Come back in November `04, to read MORE about Post-AT Syndrome. 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

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.

Thank you, Everyone, for your incredible Love and Support!

Coyote Orion & heinous indecision

Yazzy's Cabin, Lake Francis, NH, a few miles south of Canadian border

So that's how it's gonna be. A little insomnia, restlessness at 4 a.m. as my flight departure approaches and those few missed AT miles plague me in the night and conflicting schools of thought, "Oh, how much easier it would be to do now with all gear at the ready and me here and in shape" and on the other side "Fuck No! It's frikken winter already, could snow any day, cold, steam of breath, ugg!" and conflicted and needing to pee out i go into the cold NH night of near Canada, temps in the mid-30s and peeing look up at blinding clear night sky of descending Heaven and Whoa! Coyote Orion! My Patron Saint of the Road, always there for me on long night lonesome desert stretches to guide just outside my driver's window, out and up or just above if I lean forward over steering wheel and all those silhouetted saguaro cactus flying by or nothing but sagebrush in the dead west Texas I-10 night and Pow! Coyote spirit of bold Orion brilliant and clearly outlined, defined, he guides and gives me hope, a sense that what I'm doing, where I'm roaming RIGHT and OKAY. Orion, my one constant in a sea of constellations.

But Orion hasn't been here this summer. Maybe it was just the dense forest canopy of most nights, shelters tucked in trees with little view of sky but no it seemed Orion just wasn't around, like he knew I didn't need him to walk the well-blazed and purposeful A.T. So he hid and I walked instead of driving and all was well with the world. Then Wham! Like an angel visitor my secret nocturnal Friend of the Western Road, there he is! Tilted just so as always and framed perfectly in the one open chunk of sky here in the likewise dense forest of Yazzy's Camp, far northern New Hampshire. Wow! Whoa! "What's that you say, Orion?" Go?

"Go roll your bones, alone! (Kerouac, 1950s) Close the gap in the wide toothy smile of your A.T. triumph then come home to us, to me, in the West, where we will roam again the roads of Arizona, Texas, Cali, New Mexico."

Yes! Together. Me and spirit brother Luci in the Beamer bolting through black night with great stereo sound and Orion `oerhead, we'll go to Bisbee, see Kate. New Mexico and Dave. Texas and Mary, Hunter, Stephan. Maybe even NOLA and the Stocks, but no farther East. Fuck east. God Bless The East and all it has given me, blessed gifts and adventure and Love, but time it is to Go Home. Or nearly so. One more week? Can I stand it? Orion says YES. Do it. Do it now. Sobo from Sugarloaf through the Saddlebacks and stroll Monday to the highway and kiss the ground and say "Woo Hoo!" For only then will your heart be content.

I'll sleep on it. Another hour or two before bloodshot dawn and decision time. But I do believe the dye is cast. Orion doesn't just drop by to see me every night. The message seems clear. And I am clear and well-rested now, enough anyway, from Katahdin and stress of making it last week. A vision quest. Alone I'll do this one. Perhaps at last I'll see my moose, my bear.
-RSM

[Postscript: Orion, Yazzy tells me, is a winter constellation, thus accounting or its summer absence. Also, Orion is for me solely a phenomenon of the haunting, open West. It was surely the stupor of 4 a.m. that made me think Orion wanted anything more than for me to come home, straight home, my journey at an end.]

(Rick McKinney, aka Lord Duke Jester Jigglebox,
summited Katahdin on October 8, 2004, after walking over
2000 miles in 222 days on the AT since March 20, 04. He
will continue to add to his journals as he returns home
and transcribes tons of material from notebooks not yet
posted here or on http://www.trailjournals.com.
The following was whipped out on a library computer in Gorham
just before Jester returned to his native California.)

October 13, 04
Summited, Done

Madness on a hump day in New Hampshire. Awoke early this morning, 4 a.m., to the conviction that I must return to the AT and make up a few miles I missed in the Saddlebacks, in fact all the Saddlebacks. Wrote crazy Kerouacian entry in journal to the effect that the constellation Orion was forcing my hand on this one, sending me back. And why not? Here I am in NH still, as close to the trail as I'll be again for a good year at least, and Yazzy to drive me there and pick me up and good weather today.

