Mile 167
Fontana Dam
Dinner tonight consists of tree bark shavings, hapless hibernating cicada pupa (and a good a bit of the dirt I dug em out of), eye of gnute, hearts of pine cone, oh and of course granola. Actually the real ingredients are not much better. I started, as I often do for dinner, with a scant two tablespoons of rice in a cup and half of water. Chopped in one clove of garlic and diced up a handful of those baby carrots that keep so well in an unrefridgerated pack, then came curry spice, pepper and a wink of salt. Surveying what all I have to eat over the coming week (all of it fitting in a nylon sack no bigger than a lady's large-sized purse) I foraged for some dried berries - cranberries, raisins, blueberries & I think even one strawberry got in there. Threw them in the pot. Then there's the teenie dope-like half baggie of smoked salmon jerky that I hoard like a squirrel on methamphetamine. Crumbled a bit of that in there. Then went some soy nuts, some sunflower and pumpkin seeds, and a bit of kamut to thicken it up. More water to make it go a little farther. And that's it. That's dinner out here on the trail for your author and friend. Actually, today that's dinner at the so-called "Fontana Hilton" a kindof hopped-up big budget version of the usual rangy old shelters found along the trail. The "Hilton" overlooks Lake Whatever-you-call-it, probably Fontana and is full of all the amenities of an interstate rest stop, things like concrete picnic tables and trash bins and a water fountain, simple things the Dam-visiting public come to expect but that we, the few, the proud, the AT thruhikers, find ever-increasingly odd and alien and, well.. plush. I have to laugh at the sign at the top of the road leading down here from the Dam: "Shelter 300 yards: Hikers Only." I feel like royalty.
I say all this with surprising good spirits considering that my introduction to Fontana Damn.. er, Dam, was hardly pleasant including one more meal of humble pie, a brief fit of paranoia and the expenditure of my very last dollar bill. The latter came first when I excitedly spent my last dollar on the $1 shuttle from the trailhead 2 or 3 miles into town for a motel room and an ATM. A pick-it-up and dial zero airport-like convenience telephone at the trailhead made this wonderfully simple and seemed to bode well. But I've had trouble with my credit card already on this trip, and although I knew a few hundred bucks had been deposited into my account three or four days back, I still went forth with apprehension. And sure enough I was turned away at the Fontana Inn for insufficient funds. Embarrassed and upset, I fumbled for small change in the various folds of my pack. Trouble is, constant "weight checks" on the pack had me fully aware of everything that was and wasn't in the pack, and I knew thus that very little change, if any, was. I managed to scrounge 75 cents and asked shuttle driver Laurie to take me back to the Dam. She kindly did. At the phone I used my calling card, only to learn that I had perhaps two calls before it, too, ran out. I chose to call Rocky, my pillar of strength and optimism in the West, and keeper of a small stash of backup money for me in cases of emergency. Standing there alone on the dead-vacant Fontana Dam with not a thruhiker in sight and no one else to boot, penniless and quite suddenly aware of how very far from home I am, I pressed the emergency button. He wasn't home, but I left a message: please send cash asap, 911, to me c/o General Delivery, Hot Springs, NC, etc, etc. Then I called Paypal, keeper of my one sacred piece of plastic money. Turns out it was just a matter of checking account monies clearing in time, or not in time as the case is. The 7th they told me. Okay. Today is the 5th. Tomorrow I walk into the Great Smokey Mountain Wilderness not to reappear again for a week. And standing there, penniless and thousands of miles from home with no hope of money for a week, I realized that it just didn't matter. I would simply walk into the woods again. I'd light my stove, roll out my bag, and live again as a king. -RSM
In my bag this morning I am a skydiver, belly toward the Earth, leggs raised at the knees, feet elevated (in this case to keep them above my heart til time to use them), my hands folded beneath me for warmth. Skydiver, basejumper, nothing between me and the Great Smokey Mountain Bear Enclosure but a few more minutes of snores, sleep-mumbles and moans, and maybe even some real moans coming from the couple across the way, hard to tell. There are some two dozen of us laid out here at the "Fontana Hilton" this morning, still snozling, still squirming on Thinsulite pads and wooden floors and bunks against the predawn cold. When I came here yesterday, i didn't like it at all. The whole scene creeped me out and I wanted to flee immediately across the dam and into the Smokies.
