Author’s Note: At last! I have finally caught up to the present, to my current days on the AT. I lost a lot of time when my keyboard failed a month or so ago, and, as Justin informed you, we even lost some posts to the demon dark forces lurking in the sewers of cyberspace. Just yesterday, I sent my last nine posts, more or less covering all material from my notes, minus one great dreamy piece (yet to be edited) telling the tale of a magic night spent sleeping beneath a 300-year old Virginia oak tree during thunderstorms, an electric night full of purple skies and dragon flies and, for those of you who believe in such things, a quick and peripheral visit from a genuine faerie (I kid you not). I will do my best to reconstitute that story as well as the second half of the last chapter herein, also lost yesterday when my Palm Pilot, my bestest little electronic friend, died on me last night. THANK GOD I had just successfully mailed everything below. So, I lost a little. Loss is a good thing, I’m learning. It forces me to dig deep again, and in all likelihood, the story will better the second time around. Special thanks to Justin, my coolest Cuz, for all his work editing and posting all of my work. -RSM

May 19, 2004
Mile 622

Time to count our blessings. Okay, blessing #1: Despite our current
dental problems, we DID have the money to pay the dentist to write the
scrips to get the drugs to nail the pain and kill the infection,
thereby staving off the inevitable root canal a few months. Bottom
line, we're still on the trail. Or we're on the trail again, as it
were.

Blessing #2: the robins are out, the air fragrant with flowering azalea
and rhododendron, and Virginia is bursting out in green all over the
place. Bottom line, we are a part of all this, a welcome guest and the
trail goes on and on.

Blessing #3: we don't have diabetes and swollen feet and the demeaning
fate of a four hour wait, unattended, at the local ER, as is the case
with Gatorman. Bottom line, there's always somebody who has it worse
than you, and in this case, in my case, in OUR case, that of all
thruhikers here on the AT, we have it very, very good.

Okay, enough with the blessings. Today I had to go off trail
temporarily to see a dentist, get some drugs, kill this rip-roaring
pain in my mouth. Other hikers here at the Catholic charity hiker
hostel in Pearisburg wanna know if I'm gonna go back up into the
mountains to make up the 10 miles I missed today when Miss Tilley and
friends insisted on driving me into town to get help immediately.
Won't I feel guilty for missing that 10 miles? Good question. And
here's the best answer I can come up with presently, still with a head
fulla pain and recovering from the shellshock of a medical pit stop and
two trips to Wal-Mart.

No.

I know this about myself: if there's one principle etched into my
person that will overrule any guilt at miles lost to a medical
emergency, it is that I HATE going backwards. "What is behind me is
not important!" I won't do it. I won't go backwards.

What I'll tell them when I am done: Yes, I walked from Georgia to
Maine. Yes, I took a few shortcuts. Yes, I rode a few miles in cars
when walking wasn't working. No, I am not a purist. Yes, I walked the
Appalachian Trail.

The original trail was 2000 miles long. It has been expanded to
encompass 2,174 miles. I figure that gives me 174 miles to fudge it
here and there and still be a "2000 Miler." Setting out, I said I'd be
happy if I made it one-tenth of the way. One week from today, I will
have completed fully one-third of it. Guilt? Fuck guilt. I'm a
frikken Olympian.

Next morning and I'm groggy as hell from the 1300 mgs of oxycodone it
took to keep me from screaming my head off last night in Toothache
Hell. Lying awake last night to a chorus of snores, male and female
from the bunks all around me, I decided I'd ask Bill, the attendant
here, to take me back up the otherwise desolate winding dirt roads to
Wood's Hole so I could make up the miles I sacrificed yesterday to
dentist.

Well, Bill just came by and said sure, he'd take me up. Twenty bucks
for the shuttle. I hem and haw. A man of decision, conviction,
impatience, one or all three, he walks off saying "Well, you haven't
made up your mind." Now he's gone. Big Bill and his big red truck and
his cat-sized dog.

Out here on the trail, on foot, we hikers are at the mercy of people
with cars. Many would say I'm wrong here. Okay. It depends on the
situation and your perspective, I guess. But here's one clear case
where I'm kinda screwed. This hostel is 3.5 miles off the trail.
Wood's Hole, where I left off, is 15 miles or so away up-mountain. I
just blew $120 on medico bullshit yesterday, leaving me $50 in my
pocket to last me the next ten days. Twenty bucks suddenly sounds like
a lot. Does this sound like a cheap rationalization of a little AT
white lie? Well, I guess it is. What did I miss? 12 miles? Groovy.
12 is what percentage of 2174? Not much. Whereas $20 is 40% of my
current cash assets. Fuckin' guilt. I'm walking North. -RSM

[Later that day..]

I stand at a crossroads. Right where the AT enters and exits
Pearisburg, VA. I was "forced" to cut off 12 miles of trail to come
here on a dental emergency. Now to get back to the remote forest
outpost where I left off is a pain in the ass. I could back-hike it,
going southbound, and bank on getting another ride out of the woods.
Or I can just say fuck it, and, doing as I decided back at the hostel,
not look back.

I leave it to the flip of a coin. A nickel, my favorite American coin.
If it comes up heads, I'll go with my head, where I believe guilt was
learned and now resides, and go South. If it's tails, I get my tail
back on the trail in the RIGHT direction and go North. I flip.

It's tails. I heft my bag with a smile and disappear into the dense
undergrowth. I have found the coin-flip to be a sure-fire way, when
indecisive, of finding out what I really want, every time. I'm pleased
with the decision of the Fates. Just a few feet into the trees, I feel
triumphant in my escape from Pearisburg, a queer little town in
Virginia where the people are nice but.. I dunno. Weird vibe. Don't
ask me to be objective about Pearisburg, however. My experience of it
was dental pain and Wal-Mart, a consumer tomb, a repository of deep
spiritual angst for me.

