|
Mile 1571.5 Strange night. All alone here in the bunkhouse behind Bascom Lodge high atop Mt. Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts. The Bascom, a lovely old lodge with breathtaking views to the south and west, provides bunks, blankets and pillows and access to the lodge's showers for ten bucks, a lot less than the cost of a room in the lodge itself. But down here in the bunkhouse tonight I am the lone thruhiker, and as I walk from lodge to bunks in the growing dark and cold , the clouds settle on the mountain and the feeling is rather eerie, rather like being in the film The Shining. I am stunned at the winterlike conditions of the past week here in the Berkshires. It's the first week of August! It can't be in the forties! But it is tonight, and the other day whilst hiking I donned my fleece for the first time since The Smokey Mountains, wearing it while hiking that is. Now to add to the creepy Shining theme, a flashlight beam searches in the window of the bunkhouse and someone jiggles the lock on the door. I have locked it. Why not? I'm the only one here and it's frikken spooky out there so, so, so there! I remove the keyboard from my lap, climb out from beneath a mountain of blankets and go to the door. Opening it, I see only the wisps of clouds swirling around in the dark. There is no one there. But I am not entirely alone. A bold little mouse came out to inspect my food cache a while back when I still had the light on. I found a five gallon paint bucket with a firm lid and locked up my food for the night. Sorry, pal. No frills, someone called it. It was a lodge like this one somewhere a ways back and they offered, in addition to their normal high price rooms, "no frills" rooms for thruhikers. It's funny. But it's good. I don't much care for frills anyway. It seems to me I have stayed in nearly a hundred funky places like this in the past four and a half months. Last night in Dalton MA, I showed up at the Shell Station in town and, on a tip from other thruhikers (one not published in the guidebook), I got hooked up with Rob, a local musician and friend to thruhikers. There I found Jolan-Jolan, Skins, Hemingway and a few others all flopped out watching Jurassic Park on TV. When I first came in the house, I went to sit on the couch in the living room and was told by Rob, "Nope, sorry son. Out on the porch until you've showered." I'd bought a giant jug of some locally brewed IPA, and was already sipping on it and pouring cups for the boys, so I took it in stride. "I'll be out here in the quarantine enjoying my beer,'' I said, fully willing to take a shower but having to wait til it was unoccupied. I've slept on floors, on picnic tables in small town pavilions where locals gather for barbecues and feasts and whatnot. I've slept on rooftops, in basements, in an old jail, in stone huts built by men of the Depression and in sweet old log cabins atop mountains or on edge of long prairie or pond. I've had a few motel nights, not many. And of course I've slept out under the stars and through torrential rains. And I've slept side by side with other thruhikers in dozens of shelters, cabins of the 3-walled variety. But I have rarely been alone in a structure or hostel of any kind. Tonight is unique. I see in the lodge ledger that I have just about caught Mousebait and White Patch. I am glad. I caught up to Chris and his girl Elly (not to be confused with my Elly, who by now has summited Katahdin and gone home to her commune in Virginia). But Chris and Elly fell behind me just as fast, and Rooney Tunes, too. And Jessica and Eric have never caught up. And I, driven by the prize and a strong body addicted to its new twenty mile/day regimen, can't stop to let them catch up. So I am alone. I could have zeroed in Dalton. Coulda had Rob drive me the ten miles to Cheshire to get my food drop at the local PO this Saturday morning. But I chose to rise, hungover as hell from half a dozen Budweisers atop my jug of local brew, and hike out, made Cheshire just before the P.O. closed for the weekend, then humped it, slower than molasses and sick as a dog, up the highest mountain in Mass. Dumb ass. But no. I had to go. A lot of people, guys, I was gonna say, and it is mostly the guys who do this, find a snug haven like Rob's and stick there awhile, rest up, vegg out. I thought about it this morning, Budweiser-beaten as I was, but my mind was made up the moment someone lit a cigarette in the house and the TV clicked on and the day of testosterone loafing began. I was out the door in seconds flat. That's the beauty of the trek. You can always just keep moving, and the woods are free. Live from The Shining Mountain Lodge in the eerie mists and phantom snow drifts of a freezing August night in New England, I paint pictures for you from bed like Frida Kahlo, and like Frida, I mostly paint myself. -RSM
