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Sept 29, 2004
Maine's 100-Mile Wilderness
We have achieved maximum escape velocity and are moving outward into the furthest reaches of Nobo space with all the style and finesse of a tortoise two-stepping to Nirvana's “Smells like teen spirit.”
We are limping, in essence. Limping, stumbling, bumbling, swaggering, tripping and slipping in mud and roots and sunken puncheons `oer truck-sized stones and bridgeless rivers fording.
We are malnourished, under-funded, broken-hearted, bereft of body fat and fast metabolizing muscle mass. We are sick of the forest and our one ripe set of clothes, yet terrified more of what lay beyond Katahdin's close. We're in the Hundred Mile Wilderness, the last stretch of the Appalachian Mountains, the terminus of the AT. We're ecstatic, exhausted, horrified and pale. -RSM
Next a.m.
The condoms slip. They are of the lubricated variety and it has been so long
since I've had any consistent occasion to use condoms that I musta plum forgot
that these don't work for me. Forgot that lubricated condoms don't stay on an
uncircumcised "Tool," can't be trusted in a pinch. And it's definitely a pinch down there. The woman is young and strong. She's a helluva good hiking partner and I'm both honored she chose to join me on this final stretch this “green mile” to Henry David's “Kaatdn,” honored and proud of my moment of good sense the voice, the urge, the calling, the nickel coin-flip-in my favor that led me to stick out my thumb and make the jump ahead. One small chunk of Maine, one large leap for companionship-kind. So why bring up condoms? Because like Pop Tarts, they're hard to come by out here in the 100-Mile Wilderness. I bought the wrong kind and now I'm screwed. Or not screwed, as it were. You got the idea. Sex or no, I'm happy.
If it weren't for this girl, I think I might well have hopped a freight south and then west about a week ago. I am THAT DONE with this belabored journey,
this “oops! I forgot what the point was” long-ass walk halfway around the sun.
I am Forrest Gump, suddenly just done running. I have physically and emotionally reached my limit. But unlike Forrest, I have one last mountain to climb, and he's only 99 miles away. Seven days tops. Spiritually, I am not done. Nor topographically. So here I go. Morning campfire smoldering, coffee drunk, sun finally crackin' through the wall of woods. We walk another day.
11:22 a.m.
Trailside at one of a zillion ponds up here, this archipelago of water and pulp
mill fodder called the Great North Woods of Maine. Three go-getters pass us,
the Blues Brothers and Ranger Dan. Before them this a.m. went Swix and
Squatter, checking out of Leema Brook Shelter early, tip-toeing by our tent
unheard by us and thus likely privy to our morning coitus cacophony, a loon
and a barn owl trapped in a double-zipped mummy bag thrashing about.
Maine public radio escorts me gently through today's first mile with a lullaby
“lied” (song) of sweet-sounding strings: cello, viola, violin. I think of
Luci, of Paz & Anna. I lament that I may have offended the latter, so lovely,
so volatile, so stunning and soft the day her brother died.
The forecast calls for sun and scattered clouds through Sunday. It is Thursday.
The sky is blue, the sun warm, hiding from us the approaching tempest of Maine
winter. I am grateful. Just one more week, God. Just give me one more week.
Last night another soft bed of moss. Yellow birch, balsam, fir, the latter
known by their flat leaflets, unlike pine needles that can be rolled between
fingers. So says Yazzy. And ferns. Forever ferns the rich green carpet of
the forest. These are our neighbors this morning, and they make not a sound.
Yazzy has the legs of a horse, the strength of a Himalayan sherpa. She is a
good partner, a good woman, an Alaskan dreamer, a pretty blue-eyed breeder.
Is she my type? I didn't think so. But perhaps I think again.
2:27 p.m.
I sent my Piglet fleece to Tinker after giving up on ever making it into another
Jester hat. I told him to, if nothing else, take a small swatch of it with him
to Iraq as a good luck charm from me, as a reminder of childlike innocence and
soft cuddly things. Innocent as Piglet & Pooh.
I am disenchanted with our pace. The autumn foliage apparently so brilliant in
New England now, appears dull and lackluster in the bright light of midday, and
I sense it is my eyes that lack. My jaded eyes that have been awash in the
endless timber for six months now. I cannot see the foliage for the trees. I
am bone tired and lugging an impossible burden. Ten days of food, the sign
recommends. I have eight. With every step, especially downhill, the added
weight rattles my knees and sore ankles, loose bolts in creaky hinges. My days
of 20-mile races are over. We will be lucky to make 12 miles today.
