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

Sidetracked in southern Virginia

Mile 460
May 2, 2004
Damascus, VA

"My God, man, what a marvelous adventure you are having! Thank you, thank you for sharing it via Jigglebox. I haven't been this excited about reading something since first discovering Kerouac and Salinger way back in (mumble, mumble)." - Pam Johnson, Reno

"And then, depression set in."

Bill Murray said this. I can't remember in what film or context. The phrase, the sentiment, is however, the first thing that comes to mind this morning as the black sedan containing my friends pulls away from the curb here in Damascus bound for points south. My journey is North. Ever North. Every morning I rise with the sun and despite the maelstrom of mental crap which daily rises with me, I need heed but one call: walk North.

Vanishing in the "trail-alien" automotive spacecraft are Obermeister Eric and Lady Bic Jessica, my trail companions on and off since Day One, but especially recently. I have gone to great lengths in recent days to stay on-track with their trek. I have committed a number of trail sins to keep up with them, sins for which I ought no doubt be in church this very moment, this Sunday morning in Damascus.

Church in Damascus. Seems a moral imperative of sorts, a kind of ironic play on words, a biblical theme ride that must, for the sake of the story, be ridden. But no. Instead I sit in my church, Our Lady of Pre-Noon Hefe Weizen, drinking my favorite beer and stroking the keys of my new Palm keyboard as though they were the softest parts of a woman, touching them with a love and reverence only a writer could understand. The keys respond to my touch like bare nipples in a breeze.

I have hiked some two hundred miles with an ever-diminished capacity to write, my old keyboard stricken with a crippling combination of Alzheimers, Palsy, and just plain old age. In the end, when I pressed the "W" key I would get a Q. When I pressed many other keys I would get nothing, and many more, still working, would come accompanied by a mysterious "S." It made filling in the gaps exceedinly difficult until at last I gave up altogether.

It was about this time that I ran into Eric and Jess again, not them personally but their names in trail shelter registers calling out to me, "Jester, where are you?" After a weekend off-trail with their parents, they assumed me to be ahead of them. They raced forward. I was in fact behind them. But trail news travels fast. It is uncanny how news makes it far ahead when it would seem its only modus the journals be. I busted ass to catch them.

One madcap day, I pulled over 22 miles alone, enduring hurricane winds and the charge of a long-horn bull atop some high bald in sideways snow. I dodged fast freeway-like traffic across one highway, hiked lonesome and teary-eyed like the old Indian from 70s TV along a river canyon strewn with trash, then badly twisted my right ankle. Braving the well-documented wrath of locals who had lost land to Appalachian Trail-related government land acquisition, that and a less-than-ideal map of the region, I blue-blazed two-miles of white trailer trash Bubba & pit bull infested Tennessee neighborhood, all to reach Moreland Gap Shelter and my friends. Even then I didn't make it. Fell two miles short, literally landing with a fwump on my back in a bed of leaves and barely coming-to long enough to erect my tent in the moonlight.

But all this is pointless. Though I eventually caught up with them and we hiked together three days into Damascus, Jess and Eric are gone now. Just like Lark. Just like Maine-Sail. Just like No Beard & No Dog. Just like Doug from Jersey and dozens of others who've gone on far ahead. Jess and Eric, however, are now officially off-trail for a friend's wedding, not due back for nearly two weeks. The chances of my hiking with them again are slim to none. Depression sets in.

A squashed lemon wedge sits awkward at the bottom of my empty pint glass here at the Sidetrack Cafe. Boo-Boo whines across the cafe, continually mentioning my name in connection with pissing off the cook last night with my comment that "Cuban food and Mexican food are hardly different." Death by Cotton, the tie-dye-shirt-wearing cook, was serving up Cuban food. I waited for the fried plantains, ready to be proven wrong. The boiled chicken and rice and beans didn't go far toward changing my opinion. I left before dessert, disappointed, exhausted, bloated with beer and Mexicuban food.

It is a sore spot for Boo-Boo, apparently Cuban. I don't hear an accent. Boo-Boo is likely as Cuban as I am Irish. But no matter. Perhaps Boo-Boo's just pissed that I forgot who he was, despite having roomed with him one night in Hot Springs. It was a multi-beer night, and he'd been "moved-in" to replace my departing friend Maine Sail. Good friends leave big empty spaces. Back in my room now at Dave's Hostel, Jess and Eric have gone. I stand in their absence like an empty and winter-wasted Iowa cornfield. Alone, I type. Later, I will cry. -RSM

So it was trees all day today. Blossoming and blooming trees at last! Stepped through a buttery cream-scented dream, a grove of trees with flowers white and tiny but a perfumed presence bigger than the sky. Wish I knew their name. Later picked lilacs for Jill from Indiana as she, her hiking companion Matt and I met up by chance and settled on a tranquil field for dinner and sleep.

With me also today in my otherwise lonesome trek was the rushing music of water moving in large volumes through the canyon below. And then the river came louder still as the AT dropped down and joined the Virginia Creeper Trail, an old steam railroad bed now made trail for hiking and bicycling.

I purse my lips like duck bills and, conjuring images of big black engines huffing along thru the past, I make steam train sounds with my mouth as I make my way over a long, wooden trestle, an antique sky bridge of sorts of aged wood taking me high above the river and far, far back in time.

But my revelrous time travel has a down side. When the trail veers off the old rail bed and back into the woods, I am plagued by demons both physical and mental. First it starts with my right calf, my "calf gone bad" as I'm calling it. The result of the worst of many twisted ankles in the past month, the strained calf muscles are screaming at me lately, but I cannot simply stop. So I talk to them. "White light to the right," goes my silly white suburban voodoo chant with healing intent.

