Scroll down to find LOST POSTINGS FOUND! (highlighted in red)

Broken Keys & The Greek
Ruins of Tennessee

Mile 281.9
April 18: Day 30
Approaching Erwin

Tuned in right off this morning to Herb Alperts Tijuana Brass. Sweet. Then some lousy jazz shit takes over and I change the station. Yes, that's right. Henry David has gone to ear buds and Appalachian stereo. Johnny Cash is bound for the Promised Land. Me, I'm bound for a town called Erwin where a new keyboard awaits to replace this poor old plastic magic gadget upon which I have wailed poetic for two years now. Until then, the words will be few I'm afraid. [All D's, E's, and W's have been meticulously added in by hand with the stylus today.] Until then, here is a list I have compiled over the past weeks of trail names I have heard spoken or read in shelter registers. You'll love this. I know I do. -RSM

Trail name list (partial thus far):
Captain Hook, Fuman Chu, Biscuit, Fireass, Long Shot, Toe-ritis, Poppins, Squirrel, Squirrel Master, Hog Walker, James the Wandering Nun, Tinder, Shortcake, Sir Fix-a-lot, Hoplite, Mississippi Mule, Marzipan, Krispy Kritter, Eagle Eye, Blue Bell from Texas, Sweet Leaf, Ashtray, Dirtnap, Dingle, Skirt, Sarge, Little Engine, Mockingbird, Solarman, No Dog & No Beard (couple), Big Horn Wanderer, Breathless & Speed, Crash Bang, Maine Sail, Circuit Rider, KP, Sherlock, Dark Cloud, Sunset & Sunrise (couple), Pipesmoke, Zipcode, Slow Walker, Pucca, Wicomico Walker, Kickstand, Squish, Grits, and me, Jester Jack Gaget the Only.

Justin..
Happy Easter to you, too. My love to everyone in return. I wish I could have been with family today. Instead, I got to hike for my sins. Hike and hike and hike, and in the rain no less. And then I looked up at one point to see my buddy up ahead and wham. Next thing I know I'm pulling my face off a flat rock splattered in blood. Tripped on a root. First thing went through my mind was, "well, there it goes. broke my glasses, broke my nose, game over." But my nose is okay and my glasses, miraculously unscathed. I took the full brunt of the fall with my forehead. I was still bleeding when I emailed you, as I had reached a mtn top and that was the next thing I was gonna do. Got right back up and kept hiking. Spent a coupla hours at a shelter being watched/interrogated by a few fellow hikers to make sure I wasn't concussed.

But this is all just fodder for the writing. I just wrote to say bangup job, thank you, glad yer mom's diggin the words, can't wait for the cookies, dunno at moment what else to ask for, but thanks I'll let you know. Alone in my tent in the rain.. actually nice to be alone after over a week spent in shelters. Drinking hot cocoa ww/nip bottle of pepp schnapps, my Easter present to myself. My big Easter meal was powdered Huevos Rancheros in a bag, just add water! The forest I am currently camped in could easily be right out your mom's back door, same. God bless us beasts and the children we'll always be.. -Tricky Cuzn Gonzo Rick

LOST POSTING FOUND! (Added 10-20-04!)
Mile 290
April 18, 04

This place is a Greek ruin. This is not a forest! We hike of-late over chunks and slabs and mountains of marble-white rock, much of it appearing to have been carved, built into something, then ruined, as though the Cherokee or early white settlers had time to build and destroy their own Troy, with history recording none of it. Jessica, Eric and I struggle over it together.

Dead and downed trees hold these chunks of white stone in their roots, like gnarled old fists refusing to let go the prizes won in their towering days of their lives.

Largo tells a story of the shelter we're at this morning. Says hiking the trail last year he rounded the corner coming out of the thick of the woods and in view of the shelter. "And there," he says, "bent over right beside the fire circle was a women, shorts and underpants down around her ankle, servicing her peach." Largo said he had the next 1000 miles to think about that one.

Rael is this wiry, feisty guy from South Boston. I didn't like him right off, found him gruff, unfriendly. I figured maybe he didn't like my hat, thought I was a fag. But I was dead wrong. As far back as the Nantahala Outdoor Center, I think it was, he expressed great admiration upon seeing a postcard of my art car Duke. I believe he said, "That's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen." I was floored. Many hikers, upon being offered a card, for free, wouldn't even take one. Lark actually attributed her "no thanks" to the weight it would add to her pack.