At Big Wilson Stream, the “ford” turned into an Oldsmobile and halfway across
the water, she listed badly to the right like a boat punctured and sinking
sideways. The “ford” was Yazzy, fording yet another bridgeless stream up here
in the Maine woods where it appears they have yet to invent the bridge. They
can't build walking bridges tall enough or formidable enough to withstand
spring floods.
And so no bridge. Yazzy wanted to cry. Can't blame her. Pack half-submerged,
sleeping bag and tent soaked, camera drowned. It took me forever, the
unbuckling of a dozen straps and unplugging of headphones from ears and
disentanglement, but I finally managed to drop my pack and run to her aid,
trekking poles firmly in hand and probing the rocky bottom, depth-finders &
crutches-in-one navigating the fast-flowing, slick-rocked waist deep water.
After some argument, I managed to unburden her of her pack (and pride) and get at least the former safely to the far shore. Successful in this, I went back and retrieved mine.
Yazzy was wet and unhappy but agreed to hike on to get as close to our needed
daily average. We made it 11.4 miles to Vaughn Stream & Falls where Cherokee
Tears had a fire stoked and ready and welcomed us.
October 1
100.8 miles to go Awoke just now, 5:30 a.m. absolutely convinced that a downpour has begun. I leap out of our zipped-together combo mummy bag and jump outside the tent to move my pack to the cover of the rain fly. Then I remember the river roaring nearby, the waterfalls. Not a drop touches me as I stand in the dark. So I pee on a tree. Yazzy ambles out of the tent on all fours wobbling, a sleep-drunk bear cub rousted from hibernation. She pees and we return inside, exclaiming in mumbles our surprise that the rain was not rain but river. This is what happens to you when you sleep in a different place on a different
piece of ground every night for 193 consecutive nights. You are temporally
displaced. You are a slave to every bump in the night, and like that poor
bastard in TV’s Quantum Leap, you rarely know where you are, let alone who you
are and how you got here. Yazzy, whom I’ve know just a few weeks now, rolls
over to face me in the pale gray death light of pre-dawn and I don’t recognize
her, not a line, a curve, a bone in her face. My father worries about his memory. His father died of Alzheimer’s. I am only
37 and I have perhaps the worst memory of anyone I know. Mine, however, is
drug related. I drink because I like the taste of beer and for obvious social
reasons. Perhaps if I quit drinking altogether, I wouldn’t need the
Prozac-esque anti-depressant I take, though I’m afraid it isn’t that simple. Then there’s the Valium, to cure the anxiety caused by the anti-depressant. I knew an old lady who swallowed a dog to catch a cat to catch a spider to catch a fly... One or all of these drugs wreaks havoc on my short-term memory. Yazzy has
spoken perhaps fifty trail names in her lucid storytelling of days hiking in
Georgia, The Smokys, Virginia. I recall few names and zero faces. Did I meet
them? Probably. When this adventure is over, I will read about it with wide
eyes of surprise and wonder, much as you are now. My breakfast grows cold. By the riverside, Yazzy washes her cookpan of last
night’s dinner, perhaps the worst burn job I ever did on noodles. It’s hard to
simmer over hot coals on a campfire. The sun is up and sky clear. I meant to
listen to the presidential debates last night on Maine public radio, but passed
out before nine. Oh, well. In the words of our Commander and Chief, Alfred E.