But the Smokies have strict regulations regarding the "kindness" they afford thruhikers and the one big rule is that we may sleep ONLY in shelters. There is no stealth camping allowed in the Smokies. I pulled out my mileage book, consulted my watch and did the math. Nope. no way I would make it to the first shelter by dark. So with great restraint, I gave in to the forces of the Great Magnet, as Thompson calls it. I gave in and made my dinner instead at four in the afternoon. At that time, there were only two other thruhikers here, Doyle and Sunset. Nothing against them, but I don't know either of them , and my recent credit card rejection experience had me weirded out and the whole post-apocalyptic environment of the dam, well, i just wanted out of there. But I calmly cooked instead, and as I cooked the parade of thruhikers began to appear from the south. Mockingbird, now Nathan, now Shortcake, now Southie, now the Newleyweds, now Breahtlesss and Longjohn. Then the place felt okay. I was with my tribe again, or they with me. The evening went nicely with the one not so nice aspect of Shortcake's resignation. The trail hadn't turned out to be as much fun as she'd hoped for, and that was that. Sounded like a good a reason as any. It would definitlely be one of mine, should it occur to be less fun.
Now this morning the birds begin to sing and outside the mummy wraps of my bag i hear the troops beginning to move about. A peek out of my hoodie reveals a lot more light in the room . the sun is by no means UP yet, no way. But it's coming. And soon I will be diving, for real. Jumping off the dam as it were and into seventy miles of Smokies, the much-touted and kinda haunted sounding Smokies with all them bears and scarey rangers and regulations and bears and, well, bears. Part of me envys little Shortcake. She gets to go home now, no harm , no foul, no shame, and from the sounds of it she even has a home to go to. Most of these folks do. Most are much younger than I and thus still have the parental option. Most are in semi-daily contact with their parents to assure them that they are well and alive. I emailed my mother a week ago and still haven't heard back from her. But this goes both ways. She hardly got more than a minute's notice from me that I was doing this, and not much of a farewell visit at that. But mom's got her husband and her life, and dad the same, and I'm too frikken old to be phoning the parents all the time, and as safety nets go, they're not there for me anymore anyway. So it's back to the freefall metaphor. Back to the skydivers crouch, or whatever that would be called, legs up, arms out, eyes Earthward, look out Appalachia, here I come. - RSM
Fontana Dam, North Carolina is what Hoover Dam or any damn dam will look like if some hellish virus wipes out every living creature on Earth someday. It is a strange and eerie place. A giant concrete monument to.. to what? Ugliness. The dam is ugly and the body of water it creates is, by very nature of being manmade and awkwardly so with its telltale dirt skirt shoreline where the waters recede, is ugly. Shortcake says the whole dam complex reminds her of Stephen King's Langoliers. A place where nothing lives yet everything is still in tact and all the machines still humming along, stupid, irreverent of our absence. Sure, the shower there last night was nice and hot. But it was like showering in a mausoleum, all marble walls and steel doors and concrete structure. There wasn't a soul in sight last night when I walked the half mile down from the shelter to the dam and the showers. I'm not complaining. It was kinda peaceful in the way I imagine death is. I said it reminded me of Logan's Run, of the underbelly beneath the city full of weird, 20-something people. But that reference was too distant perhaps for young Shortcake and Danny from Mass. Whatever. Someday somebody's gonna walk across a dam like this and say the same thing about us, about me perhaps, about the free people who used to walk the now-gnarled and overgrown trail from Georgia to Maine. In their future time, perhaps there will be no such freedom, or perhaps there be so few people that humankind will once again have clustered together in fear and be afraid of the woods. Or perhaps it will go the other way, the way of too many. In this latter scenario, I don't see the dam or the trail. I don't see anything. Anything but people. But that's not my hunch. My hunch is that this dam will always be a spooky, haunted place and that whatever push toward overpopulation continues into the coming decades will end, tragically probably, leaving the dams and other self-running machines to go on humming, quietly in a silent world.
Afterthought:
There are thousands of people walking this trail, all of them having
started around the same time as me and headed in the same direction.