Rael points at Tinkerbell, suspended from the straps on my chest and asks, "Who's the little yellow broad in the cage?" Later we discover a mutual affinity for Monty Python. He finds my word-for-word delivery of several scenes (complete with accent of course) fascinating. He says he's never heard anyone do Python so good. On the contrary, Rael can improv in Python-ease like no one I've ever heard. That I cannot do. I can only repeat from rote memory.

Maine Sail and I are discussing his recent trip to Disneyland with his girlfriend Krista. And always we are talking movies. Maine Sail says a lot of the rides were closed when they went. I ask him if Pirates of the Caribbean was open. Nineteen year old Mockingbird chimes in, "They have a ride called Pirates of the Caribbean?"

I am sick of this shit. This isn't hiking, this is bouldering. Except you don't boulder with a 35 lb. pack on! This is not my beautiful life! That is not my beautiful wife! That girl running close behind me today, tailing me almost as though she's got something to say but can't, that Italian beauty & southern bell all rolled into one, that's another man's woman. And the rumored trail magic at the top of that brutal last climb, wasn't. Worse than no trail magic at all, there hung from a tree branch a bag of empties, the rumored cooler fulla Cokes below it cleaned out.

I wanna go to American Samoa. I wanna go to my twentieth high school reunion back in Del Mar, California and meet again the high school sweet heart of mine who never knew she was. I wanna find out she's divorced or still single like me, no kids, doesn't smoke, doesn't turn into Godzilla after five whiskeys, believes in an afterlife and has always wanted to marry a half-mad social miscreant & writer.

The Beach Boys comes on the radio blowing Aruba-Jamaica in my ears. Eat me, Beach Boys. And you slack-packers that drank all the fucking Coke, may you contract intestinal bugs that gnaw at your guts for days.

In amidst my zillion trail names that flashed in the pan and vanished was one I made up myself and rather liked: SPIR. It's an acronym for Sylvia Plath In Remission. It's heady, I know. But it says a lot. It calls depression by its proper name: a disease. And a few other things. Plath and I share a birthday, and I, by this hike and by God if it kills me, am gonna beat this disease. SPIR. I liked it. But the few times I said it to other hikers, it just didn't sound right. And the explanation woulda been a bitch.

So I let this great crazy old coot thruhiker named Sarge name me based on my hand-made hat: Jester.

Maine Sail figures we oughta be famous by now. I agree. Maine Sail says the word "Fuck" a lot. He's pissed off about not being famous. Me, too. And the radio, though God Bless it and WIMZ Knoxville for their Skynard Fest Weekend (I'm loving it).. the radio as I was saying is a constant reminder that I am not famous. I hear Maynard, Paz, Martin Sheen, David Horowitz, you name it, I know em. They're famous and Maine Sail and I are fucking nuts, walking in the woods. And TV? Forget it. I'd slit my wrists twenty times a day with all the people I'd see whom I've met in my life yet in the meeting gained nothing, no toe-hold on the big fame thing.

Aside from all that, the sky is an orgasm, and the trees bottle-rockets of joy. -RSM

Mr. McKinney,
It has come to my attention that you have had a wee little mishap on this trial, uh, I mean, trail. We at Mutual of Omaha want to be certain that you are in the finest condition possible to continue on this ordeal, er, vacation. We are sending our finest health inspector agent out to your location for a complete physical. We at at Mutual of Omaha are requiring this testing in order to assure the financial stability of your primary dependent, Duke. Dr. Ruth Westheimer should be there to meet you at your next shelter and will need to conduct many tests to determine your true well being. She understands that you have been woman-less for awhile now and believes that this could be the underlying cause of your spontaneous face plant. It is a well known fact that men's brains can not function properly if there is a lack of influential female presence. This must be remedied. Dr. Ruth will be interviewing potential "mates" for you as she makes her way along the trail to the shelter. Look for marks on the backpacks of all the women as you hike. She will put large check marks on the backpacks of those that she feels are appropriate and large Mr. Yuk symbols on those that are not. She is an expert in her field and you must follow her advice. Remember, baby Duke is counting on you! Thank you,
Sister Maria Margarita
aka Agent Red
Department of Salvation and Copulation

[LOST POSTING FOUND! Added 12/9/04]
The Old Gunfighter Trick

I do this thing with my wrists wrapped in the straps of my poles. Throwing my fingers out in a gesture not like unlike a magic trick, showing the hands are free, I then flick them inward and the cork grips of my poles snap right into place in the palms of my hands. It's fun. It reminds me of an old gunfighter trick, twirling six shooters out of holsters and into place in hot, trigger happy hands.