But then my mind starts playing tricks with me. The evergreens across the canyon cast shadows darker than chicory coffee and suddenly spookier than that dribbly nose scene in The Blair Witch Project. It's the middle of the afternoon under bright sunny skies and suddenly I am seeing movement in the trees all about me, ghostly in nature. I stop to rest a moment, check to see if for some reason I am dizzy, find that I am not. I decide to test myself, to see if this isn't some sort of psychosomatic trick of my mind, both the pain in my calf and the eerie visions. I pop a klonipin, 2 milligrams, my valium-like salvation reserved for major freakouts. But then I blow the validity of the test by also popping an 800 mg ibuprofin for the pain. Oh, well. In either case, I should feel better soon.

Moments later, however, I arrive at Lost Mtn Shelter. The name is fitting. Besides Jill and Matt, there is an older couple unknown to me and queer somehow, perhaps for no other reason than that I'm having a panic attack and they don't jump up to introduce themselves. Whatever.

The Feng Shui of the place is all wrong. The privy is positioned straight ahead of the shelter instead of behind, a kind of "display privy," for those boring afternoons when there's nothing better to do but monitor your friends' bowel movements. And there is a scary silence about the place that just doesn't mix well with where my head is at. Jill and Matt are a mixed bag for me. Either I feel a connection with them or I feel shut out, like they're a private club of two, with some kinda Indiana voodoo to seal the deal. But as I say, I'm nuts.

The drugs are not kicking in fast enough. I heft my pack and bail. I'm limping and wondering if the real cause of all this freakiness is a subconscious fear that this newest injury could be the death of me, could spell the End of the Trail. Last time I felt like that was in Neel's Gap, GA when my knees felt ready to collapse and it seemed sure to call a quick end to things. I was wrong then. I hope I am wrong again.

I keep track of my mileage with my stopwatch. Exactly 9 minutes and 34 seconds after leaving the shelter, I round a corner to a wild and cheeringly funny sight. It is Superman with a pack and a white and balding dome. Well, not really, but the tired old man standing before me looks every bit Superman at first glance in blue tights, blue shorts of a slightly darker hue, and blue skin-tight shirt of yet another blue. The Super-cue is his bright red fleece hat hanging from round his neck and positioned dead center on his chest. I give him the cheery news that his shelter is but nine minutes away.

Half a mile later, the trail intersects route 58. I have a choice. Tendering my bum leg, I could hitchhike from here straight back into Damascus, set myself up in a $4/night bunk at The Place, and rest. I forge on instead.

I am the real Superman. And I have nowhere to go but North. -RSM

Sixty-something Ed is pointing the girls toward the white blazed route that will swing them far east into a national park. I have studied the map and know that the blue blaze route he is guiding them away from is in fact the old AT route. As the girls sidle toward the blue blaze route, Ed says "Oh, you don't wanna go that way, there's much better views this way."

It's weird, his being here, now, at this very moment. It's like he's some manifestation of my conscience, or the devil at the crossroads. "Will you be true and avoid the blue? Or will you slight the white and take the shortcut path?" I'm thinking, hey buddy, I just twisted my ankle for the 14th time and I'm in F-ing pain and I see a line on the map heading straight North, just five miles long, and it's looking a whole lot nicer than your 15 mile reroute.

As though reading my mind, Ed butts in on my thoughts, asks me my name and where I'm headed. His silent response to my stated trail name tells me either he dislikes it or he's half-senile. He asks a few other questions. I don't like it. I don't like this guy in semi-authoritarian garb grilling me whilst standing in the way of my plotted blue blaze.

Thinking of Breakfast Club, I ask (with not just a little hint of Judd Nelson sarcasm) "And what are you doing out here today Ed?" He babbles something, then departs and I take my shortcut. I'm calling it an Earl Schaeffer Shortcut. Earl, first to hike the trail in the late 40s, likely walked the shorter route I walk today.

It is my sense that lines on a map are never random. That, and they are usually political in origin.

One of the girl hikers' names is Miranda. I meet her later again at Damascus and find that she is leaving the trail that very day. Sad. She was cute.

Sitting sentry at the other end of the blue blaze, a kind of second witness to my AT impurity, sits Gray Fox, a tall skinny guy of 21. We walk and he tells me the story of how he came to dream of someday hiking the AT.

It seems at age 11, he was hiking through this very section of trail as a young boy scout. They'd been hiking perhaps three days in the rain when they finally retreated, arriving at a parking lot just off the trail. There young Gray Fox and his scout buddies saw a dog. "There was this huge dog running around loose with a pack on. We watched as the dog went over and started sniffing around some garbage at the edge of the lot. Not wanting him to get into the trash and spread it all over, we went to get it. Just then, a hand reaches out of garbage and pets the dog! Turns out it was two thruhikers covered in trash bags to keep out of the rain! And the dog was their dog! It was right then that I decided that someday I would thruhike the trail myself!"

Earlier, Gray Fox had asked me why I was hiking the trail and suggested that perhaps I'd been dropped on my head as a baby. After hearing his story, I could see why he'd think that.

Sarcasm aside, I liked Fox and his story. I especially like hearing of the passion he had for his fiance, "or not quite fiance yet as we can't afford a ring." So in love with her is he that he's going to sell his 1967 Ford Galaxy to buy her a ring. Trouble is, he lives locally and has been finding it hard to stay on the trail for very long, what with her waiting near at hand. So far, he's taken a whole month off, he said.

Heck, I've only been on the trail a month or so. Ahh, love is a many-splendored thing. Ain't it? -RSM

[LOST POST FOUND! Added 12/10/04
Note: lacking a date, post has been placed where it belongs in the timeline]

Filth and Roadie show up at Partnership Shelter in southern Virginia and hand me a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. "We're the ghosts of thruhikers past," says Filth. They're delivering late night trail beer magic. I've just gotten off the phone with Justin, my mad cousin, my master webmaster bar none. He is really the only person I call anymore. He and the Swami. Otherwise, phones have become very alien to me. I get into towns and barely have time to drink, be hungover, receive and repack packages from the P.O., and get back on the trail. It's madness. I am finding that there's no such thing as a day off the trail. No Zero Days for me. Well, they ain't zero, anyway. They're work. Too much work.

