antietem, the workers said something that irked me. They asked our "numbers," that is to say what number thruhiker we are/were when we passed the halfway point at Harper's Ferry and joined the registry of hikers. When we both answer in the early 400s, one man shakes his head and says, "Hmm, getting up there." My brain shouts, "Fuck you." This is not a race. This is not a race.

I feel as though I am at the end of the pack, and it isn't a great feeling.-RSM

[Written on Ronnie Raygun's week of mourning]
Surreal romp through the fast forest of morning today stomping the terra double-time to reach a road crossing and a rumored ride to town. Surreal music, that is. Or voice/music overlay. Ronnie Reagan and Ray Charles, suddenly married in a weird mournful tribute montage of Ray's song and Ronnie's rockem-sockem "Don't tread on us!" rah rah America drama club champion oratory overlayed. Very strange. And I'm very near D.C. now and all I can think is: Yesterday the old coot's corpse flew over my head on its way to the rotunda, and this afternoon they're gonna wheel his old bones back on another armor-plated stealth jet and roar over my head again on route to Simi Valley Cali-Cali and stick him in the ground just as the final green flash goes, "Ffffllllppppuut" and the Pacific goes dark and mournful forever more. Dead President flying over my head, and old Ray Charles finally getting' his sight back on the streets of Heaven and me? I've been humpin' the Blue Ridge with all the gonzo conviction and masochistic foot-mashing, bone-crunching slam-dunk drive of Attila the Hun on a rotgut homebrew binge & tear, stomping out 90 miles in just 4 & 1/2 days. Madness. And the result? Well, hell, it was suddenly announced to be a national holi-day-of-mourning, so, why should I work? Hiking from dawn to dusk, some 12 hours a day for close to a whole workweek. I quit. - RSM

Boiling Springs, PA
Mile 1100
June 29, 04

Man, I just can't go on. I just can't take it anymore. S'fucking pointless. And I miss SEX, goddammit! Nature without sex is goddamn boring after 1000 miles, lemme tell ya. I dunno whether Thoreau was a unick or what, a castrato? Gawd! Not my favorite writer! A man with no balls! Oh, well. I sit here by the side of some road in southern Pennsyltuckey and I just wanna get up off this frikken rock, heft my pack, stow my poles and stick out my thumb. This isn't fun anymore! I gauge my progress everyday by how far I am from the nearest mattress, the nearest beer, the nearest decent zero day town. Ugh. Where is the zeal that got me out here? Where is the love? Where is the sweet woman companion to warm my nights and make the miles fly by day with talk of everything and nothing? This is ridiculous. I've got just 33 miles to go to get to Duncannon and the historic Doyle Hotel where I'm going to check in for three nights at $17.50/night and drink dollar drafts with bawdy women and randy local men and sit in my room and write glowingly of the AT and my adventures this past week. But all I want to do on this Tuesday morning is fucking quit. Fuck! I'll get back with ya later. I got to walk. -RSM

[Later..]
5 p.m., Boiling Springs, PA
The Boiling Springs Tavern

Feeling better. Muuuuch better. Locally brewed Stoudt's Pale Ale in hand, another ten miles, one two-hundredth of the trail, behind me. My feet are killing me still, no doubt about that. But I'm happier. Dropped dead at the last shelter after five hours of solid truckin' down the trail. To my amazement, I went undisturbed for a full 45 minutes of total blackout nap, flat out on the shelter floor with nothing but my hand-towel rolled up for a pillow. It was bliss. I remember having such a vivid image of some lovely female handing me something that I sprang awake a moment, catching myself in the act of reaching out.. for whatever it was. Then I was dead out again. When I awoke, I tanked up at the nearest spring and hit the trail running. I was in Boiling Springs in just over an hour, some four miles away. And now I'm in a bar. A tavern, I should say. Very chic. Reminds me of the haughty atmosphere of the country club in Caddyshack, the kind of place where young people, most of them likely not even nearly-rich, have to act rich and stuffy to make it with the clientele. If I had the sarcastic class of Chevy Chase or the pure crass & brazen carefree balls of Rodney Dangerfield, I'd have made some noise in here. But I have neither. And I don't care. I'm just glad to have a beer, and to have made it to Mile 1107 on my northbound conquest of the Appalachian Trail. Bartender Mike is James Spader in the 80s rat pack flick "Less Than Zero," sophisticated, cool bordering on chilly, but then suddenly (also like Spader) friendly like a brother and impressed with me and/or my little technological wonder here. Though I'm unshaven a good week or so, and hiding natty hair beneath my AT insignia ball cap, and I probably smell bad, he keeps the beers coming. I donned my dark blue wool Crew sweater to get in here, on the advice of mammoth thruhiker Caterpillar who said they woudn't let him in without sleeves. The high bar and dim tavern lighting hide my mud-smudged and stains of my all-around one week unwashed shorts. I figure if I just keep flashing' them ATM-spewn Andrew Jackson's, I could probably close this place.