So we pack it up and leave the quiet of the Lake Francis cabin high up in the peaked roof attic portion of the Old Man's house, New Hampshire, and head south and then east and with every mile I'm flipping out, flipping and flopping and changing my mind. Go. Don't go. And there's the seat awaiting me on Southwest Flight 925 outa Manchester tomorrow and although the ticket is open-ended, do I really wanna give it up?

Forward to: complete mental meltdown in a gas station parking lot at the junction of Route's 16 and 26, the turning point where I must make my decision. I walk to the phone to change the flight and can't do it. I flip a nickel two outa three. I do it again and again and hate it, hate the outcome that tell's me I gotta do it, but feel sure I'll never sleep again if I don't go back and finish what I started. I walk. I come to a picnic table in a small park and cry. This is madness. We have become fully lodged in the throat of the space-time continuum and we're gonna choke the life outa the world if we don't do something quick.

But wait a minute! So what if all the cards are in place for an easy return to the trail? So what that Orion came out last night and said hello for the first time in months? I'm F-ing exhausted! I can't do this anymore! I'm done! I was done weeks ago. But I kept walking to make it Katahdin (not counting of course the little hitchhike-pink blaze I did to make it to Yazzy so's I could finish the trial (sic) ..er, trail with a much-needed companion after so long alone out there). I kept walking and walking and walking and until my ankles were going bad on me again and my knees collapsing like sat-upon eggshells and my back went out.. jeezus, I was a mess BUT I KEPT ON WALKING! And then I finished. Boom. Voila. Just like that it was over.

Is all this just some kinda post-traumatic AT syndrome symptom? Cuz man I don't like it.

So what did I do? you're wondering. I walked into that gas station and ambled around. I contemplated a new round of trail rations. Not appealing. And then I came to the Heet, that methal alcohol gas line treatment shit we alcohol-stove users use on occasion when we can't find pure denatured. I stared at the bottle of Heet. It stared back. And then my focus shifted. Behind the Heet were glowing cases where cold beverages sat waiting my attention. I gave the Heet a miss and grabbed a sixer of Jim Beam & Ginger Ales in the can. I calmly walked to the counter. I paid. I walked out to the truck and cracked one open. I took a swig and I knew. I knew the truth.

I knew that the truth was bullshit, the truth in the exact mileage, bean-counter sense of the AT and what it means. "Endurance is more important than truth," Bukowski said. Had I not endured enough? Two hundred and twenty-two daze on the trail in the woods with no outdoor plumbing and stinking socks and going to bed at night sweaty all over despite the outside temperature, sweaty from ten hours of hard physical work. I had endured plenty.

I looked up at the center rearview mirror and remembered a line from an old road-race movie from the sixties, when a racecar driver tore the mirror off and tossed it out the window saying, "What is behind me is not important!" Yazzy returned from the payphone and chuckled as she saw the sixer of booze. I chuckled back. "Drive, woman!" I said. "Drive SOUTH!, away from Maine. I'm done. I'm done, Aug. I just wanna go home." -RSM

[Postscript: New England now shimmering in golden light of sun, the sun a bobbing apple in the barrel of mountains, hills running the New Hampshire/Maine line and all the leaves in the full burst of autumn color, the crescendo! And the colors clearer now in my joyful eyes of decision made. Going home. Home to the idea of home. Zepellin and Moby and Petty and the Beasties mix it up on Yazzy's stereo truck rolling past bright white homes and jeans hanging on the line to dry, North Fryeburg on route to Daddy-o's for a final visit. Let's see if he can embrace the occasion a little better than has been done thus far. Out now. Over and out. Too much beauty passing out October window to be looking down to write. -RSM]

[transcribed from steno scribblings and posted 12/15/04]
October 14, 2004
The End of the AT: part one of two

[To be read to tune of Bach's Cello suite #1 in G major]