August 10? 2004 Strong smell of Christmas along much of the trail yesterday, today in alpine regions, the highest of the Appalachian highs three and four thousand feet in Mass, VT. Right now the smell of cool new rain-washed air and all these trees and all of this floor-level plant life just happy exhaling oxygen in gratitude for rain sweet rain. And I in a position to appreciate the rain because I myself am dryer beneath my sil-nylon tarp slung so low to the ground that I'm nose to tarp here on my back in the dark. Almost. I, too, have room to breathe. Distant lightning so faint , faint as the flicker of now distant fireflies. Where have the fireflies gone? Would that I konwn I'd be bidding them farewell back in..? how far back was it? Pennsylvania? Jersey? I miss them. In New England they've been repalced by mad mushrooms red and orange and purple popping up everywhere in that graveyard dig smell of earth, earth, earth. Ha! To equate the beauty scent of loam with death, all of our death's, is it wrong? Speaking of death, up up on Greylock Greystoke gray and cold in the clouds when I walked over it anyway, young urban professionals stroll about Nature's Learning Center there in the old lodge, the yups clad in the newest and the finest REI has to offer, Golite bags for the day hikers, Patagonia jackets and fleece by Marmot , they stroll the grounds and outside read the words of Henry David carved poorhy in the wrong kind of rock such that the words are chipping away. Thoreau. Of all the words, the bad-ass tough love to humanity and real love of the Earth words he wrote, of all his tight Harvard-taught expressions of grief over the stupidity of man and the crystaline constancy of nature, clear as Walden ice, the yups read from the rock a bland and half hearted description of the view from their damn puny Massachusettts mountain. I'm sorry. But I think H.D. would agree. And MA native Kerouac too. I read it and shook my head. God help mankind if all he ever chooses to commemorate are the blandest of the bland expressions of great minds. But I digress. Tonight it is the song of rocks and water wrestling in the brook below. It is the plap plap plap of raindrops dropped twenty minutes ago from sky, now reaching my tarp from high above in leafy canopy. It is the comfort of a hundred years of leafy dead matter making cushy my bed and half a dozen small trees and leafy plants here beneath my tarp with me like the living room of a plant freak but all just because there are so damn many of them that I could barely find a clear place to throw down my ground cloth poncho and make this night's home. Home away from home. Going on five months now of life inside this tunnel of greens and gray of stone and white and shades of brown forever. Sometimes blue of sky seen through tree tops but mostly not as eyes like lazer pointers scan the trail ahead for footing, obstruction, bugs, animals, mud, rock, root, you name it. And coming out the tunnnel momentarilly at powerline easements or long gravel surfaced roads that start and end nowhere in the wood, or so it seems, coming out into these places to fluttering eyelids and waning pupils as eyes adjust to so much light at once. A flood. And here in Vermont a new trick: beaver flooded sections of trail sometimes deep enough you gotta wade through. Beaver damns everywhere and mud, mud, mud. Now I just wanna see one of the critters in action. And so today on a dare and a bet for ten pints of good Vermont beer I summoned the fearless spirit of my youth, stripped down to shorts and clambered in to beaver swamp pond, swam a short distance and climbed atop a beaver mound for the amusement and photo snapping fun of fellow thruhikers Mousebait, Keytone, White Patch, who were beside themselves that I would actually do it. Why not? Three a.m. tired and now hunger returns as body, awake at this unruly hour, thinks it time to eat again. Woken by the storm now passed, I thought I'd write a bit. Five months of bug bites itching, of spiders crawling though none tonight I'm happy to report. Five months of going days unshowered, of lousy Liption dinners that queerly taste of Heaven after long days hiked, of blisters and split toes, sore pads of feet, tweaked knees and ankles and of ever more obvious and growing and sculpted muscles of upper and lower leg, carved from wood, carved from marble. Amazing. With but five hundred miles or so to go to Katahdin, I wonder: what next? -RSM