LL Fluffy and Star Gazer are my new amigos, two crazy girls with degrees in outdoor fun, something I should have thought of way back in the day when I stupidly made up my mind to follow Hunter Thompson in Gonzo Journalism. Fucking idiot me. They hadn't invented Gonzo Journalism yet at Humboldt State. They probably still haven't. It has long been a dream of mine to make it big somehow, some way, and donate back a large sum of grant money to be given only to the student most likely to use it in the most aberrant way possible, to tweak the norms of journalism as far out as possible. And of course, I would be the one to choose the recipient.

LL Fuzzy strikes my fancy in a fun-lovin' curly haired petite powerhouse kinda way. And Star Gazer intrigues me, too. Hell, all female energy out here is GOOD female energy. There's just not enough of it.

Sox and Sanguine have been great female energy for me, great hiking and/or just kicking around hostels kinda companions. Sox is this freaky ex-ranchers wife from Montana or something, half-Japanese, tough as nails, smokes like a chimney, up all night or at least the first up in the morning, very, very interesting character whom I am always glad to see in this ever-in-flux family of hikers, many now ahead, many behind. Seeing her tonight at Partnership Shelter was a real thrill. I hope I keep running with her for the duration. Good woman.

Same with Sanguine. Teacher, been to Africa and taught there, tough gal with a big pack and a big heart and some indefatigable quality about her that tells me she just may well make it the whole fucking way. She too has been good to the Jester. We've shared tea, meals, readings of Henry Miller. And Sox does my laundry every time I turn around. Which is nice.

Christ, there must be 30 of us at Partnership Shelter tonight, a high class log cabin with two levels and a hot shower and a phone from which pizza can be ordered. I tell you what, there sure as shit wouldn't be half these amenities on the PCT. The AT, for all its grubbiness and hard-core hiking and pained feet, is a high class gig. And there are people ready to help you everywhere. Just today I came off the trail at Dickey Gap and had to hitch 3 miles into some podunk town to get my "bounce box" (box of food I sent myself a week ago from Damascus) from the P.O., wasn't having much luck getting a ride, and then a miracle happened. Ranger Jim and parents arrived to drop thruhiker Jim off at the trailhead. I introduced myself and asked about their going back in the direction of Troutdale, and no, they were going the other way. I bid them adieu, gave thanks, and headed back to the road to resume my hitch. Seconds later, Ranger Jim had convinced his dad to take me back into Troutdale. Groovy!

Bill, a retired NYC firefighter, was everything cool in a sixty-something guy. He drove me into town, and town looked pretty sad. I'd heard their was a hostel there, some Baptist Mission or something, and there appeared to be a store, but man, that was it. As Bill pulled into the parking lot of the Post Office, I made a snap decision and said, "Bill, would you mind just hanging here a moment while I get my package? I have no business in this town and really ought to just get my food and get back on the trail."

Bamm! I'm back at the trailhead. And bamm! I've hiked 15 miles to some shelter that's rumored to be soooo nice that it's pictured in a postcard that I bought in Damascus and sent to my nephews. They probably got the card today. And here I am now, sleeping here tonight, up in the loft, well-fed on delivery pizza, drunk on Molson Canadian, buzzed on all the cool social contact with Elly (another Elly) and Chris and Sox and Sanguine and Ranger and Tree Frog and on and on and on, oh, and the aforementioned girls.. er, women.

I love women. I just can't help myself. Perhaps it's because I grew up with women. I just NEED their energy. I feed off of it, and compliment it, I think. Thank God for women. Please God let there be more women on this trail. If not, this journey is to little avail. I think of Franky back in Idyllwild. Frank knows women. And he's got himself a good one. I think of Lori and Frank, of Michael and Blythe. Time to sleep. -RSM

Mile 535
The Relax Inn, Atkins VA

Dropping down out of the mountains in the late afternoon, my feet scream "Stop! Stop! You heartless masochistic swine. Stop or we will bring you down like a broke-dick dog, you fucker!" The sky is a temper tantrum waiting to happen, all black behind me and closing in, thunder & the electricity of a pending storm licking the back of my neck, all threadbare wiring snapping in the breeze and ready to burst into flame. On the urging of Leap Frog & Old Gray Goose, two women hikers at the last shelter, I do 4.5 miles in an hour and a half, half-running most of the time to get out of the mountains and down to a truck-stop motel and rumored Dairy Queen.

It is ironic, this. More and more, I feel I am running through forests at top speed, unable to see much around me by dint of extreme concentration on the ground below me, only to arrive at some outpost of civilization to buy caramel sundaes, Snickers, Corona beers and clean sheets.

I pass an old schoolhouse, circa 1894, door open, desks all in rows with books tucked inside every desk, even writing on the chalkboard. It is part of a museum of some sort, one utterly bereft of attendants. Alone, I step out of the field and off the trail a moment to peek inside. On the chalkboard in cursive letters is written, over and over in the style of one kept after school as punishment for something: "I will not hike the AT naked. I will not hike the AT naked..."

Just out of the woods, I drop down into stunning green grass fields stretching onward to forever, dotted here and there by a white farmhouse or some flattened old barn. I pass a tiny sapling not much taller than me with a tiny gray woven bird's nest sitting gingerly in a branch. I could reach out and touch it.

The thunderheads lingering overhead, I pass into a powerline easement and beneath mammoth powerlines buzzing dangerously as though about to pull down the fury of God from the sky and burn a hole the size of football stadium right where I stand. I duck and run beneath them and back into the cover of another small stretch of trees.

As civilization approaches, I am again reminded of the pure genius, the engineering, the determination and the magic that have gone into creating this uninterrupted "corridor" through all lands from Georgia to Maine for nearly 2200 miles. Down close to towns and roads like this, the AT might only be a thin green easement on the map, but there it is. A passageway. Safe passage through the consumer world. Safe and free.

And the white blazes never fail. Onward and onward I go, and always they are there to greet me. If not on trees, then painted on guardrails, telephone poles, sidewalks, random rocks. A docent at Springer Mountain called it "the largest volunteer effort ever, the pyramids notwithstanding, and they were not likely built by volunteers."