Bach's sweet cello music lifts me high in jet-ascending rush of strange New England farewell. Up then we rise over densely populated Manchester, the suburbs beautiful "Today Only!" by dint and loving brush of autumn leafy color, the colors of God, the colors of pending winter death and sleep and change. And like a thief in broad daylight I bid adieu to you, New England, and steal away (just in knick of time) to golden shores of western dreams to California, straight back to my private suite in that Forever Hotel where checkout time is flexible, but leaving for good? Impossible. Southwest Flight #922 has lifted me already, in the short space of this page, high aloft past showers just beginning straight up and into blue blue skies where all the world below is white and soft and forgiving as deep, deep sleep.

Where now is my Appalachian Trail? Where now is my daily friend and spirit guide over mountain after mountain, mile after mile? I look down now at the biggest white blaze I have ever seen. And Sting sings in my ear `bout how he’s sending out an S.O.S. Good thing. We’re gonna need some guidance, some counsel, to deal with a blaze the size of all the world below this plane.

And Auggy’s gone, tears in her blue eyes and running down soft cheeks as I heft my pack for the last time in New Hampshire, in New England, on the whole of East Coast or anywhere a continent away from the At World. Good bye, sweet Auggy, hiking partner and more there at long journey’s brief Maine end. You leave me curbside and drive your burnt orange pickup away as bade to do by cops and security lights and all the rushing madness that is airports and fear combined.

I go inside and run the gauntlet, anxious a bit as I’m set aside for secondary invasion of personal privacy and wanded down and removed of shoes and hat and zippers et al. Anxious only should they produce my little pill stash and start asking Q’s. Pain killers, anti-depressants, more pain killers of a more prescription-level nature, as many colors in that little jar as all the autumn leaves falling dead in suburban yards below.

My fears are for naught. I’m free to go. Free. That’s the key word in all of this, folks, in every paragraph of every page of prose and poetic rambling and just straight reportage, the sum total of which is fast approaching 200,000 words from six months on the Appalachian Trail. Free. Freedom. Live free or die. I leave you New Hampshire, but I take with me your spirit, your license plate slogan, your words to live by. Freedom IS NOT “just some people talking” as stated in the lyrics of Desperado. In the case of the AT, it’s just some people walking. A lot of people. And we walked and we conquered and we walked ourselves ragged and our conquests in the end were all internal. It is quiet here at the end. Hardly a hoo or a rah.

Heading straight into the western running sun, chasing him as it were. We will not beat him to Cali, nor even to my layover destination of Vegas. But it will be fun to be on-course with him for a change, after all these months of late afternoon shine and warmth like a kiss on my left cheek, always on the left or the back of my neck as I balance-beamed over bog bridges following bear tracks in the Maine mud or Spiderman-walked up steep sloping bald tops above tree-line or alongside minimal alpine growth or even in dense forest letting only a flickering strobe of healing western sun reach me in the darkening woods of moss & lichens and roots savage and unruly, stones drunk on snakebite and rolling about thus to trip me up after some hoary saber-toothed rattler dropped by to sharpen his teeth on them.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, how can a poet fly and not be dazzled beyond all cure? One thousand seven hundred & fifty miles from Vegas, says the pilot just twenty miles out of Baltimore. How can the mind fathom such a distance until the feet themselves have walked every mile?

Don’t feel bad if you can’t. I just DID WALK all that way and more and I cannot comprehend it. I am humbled by this Earth, humbled by God’s big key lime pie planet over which I now soar in whipped cream splendor agog at the rolling hills and mountains of water-retaining air. This is the pilot’s world, where he lives every day. How could not the pilot become poet?

Same way I suppose that I could walk the East Coast Earth from near end to end and sometimes have nothing at all to say, just complaints about sore feet, and to see the AT as nothing more than an oblique “green tunnel” as it is often called. You get sick of anything after too much of it. I could not, after summiting Katahdin, stand the thought of saddling up another day, of stomping up the Saddlebacks, the mountains I missed in my Sissy Hankshaw pink blaze for companionship.