And I see a dozen or so every day. But on the trail, all I need do is
stop a moment to write or push on ahead a little, and suddenly I am the
only man left in the world. It's baffling, really, how much space
there is still left in the world, how much so-called emptiness that is
alive and humming with living things with consciousness far beyond ours
such that we call them vegetative or animal. While walking the Trail,
I sometimes like to imagine that the trees are all actually moving very
quickly, and that I am just on such a different quantum time-space
plane, that I cannot see their movement. I say all this both in
support of my idea of the solitary nature of the dam, and in contrast
to it. The dam therefore is a blight and a joke, a falsity and a lame
attempt made by men who do not walk the woods, to conquer it, to stop
nature in her tracks. Nature will never stop, of that I am sure. We
are fooling ourselves with our dams. Nature has already destroyed
them.-RSM
Mile 176
Tuesday April 6
Mainsail, Mockingbird & the Great Race against Smokys Storms
Heavy day. Spooked by that damn dam, I hoofed it hard up the first four miles, all ascent, straight up and into the Smokys. I passed the Honeymooners, Mainsail, Mockingbird, everybody it seemed. I was on a tear and feeling every bit tore up around mile seven. I start slow mornings, typically feeling like shit for the first few miles. And today was no exception. But for some reason I was driven. All this jazz about "only" being allowed to sleep in shelters in the Smokys pushed me onward, knowing that I either had to make it ten miles, or sixteen miles, and wanting to achieve the latter. Mainsail is my new buddy. We gabbed all day about this and that, about women and beer and some of the places we'd both lived or visited like Humboldt and Missoula. Mainsail's got a girl at home. He misses her of course, but it sounds like they have a good chance of surviving this journey of his. Seems she's headed to Africa to do volunteer work for a few months. That oughta work. It's the hikers I meet that have a lonely spouse or mate at home that I worry about. So today Mainsail reminded me of something I think I oughta explain to those of you who don't really know or understand what the AT is. Mainsail says even Backpacker Magazine is sorely mistaken in their assessment of the AT's difficulty in reference to the Pacific Crest Trail or the Continental Divide. The AT is NOT the easiest of the three trails. Coming from the west coast, i can attest that there are long stretches of flat or near flat ground between mountain ranges, at least in California. While out here, damn! I have done nothing but climb up one mountain and down another for nearly two hundred miles and there's no end of it in sight.
To look at a profile of the Appalachians is to see a never ending roller coaster of "balds" or tops, and "gaps" or lower regioins between mountains. It's frikken crazy! And the AT of sixty years ago is apparantly not the AT of today. Earl Shaeffer was first to hike the trail in the 1940s. Fifty years later he did it again to become not only the first hiker but now the eldest. his report upon hiking the lower regions especially, that is to say the miles I've just completed, was not at all positive. He was downright pissed. According to Schaefer, the trail engineers had added all these unnecessary loops and trails straight up mountains, making every effort to complicate the trail he had navigated easily in the Forties. Having looked at a few topo maps, I'd have to agree. There are some real bullshit east and west divergences that allegedly were thrown in there to discourage thruhikers rigth from the start, thereby minimizing impact later up the trail. I dunno. That sounds kinda hoaky and conspiratorial, but I wouldn't doubt it.
The AT is a monster, no shit. i'm doing it. It's all mouuuntains, man. And the tttrails go straight up every one of them. So, just so you all know, this ain't no sidewalk I'm strolling down, or up, from Georgia to Maine. This is a beast, and today my feet felt every bit gnawed upon by that beast. I made my dinner lying down, just too waasted to stand, or sit. sixteen miles today. Probably twenty tomorrow. Gotta get out of the Smokys quick. Aside from being home to apparantly ttwice as many plant species as all of Europe, the Smokys are also the most visited of all America's national parks, with around 20 million visitors per year. What this means for thruhikers is hike during the week and get out before the weekenders show up and pack the shelters like sardines. Because remember, you are only allowed to camp in shelters. Oh, and Big Horn just reminded me of the other thing pressing us to roar through here fast: the rainfall. The Smokys get more annual rainfall than most anywhere in the US, apparently. Thruhikers talk of it incessently. Today it was sunny and clear. Tomorrow we might get lucky again. But then Thursday's another story. And we've still got sixty miles to go. This is Sir Hamburger Feet signing off from my bunk in an old stone hut shelter in the Smoky's.. goodnight. -RSM "Jester"
Mile 183
April 7, Wednesday
Bambi likes me
Having a hard time keeping my spirits up. Two guys from Gatlinburg, long like cigarettes and silent, sit chain smoking by the fire. They're cooking steak they hauled up from town. I'm eating granola. A short distance from the stone dungeon-like shelter Circuit Rider reads aloud from the Bible to the boys of the so-called Fab Five. They need all the prayer they can get, I figure, staring down at a 25-mile day tomorrow. Already the flies harrass me. I can see insects bringing down my house of cards "big hike conviction" real easy some day more tired and pained and feeling less purpose than today. Some day soon, perhaps. I sleep fitfully. In the night, one or both of the Gatlinburg boys is up for a smoke. I can smell it mingled with the stench of woodfire smoke. I rise to pee once in the night, go out through the chainlink fence gate into the bear-infested night. The moon is near full. There are no bears. I begin to think the whole bear thing is a myth.