All was not bad in Pearisburg. There was Party Girl, after all. Party
Girl from some tiny New Hampshire hamlet near Concord, Conookanook or
some such thing. Party Girl resting her ankle from some injury and due
to be back on the trail in five days, having already missed a week (oh,
Jeezus I would go nuts!). Party Girl, early twenties, sleeping outside
the hostel on the picnic table. One hot number. And the Beastie Boys
say, "Phone is ringing, oh my God."

Tall, tanned, talkative, funny, proportioned like some Greek goddess,
laid out on a picnic table like a banquet, and at a Catholic charity
hostel, no less. Un-believable.

Party Girl shares her photos from Trail Daze in Damascus last weekend.
Every other one is of her doing a beer bong. Incredible. She looks at
the photos with the same incredulous wonder that I viewed photos of
Burning Man 1999. Photos are about the only memory I have of that
year's gathering in the Nevada desert. I'm told (and I recall the
general sense) that had a LOT of fun. I was drunk the whole time.
Party Girl's recollection of Damascus is similar.

"I was the guy with the neon green beach sand bucket on my head, rubber
duckie slippers, crazy patterned green and purple bathrobe, mop in
hand, yeah, the guy pretend-mopping up the streets after all the water
balloons."

I watch as delight dances across her face and her eyes light up with
lost-memory suddenly recalled.

"Oh my gawd! That was you? I remember! That was great!"

We laugh and swap stories of New Orleans, realizing we both lived there
for the same brief period in 2001. She's an amazon, a goddess, a lush
and a nut. I love it.

I was a fool to leave, of course. We got along well. She wasn't going
anywhere. Who knows? But no. I'm a frikken spaz. A hot-footed
sketch-case currently with toothache, freaked out by Wal-Mart and the
location of the hostel (deep in some suburban neighborhood several
miles from the trail), second day, mid-afternoon, I gotta go.

And away I went. But not before she thrust a pen and pad in my hand
and demanded my email address. I hope I hear from her. We could have
a blast when I hit New Hampshire.

I say "I" and not we because she's not only five days behind me now,
but several hundred miles before that, as well, having hitchhiked
forward to Pearisburg for some reason. Whatever. I wish her well, a
great hike. No matter how "complete" or incomplete a thruhike it is,
Party Girl, just have yourself a blast. You deserve it! This is YOUR
great adventure.

On the outskirts of Pearisburg, the AT passes right by a manufacturer
of celenese acetate, whatever that is. The plant is depressing to look
at, dismal really. Right out of "Joe vs. the Volcano." A sign over
the entrance (or was it on the smokestack?) says "Our People Make The
Difference." Man, if ever there was a frightening, banal, meaningless
statement of corporate pride, that's it.

Even up in the trees away from the factory, the air smells bad. I
cross a creek with an orange cast to it. Not that I would have
resupplied with water from it, but a sign says, "This stream has
naturally occurring bacteria and should not be consumed," or some such
horse shit. Naturally occurring, eh? Just like that factory back
there. And their waste dump upstream that I passed awhile back. Hmm.
Yes, very natural. As I ascend the mountain out of town, clouds of
tiny flies blur my vision. I almost step right on a giant black snake
sunning itself in the trail. Eak! Get me outa here!

-RSM

Franco and Bennie from Indiana. They are shorter and stockier than I.
Knowing they both cashed out savings and quit jobs to do this, I ask
Franko if he doesn't sometimes wish he'd blown his wad on a trip to the
Bahamas or some tropical vacation rather than trudging in the woods.
"No," he replies. "Because I'd be home now and broke." Good point.

Bennie, the bigger of the two, seems always to be following Franco.
Now I'm ahead, talking to myself in Schmeogal tones and coughing from
pollen. The cough forms a word: "Gollum! Gollum!" Franco is Frodo
and Bennie Sam. I turn and beckon them forth with a wide swing of my
arm. "This way, hobbitses." I cannot but make the connection.
Physiologically, and in my case, (alone, auto-conversant)
psychologically, we are the last hope for the world of men. I hope
Franco still has the ring. I have the oxycodone. Bennie has bank. I
caught him checking his stock profile online the other day at a
cybercafe. We make a good trio. I promise not to lead them into the
lair of any big spiders.

Saying this, I remember today, the REAL today. I feel pangs of guilt.
I should have done something to warn them. I was far out ahead but
knew they would be next to encounter the monster. I almost stepped on
it myself: a mammoth rattler, whatever brand of rattler broods in the
grasses of Virginia. It lay straight across the trail, tail hidden in
the grass on one side, head hidden on the other. It might be a log
with uncommon fractals color & pattern. Step over it and see. Not.

It is the second baseball bat-fat snake I've seen in 24 hours. Seen
and almost stepped on. Yesterday's was black as night, a giant negro
phallus underfoot, another Freudian slip, a cock of a root to trip you
up and take you down harder than usual.

The rattler doesn't move. Backed away a safe distance, I lob a stick
at it. Nothing. Another, nearly hits its tail. Not a flinch. I am
Indiana Jones. Don't like snakes, even the ones behind thick plates of
glass. There is no glass between me and it.

What can Schmeogal do? How can we warn master and the fat one? Maybe
it's dead. Yes, we convince us, it must be dead. No movement. No
rattle. Case closed. Giving it a wide berth, I pass and move on.

What was Schmeogal thinking?!! Gollum! A short coughing fit later,
and I am myself again. Ahh, peaceful woods. Back in the Shire again.

At the next Shelter, I nervously prepare lunch. I await Frodo Franco
and Bennie Sam's arrival. "Hobbitses taking too long! Oh, no, no.
What has Schmeogal done?"

They arrive at last, in tact, with digital photo no less of the snake
coiled and rattling.

In the evening, we make camp amidst the ferns. We drink whiskey and
smoke cigarillos far afield of the crowded shelter. Schmeogal takes
his whiskey in tiny sippy sips and tries not to cough. "Don't you
think Bennie looks like Gimley? You know, the dwarf?" Franco asks.

"Yes, master!" says us. -RSM

May 22, 2004
Mile: Mid-600s

I heard cicadas for the first time today. The flies arrived on the
20th, on my two month anniversary. It was like one minute there were
none, and then whammo! The big ones were buzzing my ears in that
super-annoying round-yer-head 100 times fashion, and there appeared an
ever-present crowd of tiny ones just in my field of vision. Madness.
I feel like an Ethiopian child or a water buffalo just covered in them
and doing nothing to shoo them away.