Now Jeff the owner comes in and we chitchat and I tell them about Party Girl and Powder Foot, proof positive (in my mind) that the trail is not all "dudes and dykes" and they've likely got a few beauties to look forward to in the coming days. Jeff and Mike joke about how little I must get laid on the trail, and evidence the fact that I'm sitting in their tavern typing alone and not drinking with one of the aforementioned girls. They got me there.

Okay, three (or was it four?) beers in now and its likely time to go find that campground outside of town. Fuck. I got to backtrack a full mile. I ain't gonna dig that. But there's no camping here, nowhere for the next 14 miles, so the options are hike another 8 miles and pay money at the Super 8 off Highway 11, or hike the full 14 miles to the next shelter. It's six p.m. I ain't going anywhere.

[Later still...]

Now it's nearly midnight and I'm chuckling to myself as another freight train approaches and, just as it seems ready to crash right through our little "thruhiker camp" clearing in the cornfields outside of town, roars and crashes and pummels and blares on by just yards from my tent. That makes me giggle. But what's even funnier is Mouse Bait snoring in her tent a few feet from me. Hell, I'm not sleeping with these trains storming by, so I figure no one else are either. Wrong. Nipply Mouse Bait is a snoring locomotive. (I told her twas her nipples got her in the tavern in naught but a tank top.) Ha. Ha. Ha. -RSM

The Doyle Hotel
Drunk Cannon, PA
Mile 1134
June 30, 04

Have arrived in Drunk Cannon, PA, and landed, blissfully, in the barfly arms of the 100 year old decrepit Doyle Hotel, long a haven for AT Thruhikers. I'm on the fourth floor of the old firetrap in a room that, I swear to God, is the spitting image of the final location shots in the film "Drugstore Cowboy," a seedy old hotel where Matt Dillon hangs out with William Burroughs. Great flick, one of the few DVDs I own. In the film, he's been a junky all his life, robbing drug stores, finally cleans up, and in the end get's shot (not fatally) by some punk kid, and as they wheel him off to the hospital, his closing line is something like, "I was gonna be just fine.. the irony of it all. They were taking me to the biggest pharmacy in town."

I loved that. I just loooooove irony.- RSM

Doyle Hotel Bar
July 1, 04

My God, things are getting way out of hand. The bartender, my love, my life, my future wife Sara, has just admitted to me that she wants Pegasus in the worst way, that she likes to lure girls off the trail and take advantage of them. Sara's mother, Sue, strums her guitar and sings, wrapping the present of an evening bar scene in the ribbons and bows of acoustic blues, beautiful. All this here in the bar in the downstairs of the Doyle Hotel, Duncannon, Pennsylvania.

This place a favorite of thruhikers for years now and years to go I'm sure with rooms reasonable like thrift store prices and a clientele rife with all the usual vices and tap-tapered 16-ounce cures of all the ills of the sad modern world of terror and cruel, cruel poverty. And Pegasus tells me how she likes brutal honesty so I finally, after an hour or so of build-up, come out with: "I'd like to take you upstairs right now and get nekked, you know, no expectations, I can't promise you much, been drinkin' all day and all, but I'd just like to get naked with you, just be. It's been a long time since I've so much as touched a woman."

Well, Pegasus took it rather well. But she didn't bite. We sit here still an hour or so later listening to the harmonica and guitar riffs and waling...

[the preceding passage was never finished due to the author being swept away in the clutches of a winged horse and dropped onto a squeaky metal bed and um.. ]

We apologize for the abrupt cessation of the previous passage, but Net Nanny has censored said explanation. Thank you and good night. - RSM

I pulled my longest day yesterday, 26.4 miles. A true marathon. And much of it over heinous rock fields, miles and miles up and down of toaster-to-TV size stones. Insane. As such, arrived here early for my Saturday flight. No problem, I thought. I'll write. And write. And write some more. Oh, and drink vast quantities of beer, since I'm basically now living above a bar. Single room: $17.50/night. 22 ounce PBR draft: $1.95

Heaven.

And owner Vickie took a shine to me immediately. Wouldn't let me go to bed last night without a hug. Bathroom down the hall, pull string overhead lighting, lots a caulked holes in the walls, old wooden six-pane windows that threaten to launch out into the night with every touch. Sturdy fire escape right outside my door though. Gotta love it.

[We interrupt our bar story with this short lesson in how not to deal with Chilean women on a train..]

