September 4, 2004

Franconia Ridge, NH

Mile 1840-something

It's a Saturday night and I sit in the dirt staring at the tiny flame of my luxuriously-packed-in blue votive candle drinking a 50/50 mix of hot cocoa and Canadian Black Velvet whiskey and trying not to think about Burning Man. I'm fooling myself, pretending not to care that 3000 miles away in a vast enchanted desert 35,000 soulmates of mine are dancing and cheering ecstatic as the Great Man of neon and fire crashes to his glorious death without me.  Without me for the first time in years and years. I try not to think about it. To even talk about it would be impolite. I have guests after all. My cousin and his girl Jessica. This night of the Great Burn of 04 is the occasion of their first backpacking trip. Or maybe just first in some time. Or first together. Whatever. 

I had intentionally skipped a rather simple 10-mile stretch of the AT just shy of Glencliff, NH, to await the weekend when Justin and his girl would be free to hike. I had chosen well. New Hampshire's White Mountains are stunning: stunningly beautiful and stunningly harsh in degree of ascent and descent, every trail a black diamond. For every ten foot flat stretch, there is 100 feet of hard core, just-shy-of-technical-climbing, vertical slabs and gaping synclines, the stuff of blood sweat and tears. The little 10-mile leader trail I reserved for J&J was just enough for them.  

A few days before, I had gained some miles on Jess and Eric, with whom I'd been hiking steadily since Dave's house at the base of Bromley Ski Mtn in Vermont.  I wasn't that far ahead of them, a couple of miles maybe, when I reached the road crossing which, upon close map inspection, turned out to be the closest the AT would come to my aunt Mary's house in Franklin. So, even though I'd just been there a week before with the whole Tinker beach gang, I said what the hell, stuck out my thumb and caught a ride east.

I was feeling mischievous, I guess. A little hide and seek with The Happy Couple was in order. Lately, I'd found myself in a constant state of attraction-repulsion with the couple. Attracted to her, repulsed by my own Christian-bred inability to seize a moment alone with her and take her, caveman-like, on a bed of moss or leaves in the magical Christmas Tree-scented forest. If this sounds barbaric or rings of anything but CONSENTUAL, natural instinctual animal behavior, it wouldn't have been.

How do I know this? Just a guess, but a good one, I’d wager. I knew the way you know the heart through the soul through the eyes. Or less profoundly, the language of an embrace. I've always found the embrace to be so telling, so full of unspoken language. There are the awkward hugs of homophobic men. There are the hugs of good friends. There are the hugs of lovers. And there are the hugs of two people desperate to pull one another straight into themselves. These are often, alas, the hugs of two people who should not being hugging at all. Far from barbaric, this was the stuff of romance novels, and my heart would break a little more with every day a-hiking with the Happy Couple from North Carolina. 

So there was the hitch to Tilton (amazing I got that far in one hitch), a sunny stroll through town toward my aunt's with no luck hitching but a nice walk on long-familiar ground and the bonus of finding another aunt, Patty, at work at a local convenience store and a visit with her and the surprise news that my Grandmother, just a week ago fine and dandy and snug in her room at Mary's, was now in the hospital. 

Patty lent me her truck and I zoomed on over to Mary's and learned that Grandma,90-something years old, had suddenly decided to go swimming and had fallen five feet off the porch surrounding the pool. She was, although doped up on morphine and probably down for the night, miraculously unbroken. That night at the VFW tavern with aunt Patty, I shuddered to think of what would have happened had Grams actually made it IN the pool. Too weak to pull herself out of the uniformly four-foot deep water, I fear she would have drowned. In a weird way, the fall seemed a blessing.  

Aunt Patty, always good for a little salty New England discourse and family-related prattle, chain-smoked and talked of the damn foolishness of men, of her lack of male companionship, and of her absolute determination to keep the McKinney name to spite my uncle, her X. Then her phone rang. She had a date, she said. And that was the last I saw of aunt Patty on my Great Appalachian Adventure. Next morning it was off to the hospital with aunt Mary. Contented by the sight of my last surviving grandparent and word of her good condition, I departed and was back on the trail in no time thanks to a ride from poor Justin who wound up late for work on my account.  

