Stealth camp, Schaghticoke Indian Lands
Mile 1449
August 2, 04

Damn-near running to get to Pawling, NY in time for dinner, legs and
arms and poles drawing blurred circles beside me like the pistons and
armatures on old steam train wheels, I stop at a stream and splash
down, cool off. Exhausted, I drop flat onto the small foot bridge and
rest a moment. Looking up, I see steam coming off my body, misting
skyward and waves of heat (my heat!) to warp the trees and sky above.

That was the same day the shirtless day hiker with hairy chest and
folds of fat hanging over his pack waist-belt stops and in making
conversation asks me what I'm listening to. "Morphine," I said. And
he says, "You're shooting morphine?" all accusatory-like. I look at
him like he's grown a third head and reply, "You asked me what I was
listening to, Sir," the word sir coming outa my mouth with a thick
dose of sarcasm as I smell cop all over him. "Do you think if I were
shooting morphine I would have made it 1400 miles from Georgia to here?
Music, man. The name of the band is Morphine."

I decided he was either a cop or a moron, spun round on my poles and
flew down the path at speed, a coked-out laughing squid taking up land
travel with legs to spare.

Last night it was cowboy campin' here by this trickling little brook, a
tub-sized pool all my own and my on my rain poncho spread out over
sweet soft bed of green green moss, no tent, just the sil-nylon tarp
staked in on three corners and ready to be pulled full over me in case
of rain. No rain came. Cold dinner of sweet granola and dried fruit,
powdered milk, then out like a light with the last light of day, worn
out from an early morning rise in Brooklyn, the commuter train back to
the trail and the ensuing 16 mile hike outa New York state and into
Connecticut.

Just three miles from Kent now where I will intercept a package of food
and very possibly stick my whole heavy pack and everything but the
"bear necessities, the simple bear necessities" in a box and ship it
off, off my back, off my sore dying feet, then RUN! like a cheetah
cross Conn and Mass and into Vermont where at last I'll feel the Cherry
Garcia ice cream buzz of the sweet, sweet finish line not far ahead,
and great New Hampshire fulla family in between. Beautiful! Get me
there, feetzes! Get me there, Jesus! Get me there Jehovah and Buddhah
and Allah and all my friends and pets long dead or not so long, Luci in
the sky with Matilda. Get me there! I love you! I love you all and I
walk now to kill time, grandiose, to hasten this journey back to you.
-RSM

Awoke this morning to the pleasant sound of rain outside, drops
plopping on large leaves of garden plants, dripping from tree branches,
lovely. And just what I needed to hear at 6:45 a.m., still wrung out
from a week of solid big mile days capped off by the past two nights of
horrid, survival sleep, first in a rain of daddy long legs and next in
a real downpour that flooded the ground beneath my tarp.

I rise from comfy futon and visit the commode. Therein, I contemplate
the connection between the words "commode" and "accommodation."
Perhaps it simply means that an accommodation is a place to stay where
there's a commode?

The accommodations here are just dandy. Peg Leg and I had been picked
up at a road crossing by a woman I'll call Switch. Switch introduced
herself as a devout Buddhist and said we could stay the night at her
place in a nearby small Connecticut town provided we made a donation to
the erection of a large Buddha statue she was building to adorn her
front lawn. Sure, why not. It was cheaper than a motel by far, and it
included laundry and a shower.

Back at her house, things went smoothly enough save one detail. The
transfer of money. You can tell a lot about a person by how they ask
for and/or receive money. Switch was not what you might call "at ease"
with the transaction, and her uneasy tone of voice stuck a brief odd
chord in my first impressions of this otherwise pleasant woman . I was
so exhausted at this point, however, that Switch could have been Satan
himself in female form and for the love of a bed I would have seen only
an angel, a shower and a pillow.

This morning then, my musings complete, I returned to bed toute suite.
Feeling a bit of a headache, I took a few ibuprofen and
went back to sleep. Ahh, it was a divine sleep. And had been all
night, starting from around 7 pm when I first hit the pillow. All told
I slept about 14 hours. Wonderful. I'd needed it badly.

