Horrible weather. Bay-ootiful friends. The weather, well, I am OUT of
it now by a mere six feet or so, just enough, snug inside an old stone
shelter with a good metal roof. I'm looking out at the weather,
sticking my tongue out at it, and all it can do to me now is make fog
of my breath. Fog-breath in July. Weird weather.

My beautiful friends are not with me, not in the flesh anyway. No one
is with me tonight. Driven here by relentless rains, I made an
exception to the rule and traveled an entire 6/10ths of a mile off the
trail to get to a shelter. Typically AT Thruhikers scoff at any
shelter more than a few hundred feet from the trail. No sense adding
extra mileage to your 2200 mile trip. But tonight I had no choice.
And as I approached, I had a sense it would be nice. For the
aforementioned reason and it being a weekday and miserable out, I would
likely have the shelter to myself. I was right. At rougly 7 pm I came
running in here at top speed, the extra effort employed not out of
haste but fear. I could feel the temperature dropping rapidly and I
was soaked. I'd stopped for a rest and suddenly felt quite chilled.
Hypothermic conditions. I made the last half mile here in under ten
minutes and insodoing generated enough body heat to sustain me whilst I
stripped, toweled off and got into warm dry clothes, literally putting
on everything I had in reserves.

I now sit wrapped in my thin summer sleeping bag drinking sleepy time
tea with Crown Royal on the side. Mary Forbes, you spoil me! I'm
about to plow into the Mountain House brand Pasta Primavera Mary sent
me, too. Today was a good day at the post office. I have some very
fine friends indeed. Not lonesome tonight, no no. Cozy, warm, charmed
by the stonework and old wood of this mountain dwelling I'm in, and
eating and drinking the love of my friends. Kinda like breakin' bread
with Jesus, his body, his blood, all that, but with earthly friends
instead.

And I've got a new friend today, too! Cynthia of San Diego, who are
you? You goddess, YOU! Cynthia sent me Paul Newman Oreos and a
frikken pound of gummi bears and a pound of dried mango and Jasmine
Green Tea and the book Immortality by Milan Kundera, all with a sweet
little note that lent no clue as to who Cynthia is. "She certainly
knows what you like!" I said to myself. "I wonder how she knew so
well? Well, Rick, you do write about your damn self all the time. You
probably wrote that you liked gummi bears."

Amazing. Thank you, Cynthia, whoever you are. I wanted to send you a
thank you note, but as a matter of hiker ritual, I "processed" the
contents of all three boxes I got today, removed as much packaging from
everything as I could, and broke down the boxes and threw them away.
"Shit!" I thought a few miles down the trail. ''I forgot to copy down
her address off the box.''

I made the same error a few weeks back with another wonderful goodies
box from friend Marie. Her address is not in my Palm Pilot and several
attempts at remembering her email off the top of my head have failed,
my thank yous returned unsent by that "Mailer Demon" guy, whoever he
is.

Then there was the package from Linda that I never got thanks to the
ding-dongs at the PO. Ehh, they're not ding-dongs. Just busy as hell.
More than once they failed to give me all the packages or mail sent to
a drop address. The one from Linda had far out homemade
blondie-brownies and business cards she'd made me to give out on the
trail to promote Jigglebox. All lost. Have made inquiries, but the
USPO says they don't know.

And did I ever mention Nayber? A Thruhiker from last year, he saw my
1000-mile-thrashed Lowa trail runners and sent me a replacement pair of
shoes! I told him I couldn't accept new ones, so he sent a used pair
of Addidas. Far out.

Marie, Mary, Nayber, Kate with her never-miss postcards, Mike with his
care package & then the gift of a motel, My Sis & nephews, Linda, Tank
Girl, Chris Stock, Colleena, Justin & Jess, Cynthia. Boy, am I lucky
guy.

Dinner eaten, I am now, however, a meat popsicle. I'm done for.
Exhausted. I wanna write a few emails, read some Kundera, expand on
some thoughts I had today on the trial, but I can't. I twisted an
ankle again today, the balls of my feet are like perma-bruised, and I'm
wiped out. Took every ounce of energy to get me another 12 or 14 miles
along the trail today in the pouring rain. And I can do nothing else.
It's after 10 pm, hiker midnight. Gone. -RSM

Mowed field of early morning grass wet and all bejeweled, diamonds of
dawn as golden sun not seen in days rises powerful over eastern forest.
Yesterday I met Walt Whitman in a forlorn old zoo fulla black children
singing Jesus songs and howling to make the caged coyotes howl. Walt
standing there eternal, eternal as bronze anyway, tall majestic there
at the lowest elevation point on the AT saying, in essence, you can
have your cities, your stress, your Turtle Wax and toe nail polish..
give me the trees, the rocks, the long open road across America. And
that river otter in his tiny pool doing loopdi-loops, I wanted to take
him home!