Where would Jack be now? Where would Thompson lay his head? Would Miller even go to bed? And like the constant division of the "old Elvis" versus the "young Elvis," would the septuagenarian Bukowski burn the midnight oil with me for the reasons I now sit here, still awake, still drinking, thinking radically impaired as I round the corner and enter the final lap on a five liter box of table red? Well, I can answer one of these questions with some resolve: no, Bukowski wouldn't be sitting here with me. Not to belie a lack of interest in boxed wine, but because Bukowski would have told that Chilean chick to suck his dick, or fuck off, anything but my milquetoast concession to her question "Do you mind if I lie out on both cushions?" which meant no seat for me, not even to sleep sitting up in. Thompson would have slapped me upside the head and Miller would have ignored me and seduced the woman. Jack just hands me a jug of red and smiles and we drink till dawn in the train's bar car. -From the Amtrak archives

Harrisburg International Airport July 3, 04

Mary Parry is a trail angel. She drives hikers the 15 or so miles from remote Duncannon to neighboring big city Harrisburg for trips to the outfitter or perhaps even the airport. Mary makes it very clear that she doesn't do it to profit from the hikers and will take only gas money. Unfortunately, Mary wasn't available this morning.

Heather, the cook at the Doyle, offered me a ride to the airport two days ago. Heather does profit from hikers. No problem, I say. Just be up front that this is a fee ride, not an act of kindness. Heather, however, neglected to tell me that it would cost me $20 until late yesterday. I slept on it.

After three nights at the Doyle at $17.50/night, meals in the bar and two good nights of swilling Pabst Blue Ribbon, I just don't feel like forkin' over $20 for a 15-mile ride. I decide to hike it, or hitch, or both.. What the hell. I hike 20 miles a day now! I'm a frikken machine. And I've got all day to do it. My flight isn't until 7:30 p.m.

I heft my pack alongside my weekend romance, Miss Pegasus, and together we walk North out of Duncannon and over the bridges of the Susquehanna River. There, the trail is once again a portal, half-invisible, in the vaulting forest canopy beyond the freeway and the railroad tracks. I watch Pegasus disappear into the AT. I turn then and face my days adventure. It isn't looking good. To my right, the river. To my left, the forest. And the only passageways heading southwest toward Harrisburg are the unwalkable freeway and the illegal but doable railway easement. I walk the tracks.

It's hard walking railroad tracks with the roar of a nearby freeway and a giant pack on your back that makes looking over your shoulder a full torso-swing thing. I walk about a mile to the nearest hamlet and a widening of the heretofore thin corridor between forested mountain and river. Here at least there are exit and entry ramps for the freeway. I don't stand long at the onramp before the absolute lack of traffic reminds me that I could be standing here a long time waiting for Grandma or Grandpa hamlet dweller to come out of the house and hit the freeway for their monthly pilgrimage to Wal-Mart. I begin walking a frontage road fairly sure that it will soon end and I'll be forced back onto the train tracks. I walk on with faith in the best outcome.

I am quickly rewarded. Jumping ahead a moment in the story, let me tell you this. Just north of here a few miles farther up the AT than I have yet traveled, there are buried the ashes of a man who long dreamt of hiking the AT from end to end. He managed to section hike parts of it, but fate cut his life short before the fruition of that "thruhike" dream. Where Mark Noel's ashes rest now grow wildflowers from seeds planted along the trail by his brother Richard.

I know all this because the one car, the only car, to stop (and at this point I didn't even have my thumb out) and inquire if I needed assistance, was a car carrying Richard and his son Andy. I know this because Richard picked up me up. Or did he?

"It was Mark who picked you up," said Richard. "I haven't picked anyone up in 30 years. But you had that AT hiker look."

Richard introduced himself and his son, and told the story of his late-brother Mark as Richard, or Mark, one or the other, drove me straight to the airport. "Hiking the whole AT was a lifelong dream of Mark's. This is Mark's doing," Richard said, repeating his sense of his brother's intervention in what might have been an impossible journey for me across Pennsylvania's capitol city.

Saying my goodbye's and stepping out into the airport world, there was a wide smile on my face as I shook my head with wonder. On a journey full of seemingly endless favors and kindness and hospitality and graces and trail magic and angels, this one was a new one. I'd been helped out in time of need by many a trail angel, but this one beat all.