I went without my shirt for the first time today, hiking topless. Twas hot. It varies radically out here, one minute in the 80s, sometimes 90s in the sun, and then whammo! it's down in the low 30s again at night. I wanna send home my 20 degree down bag. I wanna send home my tent. I wanna send home everything and sleep in the dirt. Not yet. Not yet.

I'm walking this stoney path that looks every bit a giant chess set to which some god has taken a sledge hammer and just wailed the shit out of it. The moss is soooo green and pours down the rock to my left like a green waterfall or a soggy sub-sea kelp carpet on an underwater stage where crawfish dance in tiny creeks and raccoons reach in to dine.

I hear the Perfect Circle song "Judith" on the radio and think of Luci. I know that it is Paz playing bass, but I think of Luci anyway, perhaps because of how close they were, like little twins, and how much he loved her, and how much strife there was between them when he died. Luci, like me, had a penchant for pouring drink upon his blues and misery, and maybe that's what done did him in, in the end. I love them both, Paz and Luci. I miss the latter badly. I hike with him in mind everyday.

I stop to flick a snail off the path. It is this empathic streak in me I cannot help but answer to. I love life. I cannot kill things, anything. Not even spiders, they that so disgust me.

With my disabled keyboard, I write the following in a fit of pique (I've reinserted some of the missing e's, d's, z's, & w's for you, where even I had troubled guessing the words):

''Okay, so sh ruin my lif. I'm starting to gt that feeling. lik to years hav passd an I'm just not cluing in , just no raliing it, ust no fling angr. Th angr thta I so abhor in othrs, th reason I let Elly go. i'm angry. An alcoholic beast cast me out of my comfy world with a good woman an I just let her. Let it. No I'm...''

Got that much written after a crying fit plopped me down in a bed of leaves, then passed out.

Mile 297.3
Monday, April 19, 2004

Word for the day: Tortoise

As in I am the tortoise, the last to leave each morning but I pass many along the trail.

[Note: this entire entry is written without the E, D, or W keys and painstakingly, er..lovingly reconstructed with the stylus after the fact for your reading pleasure!]

Coming out of Hot Springs the sun heats the trail to 80 degrees. I'm carrying a 45-pound pack. Insanity. But a good kind of insanity considering most of the extra weight owes to the kindness of my many care-package sending friends: boxes from Mary, Linda, Marie & Justin and cards from Kathleen and Pam.. wow! The significance of such signs of love out here in Appalachian Space is immeasurable! Special thanks also to Indian Gap trail angels Jane, Tom & Pat. Wow!

From my new little $40 pocket radio comes the words I wanna say but cannot for the sake of movement, that and this failing keyboard. Skynard (I think) sings of "movin on town to town" and as the strains of live bluegrass drift upward to the trail from Hot Springs below, I know it is so of me, moving on from yet another town, this one a winner, a place I could have stopped and stayed, love it, but left, left just as the weekend festivities were getting under way. Another song comes on, the singer sings (an I paraphrase) I get up in the morning once more with the blues, summon the strength and put on my walkin shoes, I go up on the mountain and what do I see, but the whole world falling down in front of me.

Between my all-comfy 3-night stay at The Gentry house of Elmer and closing Paddlers pub with the legendary Baltimore Jack, (who went out for a ride and never came back) the latter resulting in seven consecutive thru hikes of the AT, and with copious amounts of Bourbon. I was all about Lisa, my Paddler's waitress, and if she wasn't game (I never asked), I was interested in Caroline @ the local outfitters. I did manage to ask the latter out for dinner or beers, but she was busy that night. Her request for a rain check went unfulfilled. Hell, I'm a thru hiker. It's now or never, every day.

I did a face plant the other day that for a moment had me sure my trip was over. Broken nose, broken glasses, concussion, anything. Much smaller things have spelled the "end of the trail" for many. Amazingly, I suffered none of these. But it was that one look up and away from the trail at my feet that took me down, the very momentary lapse of attention on the path over which I have expressed so much concern. One look up and next thing I know I'm pulling my face up off a blood-splattered rock. I got lucky. Very lucky.

So in drunken solidarity to my ramskull-tough forehead, I took a 2:30 a.m. dive off an unusually steep chunk of sidewalk outside the Hot Springs Post Office, bloodying up my knees to match head and tearing a good-sized gash in my $50 hi-tech mountaineering pants. These things you gotta do after weeks of Olympic-monk like livin' in da woods.

Hot Springs has an old red caboose for a tourist info center. I stopped in there and met Helen, sweet old grandma fulla love for her town but kinda lacking in just about every brochure I asked for. She knew a little about cabooses though, which was nice.