Audioslave sings, "take it out on me" as I take it out on myself,
straight up a hellish incline, 2000 feet in one mile. The trail is
crowded now. I remember many days when I would walk all day and see no
one. Now we are bunched up. Puca & Eagle Eye, Franko & Bennie, Pilot
and Puja and Krispy Kritter and Little Chicken and Beat Box and Pita
Man and Palm Tree and on and on.

Beat Box earns his name as I hike with him. For awhile when we run out
of water he is quiet. We find a stream and resupply. Now he is going
again, doing raps, singing songs from Alladin at the top of his lungs,
telling tales of his time spent working at Disneyworld. When not
talking, he walks and makes sounds like a beat box, all percussive
sounds from his mouth. He's a trip.

Hikers are so intent on the trail they never look sideways. You pull
off a bit and disappear. You and your lover could be buck naked
banging back to nature just 30 or 40 feet from the trail in plain view
and, so long as you remained quiet as the next thruhiker passed by, go
entirely unseen.

Flowers. Okay, we have flies but we have flowers now, too! Tons!
Orange fire azaleas burn against the green forest backdrop. I learn
the names of some of the other flowers: pipsissawa, wintergreen,
pyrola, toothwort, chickweed and stonecrop. Naming things of nature
usually means little to me, but lately I crave their names as I marvel
at their beauty.

I pull 20 feet off the trail and set up my keyboard on a flat high
rock. There are not many desks in the forest but here is one. My
blotter is dense green moss. My feather pen popping from an inkwell,
a cluster of grass growing out of the moss. Puca and Eagle Eye pass
me, totally unaware of me, absorbed in the trail and each other. Not
even Puca's dog Zack sees me. Astounding.

You can always be alone out here, if you want to be. A little to the
right or the left of the trail and you vanish amidst oak, hickory,
hemlock and maple.

I pop another oxycodone. I don't like taking them during the day,
while hiking, but the pressure, the intense strain on all the muscles
in my body as I pull up a mountain, perhaps this set my tooth to aching
again.

I immerse either full-body or as much as I can in every stream, every
creek, and the occasional bonus deep river. Eric & Jess are close on
my tail. Even after taking ten days off the trail for a wedding, they
are catching up to me. I can feel them gaining on me. They are very
close now.

We finish a heinous ascent to find that a trail angel has left two
large coolers full of sodas for thruhikers. Yes! I drink one, turn
and see cars on a road nearby. To my half dozen fellow thruhikers I
proclaim with indignant surprise, "What? You can drive here?" It's
hard to describe the feeling you get when you scale a mountain by foot,
only to find cars at the top.

The profile map lays it out for us every day. The topo shows the
bird's eye view of the lines nicely dancing northward through the
Appalachians. But the profile gives the heavy news, tells it to you
straight. "Son, you gonna CLIMB today, straight up, and then straight
down again. Ooh! And look, another 2000 foot climb before dinner!"

I begin to see a pattern to all this trail shit. It is this: the only
wilderness left anymore is in the high country, mountains too high and
steep for lazy-ass humans to build upon and develop. Aha. How about
that. Big mystery, right? So "doing the trail" means daily going
where no man has.. any desire to go. Up. Straight up. And straight
down again. Whippeee!

The other day in dense jungle-like forest, I saw a stone wall about
knee-high going straight up a 45 degree grade on a mountainside. Hmm.
Not every human was lazy, I guess. Just stupid. -RSM

May 23
Mile: mid-600s

I feel utterly tapped this morning, an empty keg, and somebody stole
the pump, to boot. The thrill is gone. Not a shred of yesterday's
zoom in me. But the usual parade of early-risers had already made up
the five miles I gained on them last night and was passing me by as I
stood contemplating making coffee.

"It's not a race," I hear my gentle self saying. But it pisses me off.
Their movement makes my non-movement look bad. There's just no way
around it. It's not a race, but we fall into these social groups, and
whether you like the crowd you're in or hate 'em, you feel compelled to
move at a similar pace.

People often ask me about Tinkerbell and Uncle Duke, my two steadfast,
never-annoying companions on this walk in the woods. The figurine of
Uncle Duke from Doonsebury and little Tinkerbell in her tiny red lamp
both hang from the chest cinch straps on my pack, so right out front.
Speaking of my gentle self made me think of what I told some woman the
other day about the two. "They're like the little devil and the little
angel on my shoulders. Tink speaks good sense and gentleness and
understanding. Duke is there to maintain obstinate forward propulsion,
at any cost. He is the enforcer, the bully." She looked at me like I
was nuts.

Walking along the crest of some major bump on the profile map, the one
that tormented my listless body this morning, I turn to look over my
shoulders and have the queer sensation that I'm seeing the forest
through one of those helmet cams. You know what I mean? That kind of
floaty, sometimes bumpy disembodied camera work used by climbers,
explorers, whatever. Looking through my eyes this morning is a trip.
Things are just a wee bit strange.

A local station called "The Bear" plays a long "Tool set," as it were.
It helps my energy level immensely. I walk and sing to the trees and
piled stones, "I am just a worthless liar, I am just an imbecile, I
will only complicate you.. trust me, trust me!" Of course, I really
wail out the "Why can't we.." chorus parts.

The piles of stone are increasing in number here atop Braisers Knob
just south of Catawba. Flat stones all, they are piled sometimes
higgilty-piggilty, sometimes as to make a fireplace or a wall. They
are everywhere, and as I walk amidst them shaking my head in wonder,
wondering how they got there, up on a mountaintop in lush jungle-like
overgrowth. Very strange. And Tool sings to solve the puzzle. "I
know the pieces fit!"

Suddenly in the forest today I smelled Band-aide smell, that special
smell that only comes from Band-aides. You know the one.