From Glencliff, I roared up Mount Mousilauke to its vaulting, öber-treeline heights. In a word, Mousilauke rocked!  Mousilauke cranked open the heretofore viewless tunnel of green like an electric can opener, my legs the electric power pedaling the gyro-pyro crank motor sky-opener until bamm! Blue New England sky forever above and below and me so high on adrenaline and clear sky joy that suddenly I'm skywalking, dancing on the ceiling in gravity boots past alien rock sculpture towers and to the top where whoa! Jessica! Eric! Sundown and.. ooh! Who is this lovely fraulein? I spin down out of my dream inverted world of walking in the sky, land gently on my feet and say hello to all.  

Yazzy. The azure-blue eyed girl who would save me from myself, from my Heartbreak Fate with the Happy Couple.  Maybe.

Yazzy is an athletic beauty bred for the mountains and lakes of New England.  Yazzy has a cabin on a remote lake in northern New Hampshire. I didn't know all this yet.. soon would.  I just know I like what I see. Nice smile.  

Jessica is there and I hug her hello, and as usual the hug.. well, hurts so good, as the song lyrics say. 

That night we all take up residence at a lovely shelter on the north side of Mousilauke, Jessica, Eric, Yazzy, Sundown and I. There were others there. Kip and Ryder. And a lot of other hikers, camping in a group behind the shelter, Ivy League college students out for one last blast before classes start.  

I did what I often did whilst others spread out their things and began cooking their dehydrated dinners of Ramen and Lipton noodles. I made hot chocolate.  And over that hot chocolate I inverted a liter bottle of Canadian whiskey. How long I held the bottle uncapped and inverted depended on who was watching and how much it freaked them out. The bottle has one of those governor spouts, so it's not like it comes rushing out. But it pours, fast enough. In this case, someone musta been watchin. Probably Jessica. So I poured long.

To an innocent like Jessica, I may as well have come from Mars. I fascinated and horrified her all at once. And I took delicious pleasure in watching her face contort in response to everything I did and said.  

The shelter commanded a palatial view of the mountains to the north and east of us, as though the Dartmouth Outing Club had gone and logged a section of wood for northbound thruhikers to get a good look at their future: The Whites. The sun set behind Mousilauke thus painting all the mountains in our vista fiery orange and red. I drank my whiskey-soaked cocoa and just took it all in, refusing to stress about dinner until I'd "sat around the shanty and (got) a good buzz on." (some song lyric) 

I don't remember a whole helluva lot about the rest of that evening. But what I do recall is vivid and romantic and fun. I remember Kip taking out a copy of "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller and me just flipping out and insisting on reading a few passages aloud. I was so excited. On the trail, there are no books. No one can afford the packweight. And besides, there is very little "free" time on a long-distance thruhike, despite what you might think. We hike, we eat, we sleep, we shit in the woods. With the lack of privacy in shelters and the pressure to make big miles during the day, I don't even know when couples have time for love making.  

One couple I recall read passages from Lord of the Rings to one another as they drifted off to sleep. That was Yippee and Jabberwock, and they were just adorable. Well, she was adorable and he was handsome and they were both intelligent and strong of character and mind. In any case, reading on the trail was rare. So I read some Henry Miller. The raunchiest of the raunchiest of passages, the one where he talks of Tanya and "spreading the shores a little wider." Kip was rolling. I was buzzing, what did I care how many times I said "cunt?" It was Henry sayin' it, not me! 

We had a campfire going and after most everyone had gone to sleep, I found myself still sitting watching the flames and I was not alone. On my shoulders lay two doves nesting in my hair, the girls, Yazzy and Jessica, their heads leaning in on either side of me, their arms around my back in the near-silence of the dwindling fire.  

One other thing I remember from that night. Falling asleep beside Yazzy, all the others laid out beyond us, I asked what her passions were. She said, "Being outdoors... and being happy." I liked that very much. 

While I edit this story a few days later, Yazzy is out running some logging road along the Canadian border in the rain. She will punctuate this athletic act with a jump and a swim in the remote and unpeopled lake behind her cabin here in far northern New Hampshire, the air temperature outside soaring in the high forties. A thruhiker almost by accident, Yazzy had intended to accompany her friend Anna for just a few weeks until Anna was up and running. At age 15, Yazzy had done fully half the trail with older brother and didn't feel the need to copy her brother's thruhike.