And those tired looking bears, not old, just tired or maybe content, I
don't know. I turned to an attendant there at the Bear Mountain
Wildlife Center for animals that can't survive in the wild and said,
"In 1400 miles, those bears are the first I've seen on the trail!" Her
response was like nothing. Blah. My words meant nothing to her.
Fine. I crossed the Hudson River and disappeared back into the forest.
But not for long.

In six miles I walked into this place, and old monastery whose brothers
have been taking in thruhikers for decades. Got here just in time for
the 5:30 dinner of spaghetti, heaps of it, and salad fantastic, and
bread and butter and jello and three bean soup and iced tea. Wow! I
even managed to squeeze in a 48 second shower to peel off a layer of
sweat before dinner down here at the sports pavilion’s ice cold cedar
shower house.

Rain last night, again, but again I beat it, warm and snug under cover
of the pavilion in my bag and long johns and fleece sweater stretched
out atop a table. Wonderful. Twenty miles ahead today but with no
pack! A kind angel named Gene gonna run our packs ahead, Michael,
Nitro and me. Then tomorrow one more twenty to Appalachian Trail
Station and boom! Outa NY state. -RSM

Smash cut to RPH Shelter, later that night. Whoa! Night now and me
out of the shelter to pee in the bushes and noticing that the sky is
still blue and all the forest a silhouette and whoa! Day has
surrendered to night, the former saying nothing of my 19 mile day, the
latter only proclaiming again her name, NIGHT! "Oh, Day! Speak up,
all ready!" Days says nothing and Night, predictably "Nighty night,
Dukey" as she suffers my lids to close in mid-sentence here at the Like
Water For Chocolate picnic table neath the overhang here in the New
York state garden of Appalachian comfort, such as it is, and my cat
food can stove burns a small alcohol flame to hold the day, to stave
off night for me to have something, to say. But no sooner said than
"poof" flame out and all thruhikers with beers in their bellies to bed
in their snug tents, crickets singing irreverent in the brambles,
Radiohead singing irreverent in my ears, "far away, far from pain, so you
aim toward the sky..." I am interrupted from my revelry to brush a
Daddy Long Legs from my ankle, about the third in as many minutes.

Suddenly Cynthia Wilson's Gummi Bears from Chula Vista California take
center stage over the remnants of damn near a case of Heineken beer
slapped together from some interstate Sunoco gas station, trail angel
Gene's generous driving and a twenty spot kicked down by Swan.

Cynthia! Who are you? Lovin' the gummi bears, even tho' they don't
mix well with Dutch beer poured on draft and drank from an MSR titanium
cook pot. Who knew?

So get this! Michael (of Nitro & Michael - don't know why he don't
have a trail name and she does) and I go into S& J Deli somewhere
between the Taconic forests of New York and the `burbs, and they say
what do you want? and I say Italian sub please and can we fill our
water bottles? And Michael says something about how we're hiking, and
BOOM! that's all it takes and Angie asks "The Appalachian?" and the
answer is yes, and so suddenly Angie and Richie behind the counter
wanna know all about it. Angie says she's a California girl and is
more interested, it seems, in how close I live to Ontario, CA, where
she's got family, than the trail, but the truth comes out that Michael
and I and all our time-neighboring freak brethren have indeed walked
1400-some miles to get here, here in the neighborhood of the S&J Deli
Superette. Water bottles filled, I go to the counter to pay up and
Ritchie puts his hand on the sub, slides it toward me and together they
say, "Have a safe hike." Huh? And big Italian Ritchie is like, "You
walked 1400 miles and you're gonna try and pay me? Fah-get about it."

Back in the car, Gene says, "Yeah, New Yorkers are pretty
soft-hearted."