In the morning a doe trots into camp to say hello. "Bambi" I say to her just a few feet away, and in an instant she bounds into the air, pirouttes, comes down and does the wildest jig. All of us are stunned. A small group of other locals, probably two fathers and their boys, have been chuckling at my impressions of Gollum and Schmeogal and Bill Murray from Caddyshack. For a while over breakfast, I think I've lost my signature hat. Sewed myself and resembling that of a jester, it has earned me the trail name Jester. Suddenly I remember that i'd left it in the pocket of my rain jacket. I excitedly yank it out, place it on my head and screach with Schmeogal joy. After the Bambi incident they look at me strangely, as though I really am crazy and have somehow spoken to this animal directly. It is the sort of moment I enjoy.
On the trail again this morning I am a
sloth. I simply cannot muster yesterday's power or enthusiasm.
Mainsail and Mockingbird stay with me, sortof, but are always just out
of audio range such that all I hear of their bubbling laugh-filled
dialogue is unintelligable sounds. Their "sailing" pace "mocks" me.
Our one fine moment comes atop Rocky Top Mountain in Tennessee as
Mainsail sings an Appalachian song and I laugh and try in vain to
remember the verse. This much I get:
Corn don't qrow at all on Rocky Top
Dirts too rocky by far
Thats why all folks out on Rocky Top
Get their corn from a jar
It goes on about moonshine makin' and sweet Appalachian girls and such. It makes the pain in my knees a little more bearable. But now I've lost them, too far ahead in this Hobbit-like ridgeline forest of strange grass hummocks and gnarled little trees like fruit trees bare in winter. The fields of blonde grass long and lopped over like 70s haircuts are not smooth but consistently bumpy, like a convention of 10,000 hedgehogs elbow to elbow basking in the mountaintop sun. There are patches of snow everywhere and I eat from them and when it's hot, fill my hat with it and let the icy coolness dribble down my neck. I must retain my sense of purpose out here, or I am done for. It is hard, hard work and endless, and the candidates for Katahdin are dropping like flies. Yet just what is my purpose for doing this mad thing? Already I have forgotten. I have learned that Gatlinburg is not far off the trail and makes for a nice break in the Smokys with its Vegas-like atmosphere and Dollywood, the interactive homage to Dolly Parton. I will stop there then and rest and eat a hamburger, drink a beer.
Walking without a penny in one's pocket, even here in the free forest, is difficult. My experience of being denied a motel room in Fontana was degrading, however well I paved over the sting with words. To Gatlinburg then, to spend some money on myself and give this aching body a moment's rest. Then it will be back into the Smokys for one more night straddling two 15-mile days. Just eight more miles today and ten tomorrow, then I can rest my lonesome heart and dizzy head in Dolly Parton's ample.. bed? Breasts? Whatever. -RSM "Jester" of AT2004
Mile 193
(same day)
Double Spring Shelter
While sitting trailside writing earlier, a guy and girl with matching orange hats went zooming by me like they were just out for the weekend pulling a thiry mile day or so. I didn't think much of it. Then I met them both at the next shelter. We got chatting and I learned that I was talking to Silver Girl and none other than Flyin Brian, the legendary hiker who in one ten month stretch hiked the Triple Crown: the AT, the PCT and the Continental Divide. He is the only man to have ever done them all in one year, and with two months to spare at that! Needless to say my morning musings of pain and sloath just went right out the window. Only recently introduced to this whole world of heavy-duty hiking, I admit I didn't know who Flyin Brian was two months ago.