Some of the trees along the trail have wounds, folds, places where the tree is pulling back in upon itself, collecting itself. These wounds make for funny shapes . This one a vagina. This one a church key keyhole. This one a mouth devouring a "Game Lands" sign nailed there decades ago, now bent and sinking, literally being sucked into the tree, the tree's way of dealing with such intrusions into its skin. I wonder if I leaned long enough against a tree if it would enfold me, grow around me, make of me a burl, a bump in its timeless skyward growth.

A young blonde thru hiker girl named Indie offers me a blow pop. A blow pop. I take it.

I stop at a lovely little seep and cup my hands to drink from its moss-shrouded spring-in-the-side-of-a-hill mouth. I drink the water here unfiltered, almost solely. It is clean. It comes from the ground, smells like Heaven. I understand that this will soon no longer be the case. The further north we walk, the closer civilization will encroach. Then the water will need to be nuked every time.

John Denver sings of "goin to Carolina in his mind.. seeing the sunshine, can't you feel the moonshine.."

I am in Carolina. Back and forth between North Carolina and Tennessee. A few miles tomorrow and I'll have passed the 300 mile mark.

Tiny purple irises, miniatures of the sort so loved by Van Gogh, grow like mad now along the edges of the trail. The Spring air smells of cinnamon and vanilla. My $300 down REI sleeping bag smells of me, smells like the musk of me. I crawl into it now and am comforted. No tent tonight. Zippo, Bic an I opt not to pitch our tents. The stars are out in full bloom. Let's hope they stay that way, and rain clouds stay far a field.. for tonight anyway. -RSM

As I pass the 300 mile mark on this journey I begin (again?) to ask a lot the question "Why?" Why am I doing this? Of all the things I could be doing: sailing, jumping out of airplanes, learning the saxophone, courting Ukrainian beauties, learning Italian, why this? The answer comes easy: because I can. And because I want to.

For all the people out there without legs to walk or eyes to see, for all friends and strangers and trail angels with envious longing in their eyes that they too might buy the time or find the strength of will to do it themselves, I do it for you. And I do it for the dead. Then a pine needle stylus hits the stone slab LP and from the horn of some wild flowering plant with gramophone petals comes the earnest voice of Bowie singing "It's the terror of knowing what this world's all about, and watching some good friend screaming `Let me out!'" and I know I'm walking as much for Luciano as for me.

Four suicides among people I know last year alone. And cruelly perhaps but not without just cause I say, "Fuck AIDS! Screw cancer & all the other terminal illnesses that make loved ones look up and care!" What about the lonesome disease of the shotgun and the noose, the overdose and the warm tub blood sluice? An how reassuring is it to muster the courage to call 911 when you're feeling in danger of taking your life, only to have the cops show up, guns drawn, pointed at you? Pointed at YOU!

Ahh, the hell with it. I digress and the day ambles on and the bugs buzz around my ears and everything, everything in these woods is better than THAT! Better than a shotgun bathroom goodbye and all the zillion reasons why to pull that trigger. I walk this walk for you my too-soon departed friends. Ironically, this stretch of the trail is peppered with gravestones. Little Millard Haire's tiny 12-yr-old skeleton sleeps sweetly by trail, at rest here since 1863. -RSM

[Postscript: By day's end I calculate that I have ascended a total of 2,400 feet, not counting the downhills. And this has been an average day. I am the walking dead as I stumble into camp at sundown. Only the insects gather round to greet me. My God! What am I doing out here?]

Mile 352
Unaka Mountain, TN
Elev: 5200 ft

Phrase for the day: dream big

Last night I dreamt my father was Bill Murray. The dream took place in a garish banquet hall with bad food and plastic people. I like Bill Murray, but it was not a good dream. Without the D or the R keys working, the word ''dream'' comes out ''ram.'' Without th E key working, it's a wonder I can translate any of this gibberish. (I fix all this before you know it)

When I say dream big, however, I am talking about goals, like this one I'm entrenched in. You can do better than this. This was more impulse than dream for me. If I make it to Maine, it is because I am obstinate an unruly. Dream big. No one else will do it for you. In fact, few will do it for themselves.

A girl named Skirt asks me to make her a hat (a silly-shaped hat made of fleece, such as the one which earned me my trail name). Skirt was hiking with a boy named Dingle who allegedly has agreed to dangle, behind that is, like Elly who went on before me. Thus now Dingle, like Jester, is single .