Now I’ve left a girl crying at the airport with no hope or promise of anything more than what we had on the trail, a trail romance short lived but pleasant. I hope she’ll be okay. I’m eating airline peanuts at 450 miles per hour. How I got here, I moved virtual money from my virtual online account to someone else’s, to the guy selling his Rapid Rewards flight voucher on eBay, and he made a virtual “gift” of his tickets to me and an hour later Southwest Air sent me an electronic mail message saying the tickets were mine now and “here are some code #s to make all this virtual shit seem more real.” Something like that.

I told my Dad this last night at the bar at the Black Horse Tavern near his place in Maine. I said, “Isn’t that amazing? I never met the seller, never handed anyone any cash, never even saw the money myself as it was electronically deposited for me into my account by a friend a week ago. Then voila! I’m on a plane shredding the white blaze sky at damn-near the speed of sound.

To celebrate my departure, yet make this weird transition from Auggy and the AT and Dad and Aunt Mary and Justin and New England in general, from all of this to WHATEVER awaits me in California (and because I’m more than a little scared of the latter..) I went for a kind of Matrix compromise and ate not the red pill, not the blue, but the purple one. For 222 days on the trail, I carried one 30 mg fentanyl capsule duct-taped to the back of amigo Mike’s inspiring send-off card. It was along for the ride for one reason: the guy who fell rock climbing, wedged his arm in a crevice, and after hanging there a few days was forced to hack off his own limb with a Swiss Army knife.

Now I figured, if this happened to me, or if I fell and broke a leg or a buncha ribs and was far off trail, or on trail but in what we call “a bubble,” an area of trail empty of thruhikers for a day or so in either direction, well, I’d need this pill. Turned out I never did. Made it through with flying colors.

So, nothing left to do now but EAT the EVIDENCE! Gobble it down before some Patriot Act-jacked airport security stooge DEA-wanna-be gets his rectal probe-rubber-clad fingers on it screaming “Traitor! Terror-monger! Drug fiend!” and bringing the Culture of Fear crashing down on my Bambi-hugging six month pseudo-reality with brute & ugly force.

So. We’re high now. Oh, yes. Thirty-thousand feet and cruising. Back pain from pulled-muscle of high-strung, taught sinew body of athlete, Olympiad alas unaccustomed to the hip-swivel movements of coitus alpinium. Translation: hike, hike, wee! Hike, hike, whippee! Hike, fuck, bend over, OUCH! Pulled the muscle in the 100-Mile Wilderness and voila! Along comes Spin Cycle to the rescue, a bear-sized man whose too-quiet demeanor and penetrating, seemingly patronizing looks had me avoiding the guy at all costs. Irony of ironies, turns out the former TV ad man is not only a teddy bear sweet guy but an angel chiropractor to boot! Okay, a novice, but it doesn’t take a pro (just a bear) to lift a six-foot twig like me off my feet, my arms folded across my chest, and basically “bounce” me off his chest for the desired effect. CRUNCH! Trailside spinal alignment. Amazing. Sure there was still pain, daily. But without hero Spin Cycle, it’s possible I might not have walked out of the wilderness of my own volition.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Back pain of past two weeks: gone.

Aches in knees brutalized by endless steep descents in Vermont’s Greens, New Hampshire’s Whites, and Maine’s.. blacks and blues: gone. Hangover from last night’s Jim Beam & Ginger Ale celebration with Dad & Auggy at the Black Horse Tavern? Gone. Sore feet? Gone. Sore airplane-seat ass? Gone.

Shouting noise of drunk, Vegas-bound seatmates: diminished.

Sustained on air by pills.

All the morphine doesn’t seem to have addressed is the congestion in my influenza-addled head and throat sore. Or maybe it did for awhile but has by now worn off. Hell if I’ll reveal my source, but let’s just say the pills are old, and I split the 30 mg pill in half figuring I’d save half for the second 5-hour chunk of this rather long flying day. Out of Fryeburg at 11 a.m., airborne at 3, down in Baltimore at 4:20, airborne again at 5 with a five hour run to Vegas, two hours on the ground in that psycho-deliriunk airport, then off again for a one-hour run to Ontario. Oh, yeah. Then the two hour drive to Idyllwild. Home at Swami’s by midnight.