Then WHAM! Like the crash of unfriendly thunder, reality slams into my
sleep with locomotive force. "No! No, this can't be!" a voice is
shouting. My eyes snap open and I roll over to face the shouting.

What I see is gruesome. The third eye Switch had been telling us about
just the night before had flared and swollen, grown pustulent and mean
and twitchy. Downright cannibalistic, it had eaten her two normal eyes
making of her the first Buddhist Cyclops I've ever seen.

"No this isn't right! You must be out of here at once! This is the
only time I have to clean the room! No! I'll give you 15 minutes to
clear out! Dammit!"

And then it was gone with the slam of the door. It, she, whatever that
was. It wasn't the kindly calm Buddhist woman we'd met the night
before. No, this was no bodhisattva, but a beast, a monster with
bloated head & gaunt body, an hemorrhoidal & hysterical jabbering thing,
a bipolar version of the Switch we'd recently known but not at all the
same.

Just the night before, whilst drifting off to sleep, I had thanked
Kerouac for working his dharma bum magic for me and landing me this
sweet haven of rest. As Peg Leg and I hurriedly pack our bags to go, I
half revoke that gratitude.

So much for yab-yum and the sweet loving girls of the Buddhist beat
revolution. Homegirl's yab-yum days were over. Switch had clearly
slipped a gear out of sync with dharma and straight into yab-yuck, the
culture of fear and angst and worry, an ugly zone where true
full-hearted altruism (of which I have seen so much in my AT travels)
is clearly an impossible dream.

To think the night before I had arrived at a possible name for my book
on the trail: "Faith in humanity restored." Oh, well. I still have
the faith. But I won't be using that title now, it having come to me
in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the angst-ridden morning realm
of Switch the schizoid Buddhist.

[Postscript: Three or four days later, I arrived in Massachusetts and
noted that a thruhiker-friendly and quite reasonably-priced place to
stay the night was, of all things, a Buddhist retreat. Like a child
fallen from his bicycle just days after the training wheels came off, I
forced myself to get back on the bike and give it another try. The
retreat turned out to be a fine place, and I am grateful. I was,
however, plagued by horrid dreams that night, dreams that time had
tricked me, that in my race to cross the mid-Atlantic states with
impossible speed, I myself had jumped gears and in fact here was really
there, and in the morning I would be rudely awakened again, a
dream-loop of yab-yuck infinitum. -RSM

Decompressing now after a charge of the light brigade across 57 miles
of Connecticut to arrive in MA in time for my cousin's birthday.
Connection? None, I suppose. `Cept perhaps that I was born in
Massachusetts, and for 1500 miles I've felt I was "walking home."
Justin was probably born in Mass, too, his father's family going way
back in Malden (remember Don Vito? That’s his grandfather.)

I hate to say anything disparaging about the guy who wrote the trail
guide book that 3000 hikers spent $16 a pop on, but here goes.
Wingfoot, you RUINED MY LIFE! For months I had been planning carefully
to "return home" to my birth state of Massachusetts after decades away
in California, the AT as my ticket home. I had planned to step over
the border into Mass at precisely the hour of my birth on my birthday,
to time it all perfectly.

I fell a little behind this week, so had to pull a 27-mile day to make
it last night on time. I even gave up an invitation from several other
hikers to join them in hefting beer up a mountain outa Kent, Conn. for
a party at a shelter a few miles shy of Mass. No way was I gonna miss
my goal.

Well, I made it! I crested a mountain and in descending down I saw a
sign with arrows that said Connecticut this way, Mass that way. It was
right where the book said it should be, so I took it as the state line
sign. I was so pleased.

Then I got up this morning, hiked half a mile downstream, and arrived
at a big sign in the woods saying ''Welcome to Massachusetts!'' What?

Now either the Commonwealth of Mass just recently moved their state
line, or Wingfoot's guidebook is WRONG! My dream is dead.