Anna, however, quit after only a week. Yazzy figured what the hell and kept on hiking. To her credit, she made it all the way to PA before a family outing took her offtrail a week and caused her to loose pace with all her trail friends. Loneliness like the Grim Reaper dropped her like a stone. Not dead, of course. Just off the trail. Until now.  Sundown, one of her early-on trialfriends, had made it to New Hampshire and now Yazzy was back on, if only for a few days.  

Grim Reaper? Jesus. I can be so melodramatic. You would be too after walking the distance from say.. Los Angeles to San Diego TWENTY times in five months.   

Anyway, Yazzy's back from her swim and stoking the fire and igniting the cabin's propane wall lamps and telling Jess, Eric, Sundown and me a story about some guy freezing to death on a mountaintop. But before I can relate that to you, I gotta finish catching you up on how we got here.  

Okay, so that next morning on Mousilauke I bolted ahead of the gang again, literally skipping and high-wiring it straight down the sheer rock wall trail beside beautiful falls then down out across the Lincoln access road and up the next damn mountain and over it and maybe even up another, I don't recall, and past a hut and a hundred Labor Day Weekend tourists. It was a fast and furious day, and I made it to Franconia Notch in time to meet Justin and his girl, have drinks with Still Frank in Woodstock, pick up a few sixers of Jim Beam and Ginger Ale and go pitch our tents in the dark in the exact spot where months earlier the same crew plus Party Girl had camped to do trail magic for thruhikers who never came. That's another story, one I told several posts ago, or if I didn't, I should. Someone remind me. There's just so much to tell. And I'm so very busy going off on tangents. Like this one: 

With the exception of firefighters, I don't like men in uniform. I don't like cops or men who think they're cops just because some organization, either as ill-willed as the Nazis or as altruistic and well-intentioned as Burning Man's "Black Rock Rangers" or the this new brand of pseudo cop I've come across on the AT: the Ridge Runner. From the first Ridge Runner I encountered, back in the Smokys, I just didn't like him. If there's one thing worse than a cop, it's a cop who pretends to be your friend to get you talking, to catch you in a lie.  

Meet Ryan the Ridge Runner. All I first saw of Ryan were his boots. What I heard through my half slumber that Saturday morning was spoken in cop-tone and certainly something I never thought I'd hear whilst discreetly camping in the woods. "Would you step out of your tent please, Sir." 

It seems we had chosen the WRONG spot to camp. We were in a fragile eco-protection zone. Surely we'd seen the signs. It didn't matter that after 1700 miles I had become something of a professional "camper" and knew all about the fragile zones and had done my best to hike the mandatory 1/4 mile in off the road, I was, Ryan said, off by one-tenth of a mile. Fine: $50 per person.  Enter: good cop, bad cop psychology. "How many people are you?" he asked, gesturing at my cousin's tent. Three, I said. "Well, I'm gonna let you go with just one fine." Ergo: argue with me at all on this and I'll zap you for $150.  

Oh, I had reason aplenty to argue with the officious little prick. "Normally I'd let you go with just a warning, but because it's a holiday weekend I have to fine you." Great. Groovy. One-tenth of a mile! And how the hell did I know it was a holiday weekend? My kind rarely knows what day it is. I'M A THRUHIKER! [And now as I write this, filling in details here and there from my home in California, I'M A SUCCESSFUL THRUHIKER! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! NOT A DREAMER AFTER ALL. FUCK YOU, RIDGE RUNNER, METER MAID OF THE FOREST!] 

Anyway, Justin and his Jess and I had a nice hike despite being pulled over in our speeding tents that morning. Though I had wanted them to experience "shelter life," the shelter we arrived at that night was occupied by a handful of frat boy types. We pitched our tents a little ways off. Which brings us back to the beginning of this "chapter," as it were, in which I said: 

It's a Saturday night and I sit in the dirt staring at the tiny flame of my luxuriously-packed-in blue votive candle drinking a 50/50 mix of hot cocoa and Canadian Black Velvet whiskey and trying not to think...  -RSM

Paradoxical Undressing

September 5, 04

By propane lamplight in the silence of her family cabin, Yazzy tells us the story of a man who not so long ago bid his wife goodbye, ascended Mt. Lafayette, sat down on its west face and prepared to die.  He easily succeeded in a day and a night, dying of exposure.  I think of that term “paradoxical undressing” I have heard a lot recently.  Apparently a result of hypothermia, a victim goes from feeling very cold to feeling too warm and thus sheds layers when they should be adding.  I guess this results in many a frozen dead person being found in the nude.  Paradoxical.  It seems the man was not alone in his
suicidal mission.  The story goes that several members of his family expired in
similar fashion, the most recent, a brother or a son, merely walking off into
the Alaskan winter wilderness never to be seen again.  