Mile 1663 Then suddenly I stopped. Just like shutting down a jet engine with the flick of a toggle switch, I shut off weeks and weeks of mad stomping through mid-Atlantic states and came to rest, like that jet engine from the sky in "Donnie Darko," smack dab in the Marlboro-lovin' arms of David, my Mazatlan hero. I'm looking at a wallet photo, relatively old, of my nephews and I. Relatively old in the sense of their rapid growth, now four and six, perhaps half those ages in this photo. It is very dear to me, this photo. I have carried it on this entire journey, usually in the high-use zone of my map pocket, zip locked-in against moisture with my current topo and a torn-out page from the trail data book. In the photo, Jacob and I are wearing Hawaiian flower print shirts, Matthew's shirt is slightly stained with the dribbles of a 2-year old. Jacob the elder holds his brother's shirt, a kind of embrace, and I, reclining in the back, embrace them both. I have long hair that falls to my left shoulder in one big curl, ridiculous given my shining forehead and goatee. No matter. I don't look at the photo to look at me. I hold Matthew's tiny hand in mine. We are all wearing sandals. I've come to call the photo "the Teva ad" after someone pointed out this latter fact. I tuck the wallet print back in its AT zip lock pocket home and proceed to try and tell the story of weeks untold. Weeks and weeks and so many small states through which I blew like an anxious wind only to stop dead in a poppy field in a chi-chi outlet mall town in lower Vermont, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, Dorothy and me. But the sun is setting in the West and I grow sleepy. Just ten miles today, not much. And twelve out of the poppy field yesterday. I feel drugged, though I am not. As I said, I escaped the poppy field yesterday. Nearby, a hoot owl hoots. Little critters stir all about me, me back in my hammock tent again after swearing it off long ago. What are you gonna do? I am cowardly. So tonight the lion sleeps again like the pupa. Perhaps tomorrow I will awake with both courage and wings. I will need both to finish this thing. The days are growing shorter and Oz, though closer than ever, seems impossibly distant, impossibly irrational. Ah, well the Daddy Long Legs have mostly left, and with nights in the mid-forties, mosquitoes are almost gone as well. Ah, but I was going to tell you all about my week off-trail with Doctor Dave. That will have to wait until another day. -RSM
August 22, 2004 Now it's Elly and Chris again, back on the trail. They caught me up this morning while sluggish-I crawled along the trail after a rough night of two-hour interval sleep sessions in my floppy squirmy hammock tent. Yeah, I'm back in the hammock again. Just can't seem to get the tent thing right. Elly makes a cold tea comprised of tang, instant tea, lemonade mix, cinnamon, cloves. It looks weird and lumpy but tastes great. Mid-morning and I'm divesting here in the Minerva-somebody shelter of whatever foodstuffs I don't need, seeing as how I'm resupplying tomorrow in Killington, and much to my surprise Chris and Elly take me up on a Lipton Chicken and cook it right up. Since Elly boils water, I take her up on some and make up some hot chocolate and pour in a swig of Black Velvet from the plastic fifth. Sobo hiker Wood Rat drops in and my jaw drops. Cute is an understatement. But dammit! She's southbound! And before I can readjust my jaw, she says "Just wanted to see the shelter," and she is gone, moving on. As she leaves I say aloud to C&E, "Too bad you're sobo, honey, cuz I'd marry you right here and now." Chris repeats a story told by Slow Poke, one of a total of two black men I have met on the trail, about when he was lost back in Georgia. Seems he'd been lost for days when he'd fallen in a creek and taken to screaming aloud as he struggled to erect his tent. Just hours before, a couple of local Georgia boys, trained trackers often hired to find lost hikers, had set out on his trail. They found him in just two hours, found him half naked and shouting aloud, and asked him why he was shouting. "I'm shouting because I'm lost!" The two rather grizzly southerners grinned at him and replied, "You ain't lost cuz we found ya!" The Minerva shelter is a sweet old cabin with dark oiled exterior paneling, a nice varnished wood table inside, and a ladder of chicken wire for mice to climb up the center beam of the room. I flip open the shelter register and notice where Wood Rat quickly left her mark. Beside her name, she has written her home state: California. Double dammit! The day is sweet and warm and blue. A light breeze will cool us as we make the long climb up Killington. Jess & Eric arrive. At last J & E and Chris & Elly and I are all together. It's nice, really. It's been a long time and is unique in that we all share