Slow Walker comes from Ireland by way of 30 years in Chicago. I discover the Ireland part by commenting on his "perfectly charming accent." And charming it is. After struggling to ingest and decipher half a dozen heavy southern accents, Slow Walker's gentle Irish lilt is maple syrup-on-waffles to my California ears. Self-applied, Slow Walker's name is daily earned by a cautious pace meant to tender knees that pulled him off th trail in years past. He has children in college and a wife at home. And how is the wife taking this journey of his? His reply is slow and simple: "She's supportive but incredulous." Slow Walker will proudly leave th trail briefly next month to see his daughter graduate college. Beyond that, I've no doubt he'll make it to Maine just fine in his own slow sweet Irish time.

Have I mentioned that the Appalachian Trail passes through 14 states, 8 national forests, 2 national parks, and crosses 15 major rivers? And most impressive to me was th recent discovery that we conquistadors of th first 350 miles have already climbed Mount Everest twice. According to the statistics, the 300 or so hoary beasts among us who make it to Maine will have climbed Everest an equivalent of 17 times!

I'm wondering now if I ever mentioned th Family Von Trapp? You see, unlike you, my cyber audience, I cannot review what I have written. Once I press SEND on this little Palm device, it's gone from me. Out of my hands. No chance to edit. No chance to "take it back." Pure Gonzo Journalism, folks, alive an happening right here before you, live from Mount Everest, as it were.

Anyway, I look back at my memos from th first month of the trip an find weird notes whose meaning I no longer comprehend. To whit:

cosmic banditos
panic knees
wolfsong-zipzipzing-starfire
Strtches so deprsg wo know not alone
terrible wind 30
one dollar
thank u 2 docents-blazes
ankle score=5 to 3 r
topograpy no houses
pan scrub w bark pad thai 
feel like a giant truly free
boat 2 sm
pm-gnawng on own pineal gland
jake doc ankle
9-in 4 cold sprgs

The "thank u 2 docents-blazes" is pretty plain. The work that has gone into this trail is awesome, the white blazes on trees every 2000 feet, constantly reassuring. I thank the volunteers silently to myself every day. Them and God.

The score on my twisted ankles is now more like 6 to 8, right. Just last night I went down hard, wrenching the right and badly bending my left pole in its fight to keep me upright. If I were to attribute a dollar's worth to every time my $129 Leki poles have saved my ass, they'd be worth twice as much already.

In the mountains of Georgia, I didn't see house one. That illusion of a solely-wooded world continued through The Smokys. Now, however, I see houses. Th trail corridor narrows as it heads north. I am told that at points it is no wider than a freeway, slipping silently and likely-totally unnoticed between two thundering algal blooms of suburban sprawl.

I nightly scrub my $40 titanium pot with bark, sticks and leaves. One night I feasted on pad thai, a prize find from one of the ubiquitous "hiker boxes" at every hostel, bins full of goodies no doubt woefully given up by hiker's with pack weight problems. This of course would be all of us at one time or another.

Lastly, with a nod to HST, sometimes at night the endorphin high is so great that I feel as though I'm gnawing on raw pinial gland, my own pineal gland. -RSM

Later that day at Cherry Gap Shelter...
Jessica and Eric have gone on without me. I miss them already. They left just the day before yesterday when I, forced to go the 5 miles into town from the hostel to mail a package, had to let them go. They're from Asheville, so this stretch of the trail is full of visits to friends and family for them. Had a wonderful couple of days running with them through the woods toward Erwin, TN. Soon they'll go off trail for a week to a wedding and I'll likely lose them altogether.

This is the bane of trail friendships. They are fleeting. I miss Maine-Sail, too. He was in some rush to get to New York to meet his girl, had to crank it up to 20-mile days. I can't keep up. I finally saw Tumbleweed and Underground Radio again, a week ago in Hot Springs. But they had taken a shuttle 40 miles north to come to Trail Fest, and thus had to go back to where they left off. Kristen..er, Tumbleweed, was surrounded by a bevy of boys and happy with the attention no doubt, though surely still missing her Will. Underground Radio and I spoke about his perhaps skipping forward and joining me, but no. He had to go back.

So it's forward and backward and I seem ever the more alone here in the middle. I hope this changes soon and I make some new friends. Thus far not usually one to write much in the shelter journals, today I wrote: Sweet night on Unaka Mtn where the trees get up and walk on spindly legs and the forest, devilishly dark, curls you up its downy pine bed and slips starry dreams in your evening tea. Onward. -Jester

Copyright 2004 R.S. McKinney
All Rights Reserved