Earlier in the day, Dingle passed me going "sobo" or southbound. Dingle, then Van Gogh (spitting image), Ludicrous, and one other. I asked Dingle where was his Skirt? (Skirt, another thruhiker, appeared to be his mate when I first met them both in Gatlinburg). Skirt it seems is Northbound still. Hmm. A cooling off period, perhaps. No matter. In just a few daze, EVERYONE will descend on Damascus for the 3-day orgy of trail excitement called "Trail Days," attendance 30,000. I can't picture it. Damascus is a tiny hamlet, a handful of churches, maybe two bars, a few gas stations. Where the hell do they put everyone? At Burning Man, I have seen 30,000 people. There, they are spread out across a vast dry lake bed. It is an awesome sight.

I am still debating whether or not to hitchhike back with hoards of others like me who are now some 100 miles north. At 37-years old having spent much of my life living like some trust fund baby (without the trust fund) but very much with the nose for a party, anywhere, everywhere, and making them up where they didn't exist, I feel I will see nothing new at Trail Days. New Hampshire beckons. And then Katahdin, the pinnacle endpoint in Maine.

The next day, I embark on a new strategy in AT thruhiking. Thanks to Krispy Kritter and his visiting wife Jackie (aka Trail Widow), I will do my first "slack packing." A slack packer empties their pack into a trash bag, tosses it into someone's truck, and hikes "ultralight" to some predetermined meeting point. Today we will hike just 11 miles to some road where Jackie will pick us up and ferry us to a free hostel. We will do this for five days, increasing mileage daily & staying thus every night in the same hostel. Thanks to the miracle of the automobile, however, we will make 100 miles in just five days, all with very little weight on our backs. I have blue-blazed (taking short cut trails) due to injury or foul weather. I have cursed southbound slack packers as they passed uphill me going downhill on a heinous mountain. I will not go "sobo." But here I go. A slacker at last. -RSM

"You can have yore city buildings with their twenty stories high, an' a janitor tuh warm, an' a roof tuh keep yuh dry, an' yore pretty painted windows an' yore rugs upon the floors. Yuh can have em an' you're welcome, but I'll take the Great Outdoors. I'll take a hoss & saddle, an' a blanket for a bed. an' yuh can have yore cities, but I'll take the World instead: where the roof is made of starlight, an' the the floor is made of sod, an' the walls are trees and mountains, an' the janitor is God!" - Kirbie Glover
(transcribed from the outhouse "throne" over which it hangs at Wood's Hole Hostel, Pearisburg, VA)

First slackpack day. It's Bear Trax and River Queen and Scholar and Krispy Kritter, his lady Jackie and me. I dub us "The Slackpack Sixpack" on account of the six pack of beer Bear Trax is carrying in lieu of his fully weighted pack.

We witness a garter snake eating a shiny black salamander, and later a fat centipede wrapped around a stick. Bear Trax tells me about how in Madagascar lemurs have been seen to catch big poisonous centipedes in their mouths and then bite them, but only just enough to make the vermin emit its defensive toxin. The toxin gets the lemurs high, says Bear Trax, so they do it again and again. He says they've been seen to just fall out of trees, drunk on bug toxin. Where did he learn all this, I ask? National Geographic, he replies. I like Bear Trax. He's simple in a way I am simple.

Everyone crowds 'round to watch the snake eat the salamander. I can't watch and so move on down the trail. I don't wanna get eaten, so the fact that such things happen, well, I just try and pretend they don't. But then all my incidences of suicidal thoughts and sometimes actions come to mind and I gotta wonder.

When you 51/50, as they call attempted suicide, the on-duty shrink automatically adds "acute narcissism" to your diagnosis, this apparently because you gotta really love yourself a lot to hate yourself enough to wanna do yourself in. Make sense? No. Not to me either. But then again it does when looked at differently, more narcissistically. I love myself. I hate living in the world. I love myself enough to "help" myself out of this situation I hate. Suicide, the ultimate act of self-love. That's why it is illegal. God forbid anyone should be free enough to exercise such total control over their own lives.

Narcissism. Empathy. I cannot watch little creatures eat one another. I can't even kill spiders, a species I generally loathe.

While lunching at the local shelter, the topic of "aqua-blazing" comes up. My ears perk right up at the very sound of it. Aqua-blazing! Doing a stretch of the AT on water! River rafting! Now that sounds like my kinda cheatin. Apparently I'll get my chance come Shenandoah. All right. I can hardly wait.

Despite a lighter pack, the day is still long and my body screams at me from various directions. Early on, I forget my age and ailments and go charging up no-switchback straight vertical ascents. At the tops, I am heaving like a elephant with emphysema. But I do it anyway. Mid afternoon with the temperature sticking in the mid-80s, I am dying. The water from my hydration system tastes like powder. Food doesn't satisfy. I begin to wonder if I'm not dehydrated or ill somehow. At a stream-crossing in a cool and shady rhododendron grove, we all find needed rest and cool water. I linger there a little longer than most.

Descending the final descent (ascertained by studying the topographic profile on my map), I pick up the pace, almost running again. I know, also from the map, that a river is just ahead and I have every intension of jumping in it. I can feel it pulling me. I am an Iraqi prisoner on the river's leash, being tugged downward and humiliated by some young siren soldier on the riverbank, just following orders. Yes, even out here in the sticks the news bleeds through. Saw the photo on the cover of USA Today just this morning. And of course NPR reminds me of it hourly, daily at least.

Just the other day, I was so upset by the number of soldiers killed in Iraq in the past month that I wrote a poem about wanting to tear my heart out and paint the white blazes on every tree red, that every soldier dead or walking around a marked man, his days numbered, might know that back home there is a place where peace reigns, flowers are blooming, green leaves are growing and none of that war shit matters, that the blood of my heart might blaze a new trail to guide them homeward.