a common start date of March 20. We've all been out here for five months. An old man going south calls us "the caboose." Fucker. "Thank you very little," I sneer at him as we pass. We are indeed at the tail of the long northbound pack. But who cares! We're still goin, and we ain't stopping til Katahdin's stony peak. Now it's Clarendon Gorge and a single-lane wooden-slat Indiana Jones-ish suspension bridge high over the gorge with golden waters of New England roaring through. Chris and Elly and I arrive first and after a brief glance down at the swirling deep pools and falls to stick your head under, I holler back "We're going in!" And in we went. Always the first to leap fearless into any body of water especially when I'm all hot and sweaty, it's me first, the blue blood in my prominent veins pumping double-time to the beat of trail and friends to pace. Then come Chris and Elly. Chris and I wished we were polar bears so we could ride the marble-smooth but undeniably dangerous slide where the falls gave way into the deep pools below the suspension bridge. Jess & Eric arrived but never made it down from the bridge. I told myself that if she were my girl, I'd get her in the water! Oh, yeah! But maybe Eric's apparent weakness in this arena comes from years of trying and failing. Maybe she's just a bore, and he's just given up. I get some fun out of them anyway, a practical joke. The moment I see them coming and see that they see me, I duck beneath the powerful main flow of the falls and disappear into a small air pocket below. And there I stay for several minutes, resurfacing only when I'm sure Jessica's sure I've drowned. I'm wicked. Then just like that, fun time's over. Jess and Eric cross the bridge and are gone. Tonight we summit Killington, no small feat. And very little rest for the wicked, as it were. Mile 1680 Wow! So many things to say, so much to write, so little time! So many great friends sending letters and emails and packages of support! Yet two weeks now w/o signal here in southern Vermont I have been cut off from the world! And this just days before I'm cut off again, for good! Palm.net has announced they will be pulling the plug on their wireless service as of August 31st! What does this mean? It means no more dispatches from the front line of the AT Adventure! It means no more Palm magic! And no more jigglebox@palm.net. So, strike that one from your web address book. From now on we're duke@jigglebox.com, or failing that, whatever address I plug into the mail buttons on Jigglebox. Brutal climb to Killington. I feel as though I have climbed Killington before, not on foot but by chairlift as a young boy with family skiing. Tonight it was like Kerouac's nightmare ascent of some peak in the Sierras, he inexperienced and shocked and daunted by the whole hellish jaunt. Nothing was new to me or any of us in the crew, what I'll call The Killington 7, Elly, Chris, Eric, Jess, A-Dog, T-Bot and me. After five months and endless peaks.. Wow! I just remembered that whole bit about how after you've completed the AT, you have in essence climbed the equivalent of Everest seventeen times. I thought about that a lot way back but have since forgotten it. After climbing Killington today, the statistic returns to me in all its painful glory. And I think, wow! Now with less than 500 miles to go, surely I have climbed Everest over a dozen times. How tall is Everest? I don't even know. But I do know, or at least I heard rumored, that I have a new fan in the person of Chef's mom. Grooovy. Hello, Chef's mom! Welcome to my story. Here atop Killington arriving in the rain, all windy and high and lonesome among the clouds, I arrived in the stone cabin and set about the work of tearing off wet and sweaty gear, stripping down to nothing in the near-dark of stone hut and "bathing" with my moistened washcloth. Doesn't sound like much of a comfort, but it is. Carving off a layer of sweat is a special treat not every hiker affords themselves, but I have made of it a ritual. Cold air blowing in through unpaned windows, I climbed into my warmest gear, longjohns and hitech thermal tneck, wool socks dry and Patagonia fleece sweater. And now with winter fast approaching here in weather moody New England, I have again my North Face 700-fill down jacket, a seeming luxury item until nights like this. I throw that on and set about the work of boiling up some creek water into hot chocolate with powdered milk to make it nice and creamy and then a good slug of whiskey, Canadian, and not real hungry thanks to having to force down gorp and cliff bars and tuna from the packet and carob clusters, shoving it all in my face on the move as I raced against time to reach this promontory before