Neumann, “What? Me worry?” At the Long Pond Stream Shelter in Maine there is a tattered copy of SWANK
magazine. The shelter log is full of offended hikers bitching about it. Well,
why didn’t they burn it? Or pack it out like trash? I recall the story of the
burnt Bible from Robert Rubin’s book “On the Beaten Path.” Surely if some
hiker could callously roast the word of God to warm himself on a cold night,
the Puritans would have felt righteous in burning the SWANK? I’m pleased to
read a register entry by one bawdy female hiker friend who writes thanking the
SWANK donor, saying it brought her great relief after a hard day’s hike. I make a note in my journal to buy the island in Lake Onowa, Map #3, Maine
section, beneath Barren Mtn and Barren Slide. The paper companies own all of
northern Maine. What do they need with an island? I want it. And what of the
train trestle at the far end of the lake? Hmm. 1:10 pm
I’m perched atop the wreckage of an old fire tower that no one in their right mind would climb (I never said I was in my right mind). Nothing left up top of the rickety steel oil-derrick-like tower but a few old wooden slats on which I now sit with 360 degrees of clear view of this awesome, empty (of mankind) 100-Mile Wilderness whose Cracker Jack prize at the bottom of the box is Katahdin, the great one, the grandfather. No view of Katahdin today despite crystal
visibility as another mountain hides it. Hard hump up this bitch of a peak for “peaked-out” me. Barren Mountain. I guess. Thank God for Tool, for Maynard’s impassioned wailing that never fails to reignite my tired engines. For half the damn climb it was nothing but static
and my usually-faithful WTOS, “The Mountain of Pure Rock!” failing me when all
of a sudden on comes “Forty six and two” clear as a bell and whoosh! As with
so many times previous on this colossal walk halfway round the sun, Tool came
through and rocketed me to the top. 9:20 pm
Now it’s talk of God or lack thereof and bowtie pasta with garlic fresh chopped
and into the powdered alfredo sauce and carrots, too, all this by a river which
tomorrow we must ford. And I want to write of everything, of all the random
thoughts, of the hopes and anxieties of my soon-to-come return “home,”
wherever that is anymore. Hotel California. Swami’s Music House Studio. But
I can’t. So I eat another of Marie Vlassic’s homemade post-bummer-Burning Man
cookies yum yum and sip the last of Texas Mary’s Crown Royal, a nip-bottle
amount by now, intended for Katahdin, but ahh, fuck it. Cheers Marie & Russ! Cheers Mary! Cheers to you and Sara and Ashley and all you’ve done to infuse this astronaut’s mad weightless tumbling through space green and deep with love and a sense of home. Just 84 miles to the End of the AT! Uncroixable. Now I’ve got young Yazzy to
warm me at night and set and strike the MSR tent and talk my ear off when I’m
willing with tales of everything AT all eager and alive and excited and
clueless of the Crashing Ugly Future. My needs of companionship and sex now met, I walk the trail like a businessman
awaiting his fourth commuter flight this week. I am jaded and tired, and at
this point Katahdin is just a matter of course. I wanna board the flight, pop
a valium, knock back a Cape Codder (vodka/cranberry) and BE THERE. D’arrive, Monsieur! My feet are sore, my ankles daily bruised in nasty twists that set the lion in
me roaring, shaking the quaking aspens, fracturing the rocks, and rippling the
well-ironed sky. When all 200 pounds of my pack and me come down on the side of a crooked foot, every gnome for half a mile around jumps out of his skin.
The pain runs its course. There is no option. I get up and walk some more. -RSM
October 2, 2004 Forty degree at dawn. Makes it hard to get outa bed. Winter again, or damn
near. Yazzy sips coffee I made when I got up, rousted by Nature’s Call around
six a.m. I can’t stand to be watch while writing, but she swears her eyes are
closed. The sound of water on rocks was not so loud last night, but again we are
creek side. Knocked down sixteen miles yesterday, about 13 of them “real” AT
miles and three of them magical, logical map-savvy miles, cutting down logging
roads, “folding time and space” as I like to call it, achieving in a short
stroke what AT engineers obviously couldn’t put together for reasons of
property rights, easements, whatever. Result: Shazzam! Yazzy and I hike out
and reappear on the AT just shy of the next river ford and just ahead of
Mighty Joy and Apple Cheeks, a young couple from Oakland, CA who were two miles ahead of us as of yesterday morning. Ha. Ha. Or as the kids say,
“Nanana-nanana!” I love that shit. In my next life, I hope, well.. if I don’t get to be an angel with bull moose
rack-sized wings who smells like cookies and attracts women in mad hoards, or
an eagle who soars, I hope I get to sit on some high command at FATE Central
and manipulate Time & Space. The record will show that I’ve done a damn good
job of it Down Here. So we’re on the south side of a wide river and we gotta ford it because Maine
hasn’t invented “the bridge” yet, and we both dreamt of moose walking around
the tent last night which likely means they really were. Our water isn’t
freezing yet, so I haven’t come full circle from the days of my First 100
Miles, and there’s a little whiskey left and Yazzy’s breasts are still warm at
night as Apple pies in a Mayberry kitchen window (and of equal circumference),
so we may just make it to Katahdin ALIVE. Sorry Jon Krakauer. Nothing to
write about here. Six and a half months. I’m hard pressed to remember the last time I did ANYTHING for six months straight. Even school came in shorter semesters. What a freak of Life, what a monster undertaking,, what joy and pain and beauty and strain. What EVER will I do next? What ever could top.. this? 1:14 pm Gulf Hagas Mountain
The wind is up. It spooks me. It’s not a companion I want as I head into the
next ascent. Three more ascents before we get to go down, the five miles of
that to make the day a sixteen. Yazzy is in fine spirits now. My grim, reflective mood bothers her. She seems
to have forgotten that just hours ago she was crying in her oatmeal about her
dead camera battery and other camel-back-breaking-straw annoyances. We eat our lunch of bread and salami and cheese and bird-food and I just look at her and say, “I’m fine. I’m just done. I want this to be done. This is an
endurance test at this point, that’s all. Our moods rise and fall with the
mountains. Be patient. Let’s hike.” Now it’s not feet, not like it was in Jersey with twenty-mile daze. No, now it
is calves burning, the back of my legs afire all the time, with every step, each
peak ascent like a 1000 deep-knee bends. Insanity. Maine, you are killing me.