Saying this I might be accused of not appreciating what my soldier brethren are doing for me, for freedom. I do appreciate it. What I disagree with are fundamental issues far above the soldiers' decision-making capabilities in the military chain of command.

I look back at the snake and the poor black salamander writhing in his mouth. What the hell, I think. You're lucky, both of you. You have no politics. -RSM

Here are more photos from Krispy Kritter's collection on Trailjournals.com:

• Slack 7
• Not normal
• Puca sighting
• Sponge Bob
• Slackers
• At rest
• Sox at Kinkora
• Baltimore Jack

Mile 580
May 11, 04
Candy Ass

Turned the damn ankle again. Always the right. For awhile I was keeping score: 5 right, 7 left, etc. By now I'm quite sure this is about the 12th time for the right. Turned it, not doing anything foolish, like running, (which I had been doing just moments before) but just walking, slowly following Trax and Scholar and Krispy and bamm! down I went. Fruck! Krispy, a retired fireman from Florida, came to my aide, offered a cold pack, ibuprofen, arnica. I took the arnica, old Indian remedy, under the tongue, then got right back on it. I refuse to let it stop me.

This whole week of slack-packing was intended to give the ankle, the calf, the quads, the groin (the entire progression of the pain making its way up my leg in weeks past) a needed rest without actually zeroing. I can't afford zero days, neither financially nor spiritually. Town days suck me back into the world of banality and anxiety (if ever the two could have been said to coexist!). So I refuse to take them, not more than one a week tops. I've been out here seven weeks and have taken six such days. I'm due one, I suppose.

But should it be tomorrow? CAN it be tomorrow? If it is, they'll want to take me to the local hospital. The nurses will at most take an X-ray. The doctor will find no broken bones so tell me I've suffered tissue damage and to stay off of it for six weeks. Fuck you. Fuck that. "Pardon me, Doc, but I don't think you understand who you are talking to. I have a threshold for pain you wouldn't believe."

For weeks I hiked on screaming knees and have steadily made progress on feet driven through with rusty iron spikes and charbroiled on the backyard barbecue of some queer-ass Appalachian Cannibal Cookout. And then the ankles. Twisted again and again until I lost track of how many time, I seem to have done sufficient damage to one that it now pains me constantly. I rub the foot, I stretch the muscles, I tender it. And whammo! It twists again. Or maybe it sprains or re-sprains. Do these descriptive diagnostic terms really matter? I think not.

I think my plight, as with so many of my brethren hikers, can be easily summed up in the words of the late Grandma Gatewood, AT Thruhiker in her 70s and 80s. She said, "Most people are candy asses."

Tomorrow this Candy Ass will likely take his candy sitting down. I will very likely zero. But I'm not going to the doctor. Krispy's wife Jackie does Reiki. I will let her work her Reiki magic and tomorrow I will sleep at Tilly's old homestead hostel of chestnut beams and Virginia backwoods hospitality just south of Pearisburg, VA. The following day if I'm up to it I will hike the last 13 planned miles of this grand, group-oriented, pizza and fried chicken and beer-filled "slack pack" adventure week, an idea hatched in Atkins at the Dairy Queen and carried forth with all the pomp and circumstance of any candy-coated clusterfuck for four or five days now. We've made good miles, and I have made great new friends.

Krispy Kritter is a man of silliness and admirable qualities in good, clean American balanced proportions. And Jackie, his classy carrot-top beauty of a wife, has handled well the newly-begotten and none-too-admirable role of "Trail Widow," trail angel to us all showing up at days' ends with a cooler fulla beers on ice and surprise snacks and lodging arrangements for we, the lightly-packed yet still-bedraggled hikers dribbling down the trail like Gerber mush from the chin of a dissenting, high-chair bound toddler.

Praise be to all trail angels, newly christened angel Jackie not the least of them. They feed us and sate our thirst and drive us hither and yon and on and on and on.

Many a time in the past two weeks I have contemplated a speedy hitchhike return to Damascus to rest and heal my ankle. But it would have meant a rest of several days blending into the festival of Trail Days for a total of two weeks off. I have limped and stumbled and groaned and moaned, but I am now 120 miles further North. "No rain, no pain, no Maine," they say. - RSM

Got to eat crow the other day. Locked-in to the schedule of the Slackpack Sixpack, all of us slackin' together with Krispy Kritter thanks to the patience and driving efforts of his lovely wife Jackie, I wound up being driven up a mountain and dropped at what was supposed to have been the tail end of the day's hike. Result: a Sobo day. Fuck! And I swore I would never hike southbound! But it was mob rule. All of us in the back of the truck all the way up some winding mountain road to find the end to show Jackie where to pick us up and hell, once there, why not just get out here and sobo? Group decision.

So I hiked past Switchback, Zippy & the girls, Beatbox, Sox, you name it, all with mud on my face after bitchin' at sobo'ers in the past. Oh, well. The fantastic hospitality, assistance and trail magic administered by Jackie and Krispy made for a great week. I think I'll live.

Happy Birthday to Ranger Jim. The maniac from New York is hiking 37 miles today, one for every year of his life.

Heard a lot of music by the Carter Family on the radio down here, something to do with the 75th anniversary of the music's recording, or something crazy like that. Love the stuff.

I have decided that nerdy little Danny Ashman from Massachusetts is really Bill Gates' son in disguise. There could be celebrities among us. How would we know? No one uses his or her real names. Except: ahah! Danny Ashman, who insists on using his "real name." Which is what leads me to believe he isn't who he says he is.

Pirate is another suspect character. I long ago decided that Pirate is really Slugworth. The aging, portly, bearded old sailor who, to watch his gait, appears to move as much sideways with each step as forward, and who to swallow whole his shanty tales of trail life has been wandering the AT for some 14 years now, is not I believe the roving rebel he purports to be but is in fact an agent for the Other Side.

