Sometimes its nature's fault, sometimes its equipment malfunctions but it's never a lack of effort in trying to get Rick's posts up here on a semi-regular basis. I will admit this week it was a bit of laziness on my part. First I was overly warmed by Ricks B-Day gifts to me in thanks for my help and support. Then I got to spend a night in Vermont at a mad, gonzo influenced gala hosted by none other than the infamous Dave, the man who is less myth and more legend from New Mexico who I have heard so much about and finally had a chance to stomp terra with. It was a great time and even got to meet Mousebait and White Patch, two of Rick's fellow thruhiker's we have all read about. Good times were had by all. We even had our own version of Burning Man in Dave's driveway. Maybe you will read more about it here later. Though it took a few days to dive back into reality I should have had these up earlier. I thank Rick for this opportunity to take part in this great epic, one of which is over a third finished I might add. I have a feeling the best is yet to come.-Webmaster Justino
Miles: from 1135 to 1200
A couple of nights in central PA
Tornado in Lancaster County
Sleepy time tea in this old lodge-like shelter, all the makings of a two story loft lodge minus the one exterior wall. And me on the nod, zonking out in the dark upright at the picnic table, eyes closed and all in bed, slipped into their bags and snug and food hung and me sniffing my new sweater for signs of burn, but no. I got lucky.
While cooking dinner over my cat food can stove with denatured alcohol, I accidentally left the butane lighter too close to the stove's heat shield. The red hot metal melted a whole in the lighter and whooosh! Flames of butane shot out and together with the burning alcohol sent a fireball up into my face. The explosion sure excited the gang! But I was all right. Quite a night, this after hobbling in here with Jess and her aunt Chris, the worst ankle sprain I've felt yet. -RSM
From an email sent out the following day: "Rain rain rain. Ugh. And gorillas on your end! The world is coming to an end. The sky is falling. My feet are rotting from 3 days soaked shoes. Tornado in Pennsylvania! An F3 the experts are saying. Tore up a stretch of land 7 miles long, winds 200 mph. Really! Happened right nearby yesterday, same county I'm in, whilst I on the mountaintop hunkered down in the trees squat beneath my poncho and waited out the deluge and powerful winds. Crazy weather.
Brief sweet moment last night, however, in crowded shelter thus tight up against this pretty young thing. She pulled out her guitar and sang like an angel and I nursed her on my fifth of mescal by candlelight whilst about a dozen guys looked on in the dark just gaga. Too bad she's southbound. I'll likely never see her again. Another ghost, another angel!"
Gordy is a ski lift operator in the other world. Her legs are long cat scratch posts, all scrapes and mud and bug bites and long gouges and dried blood. Suddenly I am Tarzan, and they're beautiful in a Jane-kinda way. I ask about the gouges. "Chiggers," she says. How do you kill chiggers? "Nail polish. You suffocate 'em. They die beneath your skin." And then what? I don't wanna know.
Wild girl Gordy strums her guitar, a narrow thing lute-like, and sings angelic from a handful of damp and dog-eared printout lyrics from the web. Now its the Dead and "I know you rider" and Arms has joined in on his guitar, peeling off the bubble wrap and tape with which he carefully protected it from the rain. Beat Box, ever the man to reappear in my hike no matter how much time I take off or fall behind or climb ahead, he's there. And here appears tonight phantom like, genie from the bottle like his ever-singing spirit Aladdin. "Gordy if you were a guitar, you were the one I'd pick," he says.
Now Beatbox has bowed out, gone back to his journal. Gordy sings No Expectations and Arms play along. The loft of William Penn shelter this is, rain all day like walking through waterfalls. A friend writes and describes swimming with dolphins and I feel that for a moment out here today I swam with dolphins. - RSM
My sister, three years my junior, blew the Santa Claus myth for me when I was 9, and I've never recovered. I insisted for years that all myths were truth and and still persist in conjuring faeries taking flight in my mind to places of beauty and eternal late-afternoon summer sunlight. But I began to understand eventually that quiet the opposite was true. Indeed, most truths I ever been told by peers and family or sold by crafty advertisers, are myth. My father asked me the other day what it was about the "real world" that made me anxious, panicky, and paranoid. "Advertisements," I replied, feeling at a loss for answers but actually hitting it right close to the heart. "To know that I live in a world of lies."