Bruce at Nomad Adventures in Idyllwild was the first to tell me about Brian's feat. Bruce knows a lot about his business and helped me a lot getting the right gear together. I think he would have liked to have been a fly on my hat when Flyin Brian blew by me and I didn't even know it. I won't soon forget Brian's look of consternation as he regarded the substance of my light lunch, carrots, carob clusters, dates, stilton cheese and water crackers. The Triple Crown champion was impressed, stuck as he was with the Kraft cheese and chocolate-covered peanuts he'd acquired locally. Funny day.
And of course another super-painful day. For some reason, the miles went by a lot slower today and time went faster. I was humping it from eight in the morning until six at night, almost non-stop. I decided the word for the day was stamina, which fits into the sentence "I have no stamina." If I do succeed in hiking this whole trail, I gotta do something fat to follow such an act, so to speak. Speaking more to Brian's achievement than talking about myself, I said to him, "Yeah, I was thinking if I finished the AT I'd go run with the bulls in Pamplona."
I was baiting him. I mean, what do you do to top an act like the Triple Crown? Brian didn't bite. He just said I should go on and hike the PCT. Fuddy duddy.
Later when Mainsail asked him what he did with those two remaining months of the year he did the Triple Crown, he replied that he went to Acadia National Park in Maine and did a buncha small day hikes while reacclimating to society. My uncle David drowned and was never found off the coast of Acadia in the late Sixties. Small world. I bet Brian has seen the plaque made for David and situated on a cliff above where he drowned. It's like the only unnatural thing in the park.
The views here in the Smokys are incredible, just mountain after mountain after mountain. So of course my camera batttery died. All i will have to remember the park by is some very, very sore feet. And maybe a postcard from Dollywood. Bunked up in another ancient stone shelter tonight, this one not so uglified by chain link fences. The privy, or shitter, is of the composting type, and sits up in the air. It's like an outhouse in a treehouse. Which sure beats what I saw a few shelters back: a privy area minus the privy. The effect was a mine field of dangerous deposits only occasionally announced by tufts of white tp. Very strange. If there's no privy, why bother making an area? Why not just post a sign that says "Please go shit far away from the shelter. Thank you." Whatever.
The boys are amazed at my my fully reclined typing trick. It is pretty cool. But really it is the only way I can write . In as much pain as I am in, sitting up in bed is out of the question. And when I am not lying down, I'm hiking. That's pretty much it. Huffing and puffing up hill after hill, or falling down to cook some gruel, brush my teeth, and collect water from the springs. That's all I do. That's all I can do after hiking all day. I guess Ray Jardine was right in his book ... Hitting the trail like I did without any prior training makes for a hike that is nothing but survival. And so I survive. But hey, I'm telling a story, too. So I guess I've got him beat on that. -RSM "Jester"
Mile 196.2
April 8, 04
Clingman's Dome
High atop Clingman's Dome, the highest elevation on the Appalachian Trail. A freaky spaceship-like tower rises from the top of the mountain like some replica of the Enterprise from Star Trek. The air up here on this cloudy day is, in the words of Tom Waits, "colder than a well-digger's ass." Three great old dudes named Badger, Papa Bear and Spoon, all in their late 60s or early 70s, are up here with Maine-sail (as I now I understand it is spelled), Mockingbird and I. They're in this for whole trip, too. Gotta love it. I sang a bit on my way up here in Tom Waits' gravely voice, something bout "climbing through a dead forest on a snow-topped dome, a monk, two mutants, a jester and a gnome." All right, enough silliness. Live from the top of the AT World, Frozen Fingers signing off.