but Metallica helps. And Tool. And... The trail now deep in autumn leaves, obscuring roots and rocks. The future
haunts me. I am neurotic without reason. Puccini writes a geographically confused opera about two lovers dying in a hot
desert outside New Orleans. Today, while topping White Cap Mountain, literally
the LAST peak before Katahdin, I am exalted, yet the opera rings
true. I, like Puccini in Europe with his imaginary ideas about an America he has never seen, I am geographically confused. I have surmounted some 150
mountains in the East yet have real idea where I am. I walk a green tunnel of hastily gobbled-up government soil full of bones and
blood and hunted men and haunting beauty, a far-from-virgin forest cleared and
cleared and cleared again only to grow irreverent over every flickering human endeavor, a field cleared for crops a lifetime ago now supplanted by lush jungle growth, again the forest wins, and comes now FREE to ME, free and phantasmagoric, rife with dreams and inspired thoughts and all the makings of anything the mind can muster, like a Hollywood blue screen upon which anything can be made to live alongside anything else, Cajuns in the desert and bayous thorny with cactus and housecats and crows over wheat fields eternal. I walk a green tunnel. Now with Katahdin in plain view across a valley of lakes and lowland woods, I
don’t know where my lovers are, in desert or swamp, and the woman I am with
takes off her underwear and hikes with a smile, ever the more aroused as the
wind picks up in late afternoon and stimulates her, her.. interest. I am afraid of the wind, cold wind that is, cold wind atop high places. It is a
recently acquired phobia, don’t asks me why, how or where from. But the jokes a good one. The joke is on me. My young companion, unruffled by the wind and, in fact, every bit tickled by it,
suddenly wants to get down and dirty right here and now on top of this mountain. Holy Jeezuz! I’m all for spontaneity and wild, animal-like sex in the woods, but this is neither the time nor place. All I can think about is how to get down off this fucking mountain STAT, down into the safety of the trees. It is a strange juxtaposition, my fear and her arousal at, and or “of” the same thing. The wind. Wicked clit-licking wind. Yazzy mentions having been sick somewhere near Waynesboro. I think for a moment and realize that I have never, not once on this entire journey, been ill. Perhaps it’s because I stayed out of the wind. -RSM
[Added 10/29!]
October 3, 2004
Someplace in the woods of Maine All I can tell you for sure without dragging out the topo maps and mileage
reference guide (and in so doing disturb my sleeping Yazzy) is that I rest
tonight at the far northern foot of the last real mountain (of literally
hundreds crossed, crested or circumnavigated) between me and Mount Katahdin, or Kaatdn as Thoreau spelled it. I rest, and yet I never rest well. So at two o’clock this morning, just an
hour ago, I wearily rose, dressed and stumbled out of tent (crawled is in fact
the best verb befitting the action of entering or exiting these expedition
tents) and with aid of dim headlamp only, made my way to the only outhouse
extant for tent miles North or South, a human-sized box on stilts. My business
finished, I set out on my return trip to our tent some fifty paces away.
Somewhere. Yes somewhere in the woods not more than.. okay maybe 100 paces
distant, sat our tent. Somewhere. But suddenly with headlamp dim from fast-fading batteries and without my
prescription glasses, I looked at the outhouse and I had a doubt. I had
approached it from the rear, right? Or had it been the left? Oh shit.