Back here in the woods of PA, there are no lies flashing in my face and even corporate logos are kept to a minimum as diehard thruhikers strip their gear of labels. No lies, only rocks. And rain yesterday in buckets and soaking showers. And on my first day back out on the trail after this latest break for major resupplying and family visits in New England and the consumption of vast quantities of beer, on my first day back I rolled my right ankle again. Twice. The first not so bad. The second, crippling. I slept and rested it well, taking it slow today.
As I walk I speak this mantra, this prayer: please let me continue hiking. Please don't send me back into the world of lies. I can think of nowhere safe for me out there anymore, nowhere save a secure lodging, and a room of my own within it, shades drawn against the false night sun of pink-orange streetlights, phone unplugged against greed and collection. And the only sources of music or film ones on which advertisements don't play. From such a safe haven, I would come out aplenty, but never long enough to let the sadness of the world creep into me. - RSM
Miles: Six miles south of Port Clinton, PA
July 15, 04
A Ballerina With A Hump
Crazy days. Rolling my bones alone, again. Twenty-two miles today,
just four days back on the trail after a decadent ten days off drinking
beers and eating and getting zip for exercise. Nada. Then whammo!
Twelve miles Monday, twisting my ankle late in the day. Then 17 miles
Tuesday. Twenty yesterday. And I thought when I twisted my ankle this
time I was finished. It hurt that bad. But I talked to it, and
massaged it, and took it slow each day until, as usual, by mid-afternoon
and into evening I was back to dancing across the stone fields of
frikken Pennsyltuckey like a ballerina with a hump (the backpack). Now
tomorrow just six miles into Port Clinton where I'll pick up my first
of a new string of resupply boxes, grab a hamburger somewhere, a shower
if that comes along, but then back on the trail for at least a 14
tomorrow. I've decided I want OUT of PA by Tuesday night. Today is
Thursday. I got nearly 90 miles to cover. I'm gonna do it.
[Postscript: I made it out by Wednesday]
I'm thinking of a title to name the book that must surely come out of
all this gibberish.
One idea:
The Fantastic Possibilities: or how I walked through your yard unnoticed this summer while RPGs whizzed across your TV screen
It's wordy, I know.
- New terminology:
- Pink Blazer - a guy who adjusts his pace to hike with a woman
- Blaze Licker - white blaze zealot overly concerned with passing &/or touching every white blaze
- Puron - same as above, derivative of "purist" and "moron"
- Brewhiker - a thruhiker who utilizes beer as a means of motivation to get from town to town (since one cannot possibly hike with beer, let alone cold beer, one must keep going to get to the next beer)
- Green blazer - one who uses that other (unfortunately illegal) form of motivation to get down the trail
- Superpower privy - a lightning fast bowel movement technique perfected to get in and out of a stinky privy in one hard-held breath
Mile 1203
July 16, 2004
Port Clinton, PA
I try to get ahead. I really do. But the inherent flaw in any attempt at gonZo journalism is that life is ALWAYS happening. Now, perhaps there are those out there in the world people who can BE gonZo AND take time out to rest and WRITE about the experiences they just had. Me, I don't have that luxury. Especially not now, moving as I am at 20 miles a day across the stony Eastern seaboard. Pennsylvania, anyway. Stony as a kidney preparing to avalanche down some poor bastards urethra. Fuck Pennsylvania. Fuck it especially hard given that IT gave birth to the X girlfriend, the too-lovable just-add-whiskey schizophrenic who's Mr. Hyde-side gave me the boot, and now IT gives me naught but fields of stone over which to stumble and curse.
Here at the town pavilion of Port Clinton, PA, Cyberdine paints with found paint, a broken ink pen of black, and a tampon. Not the applicator, the tampon. They are fuzzy, you know, like a brush. Very handy in a use-what-you-got situation such as this.
Cyberdine is an artist and computer genius, who, thanks to the latter talent, has made a fine living in the new world order of LANs and WANs and other wireless web networks simply by employing his vast knowledge to locate and point out holes in corporate security systems. Amazing, really. To hear him tell tales of his past life is to be inside the Matrix, to be Neo hearing it for the first time from Trinity that the world he thinks he lives in IS NOT THE REAL WORLD.
I knew this wasn't the real world, this trail world I'm in. But I hadn't thought much about how unreal was that other world, the so-called "real."
Cyberdine paints now with ketchup and mustard. They are the only things left here at the pavilion with any color. Beck plays on a tiny pocket pc, a thing no bigger than my Palm Pilot but 20 times the price and 20 times the upgrades. It's power comes from the sun, channeled through another little miracle, the Brunton SolarRoll 14, a four foot roll of solar energy captured in plastic. Astounding.