Mile 203
April 8, 2004
Gatlinburg, TN
Very strange rhythms here in Rocky Top, Tennessee.. er, um, Gatlinburg, I mean. Very strange. Extreme fear and loathing. Perhaps the pressure of this undertaking is getting to me. One toe nail improperly clipped can spell terrible pain. And how is a brain to handle the kind of stress wherein every step along a hard and twisted, precipitous forest path could be the ONE, the one step that brings you down hard and spells the end. Every step. Every fast step, for they are nothing if not fast with 2000 miles to go to Maine before Autumn's end, could be the one that smashes a femur or wrenches a kneecap beyond use. Perhaps this stress is what has me so nutty, so manic and insane today in this tiny tourist mecca of Tennessee. Perhaps this stress is what just made me insult two women hikers at the local brewery, telling their male companion that I'd meet him "later down the street at the titty bar to further celebrate (his) birthday." I.. just.. don't.. know. Such a statement isn't like me. I don't feel myself here at all in Gatlinburg. I feel like a speedfreak, like a man torn from his natural habitat of tree and rock and thrust into THIS, this overblown psuedo-alpine tourist town, thrown here by sheer dying necessity to GET OUT of the woods for a day or two. But once out.. I am out of control.
I order the sampler of the local brewery's offerings. I think I am so thirsty I could drink a keg. But when the beer comes I don't like any of them, not one of the eight. The waitress is kind and pretty and likes hikers. She is the one good thing I have felt since my arrival here. She is tolerant of me when I ask, absurdly i guess, if the bar serves any other beer. No they do not. Okay. I order one of the ones I don't like. I devour a 12 oz. Rib-Eye steak, potatoes, a salad and some buffalo wings. I drink my one beer. I am suddenly overstuffed and mentally wrong. Am I drunk? No, not really. But while leaving I do manage that very-un-me comment about a titty bar. What then? What the hell is wrong with me? I come to "town" to feast after days of Ramen noodles and packaged oatmeal. I dream.. WE dream, Maine Sail, Mockingbird and I dream out loud as we hike of hamburgers and fries and steaks and beer. But when I get it, it is too much.
A queer aerial tram drops out of the late afternoon sky from "Ober Gatlingburg" down here to Gatlinburg, Earth. Tourists fat and skinny alike look exhausted every one of them, towing kids, carrying them in their bellies, shopping, dizzy, momentarilly stunned by the sight of the weird and albeit dirty looking REAL alpine hikers in their midst. Most don't even notice us. But I see them. They are tired, every one. I KNOW I am tired, physically exhausted from day after day of putting one foot infront of the other from sunup to sundown for nearly three weeks over mountain after mountain. Why are they tired? Why do they look more tired than me? I neither look nor feel tired, just now bloated and, well, drunk I guess on two beers. My face is bronzed from constant exposure to high elevation ultra violet light even though many a day is overcast. My beard is thickening. My muscles are changing overnight. My beer belly of three weeks ago, now nearly gone. These changes in my metabolism frighten me some. I rush back to the motel room and ferret out a klonipin. Too much change, too soon, too much.
As I sprawl out on the motel bed and try and relax, my mind drifts to Benicio del Toro in "Fear and Loathing" as he admonishes Johnny Depp's Thompson. "You took too much, too much. If I put you in the pool now, you'll sink like a stone." But too much of what? Roaring down the trail at breakneck speed over tangled-ankle wrenching roots, down rock slides, over fallen trees and like yesterday through a foot of mud and melted snow much for 8-miles straight, the effect on the brain is like chewing not on extract of pineal gland, but ON YOUR OWN pineal gland. Flying Brian embodied this kind of wound-up teeth-grinding speed-talking fast synapse energy. The Champion truly is a machine. I imagine he suffers from a kind of impatience with the slowed down world. His metabolism is jet fuel through a fire hose. I feel that I myself am well on my way to hyperspace.
The boys return from their foray into downtown Gatlinburg. They report on the weirdness of it all. There is a wedding chapel downtown that offers weddings cheaper than the cost of a night's lodging, a mere $25. Two Baskin Robbins and dozens of fudge shops. Oh, and the Space Needle. Nineteeen year old Mockingbird calls the needle, "Very Seventies." And let's not forget the chair lift that goes uphill to nowhere, appearing for a moment to indicate the presence of a ski resort, yet there is none. And the list goes on. Not one, but half a dozen Ripley's museums and attractions of one sort or another. Everyone is consuming the pseudo-Alpine product. We, the real thing, appear as actors on a theme stage set, like dueling cowboys in full costume on the streets of Tombstone.