Suddenly in that miscalculation alone, I had opened up about ninety degrees of
dense wilderness in which to spread out my search team, me my self and I,
and hunt down our tent. Mother of God, lost again! Mind you, dear reader, that forest trails are not like the nicely-graded
walkways of parks, even BIG parks like Yosemite. The AT is itself almost
completely indiscernible from the surrounding landscape, this in BROAD
DAYLIGHT! Add to this the very name given this bowsprit NeverNeverland of
northern Maine jutting as it does deep into Canada, “The 100-Mile Wilderness”
and you’re starting to get the picture. Setting out with the privy at my back, I walked therefore a “path” which bore
no resemblance to any path known to modern man. I was walking on memory,
and I was thus, within a minute’s time, completely lost. How had I found the privy in the first place, you ask. Same way. Memory. I
had a vague recollection of seeing the outhouse on my way into the shelter area
and so knew it to be somewhere vaguely “over there.” Obviously I found my way back eventually, or you’d be reading this in a pattern
of sticks and stones laid out on some lakeshore or bald mountain top, my final
words before disappearing forever into the wilds of Canada or wherever. “His
final words.. a story about a privy.. rather banal, strange, but it’s all
we’ve got to go on. No S.O.S., just some silly thesis on comparative forest
environments, or some such thing.” I’d likely be off in the trees somewhere standing nose-to-snout with the pissed
off bull moose whose moose coitus I interrupted this afternoon when the wild
howling calls of bull and cow drove Yazzy and me off-trail to investigate. At
any rate, I found my way back to our tent tonight by first locating a white
blaze, which I followed in the wrong direction for awhile, then a blue blaze
which I followed right to our tent. Go figure. 8:27 a.m.
I write funny because of these fingerless gloves I’m wearing. It’s the third of
October and I may as well be in Alaska for what a clear post-night’s rain of
morning sky brings. Thirty-eight degrees. Yee-hah! It’s March in Georgia all
over again. But with a difference: I can see Katahdin!! I have him in my
sights! I have won the hunter’s lottery for the right to kill this year. And
any day now, I’m gonna raise my weapon, aim, and I’m gonna take the
motherfucker down. Mount Katahdin: DOA. Mount it on my wall. And NO! I’m not gonna do it out of mercy or some ecological “culling of the
herd” or even because I’m starved and I need the meat. No I’m gonna do it for
vengeance. Oh, and for the trophy to hang on my wall. I’m gonna shoot the old
grandfather out of pure sardonic gratitude. Thanks for the blisters! Thanks for the shredded knee ligaments and the 147 twisted ankles! Thanks for
the pain so bad in the balls of my fee that I pissed myself in Jersey. Thanks
for the trip half way `round the sun that made me miss Burning Man, Houston’s
Art Car Parade, San Francisco’s Art Car Fest, and my 20-Year Torrey Pines High
School Reunion. Thanks for the chiggers, the rattlers, the ticks and the mice.
And thanks for nothin’ for denying me even ONE bear sighting in two thousand
miles. Yazzy eats her oatmeal out of the packet. Worse, she most often eats it COLD!
Just add cold water, eat. Primitive hussy. I have brought warm water into her
life. I am a missionary of sorts, bringing God to a savage world. Today we have to ford another river. This will make three. Two thoughts: one,
the logging companies that own all this land don’t need the islands. Two,
they should build us bridges! 10:36
The Ford was not a Ford but a Chevy. Easy. Rock hopper. Yazzy tells about a
hospital visit, a severe sinus infection early in her thruhike and of her
insurance company’s refusal to pay for her ER visit. Cost to her: $600. I stop her short of more details. “Please, don’t go on. That shit makes me go
Fight Club. I just wanna go postal.” I think of several good lines from
Chuck’s twisted book/film about wanting burn it all down, blow it up, “..put a
bullet in the head of every endangered panda that won’t screw to save its
species.” It’s time to walk now, another sixteen today, a cake walk into Antler’s
Campsite, purportedly the most beautiful site on the trail. The rain was kind
enough to do its thing last night whilst we slept. Today is all sunshine, blue
sky and the sepia-washed rainbow of spring and summer’s death which is autumn,
which is right and natural, brutal, unforgiving yet natural, comprehensible
unlike anything ever conceived of by Man. 12:40 p.m.
Little Boardman Peak takes me by surprise, another goddamn hump up some useless
pile of rocks. And me with ancient back injury not felt since throwing my
buddy Frank’s kids in the pool a summer ago now flared up, my whole lower back
at tight and angry fist of sporadic breath-taking pain. I curse at the
mountain, small as it is, saying “Fuck you, peak! Fuck you! I stomp on you,
fucking peak!” and so on to the not-so-distant top (only 500 feet straight up).
Yazzy is fortunately a way’s back, having stopped to pee, and thus misses my
tirade, a potentially frightening litany of fucks. I think back to that day in the Doyle Hotel with Yippee and Jabberwock, the
former fixing me with that intense stare of hers and asking (in the way one
tells more than asks) “Well, are you STILL a thruhiker?” The question arose
over my recent “departure” from the trail, my “aqua-blaze” as it were in which
I substituted 100 miles of the AT to parallel the Shenandoah Mountains in a
canoe, paddling 100 miles of the Shenandoah River. “Well, ARE YOU, JESTER?