Cyberdine finishes his masterpiece with a liberal sprinkling of sea salt. His license-plate sized canvas features rolling hills, clouds, a hiker and a bunny rabbit, all under a swirling sky of sea salt which smells vaguely of McDonalds. If it sounds like I'm being sarcastic, I'm not. I do in fact think it brilliant. Here is an artist and thruhiker like myself, working with nothing and making art. It is the best sort of art. Call it outsider folk art. Call it tasty. Call it smelly. ( Just give it a few days) He titles his piece, "I saw a bunny."
"I have to say, this is the first time I've ever painted with a tampon." We drink quarts of Yuengling premium, a beer I've only ever seen in PA. Cars roar by on PA 61, and the sirens squeal off in pursuit every six minutes or so, a speed trap if ever I've seen one. Must be a freeway of sorts, but it drops to 35 mph in town, and boy are the boys reeling them in today. Sitting in the bar at the Port Clinton Hotel, it sounded like there was a fire every five minutes. What a country. Most folks speed now and again. Some people suffer with speed. Some people benefit by it. Me, I hear the sirens and am damn glad I'm walking for a change. Twelve hundred miles as of today.
Out front of the pavilion stand two centurion-like castle columns. They look like stone things drawn by Maurice Sendak.
Cyberdine and I sit here at Port Clinton's public crash-pad like vendors awaiting customers. And at last one arrives. Boo-boo.
"Mountain Hardware sent me the wrong gaiters!" he says to us, a cell phone at his ear awaiting customer service. It takes Boo-boo awhile to say hello. He's just come from the local outfitter and he's fit-to-be-tied.
Oh, Jesus. Cyberdine has taken up with ketchup and mustard again. It's a good thing this pavilion is huge, plenty of air space. The McDonald's stink is everywhere, and I'm about out of beer.
But as I was saying, I try to get ahead. But the miles are flying. And then there was New Hampshire, seven days or so of major beer consumption with my cousin Justin. And church with Dad. God. Beer. Major distractions from.. um?
From the woods! Yes, this was about the forest, wasn't it? Anymore, it feels as though I hike with naught but the towns in sight. Descending into Harper's Ferry, Chef said: "Funny, after six days out on the trail we equate the sounds of traffic with beer and food."
And showers. Amidst the siren scream of some young buck cop with a hard on for speeders, I walk into the Port Clinton Peanut Store and pull four Andrew Jackson's out of the ATM. The mini-ATM company makes its two buck off me. Paypal already took their percentage. I am grateful for the $80, although I'd expected $100. God Bless America.
I drop a twenty at the Port Clinton Hotel Bar. It's worth it. I charge my mp3 batteries from a wall socket, eat a hamburger and bail. - RSM
Mile 1265
July 19, 04
Stealth Camp: Alpha Adios PA
Spent the night in jail last night. I should have seen it coming. All that talk about computer hacking with Cyberdine and me giving' him pills because he said was really stressed. Hell, they're my prescription drugs! Once they're mine, it's legal to give em away if I want, ain't it?
Anyway, I left Port Clinton kind of hungover and creeped out, the latter for no logical reason I could discern. At not quite 7 a.m., I was up, packed and out of town, vaporizing back into the magical forest as though I'd never existed in the town of PC.
Except in the 1100 block, the forest isn't so magical anymore. Here in Pennsylvania, God said let there be rocks and there are rocks. Big and small, from fields of rocks you got to scramble over to an endless foot-torturing pathway of smaller stones. The whole state is rocks. And then there's the "green tunnel" effect, which is basically realizing (after 1000 or so miles) that the Appalachian Trail is rarely more than a green tunnel. Views are scarce, especially now.
But I've gotten good at rock-hopping and I like the color green. Always behest of a keen sense of balance, I sort of dance along the fields of bigger boulders. And so this day I danced and danced and damn near ran in rare moments when the path was clear, until very late in the day, dark in fact, I stumbled like a drunkard exhausted into a campsite. I checked my mileage: 28 miles in one day. It was a record day.