Flying over the Rockies now. The Rockies already snow-covered to a certain elevation, and I think of Flyin’ Brian running over all those razor ridges lit with the pink alpine glow of reflected sun on their western faces. And I think: No F-ing WAY.

I’m done. I’ve done my Great Hike. Jeezus, I wanna sleep for a week. Maybe I’ll throw down, spend the cash on one of those motels that rent by the week, just check in, hang the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob, and lay there until I get bedsores. I am that tired. Please God, let there be some peace at Swami’s and some nook for me to crawl inside and hide awhile. I told Auggy today on our approach to MHT that if the plane started going down, I would just cackle and hoot. “Yee-haw! Bring on the Big Sleep, Baby. I HAVE lived `a good life, enough to base a movie on,’ as Morrison said. I’m done.”

But far from going down in flames, this plane and everyone on it gets higher by the minute as Vegas-jazzed passengers liquor up for a night of celluloid fun. It’s some guy’s fortieth birthday, so suddenly the whole crew is prancing down the aisle with a toilet paper roll bedecked in plastic Southwest captain’s wings and a small can of juice on top: the effect is more mock-wedding cake than birthday cake, but what the hell. We all sing the song as the last of the bright pink and orange light of Thursday, October 14th makes the engine and wing out my window look like a Mary Kay car and far below the Colorado River winds and wiggles its way toward California.

To get the gamblers in the mood, the crewmembers have us all write our seat number on a dollar bill and toss it in a hat. Little boy Nathan is chosen to do the honors and pulls out Seat 3-A, the Asian woman directly behind me who has been kicking my seat for hours wins the pot. I’m too tired and stoned and tired and exhausted and stoned and wore out and bone dry dead on my 2000-mile-ragged feet and boney, hiked-off ass to even flinch, either earlier at her kickings or now at my not winning. Congratulations Asian kickbox lady from Baltimore. Live long and prosper on your $102 booty.

Did I mention I’m tired?

Did I mention my last-surviving grandmother’s parting words to me the other day were, “Have a nice life, Ricky.” Did I mention that Baltimore Jack locked me in the porta-potty at the Caratunk party, then proceeded to run at it like an offensive lineman? Did I mention that I let all my fellow Katahdin summiters sign my back in the Blue Ox Tavern in Millinocket on the night of our festive farewell?

Did I mention running into Eric’s dad Terry in our cheezyass hotel in Millinocket and thus Eric and Jess and going out to dinner with them, they who had yet to summit? It was then that I learned that the two had become engaged atop some mountain and heart broke and my heart giggled and I decided I just didn’t give a shit, that Jess had never been mine, despite my lust for her from Day One out Springer and vague and whispered mumblings on her part hinting at the fact that I was not alone in my affection?

Did I mention my Mahousic Notch Miracle, my record-breaking conquest of the dreaded “hardest mile on the AT?” I shall tell you of that presently. However, the lights of Vegas have grown bright below. Brighter and brighter. And now a patch of darkness and that sense that the ground is very close. The screech of tires, the roar of thrusters in reverse. Vegas. Time to find a bar and await my final flight. –RSM

[Bonus for my hard-core readers! Scan earlier AT link pages for LOST POSTINGS FOUND placed chronologically & highlighted in red!]

Flight Home continued..

8pm Pacific Standard Time
Vegas GamblePort

I amble into the only bar in this "wing" of the massive Vegas airport. Already spent my obligatory dollar on 25 cent poker, betting 50 cents a hand, my Vegas excitement prolonged only momentarily by one Jacks-or-better "winning hand." Some win.