SAY IT!” I did. Yes I did. And yes I am. Over 2000 miles on foot. 7:45 pm
Cooper Brook Lean-To
Everything on the AT north of some geographical line I never noticed is a
lean-to. In the South, they are shelters. In the New England, they are
lean-to’s. Likewise, shitters in the South are privies, whereas here in the
North they are outhouses. Sometimes the carved and painted wooden signs bolted
to tree even announce the presence of a “toilet.” Make no mistake, however, the upright, spider-infested coffin-on-stilts with a
hole in it ISN’T a toilet, no matter what the $10 Home Depot butt ring and lid
set might seem to imply. Today in the mid-afternoon of my lower back spasm hobble toward Katahdin, Nature
called when there was no toilet, no privy, no outhouse. And so I did my best to
improvise and utilized, as I so often do, a downed tree sitting roughly
toilet-height from the ground. Crude as this may sound to those of you reading
from the snug comfort of your suburban “reading room,” said practice is quite
acceptable and about as good as it et for the long-distance hiker adrift in a
toilet-less world for six month at a stretch. Unfortunately, due to my strained lower back, I had to concede to a slightly
less-acceptable distance from the trail in taking, as it were, Nature’s Call.
In layman’s terms, I had to shit just spitting distance from the Great Rock &
Root Highway, the wilderness sidewalk called the AT. Six months ago when this journey was young, I met a man from Peabody, Mass named
Rael. I didn’t care much for the man at first, but very soon changed my mind
about him, taking great pleasure in finding that my first impression had been
thoroughly wrong. And it got better. I soon found in the 49-year old Rael a
kindred spirit of the Monty Python Kind. Rael, it turned out, had the same
verbatim memory and perfectly accented recitation of line after line, sketch
upon sketch of Python material, as myself. We were a perfect match for hiking
partners. But it was never to be. Rael got ahead of me and I just never caught up. I had
even dreamed up and begun practicing the lines of a “Holy Grail” mock sketch to
perform with him at Trail Daze in Damascus. But that, too, never came to pass.
And that was the last time I saw Rael. Until today. Until smack dab in the absolutely remotest region of the AT at the least
opportune time, I looked up from my too-close-to-the-trail toilet activities,
and who should appear from the north (the one direction I wasn’t looking,
because in October the thruhike game is largely over and who the hell would be
walking AWAY from Katahdin?) but Rael. Holy shit. The Python’s couldn’t have
written a more down-to-Earth, laugh at the naked truth, “you’re human and you
better get used to the idea” kind of Meaning of Life reunion. Here’s to you
Rael. Congratulations on your summit of Katahdin and Happy 50th Birthday, you
bare-chested South Boston Napoleon with the touch facade and the Python
falsetto heart. God Bless you in this time of post-AT depression and may you
have your Pegasus and eat it, too. Via con Dios, Rael. 9:04 pm
I lay atop Yazzy to quell her shivering. This is the same technique employed to
raise the body temperature of a hypothermia victim, but Yazzy is hardly
hypothermic. She has braved the roaring creek not two car-lengths from the
lean-to, though why I use the phrase “car length” I haven’t a clue. There are
no cars out here. The only way in or out of here is fifty miles on foot. If you’re severely injured or just plain rich, they’ll take you out on a seaplane. Rael spoke sorrowfully of three dead moose he’d just seen at the game warden’s
office outside Baxter State Park. Hunting season. The moose lottery. They’ll
sell you a t-shirt, a box of chocolate moose turds, postcards of moose grazing
in the golden fields, then turn tail and sell lottery tickets. Win the
lottery, bag a moose. “How hard is it to shoot a moose?” Rael asks. “They use the excuse of too many
accidents with cars. Let’s shoot cars instead!” Edward Abbey woulda liked that, woulda been first out there with a shotgun. And
then Rael. And then me, what the hell. Polite, of course. Fake road blocks.
Cars stopped, “Excuse me folks, would you kindly step out of the vehicle.