As you might imagine I could barely walk yesterday. But I did. I got up, deservedly late at 9 a.m., and broke camp in the rain. And I rock hopped and hobbled and stumbled another 12 miles to a shelter where I met a man. His name was Jim. Jim said he was the caretaker of that particular shelter, but I wondered. He looked more like a plain clothes cop or a bounty hunter than an AT volunteer, and it was as though he'd been awaiting my arrival. Just me. Wet rat coming in out of the storm. No one else in the shelter.
Jim gave me a handful of smallish apricots and offered me a ride to town. "Nah, don't go into Slaterton. You don't wanna go there. You wanna come to Palmerton. We like hikers there, and we've got a place for you to stay, for free!" Now my hackles were really up. But after 7 days and 110 miles on the trail without a shower or laundry, I needed town, bad.
So into Jim's truck I climbed and off we went, but not before I noticed the objects in the bed of the truck, among them a shovel, a pickaxe, some rope and some tarpaulin, things one might use to bury a body in the woods. Who was this guy? Something just didn't feel right. But then, I hadn't felt quite "right" since losing $50 in Port Clinton, right after I'd pulled it out of the ATM, and then staying overnight against my better judgment, and worse of all, seeing Cyberdine go from jovial to grim to kind of psychotic looking, even after I'd fed him 4 milligrams of Klonipin, enough Valium to calm a werewolf.
And then it happened. Jim drove right up to the police station and said, "Here we are."
Oh, Jeezus. They've finally caught me. The net has descended at last. FBI. CIA. Whoever. They'd take me into custody quietly here in this podunk town and I'd disappear, end up in a shipping container prison overseas. It wouldn't matter to them that I'd committed no crime. They find something. It was the Patriot Act at work, and I was fucked.
In the tiny old mining town of Palmerton, PA, the city generously allows thruhikers to overnight for free in its historic "old jail." Jim was actually a really nice guy, and the "jail hostel" was fine and cozy and full of my fellow thruhikers, most of whom had been there since the night before, waiting out a horrendous & relentless two days of rain. Me, I'd hiked 40 miles in that rain, and I was out of my mind.
Thank you, Palmerton, for a good night's rest, and please forgive my typical psychotic musings. - RSM
Random Thoughts thru PA
In Duncannon, I discovered that I liked open fist boxing thanks to hotty lesbian bartender Sara who, after inviting Pegasus and me to her house undoubtedly with the intent of getting Pegasus to stay, decided to beat up on me. My willingness to hit and be hit by this girl caught me totally by surprise.
Just month's ago, I would shy from any major rough-housing with my small nephews Jacob and Matthew. I felt frail. I felt old. Not anymore. Now I'm hand-wrought bronze and forged steel. My legs, without flexing, constantly look as though I'm flexing muscles. Even my upper torso has taken on a lean, V-shape. And in response, I have taken to push-ups, at first in camp and now, of late, along the trail whenever the urge strikes me, pack on and everything. You get less pushups with a 30 lb. pack on, but man, they are satisfying, all 15 or 20 of them.
Now on the mp3 player I discover Lamb. I'd never heard of Lamb, a band whose music came to me and my mp3 as part of a huge, 60 gig bundle of music from cyberfreak friends in northern Cal. I recognized the female singer's voice immediately, that of the vocalist from Portishead, whose name escapes me, if I ever knew it at all.
But then I take breaks from the mp3 to conserve on battery power. The batteries are rechargeable, but out here in the woods wall plugs are few and far between. I tune into radio instead, my little credit card-sized radio that I've had duct-taped to my pack for months now. And on comes a real throwback from the Seventies, a veritable soul hoo-rah for women called "It's rainin' men!" Cyberdine says it's the Pointer Sisters, I dunno.
I recently set up thruhiker friend Eric with a Palm VII & keyboard, my ancient-but-effective wireless means of reaching YOU and the world in general. An hour ago I got an email from Eric, he and girlfriend Jess and her aunt Chris just behind me (I thought) saying that they were off the trail as of midday due to auntie's bad boots and the rain. Damn.
Now I wanna write Eric and tell him that when he rejoins the trail to just skip this frikken section, four miles of solid swamp. I'm just a few miles from hitting the 1200-mile mark and it's nothing but bog. The swamp trail! Then sure enough along come a portly family of day hikers, Ma, Pa & Jr. Whopper, headed straight for the swamp! I'm like, "What are you people nuts?" It's not the first time I've seen Pennsyltuckeyians out thrashing merrily over their state's evil rock-infested forest trail and I wonder. I mean, I'm doing this because I'M NUTS! And because it's just one part of a long trail, of which there are many nicer parts. These people ought to move to Virginia or Georgia.