Okay, but I’m getting ahead of myself.  It would be a few days before I’d hear
this story yet.  When I did hear it, I didn't ask Yazzy in what season the Mt.
Lafayette death took place.  I should have after what I went through up there.
I can tell you this much: it could as easily have been last night as some night
in the depths of winter.  Easier in fact.  In winter, the guy would have had a
much harder time climbing the mountain.  Snow shoes and all that.  It is now
early September, and trust me, last night would have done just fine for dyin'.

Or tonight.

I know this because I climbed Mt. Lafayette just hours ago.   I climbed and I
climbed and I damn-near ran at times, pausing only to scramble up rock faces
or piles of scree or stop and hold Nalgene water bottle to dripping stone for water enough to last another hour or two.  I know this because for the first time in recent memory I am forced, despite pouring sweat, to don a second layer against the cold.  And then a third.  By the top, I am climbing in two soaked
underlayers, my Patagonia fleece and my North Face 700-fill goose down jacket.
Everything I’ve got.  

Backup.  Rewind further still.  

It’s a Sunday in early autumn in one of the most heavily-hiked sections of the
White Mountains, probably second only to Mt. Washington.  I’ve come out of the
woods with cuzin Justin and his girl Jess, they tired and satisfied and quite
DONE with hiking for awhile I’m sure.  They drop me off at the trailhead near
the Flume, we say our goodbyes and I turn and face Mt. Lafayette, straight up.
I saddle up with pack, cinch straps and.. and.. something’s missing.  My poles.
OH SHIT MY POLES!  I turn and face the place where Justin has just driven away.
Gone.  I run across highway 93 and to a payphone at the campground there.  

A buckshot round of phone calls later, Justin is reached, via his mother
on his girlfriend’s cell since the battery’s dead on his and luck of lucks they
stopped nearby for lunch and aren’t all the way back home in Franklin.  If
there’s one thing I’m learning about East Coasters, well, no maybe it’s just my
family, they don’t like driving long distances.  From one end of New Hampshire
to the other seems like a blip on the radar screen to a Palm Springs-to-San
Francisco ten hour runner like me.  Anyway, they come back.  We open the trunk.
No poles.  

Then it hits me.  When we reached the car, triumphant after our bigass two day
ten mile dredge south from Glencliff, I planted the poles firmly in the
roadside sandy dirt behind the car.  And there they had stayed.  I can just see
us loading up the packs and me driving off.  “The poles are still there,” I tell
Justin with all the confidence I can muster.  “I just know it.  We gotta go
back.  I can’t LIVE without those poles.”  

An hour later we were back at the Glencliff trailhead of the AT and voila, there
behind a whole, newly-arrived lineup of day hiker SUVs, were my $150 Lekki
poles.  Trail magic.  Justin couldn’t believe his eyes.  Even I, more
accustomed to a trail world in which stealing JUST DOESN’T HAPPEN, was
pleasantly surprised.  

Back to the future.  I am now back at the trailhead ready to dive into the next
section of the Whites.  But I’ve lost four hours or so.  I head up anyway.  I
bargain with the Fates of White Blazes and opt for the more direct route
straight up to Lafayette.  I am the ONLY hiker going uphill in a literal flood
of day hikers huffing and puffing with dreams of Burger King sugarplums dancing
in their heads and yet not so focused that they don’t notice me and give me
queer looks.  “Where the hell is he going?” I hear one woman ask.  Indeed.  It
is after five o’clock and a cold fog is erasing the mountains above and no one
in their right mind would be going up.. there.  Well folks, I’m on a mission.  

Jessica dogdes a snapshot in Rocky Top, TN

You see, I’ve been secretly in love with this beautiful Italian woman since the
moment I saw her on March 20, the day she and I and her boyfriend started the
journey.  Or they started their journey and I alone began mine.  And now I must
catch her, because time is running out.  Though I am pained by the knowledge
that I will never win her, that I haven’t a chance, romantic-I must see her
again, must walk with her, must see her smile and feel her presence.  But all this
starts with a mad run up some tourist-infested mountain and a stop to pound a
Fosters oil can on a rock outcropping to the further horror of aforementioned
tourists, and then more running, uphill, happy with my poles in hand again,
feeling invincible.  