Now it's past Hiker Midnight and I'm about to puke on gummi bears and
Heineken and everybody else has been asleep an hour or more. The
chocolate-covered espresso beans I ate just to keep me from
face-planting on the picnic table are about to wear off. Gotta go.
Goodnight and God zilla.
-RSM

I was thinking I should get on my website and jazz up my resume. Put
in all the good stuff I've been up to in the past three years. I'd
start with throwing in my stint in Kaseman Psychiatric. It was less
than a week, but we could beef it up, call it a month. Say I got an
honorary degree in "How Deep is Your Love" since that seems to have
been the straw that broke my love's back.

Next I'd put up there how I spent three months in a little-known
job training program called "Drunken Float Decoration" or "How to
decorate Mardi Gras floats with one hand and drink with the other."

I'd have to post my training at automotive engine nursing and
replacement, having replaced the engine in my art car three times in
recent years.

Then we could write up "Crooked Cabin Up-righting" from when I lifted
that cabin in Maine up off its slanty hill home and put in on new
foundation blocks, such that the front door went from being at ankle
height to well above my hips when I was done. From that same summer, I
could put "Dental Extraction" down there from when I pulled out my own
tooth with the aid of tequila, a 12-pack of Maine's Sarnac beer, and
pliers.

"Pyromaniac" deserves to go on the resume after manning the propane gun
on the whale at Burning Man two years running.

I've had a recent revelation!
It concerns pack weight. After a comfy night at the Friary near Bear
Mountain, I was "slackpacked" by a trail angel named Gene who went on
ahead 19 miles and took Nitro, Michael & I's packs ahead for us. My
recent insane foot pain and ankle sketchiness disappeared as I soared
over the 19 miles of trail at better than 3 miles per hour. "That's
it!" I decided. "I'm tossing my pack and everything in it but my
sleeping bag! No more fuel, no more stove, no more hot meals, no more
first aid kit, no more too-much food and I'll lose the pack, too, if I
can and go with a mesh laundry sack or something. I'm dying from the
weight, even though mine is a relatively light pack. [I consequently
did this very thing, mailing off a full 8 pounds of lord-knows-what but
opting out of the mesh sack as it looked lame and kept the pack. The
result: I did move faster, felt better. In fact I roared across NY,
NJ, CN & MA. But I quickly reclaimed my Thinsulite pad, as the ground
and/or floors of shelters was just too damn hard w/o it. Then in the
Berkshires of MA, I began to freeze my ass off, in August! So soon,
we'll be adding back a lot of the weight. I will continue to miss,
however, my mp3 player, which was far too heavy with batteries and
recharger to lug to Maine.]

Summer sounds come to me through the woods. Sounds of children
laughing and playing. I recently came across a dirt road in the woods,
such a road usually desolate but today jammed with SUVs going
somewhere. I'd been hearing sounds of what sounded like a radio in the
woods at first, and then walking on realizing it was bigger, maybe a
parade in a nearby town. It was Sunday. Now here were all these cars
cued up and moving at a snail's pace through the woods. As I crossed
their path, I asked a driver what was up. "Parent's day at summer
camp." Ahh, sweet memories.

My day's are full of blueberries now. I eat them from trailside bushes
as I walk. Blackberries and raspberries, too. It's nice.

What is it about daddy long leg spiders that they run exactly back
toward you when you shoosh them away? I mean exactly! I flick em away
and they retrace their steps perfectly. Weird.

I am a mass of bug bites and patches of poison ivy. I itch constantly,
but am very Zen about not scratching.

The other day I summited Bear Mtn and went looking for the water
fountain promised in my guidebook. The visitor center was closed, as
were the bathrooms and the spigots yielded nada. But heh! Look what
we have here up on this empty mountain! A Dasani water dispensing
machine!! Just $1.50! I head down the mountain and tap the first
spring I find.

Down at Bear Mountain we are fed by mama Rooney, Rooney Tunes' mom
driven down from Mass with chicken and deviled eggs and pickles and
macaroni salad. It is a nice treat. Then that night, after the zoo of
broken-down animals and Walt Whitman and all that, I'm fed a full meal
by monks! What a world.

Last night at the RPH shelter about 20 miles from the CN state line,
nearly a full case of Heineken donated and Ursa Minor is on antibiotics
and can't drink and neither Nitro nor Michael drink much, leaving it
all to Swan and me. I did my best. Sweating beer today.

