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PS.. yes, it's true. I summited Mount Katahdin on October 8th! I am done. I have stomped on the terra, ascended over 150 mountains, walked over 2000 miles, and I am tired to the bone. No more crumbled Pop Tarts. No more Lipton noodle dinners. No more foil tuna. No more mail drops. From now on I can be reached once again at: Rick McKinney, PO Box 82, Idyllwild CA 92549. [Scroll down for new stuff as of 11/18!]
October 8, 2004 6:15 a.m. and the coffee is on. Last trickle of denatured alcohol ignites in cat-food-can stove and I crawl back inside the double bag to give Yazzy some lovin. She gets hers, but me, I’m hopeless. Still-strained back muscle bad enough that sitting up is tough, so no sex. Coffee made and now already mostly cold in the short space of time spent writing these words. “Do you feel like it’s Christmas?” Yaz asks. I should. Today’s THE DAY after all. Frank comes by and gives the forecast. The weather, a heretofore totally ignored factor in daily existence, ignored by me, now essential info, especially today. Today it is vital that the weather be good. And it is. Mostly sunny, 71 degrees F and winds no more than 10 mph. Some two dozen thruhikers will ascend today, a moving, clambering zoo. Time to go. Moments later.. 1:53 p.m. Wow, whatta crowd! Gordy, Ski Bum, Rooster & A-Squared, Spin Cycle, Coyote, Sunshine, Big Stick, Arms & Snax, Chef, A-Dog, Munchkin, Seraphin, Two Dogs Fucking, Yazzy, Frank, me and, and, and.. with each new round of arrivals the cheers go up and resound around the rocky place and everyone is smiling and embracing and posing repeatedly with the sign, and Sunshine, shy Sunshine from my early days in Georgia, she most of all. And then the group shot, “The Class of 04” and we are a motley crew and I’m glad, I’m among them. And though hundreds have summited in recent days and weeks, it’s odd, but it really feels like we are IT, the iconic snapshot representation of just that shade of character which was, which IS, the AT Class of 04. For now I move on. Tonight we party in Millinocket, some small Maine hamlet that must veritably shake in its boots when thruhiker season peaks. God Bless you, Thoreau. I tried to drink from your namesake spring, but I could not find the source and your stagnant water did not look so hot. Near the bottom of the mountain, I encounter two fortyish women hiking up. It’s 3 pm, so they can’t hope to make the peak today.. or can they? When I ask how they are, one replies “Not bad, a bit stinky, though,” and pulls at her synthetic sports shirt for emphasis. “Stinky?” I ask. “Oh, you have NO idea how stinky one can get. Try six months in the same pair of shorts and shirt. You can wash them every week and still they stink.” The more fit-looking of the two with apparent hiking experience replies, “Fabreeze.” Right. Okay, lady. “Thank you,” I reply, “but I’m done hiking now and do believe I will simply set fire to these clothes instead.” -RSM
[Added: 11/18/04!] Yazzy catches up to me where I sit trailside plugged in to my headphones and writing, my chair a thickly-mossed stone. I pull of the phones and, while we wait on Frank, the slower of our ad hoc threesome, I read to her from my steno scribblings. I've been musing over Thoreau. Early in my ascent of Kaatdn, "the grandfather," I had pictured Thoreau, his now-150-year-old tuburculor dust of bones reanimated and humping it up the mount beside me. He'd have a gramophone strapped to his back, its giant cone blasting Bach, Mahler, Mozart into his head, a super-inflated, outdated & cumbersome version of today's iPod. I would gently suggest to the poet that he might enjoy the fidelity and lightness of my "music machine." A man who cursed the "iron horse," throwing rocks at passing trains in protest of that brand of progress, Henry would not be an easy sell on the mp3 player. But eventually he would try the tiny purveyor of massive sound and smile. It would be the smile of Frank when I shared a Fosters lager with him atop Killington, a smile of surprise, gratitude and pure childlike joy. Frank has a walking stick he calls Thumper. Thumper was taller than Frank in Georgia, but now, thanks to the friction of 2200 miles, a lot of it rocky, Thumper stands roughly two feet shorter. We became a "summit team" of sorts the other day when Frank caught up with me at Abol Bridge. I'd heard, in advance of his arrival, that he was working hard to catch up so as to summit with Yaz and me. I was honored. Frank had several visions of how to "Go out in style!" to finish the trail with a special flair. First, he was gonna rent us a limousine out of Millinocket to pick us up at Katahdin Stream Campground and ferry us out of Baxter State Park in style. But Frank had naught but the same evil "cell phone pay phone" to work with that I'd struggled with there at the Abol Bridge store. That, and not enough advance notice. He met only with voice mail and answering machines