dark, shoving in the food in answer to my voracious body, shoving it in like a man shoving coal into the furnace of an old steam train to keep it going, to make it go faster, run better, climb higher. I arrived thus not hungry but thirsty for hot chocolate and whiskey. Now nearly two hours hence, I have completed my mission and while my compadres have tucked in to bed, pots stowed and cleaned, I have had a dinner of hot chocolate only. What the hell. I skied this mountain once. And today I climbed it with claw and roughshod hobbit feet. We climbed it. And our prize is this old cabin of stone with giant wooden picnic table with so many names carved in and nine of us shelved like warm bread out of the oven on two sets of giant bunks. Sweet. I hear that next year they will reroute this section of trail and tear this cabin down, and for what? Shame. I often feel on this trail that I am experiencing something that will not always be, not always be free anyway. I imagine a day when the park service will find a way to charge for the whole thing, fee permits from end to end. And all these hundred or so free shelters I have slept in, blissful and alive and happy in the free America that I once dreamed of but have rarely experienced in any but its more commercial aspect, now free. I wonder if someday soon there will be fees at every shelter, as there are now at many here in Vermont and will be more in NH. Ahh, fuck it. The time is now. I chose well. We live and we walk and the world is but a dream far far below this snug haven in the clouds. Thank you, world. "God be praised," I said coming in the cabin tonight. And I meant it. The climb and root-infested, jagged, razor-edge-of-the-dropoff-mountain trail and ensuing rain and gloom of mist and coming night. One felt lucky to have arrived alive. -RSM
Mile 1703.6 (less than 500 to go!) Watch out when someone says, "Two can play at this game." This likely means the object of your torturous amusement has just snapped, gone completely sideways and is about to give you a taste of whatever crap you've been dishing out. Tonight I say this to the gods. I raise my titanium cook pot full of hot chocolate and canook whiskey (in roughly equal proportions) to the Scorpio night sky and say, in essence, "bite me." This is night number two bereft of sleep. Last night it was the Long Trail Lodge at the intersection of Vermont's famed "long Trail" and the AT When you enter Vermont from the south on the AT, you are double-timing, making miles on two famous trails at once. AT thruhikers walk about one hundred miles of the Long Trail in their quest for the AT Holy Grail, then cut east and away from the remaining 160 miles of northern Vermont. About 36 hours ago, I said goodbye to my last Long Trailers, a few lovely ladies including Toco with legs that went all the way up. These three had achieved Killington Peak a day behind me, but I'd lingered and so was there for a mid-afternoon farewell. I'll tell you about Killington later. It was fantastic, a grueling ascent to a high altitude paradise, a place I should have stayed an extra day had I a brain in my head. Alas. I do not. So with golden afternoon sun shining in open wood framed windows in that mountaintop gem of river rock and mortar, and all those alpine evergreen trees in witness, I shirked a no-fault, win-win, one-night romance bird-in-hand opportunity and walked down the mountain to instead spend money on a room in a lodge by the frikken interstate. The room was stuffy and small and I shared it with long time acquaintance couple Chris & Elly and slept just three hours before being awakened by rumbling trucks on the highway. Were it not for a delightful dinner of shepherd's pie and salad and pints of beer and a shot of Tullamore Dew, all kindly provided by Still Frank in a Homer Simpson "Woo Hoo!" spirit of giving (Thank You Frank!), retired Navy commander Frank's way of celebrating "just 500 miles left!" of the trail, I woulda written off the Long Trail Inn as a bust. Instead, I rose from bed at 7 after five insomniac hours to a fine full complementary breakfast and another day back on the trail. I hit the local P.O. first, dropping a well-spent $10 spot on a mail-forward that'll save my feet 10 pounds til western New Hampshire. Then I dallied at the local deli and dallied some more uptrail eating my deli lunch and finally, with not-nearly enough time to make it to my stated destination, I launched into a 17-mile ball-buster at around two in the afternoon. Maybe maybe if I'd been a good boy this year and not wanked too much or rode too many dirty trains through dirty tunnels or bitten the heads off too many bats, maybe I would make it by dark. I made it. I made it with feet screaming