Up ahead I meet Polar and Hot Rock and their golden retriever Jake.
Bear Trax backtracks to warn us of a snake on the trail. Sure enough,
there it is. Another rattler. The third I've seen in four days. I
taunt it a bit to make it rattle for me. It looks at me with boredom
in its snake eyes and only flickers its tongue.

Speaking of taunting, I have been taunting, or testing, the bear myth.
Last night, too tired to bother, I simply hung my food at eye level on
a broken tree branch. Fuck it, I thought. There are no bears. Not
ten hours later, Krispy Kritter walks by and tells of his morning bear
sighting. Oh, well.

Arriving at Niday Shelter, I heard feminine laughter coming from the
creak below, dropped my pack and headed down for water and whatever fun
was going on down there. I rounded a corner to find Pilot,
20-something, pretty, currently bathing in the stream in the nude. "I'm
totally naked, just so you know." I told her that was fine with me,
and she seemed much relieved at that. I'm the same way. I could give
a rip about stripping down and hopping in. My only source of concern
is the potential discomfort of others. Pilot definitely moved up a few
notches in my estimation after that. Might also have had something to
do with her, well, her ample, um.. her body. Very nice. Just last
night I was musing at just where my sex drive had gone. That little
visual treat awoke something in me. And the boys sure enjoyed hearing
about it later, around the fire. There wasn't much to report. Just
the fact that I'd been witness and that she'd skinny dipped was enough.

We are camped beside a sweet little stream tonight. Our sight is like
a little sandy beach. Bear Trax and I are both tree-dwellers now, our
tents suspended hammocks between sets of trees. Bennie and Franko
arrived shortly after Trax and pitched their tents nearby. Krispy
Kritter was due, and we wondered what had become of him. Turns out
he'd gone too far and camped well beyond us. After some time hanging
at our camp, he went and with the help of Franko moved his stuff here.
We are fairly near a road. We all wish we had beer. The idea of
hitchhiking to the nearest hamlet was discussed but no one moved in
that direction. It is Sunday, besides, and after so many dry counties
and beer-scarce towns, it doesn't seem worth the effort. -RSM

May 25, 2004
Mile 688: Catawba, VA

That was bound to happen eventually. Last night, the whole of the
bottlenecked trail all descended at once on the Catawba hostel,
someone's garage generously opened up for hikers to kick it, have a
shower, play horseshoes. A note right in the Hiker's Handbook warned
against seeking out this place for a quiet night's rest. There are
about a dozen pissed-off thruhikers on the trail today, most of them
over 50, who apparently missed that warning in the book.

I came upon the place utterly spent. One hardcore day of heinous
ascents and descents that culminated, without any warning in the
guides, in the Dragon's Tooth, a seven-mile departure from our Northern
tack that nailed us halfway with incredibly arduous bouldering, stuff
you wouldn't normally do with a pack on, no way. There were places
where one could easily have died, fallen, and not likely have been
found for some time. The whole hump out to the "Tooth," a gigantic
pile of rocks with a grand overlook that I was too tired to see, was
like scaling up and down the ridges of a dragon's tail. Anticipating
my normal pace of about 25 minutes/mile, I ran out of water halfway
when the 7 mile jaunt turned into a 7 hour jaunt.

Needless to say when I hit the hostel, or garage, whatever it was, I
was thirsty, spent and mad as hell at the trail engineers who'd made
the Dragon not an option but a must-do section of the AT.

And Kayliss handed me a beer. Heaven. I grabbed a cot in the
tres-red-cross shelter-looking garage, and headed into the local
quickie mart in the back of a truck driven by Joe, the 16-year old son
of the host, about a mile at 80 mph or so around sharp curves, a bunch
of us beer and grub-seekers holding on for dear life in the bed of the
truck.

Before long there was something like six cases of beer floating around
the crowded garage. Cute but unworldly Pilot snapped pictures of the
men all sprawled about in front of the garage drinking beer. At that
point in the evening, she still found it funny.

It didn't take long to cure that. By dusk, the place was a circus. So
many hikers are clogged up on this section of trail in central Virginia
that before long not only was the garage full but a tent city had
sprung up in this guy's yard. With three dozen thruhikers as his
captive audience, young Joe gave it his 16-year old all, popping
wheelies and roaring across the resident acreage at top throttle on his
dirt bike. Much like their Marmaduke-like pet dog who stood barking
incessantly just his side of a buried electric doggie fence begging our
attention, Joe drove that bike as fast and hard as he could within the
confines of the football field-sized yard.

No longer content even with that, he began weaving in and out of the
tents in the yard behind the garage. But he was a good sport. He'd
stop every once in a while to drive the newest arrivals to the local
store for beer and grub. By dusk we were all getting hammered, young
and old, male and female, but mostly male, as is the demographic here
on the All-Testosterone AT. What happened next was just a matter of
course.

A drinking game sprang up out front of the garage. With Beat Box at
the helm, we went around in a circle naming celebrities by the last
letter of the preceding star's name, and when one failed to deliver an
immediate answer, the penalty was drink. As night fell, a lot of
hikers did what they do every night out in the woods at nightfall, they
went to bed. We didn't.

Before long, we were asked to keep it down. Immediately someone in the
drinking game circle cited the passage in the manual warning against
expectations of any quiet at this shelter. Spokesperson Pilot went
back inside.

Okay, so the book warned them. But should we rub their noses in it? I
asked myself. I moved that we relocate the game 50 yards away at a
picnic table on the lawn. We did. And very quickly the topic of the
wordplay game sunk from celebrities to porn stars, real or imagined.
To the credit of the group, some incredibly creative porn star names
were created around that table. However, with this new topic and
increasing inebriation, the decibel level rose dramatically. To those
trying to sleep in the garage, it likely sounded not as though we'd
moved the party away, but that we'd crawled in bed with them and
snuggled up to laugh drunkenly in their ears.

Well, eventually quite contentedly drunk and anesthetized from my day's
pains on the Dragon Tooth, I sauntered into the garage and plopped down
on my cot. I was half asleep when something strange began to happen
all around me. Silhouetted hikers seemed to dance around the garage,
every one with halogen headlamps beaming like a buncha modern miners,
and every one of them stuffing bags with dark objects.