and underlings who weren't authorized to make the necessary arrangements. For a navy commander no doubt accustomed to getting results, I thought he handled it pretty well. Rejection that is. Small town ineptitude. Communications failure. We can visit the moon, and a pro climber dying of hypothermia atop Everest (Rob Hall?) could, in his final hours, dial out on his satellite phone. But could he call in a rescue helicopter? No. Helicopters don't fly that high. All he could do was reach his pregnant wife in England to say goodbye. And in our little anonymous fringe world of AT Champions, a just-retired military man, a commander of six ships and six thousand men, could feed quarters to a stupid beast of a cell phone bolted to a tree in Maine's 100-Mile Wilderness until he was blue in the face. But could he score three olympians a soundproof stretch with black leather seats and a wet bar to "roll" off the trail in a style befitting olympians? No. Technology is the under-appreciated man-servant of our time. A slave on the brink of freedom, he labors only so far, then watches with wry grin as we flounder in his absence. Technology, when tasted out here in the trees, is alkaline on the tongue. It tastes of irony and has more holes in it than swiss cheese. Consequently, we left Abol Bridge a little less enthused, having got our hopes up, then dropped, one plan shot. Frank catches up to us and we three walk together awhile. I've hiked with Frank perhaps a total of 100 miles on the whole AT, and I have never seen him fall. We all fall. Rocks and roots and that occasional temptation to look up and see the sky whilst hiking, to look left or right while underway (always a big mistake) and bamm! You go down. Everyone falls. But pride dictates that it is best to fall when alone, kinda like the tree falling in forest when no one's around. No one saw it. It didn't happen! Pride aside, falling in the company of a partner is better. There's empathy, a hand up off the ground. So we're rambling down the trail toward the finish line, or rather, "back from the finish line" to our limo-less parking lot. It's Frank setting the pace, then Yazzy, then me in the rear. And I'm rambling aloud, talking about something. A grainy rainbow of leaves falls from the trees as we walk. I reach out to catch a leaf as it falls and nearly trip in the momentary lapse of attention to the ground. In response to something Frank has said about keeping in shape, I rattle off the one rule I remember from Torrey Pines High School Physics 101, "A body in motion stays in motion; a body at rest stays at rest." A real no-brainer when you analyze it, but then again a salient thought in a rather brainless world. No sooner does the word "rest" fall from my lips than frumple-umpalump! Down goes Frank. Just seconds ago, a body in motion, now suddenly, as though by the voodoo of my voice, a body at rest. The timing is too bizarre, and to my horror I'm stifling a laugh. Yazzy and I help him up and, once assured he's okay, just bust out laughing. It is Frank's first fall in the company of others, and he can't help but laugh himself. We all fall. Frank's second grandiose idea, the limousine an apparent impossibility, had been to rent a cabin in Baxter. Frank fancied a little extra comfort as a nice way to prepare for our final day on The Trail. When Frank offered to pay, we doubly concurred. On the AT, I learned the two operative words were Yes and Thank You. Three words. Though it may indeed be better to give than to receive, there is no wisdom in denial of kindnesses offered by big-hearted people. Turns out the weekend of our arrival in Baxter was the most popular choice for tourists and day hikers. And for good reason. On the following Friday, the mountain would be closed for the season. For workaday people with real jobs, this was the last chance weekend in the season to clamber up the Katahdin trail and see the foliage and breathe the alpine air of one of the few and righteously magnificent places on Earth special enough to draw Henry David Thoreau from his womb of Concord, Massachusetts northward on a journey later told of in "The Woods of Maine." And come they did, in droves, (but not so many summit climbers that our gigantic mob of finish-line-ecstatic thruhikers didn't eclipse them at the top) and thus had likely long-ago reserved all the cabins to be had in Baxter State Park. So to The Birches we headed, the somewhat remote yet thruhiker-designated camp spot, but lucked instead into a couple of lean-tos right at the base of the 5-mile trail to the top. Birches or lean-tos, either way it was $9 a head. It was a fair compromise. Still, no limo and no cabin. Two carrots dangled in the face of a jackass, and I'd reached out for both. Only one who has ascended and descended half a million vertical feet in one long, physically & mentally daunting journey and lived without any creature comforts for the duration could possibly understand how good