I reach the hut in the cold and misty shoulder of Lafayette and out comes Doc
Gnarly to greet me.  He’s been washing dishes for like eight hours straight, he
says.  As trades for lodging go, this is heavy duty.  But then so is Doc.  Doc
calls himself a humble hiker, and he probably is.  But there’s an alligator
under that zen walking stick of a man.  He says maybe they’ll take me on as a
work-for-trade, too, what with so many tourists flooding the huts.  I say
thanks but no thanks.  I have many miles to go before I sleep.  

And then I’m off.  Into the mist.  A walking human steam engine clad in naught but my shorts and a capilene long sleeve top, my lungs bellows radiating heat.
This is the mountain the guy just sat down and died on.  I didn’t know this at
the time.  Would I have been so bold had I known?  Somewhere past the cairns
and back into the krumholz, all light had gone outa the world and it was just
me and my headlamp.

And there, somewhere on a ridgeline between Lafayette and Garfield mountains, I
made my first potentially-fatal error in my five months of wilderness
existence.  

I’d hiked too long and too far in the dark when I came upon what any sane,
non-thruhiker would have called a deep, dark chasm, and I wisely went no
further.  It wasn’t a chasm.  It was just the AT, going straight down, all
rocks, nice and slick, and me exhausted at this point.  So I stopped.  Just so.
Stopped and stood there in the middle of the narrow trail and stared at the
wall of tightly-packed semi-alpine trees all around me on either side.  Where
the hell was I gonna camp?  The trail here was a walled-in freeway with no
breakdown lane, no exits and not such much as a turnout to let another driver
pass.  And the forest was more thicket than forest.  But I had no choice.  

So I turned to face the dense, dark clusterfuck of 10 to 12-foot tall trees and
proceeded to blast straight through their barricade of branches.  My mission,
as clear as I could muster in my exhausted state of mind: get out of sight of
the trail, find a pocket of moss to curl up into and drop like a stone.  I almost succeeded.

About 20 paces into the woods, I found an adequate place to curl up kinda
fetal-cowboy style, heaved a sigh of relief and dropped my pack.  But then my
brain started goin’ all paradoxical on me.  I didn’t start undressing, but it
should be noted that I had shed my down and my fleece an hour or so ago after
returning below treeline where it wasn’t freezing and there was little if any
wind.  So I was clad in my usual power-hiking outfit, shorts and a short sleeve
polypro shirt.  

No, the sudden odd instructions coming at me from my tired brain were more of
the paranoid than the paradoxical.  And I blame that damn ridge runner kid.  If
he hadn’t have put the fear of God in me about not camping in non-designated
areas, I wouldn’t have gotten it in my head that “Hmm, maybe I’m not far enough
back from the trail?  Maybe I’ll be visible at first light.  Maybe THEY’LL SEE
ME!”  I was losin’ it.  

And in my delirium, I hatched a plan.  I would leave my pack, plant my poles in
the mossy earth, walk the twenty paces back to the trail, turn, and shine my
light back at my “camp” to see if I could see my poles.  Genius, I thought.
I’ll win the Nobel Prize.  Or maybe an Emmy.  An Oscar?  And so back to the
trail I walked.  Ten paces, fifteen, twenty, boom.  Back at the trail.  Shine
the light.  No sight of my shiny poles.  Good.  And back into the woods I went.
Ten paces, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty... THIRTY!  Wait a minute.
Where’s my stuff?  

“Oh, that’s good,” I thought, still capable of a little chuckle.  “Good one,
McKinney.”  So I walked back a few paces.  No stuff.  Then a few more.  No
stuff.  Then a few paces to the left.  A few to the right.  No stuff.  “Okay,
now this isn’t funny anymore,” I said aloud to the devious trees.  “Fork over
my stuff!”  I was just gonzo enough that had elves come to mind at that moment,
I would have easily believed that this was some kinda elfish prank.  

Instead, a more sober thought came to mind.  Get back to the trail.  “Okay, I’ll
just get back to the trail, figure out where exactly I went IN before, and get
it right this time.”