and mind scrambled agog. I made it to a lovely lonesome large Cape Cod gray-flavored old mountaintop cabin not even listed in the guidebook but "known of" to those who listen and dig for special treat tips from past thruhikers or southbounders. I made it and boy was I relieved. I clamored up the cabin's three story ladder to an observation deck with panoramic views of a sunset moonrise green mountain Vermont world and took my ritual sponge bath there in sight of God and all Creation but hidden from the three other thruhikers present, Impulse, Still Frank & Paparazzi, down below. Then I came down and cooked up a fancy brand-name backpacker meal given me by the Polar Bears when they left the trail unexpectedly, ate it and passed out. And woke up two hours later. Ping! "When you have insomnia, you're never really awake and you're never really asleep." So says Fight Club. I concur. It's 3 a.m. now. The spiked hot chocolate of an hour ago is working. I'm nodding finally. God Bless you and keep you, goodnight. -RSM
Mile 1742.4 And that's it for the word from the trail, from the Palm Pilot anyway. Palm.net is pulling the plug on me and all Palm users, the corporate swine! I'll be losing service and this palm address is history tomorrow, 8/31. So next week start emailing me at duke@jigglebox.com or just go to the button on my site and hit it. It is a sad day for me and the past two years of Palm magic communications. I'm gonna finish the story of my trip "live from the trail" as best I can, utilizing library computers in what few towns in close proximity to the trail are left remaining in these final 400 miles. It almost doesn't matter that I'm losing this service, because at this point on the trail I hardly get any signal anymore anyway. Only for about three hours in the past three weeks have I had signal, always atop a peak. And so I sit here atop Moose Mountain in New Hampshire, eager to move on to complete my 20-mile day. But I know the moment I descend, I'll lose signal and with tomorrow being the 31st of August, that'll be it. The fact that you're reading the 15's now is only by lucky chance that the Moose came through. When I didn't have signal in Hanover, NH yesterday, home to Dartmouth U., I thought sure that was it. From here on out it's boondocks. Nowhere. Off the page. I am sooo grateful to all of you for all the lovingly sent care packages! From here on out (my final 400 miles!), I have a last wish. Rather than packages which often cause packweight overload, (wonderful as it is!) I ask you this: If you like what you're reading, have a burning desire & the means to help carry me to the finish line, make a pledge toward my "Bed & Bath" fund. This will weigh nothing, and help me greatly in super-expensive New England where the cheapy hostels of the South are a thing of the past. Motels run 40 or 50 bucks, not bad, but impossible for me on my budget yet so very needed for rest and showers. And in the White Mountains, which I begin to conquer the second week of August, free shelters are virtually non-existent and the only "civilization" available in this harsh, high elevation section of trail are the "huts" of the Appalachian Mountain Club, $80/night lodges which cater more to the likes of yupsters than to we scraggly thruhikers. Please know that I expect nothing in return for the stories I relate here on Jigglebox.com. I know that few if any of my friends have the means to help me, and I don't expect help from anyone, let alone my fellow struggling artists. However, it doesn't hurt to ask, for I know there's someone out there reading who does have the means and would gladly help. Every time I get online I see the reader statistics climb, so I know someones reading. Many someones. I hope one of you is an agent, another an editor, still another a publisher. Your support, in whatever form, has been and will continue to be hugely appreciated. Thank you all so much! Write me at duke@jigglebox.com should you wish to pledge, or just to say hello. And so it's goodbye from Moose Mountain, but not without a laugh or two. New England pulled a fast one on me and, after again taking on the weight burden of all my winter gear, I find myself hiking in a late-summer heat wave. Temperatures soar in the 90s this week with humidity to match. I can hardly sleep at night, as well, so warm has it been. I'm a sticky-phobic walking nightmare of sweat. The bugs are back in force, yet the leaves begin to fall as well. In the words of Mark Twain, however, "Don't like the weather in New England? Wait a minute." It'll probably snow on us next week. Adios. Auf Wiedersehen. Ciao for now. -RSM His Madness Lord Duke Jester Jack Gadget Jigglebox Malcovich, Esquire, Inquire Within |