Nayber! Alumni thruhiker and trail angel Nayber sent me some shoes! The guy saw how messed up my Lowas were and sent me a pair of Adidas! Used, but in great shape (I wouldn't accept a new pair, I told him). Thank you, Nayber! I've already put 200 miles on them, roaring outa PA and through Jersey now.
On the radio comes the song Born to Run, by Bruce Springstein I think, a song that always gets me pumped up and all misty-eyed and full of passion. I charge up a rock pile singing at the top of my lungs "I wanna die with you Wendy on the street tonight in an everlasting kiss!"
That girl Katie I mentioned, the one at my father's church, pretty yet out of my league (League of Rogue Gentlemen, or something), I actually had the following dialogue with her:
Her: "So you're hiking the trail. What do you do for work that allows you so much time off?"
Me: "I do nothing, actually." (My father standing by, horrified)
Her: "Where do you live?"
Me: "I live in the woods, going on four months now."
It was a real winner, lemme tell ya.
There are two songs that I will forever associate with my hike of the Appalachian Trail as they've been burned into my brain by Clear Channel radio, the corporate destroyers of originality in radio. One is that damn ballad by Hooba Stank where the guy lamely apologizes for hurting his girl and though he's lost her now, he'll always be a better man. Crap. The other is that song "Fifteen" by, who is that? Dave Matthew's? I don't know. Burn em both.
Climbed up outa Palmerton the other day into another Superfund site, a horrid toxic nightmare world full of gnarled dead trees and mutant fungal plant life with eyes that watched you as you went, like a thousand frogs melted together and stuck in a puddle of goo on ground leached and bleached by mineral-hungry men with no concern for the world they had left behind for their children.
But later that same day, miles away in a healthy forest, I ran my hands through dewy blades of grass to wash off the stickiness of a Snicker's bar. I saw a turtle and a ground hog, a black snake slithering across the trail and one of those brilliant orange little newts, called efts, I believe. And everyday I see deer, stunning, silent, skittish, brazen, playful, close at hand. I have yet to see an east coast bear. - RSM
Mile 1307
July 21, 2004
Forest Motel, Branchville NJ
Where to begin. What to say. Well, there's always hallelujah! although I've never been too confident about how to spell that, so how about, with a grateful nod to The South and all its angels and kindness and trail magic (now absent here in the mid-Atlantic), how about I just say "Hot shit! Hot damn! Hot diggety! Holy hushpuppies and grits! Thank you Jesus!"
Comfortably ensconced in a motel room off Highway 206 here in Culver's Gap, New Jersey, squat on the bed, an Indian chief proud, my hair full of colorful feathers I've found along the trail, proud yet humble as any true wise man seated before the Great Woodchipper in the Sky, and typing of course, and plugged hard into Massive Attack, "Teardrop" at the moment, a powerful song for a powerful man, a powerful day, a day full of pain and rain and ticks and filth and grace and wide, wide open space, and a sweet 9th inning rescue from failure, defeat, retreat.
Big Chief Paisley Feather sits here basking in the A/C and off my feet for a solid day tomorrow thanks to one of a dying breed of old friends, perhaps my second oldest friend in terms of going back in time. For only the second time on this 1300 mile, four month journey, I pressed the Panic Button today and a friend answered the call.
At noon today, I found myself roadside at one of the many places where the AT encounters the real world and we are forced to dodge traffic or walk through fenced overpass bridges or through tunnels beneath the traffic. Crossed a zillion roads and freeways by now it seems, but today was different. I was looking at this rather rural road as the beginning of the End. I wanted to quit the trail today, and I was but a thumb away.
I was sick of the trail. I am sick of the trail. I am sick of the rocks, of which there were about 200 miles in Pennsylvania. I am sick of checking my legs, my balls, my ass crack for microscopic bloodsucking ticks which, if undiscovered, could make of me a more physically and mentally deranged person than I already am. (I pull one off of me every few days, incidentally.) I'm sick of EVERYONE on the trail, from the worst fuddy-duddy dorkos and jerks to people I really like. But of course what this really means is I'm sick of myself and all the work of interacting with ANYBODY, EVERYBODY on the trail.
And there are still a lot of us. To hear the statistics, you'd think there'd be, at this point, me and about three circus freaks left way back here at the ass-end of the pack. Nope. There's shitloads of freaks. This could be a record year for successful freak thruhikes.