Frank's visions of comfort sounded. If you think a limousine would be a welcomed break from an office desk and an urban, traffic-choked world, imagine what it would have felt like to Frank, Yazzy and me. To any of us. That night, our last night on the trail before the final climb, a parade of my gonzo thruhiker peers, Gordy, Coyote, Sunshine, Munchkin, Seraphin, Big Stick and Ski Bum among them, most of them twentysomething women and not one of them hard on the eyes, so to speak, came marching into basecamp at twilight in naught but their birthday suits and packs on their backs. Hilarious. Fantastic. Ecstatic.The fireflies of the South had long disappeared, But that night the girls of The AT Class of 04  A bawdy band of triumphant goddesses Lit up the night with their "sparkler dims" as Kerouac said. Singing through the trees for all to hear Dancing into camp in their birthday suits! Yazzy joined them at some point after I lost consciousness. I hit the Thermarest at 6:30 p.m. and was out cold in minutes. Yazzy woke me a short time later, managed to get me to half sit up long enough to fork down some terriaki noodles she'd kindly cooked up. Departing thruhikers from that day's summit party had given Yaz a "30-rack" of Budweiser to take and share among our gang, and next door Frank stoked up a big bonfire expecting our arrival on the scene any time. But all I could manage on that great dark yet shimmering magic song-filled night were a few sips off one 12-ounce can of beer, and down went my head again, out for the night. Yaz claims, and I vaguely recollect from the deepest of dream sleep, that she made several attempts at rousting me throughout the evening. Was I ill? Had I drugged myself out on sedatives? Neither. I just crashed. Their final bash was my final crash. Was I sorry I missed it? A little. But not really. Not yet. I'd had the blessing of these angels' company on many, many a night and through many a hiking day and days in towns all along the way. I slept contented that night, happy for all of us, for the Dreamers-become-Doers, for the beaters-of-all-the-odds. Had I foreseen, however, how very lonesome a victory t`would be when all went home, myself included, and the November hours I would spend curled up in a ball against a world that couldn't or wouldn't relate, well, I might well have torn myself from sweet sleep to be among my people one more night. -RSM [Wanna get weird with me? Play a little mental hoochie-kootchie hopscotch between the past and the days of the future past? Go HERE and scroll to the bottom to read what I just wrote fresh da day after Turkey Day `04 and hesitated to publish, but which now, having transcribed (and thus read) the following tonight, I must publish. Together, they are two interlocking pieces of a puzzle I suspect neither time nor my mind will ever solve.] October 11, 04 It’s over. It’s all over. Even those hundred or so miles I missed, sprinkled here and there, a 10-mile hitch whilst hungover, fifty miles to chase the girl, they’re done. I’ll never make them up. It’s not in my nature. I don’t look back. Or if I do, I don’t GO back. So the AT is completed, hiked, finito. And for the life of me, I couldn’t at this moment tell you why I did it, why I hiked through 14 states over 2000 miles and half a million vertical feet. Why? Beats me. It’s Monday in America and people with purposeful lives are nose-to-it. Even though it is Columbus Day, a holiday based on a fiction, one day in a few dozen thousand day of lies. If I sound a bit cynical, perhaps it is the book I’m reading as I sit here fireside at Yazzy’s primitive camp by a lake in New Hampshire, a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. “Survivor,” the book is called. It’s a sick and twisted sister-story to Fight Club, Chuck’s opus. I read a line that makes me think of the AT, and for a moment, a flicker of the “why” crosses my mileage-stricken brain. “The whole year before baptism,” he says, “every tree, every friend, every thing you saw had the halo around it of your knowing you’d never see it again.” Walking the AT had this quality, afforded one a glimpse into the “halo” heavenly magic of everything, a magic we don’t normally get to see. Every tree or rock or chipmunk or stream or pond or beaver lodge or human shelter I encountered, I knew I would likely never see it again. Later in the book, author Palahnuik repeats the same idea, sort-of: “Imagine you live in a house, only every day your house is in a different town.” This would certainly apply to all the dozens and dozens of hostels and motels and guest bedrooms I slept in on off-trail days of rest. The trail towns, however, these I could maybe see again someday, and the hostels, especially toward the end up here in New England. Freshest in my mind, they were always a bum-rush, in and out, obscene check-out times like 8 a.m.(Heavens!!) In the eyes of this drunkard athlete-poet, there were no halos `oer the heads of these innkeepers.