Thanks to the man everyone on the trail calls Wingnut, I had failed in
my mission. Crestfallen, I began a long grueling ascent up the first
of many mountains ahead of me here in the Berkshires of Mass. I was so
depressed I could barely speak. And as one after spider web or
silkworm strand or whatever the hell they are struck me in the face, I
became angry. I tripped over my poles. I slipped on wet rocks.
"Dammit, dammit!" I shouted. Wingfoot ruined my life!

[Editor's note: We apologize for the peremptory nature of the preceding
story. Wingfoot's mileages in the thruhikers guidebook were wrong and
the author did thus inadvertently fail (by half a mile) in his mission
to cross Connecticut in two days, but the bit about it being his
birthday and everything about the ruination of his life is pure
bullshit. Thank you.]

Afterthought:
Hitched a ride out of Kent back to the trail with a stunning woman
roughly my age or younger named Athenade. I wanted to marry her right
then and there, but her ring finger was hidden by her grip on the
steering wheel and she was late for her god-daughter's birthday party
and had to run. C'est la Vie.

-RSM

Every day I walk now hard and fast and always thoughts in my head and
always I think, "When I get to my destination, I will write at length
on these thoughts." But always it is the same. I arrive exhausted
from 20-some miles and 3, 4, 5 thousand feet elevation gain over the
course of the day and write nothing, falling asleep in my bunk or
beneath the sky, keyboard splayed out on my belly, tiny input screen as
dark as I am drunk with fatigue.

Now on the dock here on Goose Pond that perfect golden light of late
afternoon, 7:30 p.m. on this August night in the Berkshires, lights up
the green corset of full rich forest surrounding the pond, flawless,
uninterrupted. Such light is the most fleeting of gifts. It is given,
and then gone in an instant.

I have bathed in the pond and washed my sweaty body, toweling dry with
a pack-sized towel most people refer to as a washcloth. I eat fig
newtons and toss crumbs to the fish milling around my still-screaming,
now-soaking feet. They eat the crumbs and get greedy. A big one nips
at my toe and when I jerk away in surprise I scare away the lot of
them.

I came earlier to a bridge over the pond's outlet perhaps a mile from
here. I was punch drunk from fatigue and nearly pitched sideways off
the little bridge and into the brook. These words came to me then:
Tippy tippy topsy turvey
Spent and bent and a little scurvy.

Not a hundred meters later I came to a sign in the wood announcing that
the cabin was still another mile off. I sat down hard on a mossy rock
and began to cry. I am new to the game of extreme physical fitness,
and I push myself too hard. My endurance grows and grows, but my feet,
and sometimes my ankles, are not keeping pace with my muscular and
respiratory health.

I cry because for the past hour I have had that recurring sense that
with the next step or the next I will piss myself, my bladder control
somehow connected to my pain threshold. I don't know. It's all new
to me. But I had to push. I had to push out of stony PA and through
New Jersey and New York and Connecticut, too. And now I'm half way
through Mass, in just two days. It's madness, but I had to do it to
keep from quitting altogether. It's psychological. I had to achieve
New England, and once in, to get to Vermont as soon as possible. Why?
I don't know. Because Vermont lay flush up against my beloved New
Hampshire. They're like bosom buddies on the map. And New Hampshire
will soon follow Vermont. And then there's nothing left but Maine. I
want this victory in my life, this finish. I want this badge called
Katahdin. I want to have finished something for once in my life. So
my feet will just have to carry me there. Somehow.

Wait. Have I never finished anything in my life? Yes, of course I
have. Oh, yeah? What, exactly?

Don't remember. ''Not listening. Not listening! Schmeogal not
listening!.''

-RSM

Stunning blue sky today, clear and bright and cold. Temp in the forest
shade hovering in the fifties. Froze last night in my thin summer bag
with all my clothes on, cursing myself for shipping off my longjohns
with last weight-reduction frenzy few days back. I had just had it
with feet pain and ankle twistings and deciding that weight was the
problem, yanked eight pounds of whatever out of my pack and mailed it
to my cousin's for later pickup. How was I to know it would be so damn
cold in the Berkshires in early August?