Yet we are freaked by it all. Or I am, anyway. Freaky Gatlinburg by 8 p.m. has provided a fantastic sort of counterpoint to the "point" of our trek of the Appalachian Trail. The metabolism of weirdness runs high. Just hours ago wishing I could stay longer, I am already ready to be back on the trail tomorrow. "What do you think potatos and tuna would taste like?" Maine Sail asks. The boys sort processed food items picked up at the same store in which, just an hour ago, fear-addled and freaked, I was able to buy only beer and half a dozen postcards I didn't want. - RSM
Mile 219.4
(after escaping Gatlinburg)
Family Day on the AT
It is a beautiful Good Friday here in the Smokys. Stunning day. Warm sun. The slush of yesterday's trails largely melted. The scent of Christmas in the air with all the pine and fir trees responding to the warmth of the sun. The parking lot at Newfound Gap 12 miles above garish Gatlinburg looks like a day at Disneyland. It's like it's Family Day on the AT today. A short while back, I had a family stop and ask me where I was going. When they heard Maine, the little girl lit up with joy. "You see, honey, there you go. You wanted to see a thruhiker and now you've seen one!" Of course I was pleased and played it up accordingly. The restroom at the Gap was like a reunion of many of my thruhiker friends, scattered over the past days here and there along the trail and trailside towns. Eric and Jessica, Reyall, Sunset, Sanguine, Navigator, all were there. I always enjoy running into the young couple Eric and Jessica. Jessica bedazzles me. She is an astounding creature to behold and I hope Eric will not hold me in ill regard for saying so. He should be flattered, that and proud to have her.
It is a day of ridge running, of skipping almost, the pain in my knees miraculously absent today, skipping along narrow ridges with giant, sweeping drops on both sides. The mountains, blue in this light, layer outward to forever. To the south, I look at them and say proudly, "I have walked them all." I reach a point on on one ridge where the view is too incredible not to howl in triumphant gratitude to the Earth. Far ahead, thruhiker Sunset howls in response. We continue this for some time. Sunset hails from Mississippi and speaks an almost entirely unintelligible tongue. In the words of my language professor in Germany years ago, he "spricht mit Kartofeln in Mund," he speaks with a potato in his mouth. My teacher was refering to me, to all Americans and our poor pronunciation. Sunset's potato is particularly large.
The day astounds me with its beauty and the varying environments i pass through. The first 40 miles or so of the Smokys kinda sucked. But this ridgeline dance in flawless weather, wow. I have it mind to make it 16 miles today, but I didn't get started until nearly one o'clock thanks to morning supply shopping in Gatlinburg and an hour spent hitchhiking back to the trailhead.
I round a corner and suddenly i am in Big Sur, so like it in color, in the grasses and trees and sky. A short time later I am transported again by the changing environment, this time to California's Lost Coast, to the steep trail Emelia and I once walked to reach the Smith Cabin from midway up the coast in the mountains, the very same road I once drove Duke on late at night reckless and high on codeine with Radioman and Hippie Streudel aboard. Those were the daze.
I stop and eat lunch. I feast for a change. I have deduced that my sluggish pace of late is due to insufficient carbo and protein intake. In Gatlinburg I have stocked up big time, almost all of it free from the hiker box at the local gear supply store. Bagged tuna is a great invention. I have tuna on Stoned Wheat Thins with cream cheese. Later I whoof down a few Snickers and move through the forest like a wolf.
I reach the shelter at the 10-mile mark at 6 p.m. but am determined I can make it to Tri-Corner Knob Shelter by sundown, putting me exactly halfway today to tomorrow's finish of the Smokys. I race on. I am in unchartered waters now. I may have to hike with my headlamp before I get there. With no knee pain today and all the nervous manic energy that made Gatlinburg difficult to bear, I burn up the trail and arrive just in time to watch the sun disappear in the west, hike another 500 yards and step into the old stone shelter to a warm welcome from all inside. I lay out my bag on the bunk, warm my hands at the fire in the hearth, then go outside and cook up Ramen with my addition of garlic, carrots, potato flakes and miso. I devour it, turn off my headlamp and sip hot chocolate with peppermint schnappes whilst staring skyward communing with Orion and friends.