Before I go any further with this story, the set designers and lighting people
would like me to remind you that it was very, very dark that night.  If there
was a moon, it was on vacation in Pluto.  Not a trickle of light from the
Heavens penetrated that dense forest.  With my headlight off, it was cave dark.
Repeat, it was very, very dark.

So I point my body back toward where the trail should be and begin pacing off
the steps.  “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, uh, twenty-five, thirty, oh shit
thirty-five, forty.  Oh shit!  

Pause for a moment while every hair on my body stands straight up and that cold
wave of primal fear washes down my spine.

“Where’s the frikken Appalachian Trail, Jester?” I now ask, fully splintered
from my trailname self and freaked to full awake status.

Awake, but not fully aware.  I make this distinction because, for the next
twenty minutes or so, I was a jabbering, bush-wacking madman, and like the
college kids in Blair Witch, I kinda let the camcorder fall to the wayside in
my panic.  That is to say I don’t remember what the hell I did for those twenty
minutes but jabber and walk in ever-widening circles.

And then I snapped out of it.  I could hear Anthony Hopkins in that film The
Edge saying, “You know what people lost in the wilderness die of?  They die of
shame.”  Oh, I was ashamed all right.  Not only was I lost, but I’d first made
a point of losing my gear so that when I, too, became lost, I would be totally
fucked.  Exposure.  Hypothermia.  Paradoxical undressing.  An idea occurred to
me, and I got really still and listened.  I even shut out my headlamp to better
concentrate on the faraway sound.

Not an hour ago I had noted, if only subconsciously, the sound of cars on I-93.
If my bearing on the trail was 12 o’clock, the sound had been coming from about
ten.  I listened and I listened and finally I heard it, ever so faint.  I stood
up, adjusted my bearing accordingly, and walked straight to the AT, by now about
sixty paces away.  

The white blaze never looked so good.  I kissed the first one I saw.  Then I set
about the difficult task of finding my gear.  But the fear was out of it now,
and I took great care to “breadcrumb” my steps back into the woods, tying toilet paper shreds to branches.  When I found my pack, there was no hope of sleep. Fear does wonders for the adrenaline.  I strapped in, took poles in hand, and took on that chasm, that WHITE BLAZED chasm like it was a bunny slope.  I walked all the way to the Garfield campsites and shelter that night, quietly slipped in amidst a handful of snoring hikers, and went right into paradoxical unconsciousness, oblivious of the snores, perhaps even grateful for them in a way.

-RSM

Eco Nazis & Blair Witch Gummis

September 6, 2004
Monday
Garfield to Crawford Notch

The White Mountains bloom with new experiences both inspiring and in some cases, odd.  

Somewhere well north of Garfield Hut, a man passes me going southbound in
nothing but a blue bathrobe and carrying not a pack but a plastic grocery bag
full of.. something.  A friend reports having seen the man hunched down hiding
behind a tree.  Apparantly this is orientation time and colleges like Dartmouth
have sent their fresh meat into the forest for a bit of bonding.  And mischief
by the look of the tall guy in the bathrobe.  

Down trail a little ways, I see something colorful dangling at eye level dead in
my path.  For once it is not a silkworm or a gangly nasty spider, but a Gummi
Man hanging from a string.  His body parts are made from various types of gummi candy.  Very Blair Witch.  Very clever.  Not wanting to be selfish, I opt to
bite off half of his gummi worm legs and leave him hanging there for the next
hiker.

This was a pleasant encounter and a good one to make up for what had happened a little while back.  I’d been walking a particularly narrow stretch
of trail when, upon seeing another hiker coming uphill toward me, I stepped
off-trail to let him by.  I might have known something was amiss with this dude
who introduced himself as trailname: Shatter.  Too friendly in a
Mormon-at-your-door kinda way.  But he carried a sizable Snoopy doll on his
back attached to his pack and claimed former thruhiker status, so I listened
when he asked, “Can I talk to you about something?”  