-RSM

Jesus! New York, what a clusterfuck. Beautiful, mind you. One needs
a local guide for this town. Haven't had much luck myself since NYFD
Fire Chief Dennis dropped me in the Bronx and I hopped a subway to
Times Square. Ok. I've had plenty of ''fun'', doing the same thing I
do every day on the trail but now with neck craned fully back staring
skyward at the vast and incomprehensible monoliths to man's vast ego.
But there's this thing about backpacks in NYC that I never thought of.
They don't like em. I tried to get up into the Empire State Building
along with a gillion other tourists on this Saturday in July. Yeah,
right. That went over like a fart in church. "Backpack! Oh, my God,
Harry, he's got a backpack!" How was I to know I'd walk outa the woods
and into the Big Apple and suddenly be viewed as a dangerous criminal,
a walking thermonuclear weapon bound on blowing myself and a gillion
fat tourists skyhigh for no good reason at all. Whatever.

Okay, I admit I did think about it a little, the pack I mean. I
actually looped back to Grand Central from Times Square to ditch my
pack fulla smelly socks and melted deformed Snickers bars and
hand-carved tent stakes and granola(all dangerous items, I’m sure) in
one of the many lockers I'd seen in movies for time eternal. Guess
what? No lockers since 9/11. Fuck me. And fuck those fuckin' jihad
bastards who knocked a whole lotta lockers and loved ones outa the sky
that fucked up day three years ago. Thanks to them, I can't go up high
and get a bird's eye of the greatest city in America, the most famous
city, a mythical Camelot known to me only in film and books until
today. Thanks to Osama and carnage and paranoia and the war on drugs,
I can't see the city from the sky.

Not that I'm complaining. Seated here in Don Vito's pizzeria in Little
Italy drinking a Peroni and wolfing down a slice of genuine NYC pizza,
all floppy and fold-up-able and dripping cheese and the waitress cute
and not afraid to get close to me, breaking the two (or is it three?)
foot barrier of personal space held my most Americans, putting her face
right in mine as she suggest broccoli instead of pepperoni on my pizza.
''You're absolutely right,'' I said. ''I need vegetable matter. The
forest is turning me into a junk food and dried-pasta mutant. ''

And then there's Fire Chief Dennis Munnelly whose lovely family took me
in last night in Pawley, NY, fed me dinner, got me showered and
laundered and made me up the couch bed (I was down and out on it,
asleep in seconds flat after a day of running to meet them at 7 pm).
When I found out about his being a fireman in NYC, I had to ask.
Stories? Yeah, he had a story. It was short and bittersweet. "I
woulda been killed if I hadn't been on vacation that week. My entire
unit was wiped out." Jesus. There's luck. And pain. What a thing to
survive. How you would feel? Wouldn't you ask, "Why me? Why not me?"
A guy could go crazy with that kinda shit. Dennis seems sane as
anyone. God bless him. He is blessed. God spared him for some
reason.

And did I mention that I invited myself to dinner with the Munnelly's?
Oh, yeah. Met them on the trail yesterday morning just when they were
ending their morning day hike and loadin' into the car to drive back to
Pawling. Did I want a ride, they asked? Well, no, thanks, that
would kinda defeat the purpose of my journey. But then there was a
connection between us, strong I felt. And it didn't seem right to just
say goodbye there and never see them again, especially since I was
heading straight for their town and we could maybe visit and I could
get to know their lovely daughter Cristelle a little. So I just came
out with it. "Why don't you invite me to dinner? I could tent in your
yard?" And that was that. Mother Muriel was all about that. And
Cristelle just smiled all sweet, so all agreed that yes, I would come
to dinner and should sleep on their couch. Dennis was sitting in the
car and, I think, more or less, got roped into the deal by his friendly
French-American wife. Works for me.

I see myself in their shower, my feet actually, ringed in dirt circles
and all busted up like a coupla old fishin' boats tossed ashore in a
hurricane and ringed, slowly, by receding waters and mud. I see the
hot steam of the shower and the cleansing waters hitting my champion
feet and all that dirt swirling down the drain and hear myself
whispering, "Thank you, God. Thank you, Buddha. I am so blessed."

Then came dinner and brief conversation, me all doped up like on valium
but really just stoned on fatigue, dead tired and done. And run. I
ran. Ran to Pawling, NY, then whammo! I'm in New York City. Then
poof! I'm in Brooklyn, seated on Alice's couch. Alice from
Wonderland. Alice from Idyllweird. We're rapping, catching up. Her
puppy eats my shoes. She drinks coffee. I drink Fosters. We nap.
Life is good. -RSM

The Evening with Alice unwinds...