Thank you Mark Noel, wherever you are. - RSM

Manchester International Airport
July 11, 04

So now Jesus is a pita here at the Rye Bethany church, and the pastor says he will come like a thief in the night. And steal what? I wonder. All our bread? The pita and the rye. Haha hodeeho. (Until today, I'd never seen a communion where the Body of Christ was finely chopped pita bread) Let him come. Me, I'm gone. Been here, done the family thing, and determined perhaps once and for all that discussion of politics or the news or religion is pointless with my father. God bless him. The banquet has been laid out, and he will have his place at the table. Me, I'll buy Christianity when it opens its arms and says all who believe in a supreme being will be welcome in Heaven. For now the Jews are out, and forget about the Mormons, the Muslims, the Buddhists, etc. "Don't get hung up on that," my father says. "Don't get stuck on that issue or you'll never come to know the good things about Jesus." I'm stuck at the exclusivity clause. I will probably always be stuck here. Stuck in the Hades between Heaven and Earth. Stuck between the zealous likes of my father and all my independent, intellectual, artistic and thoroughly anarchistic agnostic or atheistic friends who believe in no god and find my hopeful belief in Heaven an absurdity. In my father's church this morning I met a pretty woman named Katie. Very lovely, tall, no doubt believes in Heaven. Doubtful a smoker. Probably "my" ideal match. I left that church sad this morning, sure that no such woman would ever have a broken and hobbling Christian summer camp refugee-gone gonzo drug-addled devourer of earthly life, the Mad Hatter in an oyster-sucking contest with the Walrus.

Here at the Manchester airport bar awaiting the flight that will take me back to Duncannon and the Appalachian Trail, these are the thoughts that I'm thinking.

Where am I? What's it all mean? And will I, when I crest that cold rock far up in New England where Maine juts hard into Canada, will I have written something worth reading, worth publishing? Will I have stomped the American terra and told the tale well enough and with enough pride and gratitude in my American freedoms to please a nation of fear junkies, and maybe even, the poor battle-crazed soldiers in Iraq?

Will I? - RSM

Skies over Pennsylvania
July 11, 04

Shark fish with whirl of deadly spinning whiskers walks me, effortless, through cumulous sky seas high into the blue July of coming night. And it's Pittsburgh below like a bad memory fading, and funny it is that God would drop me here as well on this epic journey, after dragging me through Albuquerque and Chicago and all those other memory-laden towns fulla failures and faded, jaded faeries, and here I thought Pittsburgh was far enough west of the AT that I would never pass that way and have to think of her.

No matter now! Dancing in the white cotton mountains of pure magical moist air and thanks to seatmate Linda who switched with me in the last minute before takeoff, she noticing my fascination with the spinning blades outside her window. Now high, high! Old Jack hitching everywhere never had it so good! For this day I thank my father, not the heavenly One but the slipping-into-silver salesman dad who bore me into this world and all his faults and follies and mistakes and beauty, he is good man. And good his wife forgiven now for whatever angered me about her years ago in my mad, anxious head of San Francisco 1999 living in the art car Duke and crying and rising every morning to death thoughts, to which tree in the Berkeley woods I would hang from, madness. And me just wanting Daddy, just wanting him but being denied, yes! That was it, though first I dropped the bomb on the wife, holding the grudge as I had for harsh words already old.. whatever. And me hopefully forgiven for my words and anger and angst. So much pain and ill communication.

But now a new sweater, Patagonia! to replace the shrunken one, and new shoes and new reasons to stomp on the terra and all this heavenly beauty out my window, the window of this Dash 8 doing the tight rope, no, the slack line! Walking through and over cauliflower mushrooms and explosive milk white like dreams and mountains, peaks no man will ever ascend and should he try, would fall right through, ethereal. And the plane , the puddle jumper as Linda calls it, rocks and shimmies and I just laugh, fearless, not wishing ill on my fellow travelers, but fearless myself, intoxicated by cloud heavens and not caring if I die tonight for I have seen and felt the rapture of God's best work! Clouds as seen from Heaven.

Which makes me again think of all that hogwash about how only Christians and those who come to know Jesus will get into the Kingdom of Heaven. I don't care if it is written in the Bible, I don't believe it. I love all creatures and see something of myself in Everyman, even he who, should the worst happen, looks me in the eye and guns me down or cuts off my head in the name of his god. His god, my god, your god, it is all one God. And who could doubt the existence of Heaven or grace eternal who has flown? Who could question Heaven who has tickled the tops of snow white floating worlds of weather brewing? Up here it is azure blue and no earthly mountain, none high enough in the East, peaks through. I want to live up here. I must learn to fly, and soon. I would rise up and never again come down. Were I to fly and knowing how, I would never touch the ground. I would never again return to leaden ground. -RSM

[Afterthought on the Afterlife: He would know me, and know my meaning, and my place at the banquet would be set, for there is a place in Heaven for poets and dreamers, a place the scriptures may have missed but which exists. Sure as Jesus was a Jew, and shame on you for believing that a Jew would have any less chance than you, of eternal salvation. We all on this Earth bleed and die and hope and try. We are all going to Heaven.]

Copyright 2004 Richard McKinney
All Rights Reserved