It took awhile, but I finally caught on. The drinking game had ended
and the seven hardcore men had decided to pack up and hike out, right
then and there.

Naturally, I joined them. They had to wait for me as I stumbled around
in the dark. Krispy Kritter took a group photo of all the boys packed
and ready to go, one you could probably see by referencing his name on
Trailjournals.com.

Pack thrown together out of rote habit developed over two months (with
no real clue as to what I might be leaving behind in that garage), I
hoofed it down the driveway and onto the empty highway for the .3 mile
walk back to the trailhead. Back to that tiny hole in the forest wall
we walked, a hole no wider than a household doorway, two holes
actually, one on either side of the rural highway, where hikers of the
Appalachian Trail enter and exit the Real World all the time, likely
most often entirely unnoticed by passing automotive traffic.

I had never hiked drunk before. And I doubt I've done much if any
hiking in the dark. So it was a double adventure. I found very
quickly that I had a problem with the normal positioning of my
headlamp. When pointed low enough to see the ground, the light's beam
lit up my glasses making it hard to gauge depth. (This was not merely
a function of drunkenness. I have since tried it sober.) So I just
shut it off, followed closely the person in front of me and availed
myself of the brain's aptitude for instantly recalling what it saw a
moment ago in the light ahead. I was impressed at how well I
performed. I never once fell.

But the going was fairly easy, the terrain smooth. After a short
distance in the woods, during which Beat Box, perhaps the drunkest of
us all, rattled off every crass dead baby and paraplegic joke I'd ever
heard in one unending monologue, we hit a meadow. Fireflies danced in
the air, popping like ten thousand tiny flashbulbs over the grass,
brilliant against the dark backdrop of the forest beyond and pure magic
to my liquid yet lucid brain. And with my headlamp off, I got all the
benefit of their brilliance.

We walked for some time in tall grass, and the magic of the fireflies
just made the night! A line of Appalachia's mountains, perhaps some of
which we'd climbed the day before or would climb tomorrow, could be
seen clearly outlined, backlit perhaps by the distant city lights of
Roanoke.

It was a beautiful night, one well worth the pain suffered later in the
morning upon sobering up. We the warriors of the long trek north got
to blow off some steam, share a lot of laughs, and be witness to a kind
of low-flying aurora borealis in a pasture somewhere in west-central
Virginia. The fireflies!!

When walking amongst so many fireflies, one has also the illusion of a
meteor shower unfolding in the sky. For every time a firefly goes
buzzing by overhead, in the dark without depth perception, one can't
differentiate between the bug and a shooting star.

Earlier that day, well-before the tortures of the Dragon's Tooth but
after a morning of hard climbing, I'd made this note to myself to
develop later: "creek. falls. foot massage. fishies. it is enough."

I'd arrived at a fairly-good flowing stream, and while a few other
hikers splashed their faces at the footbridge, I'd gone downstream,
found a small waterfall, stripped off pack and emptied pockets and
jumped right in. It was Heaven on Earth after the morning's labor and
humid heat. In a pool deep as a claw foot tub, I had flip-flopped from
dunking my head under the falls to turning, laying back in the pool and
letting the falls massage my feet. In that position I watched the fish
swim around beside me in crystal clear water. It was indeed enough.
The beer and fireflies and Seven Dwarf-like comradery of the night
hikers just added to it all. Another day on the Appalachian Trail. It
is enough. It is more than enough. -RSM

Mile 714
Thursday, May 27 2004

Shazzam!! Like lightning popping off right near you and that crash of
sound, instant, thunder, boom! or the zip-zap miracle of instant
information transfer from a little device in your hand standing deep in
the woods, baffled by it all, then whoosh! With the alacrity of an
email reached, read & returned, zang! I'm out of the woods and in the
passenger seat of a next-year model BMW beside a pretty, wild-spirited
19-year old chauffeuring her brother, his girl and me far, far away from
the relentless & intrepid AT, spiriting us away like some angelic elf
out of the dark forest, taking us to.. The Beach!

Wow. I feel like Kerouac's Japhy Ryder or Kerouac himself as Ray in
Dharma Bums, whisked away on the rails or an easy Zen hitch fast out of
one glorious exultant moment straight into another, totally different,
always exciting. Japhy in his logger shirts and rucksack stepping out
the mountains yodeling and into the way of Ray, hitching, tramping,
back into the perpetual motion that was me with too many cars and
endless Zen patience for the drive.

Now observing Eric's little sister Karen-O as she maneuvers the stealth
German road machine down interstates and out of Virginia, changing the
volume of the stereo pumping out Smashing Pumpkins without so much as a
glance at the console, all done with covert controls on the wheel
itself, and the car flying, erasing in minutes what just took me all
morning to hike, in hours what took me a month, back South paralleling
the AT to Charlotte, North Carolina. Whoosh. Effortless. Going to
the coast to dive in the ocean, to revel in the holiday weekend, to
seize the day memorial, to celebrate with my brother America when he
celebrates. On schedule with the western world and the working man, I
bust out a last batch of "work" on Thursday morning and clock out at
noon, leave early and to hell with Friday. Zero Day? How about a Zero
Week? Adios, AT and all your ankle-twisting snaking phallic roots and
REAL snakes, the venomous and rattling kind that have popped up
underfoot EVERYWHERE in the past week, coiling up and into the forest
experience a new, added sense of danger and sinister slithering
freakiness. Adios, AT "Nobo" peligroso. I'm taking a week. Off.

How did all this come about? Miraculously, of course. It all started
in Damascus weeks ago. Or maybe as far back as Day One when I first
met Eric & Jess just North of Springer Mountain, Georgia. Nothing
special that first day or the next, but memorable as our first meeting,
all of us launching North in what could be called the Great Eastern
States Social Trek of Aught Four. When I tell people I hail from a
hamlet just off the Pacific Crest Trail in soCal, always the question
of why not the PCT first and always I answer easily that I chose the AT
for its social life. To undertake the 2600 mile PCT alone as my first
and actually only big trek of its kind would have been a lonesome and
likely thus unsuccessful endeavor.