No, whatever auras existed owing to the absolutely transitory nature of the journey belonged to the trees, to God’s four-legged creatures, to the lichen-encrusted stones, to the curve of the trail through a field, to the dance of an enchanted doe outside an ancient stone shelter in the Smokys. The halos were on the forest itself. The ability to see them was earned in the walking, just so. Walk and walk and walk in the woods until the woods become your reality, and the outside world becomes estranged. Mind you, however, said vision comes at a price. And here I sit in the very northern woods of NH preparing myself, mentally, to pay that price. Going back into The World.. I’m frightened. I didn’t “fit in” real well before, and I dunno how I’m gonna swing it now. I’ve got a head fulla halos! I look out and I see cobalt blue of pending winter lake of ice, its far shore a fall bouquet of multi-colored halo’d trees, leaves of New England Autumn all aglow now as the Western Sun, hidden from me here in Yazzy’s lakeside cabin, pours its heartfelt warmth and glory forth and at it, at the forest across the water. It is magic hour 6 p.m., a wood fire burning in the stove and Yaz asleep beside me here on old and tattered couch of camphouse character. And there’s NOTHING to do here. Nothing. That’s why we came! After a man walks 2000 miles and all the business and stresses that that entails, man needs to park his ass far away from the Things of The World and do NOTHING. Do nothing but reflect. I get up from the couch, go outside and down to the water’s edge to witness more closely the miracle of sunset. But I am bored quickly, as though one could overdose on beauty and nature until it reach the point of ennui. In two days, I plan to board Southwest Flight 922 out of Manchester, to bid adieu this East Coast reality, this “place” I’ve been immersed in for over half a year. Yazzy, the cabins on lakes (hers, my fathers), Justin, Aunt Mary, the AT, autumn color, ever-colder nights, the damn one same rock radio station I’ve been stuck listening to through all of Maine and the Whites. I’m leaving it, but I don’t know what for. I have forgotten. Does the Shire still exist, Sam? Quaint and incestuous little Idyllwild nudged up in the soCal mountains, my home though I have no dwelling there, per se. I have a car there. No, worse. I have two cars. Or one functional car and one monument to my insanity, very big and in everyone’s curious face and going nowhere. Can I go back? Is it healthy? Can one walk two thousand miles, apparently fully FIVE MILLION paces, only to end back at a place of going nowhere again? And something else. I never met the girl of my dreams, or rather, the woman I saw in a dream hiking the Appalachian Trail, the woman who would find me. No woman. No bear. No moose. Notice how I say “no woman” and not “no women.” Elly. Ahh Hell, let’s call a spade a spade. Pele was here name. Pele Firestarter. Good trail name, though it was in fact her commune name before that. Pele came into my AT experience early, kind of a cruel joke from those manipulative swine in the Greek rendition of Heaven. They sent me a hottie with a Melissa Moore lion’s mane of hair on Day Two, and she went Postal on me after one week. BOOM! Nutso. It took a bit to shake her (empathetic as I was to her madness but in no way capable of walking with it), but soon she was gone. Then came Pegasus, with a HUGE space in between. I had the pleasure of about 48 hours with Pegasus before my pre-arranged trail vacation to New Hampshire for the 4th of July cut that short. When months later I caught Pegasus again Vermont, whatever we’d had in PA seemed destined to go further. In an odd sequence of events, however, she returned to the trail almost immediately, whilst I, completely unplanned, wound up staying in Manchester, Vermont for well over a week, losing Pegasus altogether. Finally, a month before The End, I met Yazzy. There was a spark, I let her go, I chased her, we summited together, and I’m with her now. But the spark is still just that: a spark. No sense at all that this is the woman I was meant to lasso across the prairie home to Hotel California with me to spend Forever with in Wherever I end up calling home. No sense that this is The One. (And all due credit to Yaz: who would want ME? Mr. Wherever, Whatever, Whenever) So I did find womEN. But dammit I never did see a bear in the wilds of Appalachia!! I never did see a moose in Maine!! And I feel cheated as Hell about it, lemme tell ya! Ahh, fuckit. In the words of Tom Waits, “There’s nothing wrong with her (me) that a hundred dollars won’t fix.” -RSM
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I will continue to add to this and all six of the final links as I labor to transcribe from hand-written journals and extract material trapped inside my Palm pilot. But most of this won't happen until after my return to California around my birthday in late-October, so go to the beach, roll in the autumn leaves, drink some beers and come back after Halloween for the trickling-in of the remaining chapters of the Great Appalachian Moose Hunt. Vaya con Dios! -RSM