I did it! I made 16 miles today in just 7.5 hours, a record for me. Even the boys inside are impressed when they learn how far i've come in so little time. I climbed a few steep grades, the worst at the end of course, when my feet were screaming the loudest. They're alright when I'm moving, but the moment I stop it's as though I've tripped on a bed of nails and sunk straight through, my feet impaled by dozens of nails. This is how I imagine that would feel. Ten o'clock, a late night for me. Time to go inside and endure the snoring. The word for today: zeal. I had it today, and so did the sun. We danced together from ridgeline to ridgeline, the sun and I. With the exception of hooting across canyons with an invisible Sunset (the person) who I knew was ahead as he was the lone man to pass me all day, I hiked my own hike today. - RSM
Mile 222
April 10, 04
"Hell Ridge" The Smokys
Accordingly to my calculations, I romped across 15.5 miles of the Smokys in six hours and 43 minutes yesterday. Today so far the sun is on the east side of the mountain and I travel the west. I walk thus through dark corridors of evergreens lit mostly by the white of the snow. They say it takes 21 days to make a habit. I suppose then as of today I am habituated to the Appalachian Trail. The thought of habituation sends my mind to one habit I wish I had developed and stuck with over the year: the saxaphone. I played alto sax briefly in college and loved it, absolutely enamored of the mournful echoing sounds of one man's sax heard one night on LSD in the redwood forest behind Humboldt.
As I walk today, I am suddenly charged by the conviction that I must procure a sax, either alto or perhaps preferably soprano, to carry and practice here on the trail. I owned a cassette tape once that I played so many times I wore it thin until the sound was barely audible. It was Paul Winter's Canyon Suite in which the sax player records deep down in the Grand Canyon. Amazing sound. Walking the ridges of the Smokys yesterday I think I yearned, unknowingly, to send such sounds out into the vast wilderness cascading downward and outward around me in all directions. But I have no such sounds to make. Maybe soon I will.
The boys of the Fab Five are just behind me, having been at the shelter I bypassed last night to make my mad trek to Tri Corner Knob. They hiked those 5 miles whilst I slept-in and lavishly moved slowly about this morning. When I awoke, I proclaimed to Hendrick and Mumbles, the two men still there, "YES! I wanted to be the last one outa bed and I did it!" But as I hefted my pack an hour later, the Five had caught up. While they refilled at our spring, I bounded on ahead. But now they are quick on my heels. I can hear the tick-tick of their poles just a way's back. I hear a chopper approaching, hot in pursuit. It is me, making the sound with my mouth with a fast wiggle of my tongue back and forth between o-shaped lips. I imagine myself in some mountain chase scene. I pick up the pace and hunker down against the searching chopper.
"Get down! Get down!" Now I am Richard Dreyfuss and the blonde woman, clambering up the rocky skirt of Devil's Tower. The choppers are spraying sleeping formula. The fields of rocks become the poppy fields outside the Kingdom of Oz. But it's too late. Kevin "KP" can't be more than 21-years-old and he's practically running the trail. He catches me up and passes. The chopper stops chopping. I stop and sit silently, contemplating absolutely nothing.
The woods are good for that. One simply can't think too much. Your mind is always on your feet. When I stop I make it a point to lie flat on my back and stare straight up at branches and sky. A fast AT thruhiker barely sees the forest for the trees. He sees the path ahead, almost solely.
Fifty-something Sunshine is one of the Fab Five. He catches up and I find that I can pace him for awhile. He tells about meeting Bear Behind yesterday, a guy with a thick (he says) Connecticut accent. Sunshine says their conversation yesterday required the spelling out of several words, so disparate are their native tongues. Sunshine says once last year in New Jersey he ordered a Coke at a diner and asked the waitress for "lots a aaaaaccce." Ice, he meant, but that is not what the ticked-off waitress heard. Sunshine points out places on the trail where there are literal walls built beneath us. He points out that "no AT volunteer did that.. that was the CC back in the Depression." He's right. And the stone shelters, too. Beautifully built, stout, aesthetically fantastic to behold. The Appalachian Trail is a miracle, really. The amount of work gone into clearing this for "us" is apparent at every fallen tree cut by recent saw, at every crossing well signed, at every tree with the signature white blaze to tell us the way. It's astonishing and I feel greatly honored to be walking it, honored and grateful as hell. - RSM
Copyright 2004 Richard McKinney
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