I said sure, not really wanting to stand there and chitchat but not wanting to
be rude.  “Take a look at where you’re standing.”  What?  Oh, you fucker, I
thought.  You’re gonna preach to me about eco-consciousness and minimum impact hiking.  I looked up from my feet and with daggers in my eyes and a tone cold as freezer rot and said, “I stepped off the trail to make room for YOU.”  And
sure enough, he began to preach.  Okay, I’d stepped on some lichens and moss
that were now horribly maimed and would go through the rest of their short
lives writhing in horrible lichen pain.  I’m sorry, God, I really am.  But the
nerve of that guy to lecture me A: after I’d hiked1700 miles to get to his
precious Whites and B: after politely stepping aside to let him pass.  I woulda
liked to have left him writhing in horrible pain.  

Instead I dismissed his jibberish with a wave of my hand, a wave that said,
“Later spook,” and off I walked, straight down the center of the well-worn
path.  Until, of course, the next time Nature called, at which point I tromped
and crashed in a perpendicular path away from the trail with all the finesse of
a rutting moose.  I have seen many a brand of animal scat on the trail.  The
bears and moose and deer all walk the well-worn AT and shit on it without
batting an eye.  But I have also seen what I am quite sure was human shit.  

Hmm?  I wonder why someone would do something so uncouth as to shit right on the trail?  A statement, perhaps?  Something like, “Okay you Snoopy-toting
eco-Nazi, if you want my feet to stay on the trail, you got it.  Enjoy my
“oneness” my einigkeit mit die Natur.  Tricky swine Shatter.  What a most
appropriate name you have.  I was having such a lovely day before you came
along.

Lovely indeed.  I’d awoken slow and sweet to the sound of fellow hikers chatting
on the “porch” of the shelter, the mid-morning sun shining on them and me dozing late in their shadows.  After last night’s fright and a few more miles hiked in the dark to reach the Garfield Ridge Camping area, I am just happy to be.  In
toto, I hiked eight hard vertical miles from Franconia Notch, four of them in the dark.  When
I rise and rub my eyes I am greeted by friendly faces, none of them thruhikers
but all intrigued by the stranger who arrived late in the night.  I meet Big
John from Mass and his two lovely daughters and Erin the area caretaker.
Before she can ask, I mention the $6 fee and ask if I should pay her now.
“Later,” she says smiling.  “We can settle up on your way out.”  

The whole “fee thing” that began to rear its ugly head at the Mass/Vermont state
line is troublesome to us after 1500 miles of free shelters and camping all
along the AT from Georgia.  Some thruhikers get real indignant about it,
understandably.  Alas, the victims are the poor underpaid “poo-stirrers” like
Erin, the caretakers whose one big daily job is stirring the shit in the
composting privvys.  They take the rap for the fee system.  

I’m just so happy to be back among the living after feeling seriously frikken
lost last night that I’m just DYING TO PAY!  To myself: “Ooh, ooh, let me give you six
dollars for this blissful open space and sun and happy voices and.. hmm, Erin
you’re kinda cute.”  

I’m in no hurry but when I finally do get my bag packed and say goodbye to the
happy weekenders and accompany Erin to her big army-issue canvas tent to
“transact,” she won’t take my money.  Says she wanted to get me away from the
“others” so as not to be unfair to them, but that she hates taking money from
thruhikers.  

Okay, then!  I thank her, wish her well and head up trail.  As I go, I turn and
catch her grinning gaze as she ducks into her tent and think, “Hmm, maybe I oughta follow her in
there.  Surely these caretakers get lonely out here.. lonely.. horny.  Six
bucks is six bucks.  I’d gladly do a little work-for-stay of a “lingual”
nature.  Oh, my bad.  Walk Rick.  Just walk.”    
 
That afternoon I meet up with Jess & Eric again at Zealand Falls Hut.  God, that
woman bewitches me.  I’d spent the day moving at a half-sprint listening to
“Pinball Wizard” and Zepellin’s “Cashmere,” racing, intent on catching my
friends and sure enough found them lounging at one of the nicer huts I’ve seen,
mostly by dint of its location smack on the edge of beautiful Zealand Falls.
But did I see the falls, really?  No.  Not really.  Frank was there, and
Impulse, a few others.  But I had eyes only for Jess.

On a trip to use the “bathrooms” there (non-flushing pit toilets but prettied up
to resemble a civlized bathroom), I was astounded as I went to wash my hands and discovered “motioned-activated” faucets.  “I see,” I said to myself.  “So this
is what the AMC does with the $80/head lodging fee at the huts.  Unbelievable.”

Jessica laughs while Eric looks on