Strange rhythms in Brooklyn. Had about an hour alone with Alice before
she tired of me. Well, we were both tired so went down for a little
nap at 3, slept damn near an hour after which friend Jamie showed up.
Suddenly it was all about the girls and Alice ceased eye contact. It
was weird. Almost as though I'd disappeared. Maybe I had! Maybe I
was the Cheshire Cat now, and naught but vapors and glistening teeth.

Alice and I, the recently self-titled "Your Madnessty" have a
long-running relationship with the Wondeland idiom. Actually, Alice
has a VERY long running relationship with Alice of Wonderland. I
simply toy with the language of the story when relating to her. For
Alice (not her real name) is in fact the fifth generation granddaughter
of the little girl Lewis Carroll took such a fancy to, both in his
photography and opiate dream-filled fanciful tales of life in an
underground full of backwardses and upsidedowns and not-quite-right in
the head everybodies. Suffice to say, that was about the last I saw of
Alice's eyes last night.

Friend Jamie is cute and interesting, so I endeavored to get her to
make eye contact, but met with little success. I was drinking beer.
Had been since hitting Little Italy around noon all dizzy with the city
and needing a beer to right myself in the unright world of dizzying
heights and crushing crowds. Jamie and Alice were watching the clock
and telling disparaging tales of times past when they would have to
drink a bottle of vodka just to leave the house. These girls are in
their early twenties. I'm 37. I drank my beer and waited.

At last, apparently, the magical hour arrived and out came the blue
glasses with ice, tonic water and vodka. Suddenly, there was laughter
and connection between us and a funny shift occurred. Although Alice
continued to avoid my gaze, Jamie came around and suddenly was talking
TO me directly rather than to the walls and the furniture and such,
none of whom, I dare say, were half as fond of her comely looks,
blanched white skin and auburn hair as I. (You notice this kinda shit
when you've got nothing better to do but watch people. I notice a lot.
Probably too much.)

Eleanor comes over now and after a brief introduction in which I
introduce in my Werner accent, she talks a blue streak in Germanlish.
It's hilarious. She's hilarious. A dancer and a big girl by any
measure, she bounds about the Brooklyn flat like a wide-winged pelican
graceful as a swan. Flinging open the fridge door, she curtsies then
throws legs high, first one then the other, arcing over the fridge door
like it was nothing. Impressive.

But it's well-past "Hiker Midnight" now and though I don't make an
issue of it nor do I even openly admit fatigue, I am caught yawning,
caught closing my eyes. It feels like something of a sin in NYC to be
nodding (w/o the aid of opiates) at some pre-midnight hour, but there I
go. Out of sync with the world again. Never quite on the rights with
the Laws of Time.

Another guest shows up, and then another. One is "The Jackie" so
referred to because of all the stories I have heard about her and
photos I've seen. Jackie was the one person I was truly looking
forward to meeting tonight. Alice told me Jackie really wanted to meet
me, too, to suss out this character who moved about the rigid paths of
men like a silverfish and a hawk, sliding, gliding, and outlining the
irony of it all in sweeping Sharpie ink scribbles and shark tooth
keystrokes of pocket computer.

Jackie hardly said hello. No, in fact I'm pretty sure she didn't even
say that. I said something like, "So, you are the Jackie," and that
I'd heard lots about her and that was it. No conversation. Jackie,
Jamie & Alice became a block of impenetrable female energy. And Jackie
followed suit instantly with the no-eye-contact thing.

It was endearing really, watching these three soul sisters unite and
share such obvious camaraderie and love. But it was also sad. Very
quickly I had gone from "featured guest" to invisible man.

I kept my composure. I kept my eyes on them all, looking and listening
for a way "in" to the conversation, an "in" that never came. Eleanor
either noticed my painful disappearance or related to it or something.
She kept saying that I needed to go to bed. So I finally did.

Smack in the middle of the party in this one room railcar-shaped flat,
I conducted the ritual of my every night in the forest. I laid out
sleeping pad and bag, unfurled my fleece pillow, and hit the floor
behind the couch. And promptly passed out. I remember folks leaving
not long after. I never met Alice's beau, who returned home sometime
later that night. In the morning, I packed with thruhiker efficiency
and quiet, disturbing not even the sleeping dog, grabbed my leftover
slice of NY pizza and an oil can of Fosters and slipped out the door
and back to the safe forest world. -RSM