But what I'm MOST sick of is the politics of "white blazing" versus just plain walking North. Fuck! What is it about humans that no matter how kind and gentle and soft and fluffy and eco-tickly and lovey-dovey you get, an elitist spirit is spawned in the minds of some or many or even just one, and suddenly a hierarchy is born and with it all the divisive and derisive bullshit of a Hitler Youth brigade?
I almost hitchhiked off-trail this morning (who knows maybe a full Kerouac-hitch to California) not because my feet were hamburger after ten 20-mile days in a row (a very good reason to stop, if not quit) but because the two cool young guys I'd recently hooked up with turned out to be serious Believers in the whole Neo-Nazi Arian Blaze Race bullshit.
But the problem, as usual, was mine, not theirs. I don't believe in absolutes. And I don't believe in going backwards, for anything. So when Catherine at the AMC Mohican outdoor center said this morning, "Hey, you guys don't need to backtrack, you can just go up this trail over here and be back on the AT in no time," I said "All right!" The boys were not in accord. They would back-hike to the exact spot we'd left the "White Blaze Inquisition" and begin again from there. Ugh.
There are actually people who insist on physically "touching" every splotch of white paint on every tree from Georgia to Maine.
I loathe perfection. I embrace chaos. And so does Nature, I'll remind you. Nature loathes perfection, as we humans define it. Nature IS chaos. Heading North, I took the logical "shortcut" back to the trail. The result, sociologically? I am alone again. Morphing the words of that George Thorogood song a bit, "I hike alone, yeah, with nobody else."
I walk North. I walk North until I hurt all over. I walk North for no good Goddamn reason at all. I walk North for me. I walk North because I feel that I've never really had a triumph in my life, nothing to call a total success. I will succeed, but not without the love and support of many at home, you Mike, most certainly high up there. And Bruce, and Justin, and Timmy, and Mary, and Marie, Linda, oh,, and my God Kathleen Pearson!! My beloved stalwart friend whose postcards and letters I can ABSOLUTELY count on at EVERY mail drop. Wow. No one tops Kate for consistency. Thank you all. - RSM
Now it's tomorrow. July 22nd, to be exact. I awoke this morning groggy from pain killers and beer, the former a necessity just to get me off the mountain yesterday, so bad was the pain with every step. The latter serving a necessary medicinal function, that of calming my frantic wound-up speed freak Greyhound dog-on-the-run mind, which couldn't quite grasp WHY we were stopping. Hell, we'd done 180 miles in less than ten days, two of them measly 10-milers due to a sprained ankle. Which boils down to 160 miles in 7 days, 88 of them in just the last four. Insane, by any standard.
When I hooked up with Rooster and Ski Bum the other day, I expressed my gratitude and appreciation for being able to simply walk between them, to follow their pace. "Me, when I walk alone I just go and go. I have no governor, no shut-off valve, no throttle and no basis for comparison. So I hike fast and hard and kill myself in the doing." They nodded understandingly. Rooster moves at the ultimate cool pace. His whole demeanor is cool, unhurried. Here's a guy whose feathers would be very hard to ruffle. "I think subconsciously I'm trying to catch up to Elly, the girl I started this hike with four months ago who is now already far into Maine."
Sadly, this is true. I have no delusions about "catching" Elly, nor would I want to. But her electric pace shamed me horribly when I arrived in Harper's Ferry, NJ to find that she'd been through there over a month ago, that she was #100 on the march. I was #410. I lie here in this bed in some funky motel where the satellite cable doesn't work and the shower doesn't drain and floods the room and there's no phone in the room, but I'm happy as a pig in shit to be here. I lie here because I tried hard to catch Elly, conceptually anyway, although my bruised feet might argue that point. It is an impossible task.
I treat myself to a some HBO while I rest my feet. It's the only channel that's working. It's a film called "Lone Star" with a tolerable cameo-like sprinkling of Matthew McConaughey and a whole lot of Chris Cooper, one of my favorite actors since he popped up in American Beauty. I like the film's setting, like Tucson or El Paso likely or some border town out west. I recognize the palm trees painted white up to shoulder height and that dry light of the Rio Grande, the bottles of Lone Star and the Negro Modelo. These things feel like home to me. And then those shots of crossing over the bridge into Juarez like Dave and I that Christmas years ago driven down in by friend Miguel "Gallo" Silva to the bus station for our long ride to Mazatlan.