I have deduced that there exists a secret Appalachian Trail Organization which, until we discover its true name, we will call the ATCIA. In this organization, there are many cells, and sub cells, and tangential wandering arms and bodies, but important for our story here is that Pirate is ONE OF THEM. Pirate wears a black t-shirt with a blue blaze down the middle, quite proudly proclaiming himself a "blue blazer" or one who take blue blazed short cuts whenever possible. Blue blazing, to the purist AT thruhiker, is akin to stealing the Everlasting Gobstopper from Willy Wonka and giving it to Slugworth for free, just to spite Wonka.

If my theory holds true, Slugworth.. er, Pirate, is an agent out on the trail, much like a narc, to wrongly encourage blue blazing and report back to headquarters in Harper's Ferry with a list of those who do. A kind-of Pied Piper of Blue Blazing, Pirate lures us with his encyclopedic knowledge of the trail into taking the easy route to Maine. But just you wait, Blue Blazers! Just you wait until you apply for your Official AT Thruhike patch at year's end! Forget it! In the words of Willy Wonka, "YOU GET NOTHING!"

Congratulations to Jade in Bisbee, Arizona for her wonderful winning Earth Day essay on bats. I loved it. Thank you Gramma Kate, for that and for your unfailing cards and letters at my EVERY mail drop. Jack Jester finds it a wonderful comfort.

One night at Tilly Wood's "Wood's Hole" shelter, a lovely old house and hostel of chestnut and oak deep in the woods, I write:

I am a machine
Cut and pull back the Gortex
Skin of my arm and
See only Snickers, granola, Mylar, and REI gear
I am a Twinkie assembly line
A porcupine
A crab with titanium pinchers
I am a devourer of roots, rocks, moss and pine
Terminator of the AT
And I will not stop, ever!
Until you, Sarah Connor, are dead!
(er.. I mean, until I reach Maine)
The end. -RSM
 		

Thursday, May 13, 2004
Damascus Trail Daze

Trail Daze has begun. Truth to tell, I hitched south from Bland, Virginia (great fucking name, eh?) about 120 trail miles north of here, on Wednesday. Wednesday night at the SideTrack Cafe was a bender. Awoke the next morning with a 30-pack of Old Milwaukee beside my tent and zero desire to drink any of it.

To make something of the day, I go check out a film someone made on a previous year's trek. The film is showing in the auditorium of the Damascus "Rock School " literally a whole school, maybe even a high school, made of stone. In the audience are Dingle and Skirt and Kickstand. The latter I haven't seen since Hot Springs, or was it Nantahala? Great personality, Kickstand. Big, jovial, generous, a constant smile on his face.

The film starts out depressing and stays that way, focusing on the probable failure of just about every one of its subjects. The highlight of the film (up to the point where I walked out) was this pissed off dog that refused to let its owner put one of those "doggy saddle" packs on him. He'd growl and bare his teeth and snap at anyone who tried. Otherwise, whatever year that was they were filming must have sucked for all present. All the scenes were full of rain and misery.

I've no doubt that in a better mood, I might have sat the whole thing out. But spiritually hung over and wrestling enough with my own doubts about finishing the trail, the film was not what I needed. I retreated to the SideTrack for a beer, the Dollar General store for a clean towel and a cheap floor map to sit on outside my tent whilst here at this mudfest of 30,000 so-called hikers I've never seen on the trail, then back to the tent where I sat out the drizzly day in my tent.

Next morning felt much improved. Walked the 8/10ths of a mile into town from the alleged "superfund site" where they've got all us hikers camped out. Walked in for the breakfast at the fire station. Last night there was a free dinner sponsored by the Baptist Church that I missed for lack of a ticket (never did learn where to procure a ticket). I figured maybe the fireman were being charitable, too. But at $4 for an ice cream scoop of scrambled, biscuits and gravy, and some dried up sausage, it warn't no charity, as the hicks say.

Walked from there to the vendor area in town where all the makers of backpacks and sleeping bags and hiking shoes are hawking their wares. I went to the Lowa hiking shoe/boot tent to show them the travesty their $95 shoes had become in 600 miles, in hopes they might cut me a deal on something stronger, perhaps with better ankle support. The rep named Casey assured me that the baling wire-repairs and failed seams at every vent point were normal wear and tear for that many miles. She suggested I write the company and pointing to the www address on a brochure said, "Just write them." I asked her repeatedly to whom I should address such a letter (since email requires a name and the @ symbol) before realizing the girl apparently has so little understanding of the basic workings of the web that my query was pointless.

I then made my way down to the makers of Smart Wool socks and long johns and such. Here I explained that a $50 pair of their longjohns had torn right down the leg after being worn only 3 times, and only to bed, at that. Here I got a little more help, sort of. I was introduced to Jim, another rep, who suggested I write the company and actually gave me his card with an email address. Looking at the card, I noticed he was a rep from Lowa, the boot company! Well, how about that. Again, I repeated my tale to no avail. These were salespeople, after all. I'd heard stories of Trail Daze being full of reps from the various outfitting companies just tripping over themselves to repair or replace gear so as to maintain a good name on the heavily trafficked AT. Well, so much for the facts, Bronco!

But my morning meanderings were not totally in vain. At the MSR booth in the campground, assistant Steve went right to work trying to tighten the tines on my cool little Pocket Rocket stove. I love the stove and was consequently quite chagrined when the tines, or arms that spread and hold the pot above the flame, started to loosen. Steve went right to work with a mammoth ball-peen hammer and a stone, a fix-it method I found rather frightening. But perhaps this savage and impossible cure was a blessing in disguise, for he quickly gave up and gave me a replacement set of tines, tearing apart a new stove to do it. Groovy. Thank you Steve and Mountain Safety Research for being the only company here at Trail Days that has thus far shown me they give a damn.