But pancakes this morning at Goose Pond cabin, blueberries and tasting
fine, and fresh coffee, too, even though I couldn't seem to connect
with any of the seven or so people present. Only Jolan-Jolan did I
click with, and thus walked out with him this morning. His name
something picked up in Indonesian travels meaning "walking, walking."
Nice guy. Short and bearded and bespectacled, he begs to be called
Tyler, the character in ''Never Cry Wolf'' of whom JJ is the spitting
image.

We walked together awhile until nature called. I answered the call,
and I haven't seen him since. Expected to see him lunching at this
shelter midday, but nope. As Thompson said, "We move in fast strange
ways."

Been encountering a lot of southbound thruhikers now. Meeting them is
a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's nice to think, "Hey, this guy's got
1500 miles ahead of him, and I've got less than 700." But on the other
hand, it is socially awkward. Both "he" and I are moving at breakneck
pace through the forest and neither really wants to stop and chat but
you do anyway out of politeness (there are exceptions, like when you
can just see it in their eyes that they're someone you gotta meet).

I met a "sobo" the other day who had just a week ago been picked up by
my buddy Dave in Vermont. Dave was hauling mattresses to a storage
place or something and picked up Wind Sock hitching. Dave gets talking
excitedly about how he has a friend who's doing the trail northbound
and blah blah blah and, says Wind Sock, Dave's foot is going down
harder on the accelerator to match his enthusiasm and suddenly whooosh!
off the roof of the truck come two big mattress flying off into
traffic. Wind Sock says it was a miracle no one got clocked with a
Sealy Posturpedic..

So I get the names: Charlie the Tuna (my favorite), Skins, Hemingway,
Tumblelina, 4 Winds. Doctor Jones, meet Lord Duke. And so it goes.

I've long kicked Jester, by the way. Started kicking the name 900
miles ago but no one would accept a replacement. It took two ten-day
zero chunks to displace me enough in the AT space-time continuum to
where I could introduce Duke to a new crowd. But I'm not happy with
just Duke, either. I was Duke in the other world. I want an original
trail name, one that sparks a story, as so many do. But I'm fucked.
It's too late in the game. And when I use Lord Duke instead of just
Duke, I get these looks, mostly from women, like, "Well, don't we think
we're special." It sucks. Would they like me better if I were Peasant
Duke?

I met a guy named Jersey the other day who says he hiked last year,
almost the whole frikken thing, then quit in Andover, NH, or somewhere
damn close. Why? Said he wasn't gonna make it by October 15th, when
the park service closes the icy rock mountain of Katahdin. Crazy. So
he's doing it all over again. You see a lot of that out here.

You won't see it from me. I'm of a mind that life's too short to
repeat anything anymore. I wanna do everything, and do it once.
There's too much to see and do. May as well do something different
next time, every time.

Today whilst walking through a "select-cut" harvested chunk of
Berkshire forest, (very odd I thought that they would harvest right on
the AT, and recently) I had a sudden urge to hear Neil Diamond, and to
see again the film "The Jazz Singer." Why not? I remember it as a
tale of triumph over old ideas & traditions, a triumph for one's
personal mission, deeply felt by old Neil. Why not.

The forest has changed as I move into New England. Mostly pine forest
now. And birch. Birch fall and break apart like candy cane, sections,
chunks spread all about the woods like so many scrolls of parchment
strewn about in the wake of some ancient library bombing. If there is
any one natural symbol of New England in my mind, it is the birch tree.
We had birch in our yard in Melrose, Mass when I was but ten. In
winter, a cold rain, a freeze, a snow, all would combine to bend the
birch straight over until it formed a kind of crystal palace for my
sister Mandi and me to wander through like dazed angels in a newly
renovated Heaven.

I don't want much from this life. I just want that. I just want that
Birch Tree Heaven again. I want icicles warm to the touch. I want no
death, or a world wherein death is definite, de-fined, divined to end
in bliss. I want everything. -RSM