We’re engaged in a top-secret moose protection plan up here in the 100-Mile
Wilderness, just need a moment to give your vehicle the once over.” Have a heated trailer nearby. Nintendo for the kids. Coffee and donuts for the
dads, maybe Oprah reruns on the TV for the wives, the volume cranked up of
course. Way loud. Loud enough to cover shotgun fire as Ed & Rael & I turn the
family minivan into Swiss cheese. Have a shuttle bus ready to take the family
moose-watching at the nearby favorite buck moose rutting grounds, maybe even
slip in a little monster-sized moose sex ed for the kids, Nature Channel style,
then back to their hotel where dad, now talked into the whole mad gonzo
eco-logic of the thing, would with confidence ring up his insurance company and
explain the whole thing as a moose collision, total coverage. When the going gets weird, the weird take to the woods. And failing
insurrection on even the smallest moose-lottery abolishment level, there’s
always Mazatlan and Mama Margarita out there on Isla de Piedras, two home
cooked meals a day and a palapa palm frond hut all my my own for $5/day plus
another $5 or so for half a dozen liter bottle of the freshest Pacifico you can
drink, right from the brewery in town. And failing that there’s the next Ice
Age. I figure, either way we can’t lose. 9:34 pm
Everyone is asleep. Spin Cycle, Impulse, Tarzan and Yazzy. I’m the sole
survivor! In the cave black darkness before me, headlamp off, one nickel-sized
orange ember holds out from a campfire begun and soon neglected hours ago. I
was powerless to help it. I promised Yazzy that if she cooked dinner and
boiled water for my goodnight whiskey/cocoa concoction, that I would lay flat
out and rest my back (did I mention I threw my back out?) in preparation for tomorrow’s push to Antler’s campsite.
From there we will be just forty miles from Baxter’s front gate, then one day’s
walk to Kaatdn’s tippy toes, sleep, rise with the sun and summit. Finito.
Done. Ende das Endung. Fertig. Fin. I look again and the ember has gone black. Time for me to do the same. -RSM
[Added 11/01!]
Mile 2100
October 4, 2004 Half a dozen stuff sacks fulla food hang together on a single string, the
ballast of a hot air balloon hovering above the shelter, nestled in the trees.
No, they are a bouquet of birthday balloons for a child in an upside down world.
They hang together from a stick no bigger than my pen, tied to a length of
parachute cord secured to a rafter overhead. Where typically an inverted tuna can will suffice, this “mouse proof” food
hanger wears a bucket for a hat, a full-blown 5-gallon galvanized bucket hung
like a lampshade midway down the chute cord. The food bag “balloons” twist
slightly, slowly in the nonexistent breeze of peaceful dawn. All about this
inadvertent piece of “thruhiker art” hang back packs as well, also from the
ceiling and likewise twisting slowly, languidly as if to say “We are in no
hurry and will hang this way forever if you wish.” Beyond the open front porch-esque open front wall of this log cabin structure
there is a fire pit, huge, big as a Cooper Mini, tall enough that from my
vantage here on the shelter floor it half obscures the lovely stone-walled pool
beyond it. Far to my right I see the white of waterfalls whose sweet blanket of
siren song has made for solid sleep full of few dreams and mostly just the cozy
black velvet of wonderful nothingness. The pool, green-from here but no doubt
clear as glass up close, is fed by the falls and would make for a lovely
morning dip. I make a dip of a different sort however, reaching down out of my
bag with now near-frozen fingers (from writing) and read the thermometer
attached to my pack. The Fahrenheit numbers are too closely bunched together
on the tiny thing, but the metric message is clear: zero. There is much about this scene I would wish to hold onto: a strong and pretty
woman beside me, our bags zipped as one, she warm and supple in all the right
places; beyond her one, two, three more lumpy mummy sleeping, thruhikers
buried in colorful down bags against the morning frozen world; the tin roof
overhead, the wood beams all around and beside and beneath me, softened, carved
with decades of names, black here and there with the halo shaped burn scars of a
hundred meals cooked on alcohol stoves, the floor boards pitted and hew with use
yet glazed as well by the movements of a thousand bodies or more; and of course
the poles, sometimes dozens of them, reminiscent of a ski lodge, all standing
at attention awaiting their master’s call. They, too, walk the trail, giant
metal insects become organic with use: true “walking sticks.” I would freeze time and keep all this just so. But I cannot. Nature will at
any moment trump me and freeze this place real. It is time to summit and go
home. Then voila! Spin Cycle, a guy I never much cared for as he seemed stuck-up,
cagey, but was likely just shy and didn’t talk much, well, Spin Cycle sees me
fall this morning at the shelter and Yazzy gives him the lowdown on my tweaked
lower back and next thing you know “crunch-crunch-crunch” the guy’s a closet
chiropractor! Not an hour later, I’m just whizzing up the trial, relatively
pain free! I mean, it still hurts, my whole mid-section on red alert, a plate
of hot coals burning, burning and sending shooting pain down my legs but since
the crunching, it’s better, way better. I can walk again and walk I do, fully 16 miles today to the shore of some
lonesome lake where an air horn hangs from a tree and says “Squeeze me” so I do.