A Mexican character says, "In Mexico we invented recycling," and I laugh. It's so very true.
There's something I love about Texas, too. She's always been good to me, Davey Crockett's birthplace Ozona, for instance. Such good people.
But there's that whole shiftiness to the border world, an atavistic yet not unbrotherly realm, a queer, gun-toting Mafioso "family" of coyotes, corrupt small town politicians, Texas rangers and white hat-wearing drug lords with helicopters and gold teeth.
"It's the old west down here boy," someone once told me when I was a reporter in Bisbee, and then that warden of the DWI prison tossing me a warning in that veiled threat way, that if I probed anymore into the story of one of his prisoner's accosting a high school girl, well, I might just wind up in his prison some time, drunk or no, maybe a bottle planted in my car, a bartender paid to slip me a mickey?
Later, after a few phone calls to the West, I cry myself into an afternoon nap, lonesome for the desert dust of Arizona, Mexico, California, the dust and ocean sunsets that long ago crept into the marrow of my Boston-born bones and stuck there. I cry for Colby & Brina, for Jacob & Matthew, for Mom and Sis and Bruce, for Mary in Texas and Kathleen in Bisbee, for Harrod, sweet whale-hearted Harrod, and many more who will make if very hard to leave Hotel California, if I ever do, to give it up for a return to my eastern roots. Exhausted, I cry out this journey, yearnful of family, and most of all desperate to feel love again. I am the luckiest man alive. I am the loneliest man.
"What's the best thing you've ever done?" asked Rooster yesterday. "I wrote a novel," I said. But I quickly followed with this: "For me, that was the best thing I did for me, but as for doing things for others?" Whatchoo do, they asked, "Cared for the mentally retarded, was a friend to old people, lived and worked as a guide to a blind man." This after me saying how I've had a grand life, (Rooster, Ski Bum and me seated atop Jacob's Ladder high above the Delaware River in NJ, all of us soaked to the bone from a half hour of torrential rain that made a river of the trail). "If I dropped dead tomorrow I would die a happy man, a full man. And my belief in Heaven and God would carry me through to the where Luci's gone, and Chris and Grandma, too." - RSM
Mile 1316
July 23, 04
Mashipacong Shelter, NJ
Some New Jersey shelter with an unpronounceable name in the rain. Beautiful. Soft wind plays surf & sand sounds through reeds of birch, maple, oak.
Awakened by the slight discomfort of summer nights turned cooler than I like, I slip on my long johns and socks and fleece sweater, my cozy Patagonia, and set about to playing my own music, that silent song of keyboard and fingers in the dark. It is most always a lonesome song. But tonight I don't mind, or I should say I don't feel lonesome. The old stonewalls and stout wood beams of this shelter are companion enough. And Spare Pocket and Rooney Tunes, my two most congenial shelter mates this night (you just never know who you are going to get, a point which of late has kept me out of shelters).
They are enough to cut the lonesome song and make it ring practical, even poetic. That Bukowski quote, ''Endurance is more important than truth" now more than ever I feel its meaning. I have always been a truthful person, often to my own detriment, so for me the truth part just kind of goes without saying. But endurance, in this case it is to endure healthily, to lug along on a super-extended timeline, to endure the repetition of four months afoot yet also the constant change of surroundings and curve-balls thrown at you by Nature. Nature, the great equalizer. Out here, we are all just hobo mountaineers, a kind of smelly bum nobility that move almost unseen through a vast narrow tunnel of green light, fireflies, wind and rain and rocks and pain, the latter endured quietly forever. For one cannot walk twenty miles in a day every day without pain.
The magic was with me yesterday as my motel tenure was up and the rain came down and me, with my poncho lost a few days back, altogether not a good situation. But onto the highway I stepped and walked and facing an uphill climb of several miles through construction and fast cars that I doubted (in Jersey) would ever stop for me, I walked, but I stuck out my thumb anyway, almost lazily, my back to the oncoming cars. And whammo. Within seconds I had a ride, a young guy, thick Jersey accent, no idea what or where the AT was but took me there, or to Gyps Tavern anyway, at the trailhead, where I went inside the lone customer and Genie whipped me up a burger and a birch beer for the "road." I wolfed down my burger and root beer and we talked and outside it began to pour like a Texas flood. Shit, I thought. No poncho.
I'd been learning to endure long walks in the rain. You get wet no matter what. But the poncho makes for a little mobile tent reserving for its occupant a warm damp space in which to dwell, either on the move or at rest, folded up inside of it like a giant green Hershey's kiss by the side of the trail, waiting out the worst of the thunder or deluge.