Jess, Eric and I became fast friends in the weeks that followed
Springer, especially after the Smokey’s moving on into Virginia. In
Damascus we sadly parted ways when they had to go Off Trail for a
wedding for over a week. It would be 250 miles at a lowball average of
ten miles a day before we'd meet again. Thanks to a couple of emails
and notes in shelter registers from me forward in time to them,
arriving at said shelter a week or more later, they knew where I was
and I knew they were moving fast to catch me, skipping as they did the
big thruhiker beer bash in Damascus so as to make up time.

Just as they were closing the gap between us, however, I slipped into
some kinda possessed overdrive, driven forward at a juiced-up pace in a
race to escape a crowded knot of thruhikers with whom I felt I had
nothing in common and just wanted to lose in the woods. It took a week
and several heavy beatings at the hands of sandstone up thrusts and
mean, anything-but-northbound jags for me to realize that the only
smart solution was to simply stop.

Stop I finally did with monumental mental effort on the Wednesday
leading up to Memorial Day Weekend. At first I just slept in, a
not-uncommon practice of mine, utterly incomprehensible to hardcore big
milers who rise with the sun and roar across the dank morning
landscape, only to poop out at 3 or 4, and witness (with a snarl) as I
pass them in the magic light of late afternoon. Once up, I sat at the
campsite picnic table in Lambert's "Meadow" (a meadow when named now
long since a dense forest), a table a real luxury occurant outside the
realm of a shelter only in National Park sections of the trail. It's
hard to convey the "why" and "how" of how hard it was watching without
following as one after another of my fellow thruhikers passed me by.
For the first time perhaps in 700 miles on the trail, I felt the
familiar jones of the unmedicated junkie not for drugs or alcohol or
sex for a change, but for the hike.

I bet if I were to return to Lambert’s Meadow and to that site, I would discover deep indentations in the wood beneath my picnic table seat where I dug my fingers in straining against nine weeks of conditioning toward habitual movement: get up with the sun, pack it up, wolf down a Pop Tart, hit the trail. Every day a different place. Every day movement northward along the thin licorice whip line of the AT to a new forest, a new mountain, a new shelter, a new spring or stream to draw water to drink and eat. Go back I doubt I ever will, however. That is the nature of such a long, straight trajectory as this. Everything seen is seen for the first and last time. Every morning you awake miles from that flower, that tree, that section of trail you hiked just yesterday, never to be seen again.

But I succeeded in fighting the urge to move on. I rose late around 10 and set up shop at the campsite picnic table, laying out the makings of breakfast, lunch, dinner, leaving my hammock tent suspended in the trees behind me and simply sitting there like some receptionist at a desk offset by only a few feet from the main corridor of AT traffic. I built it, and they came. One after another of my brethren and sister thruhikers came walking, tromping, zooming, some hobbling down the trail and right by my cozy little encampment. Some said hello. Others ignored me. Most that I knew stopped for a moment to inquire if all was well and why I wasn’t on the move. Town, you see, was just nine miles away. Town, a hotel, laundry, an outfitter, and a buffet style restaurant where at to pig out like Romans at the dedication ceremony for the new vomitorium. Shoneys! Shoneys! I heard the name repeated, almost sing-song spoken with reverence and awe again and again as they passed. How could I wish to miss out on Shoneys? They did not understand.

And neither did I, really. I knew only that I was tired of the lot of them, and that my ass refused to move, and that maybe, just maybe, my friends Eric & Jess would at last catch up with me, rounding the same corner down to the creek where at I sat in my forest cubicle typing away, typing, nibbling on granola and dried mango and candied ginger. Somehow I resisted all the force of the peak-bagging jones and just sat there. I smiled, entertained their complaints and lobbying efforts, and sent them on their way. The dialogue went something like this, repeated a dozen times at least: “Crucifixion? Ye-ess. First door on the right, one cross each. Crucifixion? Ye-es. First door…”

I spent the whole day catching up on writing, watching Franco & Bennie and many, many others pass on. And I checked my email. Which was odd because I was deep in the woods and felt sure I wouldn’t have signal. I did, though. And there was a message. It was from Eric & Jess, by way of Jessica’s mother, told to her over the phone from some remote motel in some backwater Virginia Appalachian town where they’d conked out and off the trail the day before. “We’re going to the beach and want you to come along. Call us at our motel before 9:30 tonight if you get this message.” They told me later they thought there was about a one in fifty chance they’d hear back from me in time. I hadn’t checked my email in days. Miraculously, I did that day. I wrote them back immediately. I couldn’t possibly hike the nine miles out to the nearest phone in time, so I just sat back in my hammock that evening as monsoon rains and thunder and lightning came crashing through the forest, and waited. At nine o’clock that night, I had my reply, and was on my way to the beach!

Ocean Isle

Now it’s sun and surf mellow as a bay and warm southern coastal Carolina waters and showers, as many as you can take, and cake and wine and fresh-squeezed lemonade and southern special sweet tea. It’s three meals a day, every day something different, and stories by chef Terry of how hush puppies got their name and what makes a grit a grit.

Been three or four daze of absolute, luxuriant beach living here in a rental cottage smack on the sand courtesy of Terry and Linda, trail friend Eric’s delightfully cool parents.

She talks to angels. Says they all know her name. I’ve tried to talk to angels, but thus far they haven't talked me into Heaven. Most days on the trail now, I feel sure this is a good thing. I haven’t always been sure. I read about Rosie in Dharma Bums jumping off the roof, chased by imagined demons and cops, and I think of Luciano. I read about John Muir and I think of Luciano, choosing as he did to take his exit from this world in the bathroom of a friend, ironically the great or great-great grandson of the famed naturalist. My life is spotted like a dirty shirt with celebrities. Ring around the Rosie. Ring around the collar of useless celebrity, the yolk of celebrity friends that does one no good.