And wow! Does that horn split the light fandango and send every late afternoon
egret flying and duck squawking and the word on the trail is that this magic
horn will summon a man in a boat from far out across the lonesome lake. Fifty
four miles into the so-called Wilderness and here I am summoning a boatman who will take us to a remote hunting lodge for respite from the forest primeval,
the forest of which I am so fond yet so utterly sick-of, finished and DONE
WITH. Result? The boatman cometh in a flash from across the water and a dock where in
the usual customers are seaplanes delivering rich men with big guns and hunting
permits licenses to kill! The sun in the west setting all orange small and growing cold as the telescope
of pending winter sends it further west, farther away from here. Conversely,
Katahdin is so close! Magnificent. So grand and vaulting solo lone kind of
the landscape now with all other mountains melted away to the south and west. So now I sit in comfy black faux leather chair `neath lamp of propane in a large
cabin with many rooms to let yet just me & Yaz here. All the boys, the men,
the scant thruhiker crowd here on the island with us tonight sleep in the
bunkhouse up the hill: Spin Cycle, Impulse, Two Dogs Fucking and some guy I’d
never met named Screamin’ Steven. Luxury! And our tab is running high and I couldn’t care less. “Burgers please,
yet the works, and oh put me down for one of these waffle-sized brownies and
what’s that? Bud in the fridge? Two dollars fifty cents a piece. No problem.
I‘ll take four. Yazzy and I walk the grounds, check out the bunkhouse and the
private rooms, too, and pondering the joy of sharing a bed and the displeasure
of bunking with snoring men and ohh! and old four poster bed all made up nice
and knowing full well now that at close of day no new guests will arrive to
share the house with us, private room it is. Private house! I mean, how could
anyone else come? At dusk the ferryman closes shop & you can blow the air horn all you want and none will come. No. This place is ours tonight. And the silence is deafening, profound. I
tell Yazzy how I wish we could afford to stay another night here as check out
time is a brutally early eight. Be packed and ready to roll with your packs by
the dining room door at the ring of the breakfast bell, 8 a.m. But no, we
decide that to stay another night would be unnatural (and perhaps unwelcomed).
We are a nomadic people. This place, for all its lace and beauty is just one
more “one night stand” in a string of some 180 now. Thus then no time to
write. Got to shower now, then pack, then sleep, then roar across the water
and back into the wilds to hike again.
-RSM
[Added 11/03!]
White House Landing
October 5, 2004
2:35 a.m. Yazzy sleeps sweet and warm in cotton sheets (a great luxury of trail life) on good thick mattress in old four-poster bed and I am happy for her, feeling for a moment grand, a wealthy man. A Lord in the royal sense. But this Lord’s bowels go off like some dumb clock every night now at two in the morning it seems, causing every order, or disorder rather of dressing in layers and locating eye glasses and headlamp and cursing under breath as I climb from tent out over sleeping Yaz, or as with tonight subtly slip from big bed but still must dress to make the hike to privy high on hill. Which gets me thinking about the bill and $60 for the two of us in private room, yet not toilet or running water or shower, all said amenities remote in out-buildings here and there throughout the property. And I just know any city folk or any ANYBODY with a real sense of the value of money not skewed and screwed like mine would find this a deal. I fight back years of so-called poverty consciousness and choose instead to revel in this island paradise on the water’s edge, on the edge of the world with fifty miles of lonesome forest all around in any direction, all this on the edge of winter, the cold wind whistling round the house tonight in the dim gray not dark of near full moon somewhere up there lending pale illumination to low-lying blanket sky. Wind outside, yet here in the common room of the otherwise empty guest house silence such that one lone fly’s desperate end-of-season buzz is heard loud, a death rattle really as autumn snaps its late start fingers, drops a ticker-tape parade of dazzling colors, leaves, and in its fast retreat glances back over birch-white shoulders and whispers “Go! Hike now and go home, go west young man of California comforts and Pacific ceaseless dreams. Go! You have done well foot soldier.” And Autumn old and tired turned away and as he went dropped golden flakes of fading summer sun from Aspen fingers quaking. In the quiet of another night on water’s edge a loon cries melancholic long and lonesome as the moon and two trees rub together in the dark, one fallen against the other, a friend indeed and held up, and together with the help of the wind they, too, sing a song more lonesome than the loon. My heart breaks and is daily healed in the forest. This end comes natural as winter and yet I do not envy me it. -RSM
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