I seize a break in the rain and make for the door. But in the time taken to pay the check and double check the dry bag and Ziplocks for the safety of my change of clothes and my electronics, it has begun again. In earnest. I what can I do? Sit and wait it out in the tavern all day? The forecast is for rain all weekend. And there are miles to be made. Maine will not come to me. Outside the tavern a man running a summer school in the woods is about to go get his students from up trail. He offers a ride to the next shelter. I decline gratefully, but I do accept two turkey sandwiches and some chips after assurances that they have enough to feed the kids. Rain is dripping down my nose. I gotta go. I thank him and cross the street and dash into the relative "cover" of the canopy. Thanks to thirsty trees, it's always raining a little less in the woods.
Not a hundred feet into the forest, just far enough that passerby on the streets won't see, sits a yellow delivery newspaper sleeve, full of something, with the following written on it: "This Poncho belongs to Duke, aka Lord Duke aka Jester aka Rick. Hope you get it. It sure will be wet w/o it. - Rooster"
Two days it sat there, two rainy days. Many hikers had passed. No one had taken it. That's AT magic. - RSM
Mile 1329
July 24, 04
Murray Property
(Top Secret Free Hostel just over state line into NY)
So I hit a wall. Anxious to get out of Pennsylvania, I charged headlong past a sprained ankle, through a nasty stomach virus (or bad water, not sure) that had me swaggering dizzily for three days, and over far too many miles for my poor feet with nothing but the rest of night. Some nights I was still hiking an hour or so after dark. So not even night could protect my feet from zealous me.
At last the miles got to me. Here I had planned to rip through fifty mile NJ in just two days, and on the second day at twenty-five miles in, I nearly pissed my pants coming down a steep slope, so all-consuming was the pain in my feet with every step. I had pushed my high tolerance for pain to the limit.
I emailed friend Mike, told him my situation, told him how close I'd come to quitting earlier that day, and he booked me a room for two nights at the Forest Motel. Mike is a true friend.
Such constant and extreme physical rigor I had never known before in my life. I had never been much into sports in my school years, and as life went on into my twenties and thirties, I never exercised. Hardly ever. I didn't need to. I had a high metabolism and a natural slimness about me, and I was plenty active. Just not athletic. Now suddenly, driven on by haste and a desire to match the kind of pace Elly (already in Maine) had set, I'd been running a marathon nearly every day.
At the forest Motel, I lay in bed and wrote, sat on my handmade pillow at the payphone outside and called friends, and drank a bunch of cheap beer. I firmly believe that my appetite for beer has helped me on this journey. Both for the carbohydrate intake and the celebration aspect, rewarding oneself for mileposts achieved.
Below is a list of the ten day push that ended with bruised feet and a forced rest. Tonight I'm cowboy camping (no tent, just a bag beneath the stars) in some past thruhiker's field in rural NY state. I took it slow yesterday and today, hiking just ten miles and then twelve today. The feet are responding well.
- My mileages since returning from a week off in NH
- 7/12: Duncannon to Peters Mtn Ferry - 11.4 (bad ankle sprain)
- 7/13: Peters Mtn Ferry to Rattling Run - 10.1
- 7/14: Rattling Run to William Penn - 20.7
- 7/15: William Penn to Rock Steps (past Eagles Nest) - 22
- 7/16: Rock Steps to Port Clinton - 6.4 (waylaid by free town-sponsored accommodations and 40s of Yuengling beer)
- 7/17: Port Clinton to crash camp in woods - 28
- 7/18: Crash camp to Palmerton - 12 (illness & rain)
- 7/19: Palmerton to stealth camp - 21
- 7/20: stealth to Delaware Water Gap & beyond (10 miles into Jersey) - 27
- 7/21: Mohican Center to Culver Gap and the Forest Motel - 16
[Postscript: When a hiker named Paradox saw me & expressed relief that he'd "caught up with someone" and others in the group here tonight expressed surprise that I was not far ahead of them now, I came up with a clever response. "Well, you see, the ATC got a hold of me and arranged for me to stay in a motel for two nights, drop back as it were, so that all of you could enjoy the morale boost of 'catching up' to a big miler like me."
The boos were unanimous, but mixed with laughter, too. - RSM
Copyright 2004 Richard McKinney
All Rights Reserved