I get an email telling me the script has sold for 20 Grand and that Luci’s mother wants to pay me my half, and I don’t think of Luci at all. I don’t mix up thoughts of Luciano with cerebral wranglings over his mother and my long working relationship with her and all the mess and confusion that has come of it. When I get the news, I feel excitement for about a minute before the terror sets in. I wrestle with the fear of dealing with her on a business level again and a whole 24 hours passes before I find Terry’s phone in my hand, her number ringing.

For ten minutes she talks about some nebulous unnamed investor, a group it sounds like, interested in all her projects. Like the title of the script itself, “The Bridge,” this is a refrain I have heard before. In ten minutes she says nothing about any twenty grand, nothing about the script actually selling. In pregnant pauses, I listen to the Carolina beach waves chortling on shore and try to make sense of what she’s telling me. As best as I can gather, she’s telling me she wants to buy me out. But also I’m hearing what sounds like a pitch of some sort, half pitch, half ultimatum. She’s got two weeks to “fix” the script. What am I supposed to do? I’m walking the Appalachian Trail. A few years back, while being paid to write a film script based on her concept and “Fight Club” director David Fincher’s interest (by way of her rock star daughter Paz from Perfect Circle), the money to pay me had dried up during the second act of a three-act play, as it were. After I finished the script on my own time the following Fall, Luci’s mama and I shook on a 50/50 split of the final sale to compensate me my extra time. It’s been years since then and nothing. Nothing, that is, but the occasional rumblings of some investor or potential buyer that invariably ends.. in nothing.

Today I am sad. I feel like some half-psychotic bad dream arm of gangly monster reality has reached out across the country and touched my pure white Appalachian quest with oozing, disease-ridden hands. Using false good news to lure me, some beast has sucked me back in. Not Luci’s mother, surely. But just the energy, the entropy, the chaos surrounding any and all attempts to work with her, or she with me, in the recent past.

Worse of all, I shared this good news with Eric and Jess and family, all without really knowing the truth. No, even worse is that I still don’t know the truth. Has the script sold? It doesn’t sound like it. But if someone wants it and they want to buy me out of it, isn’t that good news? Maybe. I just don’t know. The cell phone lost signal at some point in the very unclear haze of her story. I dialed her again, only to have the signal dropped shortly after saying hello. I don’t call back. The surf rumbles and churns across a warm evening breeze. I wonder if there are tiger sharks out there. I don’t know what to think. I decide not think at all.

So back to the trail then. Yes. Except we can’t go back, not yet anyway. Eric told me when he picked me up it would be a week. And what a glorious sun-drenched and salt airy dream week of beach life it has been, gourmet meals and all. Shrimp Creole last night. Fresh locally grown beans and corn and potatoes throughout. Chicken and sausage gumbo. Pancakes at dawn (because after weeks on the trail rising with the sun it is hard to change) chock fulla freshly picked blueberries and glazed in pure Vermont maple. Out to dinner one night at a fried fish joint so popular that folks stand in line for hours to get in, and once in no beer for thirsty me, but “hush puppies” and southern sweet tea and later the story from Papa O (Eric’s dad Terry) about the origin of the name. Hanging out for a week solid with Grandma and sister Karen O and Mama O and cousin Molly and aunt Trina, all of us comfortably ensconced in this four bedroom house smack on the dunes, sound of surf, two big beds in every room, AC and ceiling fans and a parapet high atop the roof for sunset viewing, terrific in Monday’s evening electrical storm.

I sit here in a white porch rocker, one of six on the deck, each with a towel drying on its back, and all of them thus like little sails rocking in the wind, a ghost of some Atlantic sea watching sailor’s widow in every one. I stare out at that immortal sea, that sea that connects me with my youth, my Father, my drowned uncle David far north in Maine, my destination. I stare and the pelicans give a constant show, flying, flying over the sea in front of me all day and dropping, one every 30 seconds or so, dropping from the sky like mortally wounded bombers straight down and into the sea with an inaudible splash. Watch them long enough as they fish from thirty feet or so above the waves and you can almost hear the snap of salt-encrusted synapse as they hone in, commit, tuck wing and drop like stones fatal to a fish.

Only the constant rhythmic whirring and scraping of the sea and the tink-tinkle high pitched chirps of people on the beach reach me up here. And through all this I read Kerouac and wonder and “Wow” at his fifty-year-old words, at simple thoughts brought to me across time and space from a brother now dust and legend. I relate too strongly perhaps and too word-for-word with his struggles, but it’s a good thing after years of being told that I sound like him, that my writing rings of his, and me having never read him, ever, not even “On the Road” although I likely fibbed and said I had to save face at some time.

Eric talks to the neighbor about the trail, says he was considering quitting, that he felt “the tug of the real world, get a job, you know.” I can’t help myself and chime in immediately, not looking up from my work but saying, “That ain’t no tug.” It’s true. I don’t feel it like that. But Eric, he’s younger, eager to meet the world eye-to-eye, to show It his stuff. Me, I am jaded at 37. I have interviewed the parents of that morning’s dead and made front page news in New York for my sins. I rode with the King to see Amtrak from the eye of the engineer only to witness as the train ate a human and spit out her bones with teeth on glass gnashing sounds, impossible. I have seen enough with the skin of their jobman on me, and I have gone away.

Mama O (Linda) is interested in my “career,” such as it is. She points me to an article in the May 31st New Yorker (page 30) titled, “A book in you.” It’s about a young assistant at International Creative Management in NYC named Kate Lee who’s job it is to turn internet “bloggers” (or web loggers) into writers with book contracts. Even out here in Appalachia, trying hard as hell to ignore the world, I am intrigued. How do I get this Kate Lee to read Jigglebox? I don’t think if she went Googling for “blogs” for a hundred years that she’d ever find me. I never refer to my work as blogging. Will she ever go Googling for “rants?” We can only dream.