Made my way over to another machine and in my morphinated Morpheus stupor took a good minute to realize the slot machine-looking R2D2 thingy with a video screen monitor featuring dancing Vegas showgirls was in fact an ATM machine. This elicited a smile, followed shortly by a major buzz-kill as my brain ran through in super-sped-up replay the moment of my first interface with civilization following a week in the 100-mile Wilderness and my triumphant Katahdin summit. What, you ask, was this short-bus passenger foul up that so deftly slammed me hard and fast, back into the so-called Real World?

A visit to an ATM, of course. Bangor Savings Bank Branch #666, Milli-knucklehead (nocket) Maine. Friday night. Frank, Auggy and I passengers in Auggy's mom's car, the latter at the wheel. Now, I don't know this woman at all but she creeps me out, by no fault of her own, I suppose. It's just that for days and days on the trail I had to hear from Aug all about her mother's deep concern for daughter, concern about Auggy hiking with the freak with the confessional website. Auggy found it all rather humorous. I didn't.

So I'm nervous, and it's one of those ATMs you gotta surrender your card to, stick it in and it EATS it for the duration of the transaction. Now, thank God my middle name is Rosenthal and I hate paying the $2 fee and therefore yank as much dough outa the machine as it'll cough up (thus reducing the percentage of "tax" on my money to minimum). Two bucks outa $20 is a lot. Two bucks outa $300? Ack, a pittance!

So I hurriedly grab my cash and receipt and jump in the compact car fulla stinky hikers and stinky gear and my girlfriend's mother whom I'm convinced has it in for me, and away we drive. It isn't until I'm standing at the check-in counter of Millinocket's tackiest hotel (perhaps the tackiest in all of Maine) that I realize, to my horror, that I have left my ONE and ONLY debit/credit card in the jagged-fanged mechanical vagina at Branch #666, Bangor Savings, and that I will NEVER, EVER see it again.

Mind you, I mean no harm by this metaphor. I am in fact a great fan of vaginas! I just can't resist the sexual connotations rampant in everyday objects. Banks are rampant with them. Remember the old style drive-up banking with the phallic tubes that got sucked into the bank and ejaculated back out to you full of cash?! And then you’ve got keys slipping into locks, and boxes like mouths full of diamonds and gold, and vaults that safe-crackers tickle open with rubber-clad fingers, and, and… Okay. Back to the story.

Flash to the present: Vegas International. All I can say is thank Colonel Sanders or Lord God the Big CPU in the sky or Skynet or whoever is running this virtual reality for allowing me to pop out of the woods and, sans the Paypal credit card, go online and use pass codes and keystrokes and other imaginary matrix magic to buy my little blonde inner Charlie Bucket a Golden Ticket on Wonka Airlines and get the “F” outa Foliage Land and back to the Land of the Warm & the Weird.

Take if from a now & again closet cynic, civilization is a bad case of hemorrhoids for those without a whole lotta luck, a faerie godmother, pixie dust and your own private Tinkerbell to sprinkle it on. I fortunately do have luck in abundance and a Tinkerbell so hot and deft with the dust she makes Julia Roberts' "Tink" look a homely, clumsy fool. And civilization, in the form of a federal endowment for the certifiably creative, has likewise been kind to me.

I much enjoyed the lonesome call of the loons on New England ponds on quiet nights. I felt a kinship with the loon. And a measured of gratitude. Were I not myself a court-certified loon, this entire AT trip would have been a lot more difficult, if not impossible.

Do I feel patriotic in these politically nauseating and twisted times? Yes I do. And not because of the crazy money. And not because I love my government at all.

It's the people. It is the people of this nation, and this grand and magical 2000-mile path of freedom that have transformed this closet ex-patriot into a man in love with his homeland again. It is the trail angels and the thruhikers and the hostel-keepers and the past thruhikers and the section hikers and even those loony southbounders! It is that there exists this AMAZING path of freedom and kindness and beauty and hope and dreams straight through the heart of the whole East Coast Appalachian corridor and that YOU, anybody, can drop what you're doing TODAY if you so choose and set out on this path and walk and experience a degree of freedom you may never have imagined possible. And you can walk these 2000 miles for FREE. Cost of permits on the AT: $0.00.

-RSM