Having said this, I would like to retroactively thank Leki poles. They have a fix-it booth here replacing all busted and bent parts for free. The outfitters here in Damascus replaced my bent Leki parts last week, also for free, based on Leki's solid guarantee policy. Thank you Leki! -RSM

Friday, May 14, 2004
Trail Daze Festival, Damascus, VA

Dear M: I am currently mired in a drunkards dream, an aimless yet synaptically-well-endowed bum's beatific vision of Heaven on Earth. I am in, or at, as it were here on the "AT" the thruhiker's festival to end all festivals, Trail Daze. Er, Days. I arrived here Wednesday. Hampered and progress-dampened by a constantly twisting right ankle and consequent all-leg pain, I gave up the Great Hike and hitchhiked south to Damascus, VA, where now two daze later the festivities are well under way.

If you can believe it, they plan to fit some 30,000 people in this town, a town of 900 residents, normally. To accommodate the hiker scum, they have opened up a formerly well-barricaded "superfund site," scraped off the top layer of whatever evil chemical scum put it on the big eco-hit list, and said, "Come on in!" It's free camping, and if you can believe it even more, representatives from all the major backpacking and mountaineering companies are here handing out kitsch and fixing broken gear and camping right along with us in toxic central. Gotta love it.

If it sounds as though I am writing for the website, I am. Sort of. I am writing to you with the intent of using some of this for the site. I have been so distracted by pain and then, on these town stops, pain's ever-ready cure alcohol, and then the broken keyboard beforehand, that I have written dick for the site. To make matters worse, the government absconded with (under the auspices of the Freedom Fries Act) several posts I sent my cousin last week. With no backup, about 2500 words of good old Gonzo gibberish has apparently been lost.

The evil allure of this place, of this pub/eatery called The SideTrack Cafe here in Damascus is, in addition to these web terminals, the 75 cent Mickey's big mouth beers. I keep trying to go to town to buy toilet paper or Ramen Noodles or other important errands, and always I get sucked into this place, and down I go into that fat green bottle, a reluctant Genie returning to the lamp.

Well, it's 3:15 p.m. here and I have some sort of mystery guest arriving at 5. I should heft my laundry back to camp, some 7/10ths of a mile away, and hang the still-damp sleeping bag from the nearest poison ivy vine. Then I can jump in the river, beside which (almost on top of which) I erected my tent, fully intent on being as far out in the woods and away from the mainstream crowd and noise as possible. At night I go to sleep to the sound of the river, rushing, falling, swirling. For a toxic waste dump, it's not bad. I will bathe and be the glowing me that I really am and back here by 5. -Lord Duke Jester the Only

My mystery guest arrived on time at 5 p.m. on that Friday in Damascus. My friend Bruce the Swami had been sending cryptic emails for some time about some mystery delivery person who would be arriving from California or transporting something to me from California. I was to name a time and a place I'd be on Friday, May 14th. To whit: "Project some approximate locations for your position May 14 or 15. I want to send a special emissary with a top secret delivery chained to their wrist . . .FOR YOUR EYES ONLY."

Then a week later: "The secret mission is on for about May 14... This is very Top Secret Black Ops stuff...Hush Hush, Chop Chop and stuff."

Out here in Appalachian Space, Bruce is my Mission Control. He is a great friend and as reliable as a guy could hope for on such a long journey as this with need of ample ground support. Bruce sends me my pre-packed resupply boxes, my prescription drugs, my whatever I need. He's the man.

I scarcely know anyone on the East Coast outside of New England. I have friends or family only in surprisingly radical gay-embracing Massachusetts, my birth state), and New Hampshire, home to my father, my supremely awesome cousin Justin (current Webmaster of Jigglebox), his righteously cool mother Mary, and about 100 other relatives bearing some trace of McKinney blood. So who could this mystery courier be?

Anyone with less talent than I for willful suspension of disbelief might immediately have suspected Bruce himself. But I like a good surprise and so kept any suspicions hush-hush in my head. Bruce has family all over the East, especially around here, it seems. As it is, I almost took a day off from the trail to be hosted by his cousin in North Carolina. So I really thought it might be a family member of his. I mean, it couldn't be him. But how the hell and why would Bruce come all the way here to see me?

At 5 o'clock in line at the Side Track Cafe waiting to buy a beer, I turned around and there he was. Bruce Endres. Alias The Swami. Alias Bruce the Moose. Damn near no hair (he pledged to shave his head that my knees may heal earlier on the trail - he did & so did they), but it was him. I couldn't believe it. I was thrilled.

Turned out he'd bought a used Mercedes on eBay from someone in Maryland and taken Amtrak out to pick it up. It was parked out front. Almost immediately, I learned that he had to leave again in five hours to drive to Memphis to interview the owner of Sun Records. I was crushed. But I got over it, and a great visit ensued.

And that was that. I'd kinda like to hear Bruce's rendition of his time with me. Because aside from the garbled notes below, the above letter and one posting written from my tent on Thursday, the first day of Trail Days, I recorded nothing else of the madness of the festival. I was too busy having fun and unwinding from two months of grinding over mountains to write anything else. Such is the fate of what-makes-it-down-on-paper and what doesn't in the life of this writer. Very often the best living doesn't get a word, because I was too busy living it.

From my notes I can ascertain a few things. One, that I had fun swimming in the creek with Heidi and Holly Hobbit, twin sisters from Vermont. Then some people set up tents right beside mine and crowded me in, kinda pissing me off. The town center and the camping area were too far apart and I did a lot of hitching rides. Seven-time AT thruhiker Baltimore Jack gave me several tips on people to visit in towns along the way. I lost my handmade Jester hat in Dot's bar & grill on the outskirts of town the night Bruce visited (got a little drunk). And finally I met a cute girl whose trail name is "I Need A Hug." When I hugged her too long, her boyfriend appeared outa nowhere and put a stop to it.

Trail Days ended for me on Saturday with the grand water balloon fight-of-a-parade down Main Street, a street which in Damascus is an actual part of the Appalachian Trail. I've never seen so many water balloons fly. The citizens of Damascus took it rather well. The only thing missing from the Trail Days parade that year was Duke. But that's another story, another life for now.

Notes of 5/14:
good day-bjack
nude swim hobbits
encroaching neighbors
hitching in to town
smarmy bitch says it ain't gonna happen
Maine plates go by
rendezvous -brenda-bjack
4Pines - Joe Michel--bjack
Skippy-cute girl in cowboy hat-dots
i need a hug's bf says "ok that's enough."

Bland, VA
May 16, 2004
A Bland Return to Trail Reality

Sitting in Dairy Queen stuffing myself on a "Flame-thrower" burger and a mocha malt. I prepare for my next step north along the AT. It is nearly 2 p.m. on Sunday, almost time for the talent show back in Damascus. Feeling uninspired, drunk, depressed and/or ecstatic these past four days, I opted not to write my short mock-Python script and to skip town a little early instead.

Took just two hitches to get here, one right from the corner of the 91 by Cowboy's and Dairy King from a woman named Cantaloupe and her son Bags, section hikers up from Florida just for the Daze. They dropped me at the intersection of I-81 and I-77, where I sat a good half hour or more slowly losing faith in any possibility of a ride. I finally hefted my pack and was headed to the nearest truck stop to solicit truckers when Bonnie, a cleaning staff person at the nearby Super 8, yelled down to me, asked if I was trying to get to the AT, and whoosh. Off we went, on her break I guess. She in the driver's seat and April beside her. It was a fast, fun 12 miles of cranked up big bass rap and R&B with the cleaning girls dancing in their seats up front. Very funny.

I look at my watch and realize that this time yesterday I was walking the streets of Damascus with a thousand other hikers, me garbed up in rubber ducky slippers and a crazy purple-n-green patterned bathrobe, a child's green beach-sand-bucket on my head, plastic shovel round the handle at my chin, and a mop found in someone's trash, mock "mopping up" after my fellow paraders as water balloons burst by the dozen every minute of the parade walk. Without my art car Duke, I couldn't have done a better job of hamming it up with the local audience and having a blast myself.

Out front of the DQ, I can't figure out where to start walking. I look for white blazes, expecting to see them painted on guardrails or power lines or something. After all, when the Slacking Seven stopped here last week, we ran into lots of hikers.

Later that night..
I'm in my Hennessy Hammock, a hammock tent with bug netting sewed right to it and a rain fly taut overhead, floating above the slanted forest floor . I need a root canal very soon. This could be bad for my progress down trail. In my half awake slumber amidst raindrop sounds and that of some kinda aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I am falling asleeeep. Happy to have made it back the trail..

Next morning, I awake to terrible toothache pain. The abscess is back with all its might. Another rough night of sleep in the hammock. The jury is still out on this one. Sent my tent and sleeping bag two weeks or so ahead, with the Priority mail option to bounce it to New Hampshire and my cousins' for storage till the fall. But the way things are going in this thing, I may be picking it up in Waynesboro. Fuck. Could be just the toothache. Running outa codeine and Klonipin. Scary time. Damp time in the woods. I'm definitely the first hiker on this stretch of trail this morning, clearing all the webs with my face. At least I'm not stuck working in a Dairy Queen in Bland. I think of that poor bastard yesterday, my age, and all the noise in that place. I take another step toward Maine. And the birds sing on. -RSM

Some song lyric on the radio: "Where would you be if you weren't here with me/where would you be if you were single and free?"

Mid-May
Dismal Flood

I walk in the rain for hours. It is warm enough that I wear no rain jacket. I don't even own one, come to think of it, just a lousy windbreaker I got at a thrift store for a buck. I put this on over a synthetic turtleneck if it's a cold rain, and though I'm soaked, I'm warm. Today it's just a nylon T-shirt and my one & only and oh-so-wonderful synthetic pants that zipper off to become shorts. Shoes soaked. Socks soaked. Backpack soaked beneath a worthless pack cover. But no, not everything IN the pack is soaked. That could be very dangerous out here. Hypothermia bad.

No. Instead of a new, hi-tech waterproof backpack, I have two very good, very expensive "dry bags," one for my bedding, one for my dry change of clothes. When you're hiking 2000 miles, you don't carry much of a wardrobe. Mine consists of the aforementioned 1 pair of pants, two nylon T's, 1 synthetic long sleeve, 1 light wool sweater, 1 synthetic long johns, 3 pair socks, one pair shoes. Oh, and the nonsensical combination of the dollar windbreaker and a $50 pair of rain pants. That's it.

Sometimes the rain is coming down so hard it is like pushing through a waterfall.

Then voila! I arrive at the beautiful yet poorly-named waterfall called Dismal Falls. As I round the corner and come in sight of the cascade, the rain stops and the sun peaks out. Everything is green and glistening wet and shiny and I am a sticky, damp, chilled, squishy-shoed walking machine.

Across the river there appear two familiar faces smiling to see me. It's Franko and Bennie, two really cool guys my age from Indiana hiking together, childhood friends I guess. There's no chance of conversation over the roar of the falls, so they rock-hop across the rather wide river to chat with me. I'm glad to see them and pleased as hell with the beautiful scene that will be my home for the night.

The boys cross the river and we chat. I'm so sticky, soaked and gross from rain and sweat, I swim beneath the falls to clean off, despite the cool air and no sun.

I start to hang my hammock tent from a couple of trees downstream. I look up and watch as two fisherman, formerly standing mid-stream, suddenly jump and run for the shore. Huh? My eyes travel to the falls themselves. Handsome before, they are suddenly gargantuan. Two, three, perhaps ten times the volume of water is coming over them. I yank down the tent and head for higher ground as the flood plain I'm in fills instantly.

Must have been the rain. Across the river stand Franko & Bennie, looking at the river, and me, bewildered. "Oh, shit. They're marooned," I realize aloud to myself. They were to come over later with whiskey. We were gonna make a fire, have some laughs.

They never made it over that night. The next morning, the waters calmed again, I jump off the high falls, first alone, then with Jabberwock for the entertainment of his girl Yippee. I sit and write awhile in my hammock. I don't strike camp and set off hiking until early afternoon. It is a night and a day of adventure and luxury on the AT. - RSM

Copyright 2004 R.S. McKinney
All Rights Reserved