Linda’s daughter (Eric’s sis) Karen O turned twenty here at the beach this week. She is looking for a cause to embrace, around which to wrap her obvious gift for lobbyist gab. She speaks of going to Washington perhaps, to intern for the campaign to save the penguins of Antarctica. She has a voracious appetite for books that impresses me. I suggest, only half-jokingly, that she oughta intern for some big New York literary agent, then turn her appetite for books toward the cause of struggling writers everywhere, starting with her brother and me. We are a cause worth fighting for. I, for one, will be dead one day, perhaps never having enjoyed the fruits of my work. The penguins of Antarctica will be dancing on my bones long after we are all dead and gone. Oh, well. Kate Lee is 27, my lucky number. There’s that, anyway.

Thursday and the day of our return to Appalachia approacheth. I wake with a start (as always lately, too comfy in big beds) and this morning like no other find the strength and focus to pilot my dozy-dream-and-dropped-egg-awakened body out the glass door onto the porch and straight to the sand, drop towel, run, and splash! Into the Atlantic I go, christened and baptized and doused full body in the salty warm syrup waters, calm now but surely later in the season the stuff of hurricane floods and the sucking and slamming away of all this sand, this manmade beauty strip beach of dredged offshore sand.

Thus begins another day on Ocean Isle, a tiny island separated from the mainland only by the wide channel of the Intercoastal Waterway, a community of beach houses old and new, the older houses sporting names like Crusty Cottage and Driftwood Den and Salt Box Special and Last Dime and Giggling Pelican. Correction: that last one is a restaurant. To get booze here on Ocean Isle or anywhere in North Carolina, you gotta pay a visit to the ABC store, or, as Eric calls it, “The Alphabet.” I drag Eric & Jess in there like a couple of deer in the headlights while oldman drunkard I, suddenly feeling like a big lush for buying a case of PBR beer and 5 liters of boxed sangria within the past 48 hours, my contribution to the beach house fridge fillins, buy tequila and triple sec, standard margaritas fixins. Then I take `em next door to a water’s edge shanty bar and order up 3 margi’s to celebrate the alleged sale of The Bridge, my script written with Luci’s mother. Oh, well. One can never have too many causes for celebration, even if they do turn out to be bogus.

Couple of days later and I’m the only one who’s had a margarita. It was a good one, too. Got Eric to hand-squeeze half a dozen lemons for lemonade, some sugar to sweeten and a slice of lime, mmmm! Best margarita I’ve had in awhile. But I’m the only taker. So it appears I’ll be heading back into the woods with a coupla 12 oz. Coke bottles fulla booze. Groovy. The beer however, is already gone. Eradicating my drunkard’s guilt, Eric and Jess put a major dent in that case of PBR.

Papa O has a story for every type of beer or food. So sure enough when Eric and I return from the store with the PBR, he’s got a story. His is about how Pabst lost the loyalty of Milwaukee drinkers and how they’re just lately making a come-back. In the car, I had just told Eric my Pabst story. So Eric jumps on his father’s story and insists that I tell mine. I do. I tell about how in my last summer before high school graduation I was taken to Colorado with friend Rudy O’Meara and his mom and sis for a family trip to their grandparents’ home in Aspen. Arriving there, I was stunned to pass through an archway and gates and continue driving for what seemed miles past stables and barns and various other outbuildings obviously attendant to some grand estate, then to arrive at sure enough, a log cabin mansion easily as grand as the palatial inn atop the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. This was Rudy’s grandparent’s “home.” And so I soon came to learn Rudy’s mother’s maiden name. It was, as you may have guessed by now, Pabst.

In another strange flicker of small world irony, last night Eric’s sister is working through a crossword puzzle when she asks aloud for a five letter city in Utah staring with O. Without so much as a thought, my mouth blurts out “Ogden.” Bingo. It’s a good 30 seconds or so before my brain catches up and reminds me of the sad story behind my knowledge of this obscure piece of Utah geography. Ogden was home to my first publisher, the crooked fuckers Northwest Publishing, Inc who accepted my first novel in 1994, sat on it for a year, then went bankrupt, taking my innocence, my naivete, and my vanity press investment of $2000 with them at first to Vegas and the Bahamas, then later to prison in one of the largest & ugliest examples of vanity press fraud on record. I still feel the sting of this, and its scars are easily visible in my life, the most obvious being the stacks of manuscript beneath my bed, never final edited, never published. But beyond my scars, I think of all the other writers who likewise took it in the ass from the pirates of Ogden, some 1700 of them in all, or so the legal documents said.

Out here in Appalachia, 700 miles along and now on brief hiatus at the beach and soon to stomp another 400 miles of AT terra before I break again for Independence Day in New Hampshire, out here I feel only pity for the scumsuckers and tricksters of the world. I read Kerouac and feel a Dharma bum-kinda peace wash over me as I forgive them all and laugh a happy Buddha laugh and heft my 35 pound rucksack fulla all I need in the world to walk and live and breathe and feel truly free and for the first time in a long time there is a twinkle in my eye. It is the smile of God. It is the knowledge that out here on the perimeter, on the other perimeter, the opposite perimeter from where Jim Morrison saw no stars, there are a zillion stars and infinite possibilities and joys and there is no death, no need of early exit, no fear of that monster emptiness for which Bukowski said, “Dying will solve its power.” I have but just begun to breath and see again. And there are many, many miles to go before I sleep the sleep of Kerouac or Morrison or Luci, too. I love you all, and now leave you to the joys of Heaven. I will get there soon enough.

So on the last full day here at the beach to fully “be me” in every sense and feel me and breathe me and drink me, I niggle Eric into driving me to a thrift store and then to Home Depot where I buy a coupla baby dolls, a caulking gun and an 11 ounce tube of silicon glue. On return to the beach, I hunt down a pile of beach detritus I’ve been gathering for days and set to work gluing colorful shells to the bare plastic skin of dolls. Jessica’s first reaction is typical, and thus forgivable. She finds it “strange” and "weird" and probes me for answers or reassurance. I give her both, and at once, neither. What’s the point of telling her that dolls are cool because, with all the umpff of a disease vector, a doll carries with it so much inbred subconscious “meaning” and “significance” and elicits such personal feelings that, well, they make the perfect template upon which to glue a Freudian id’s wortha junk.

By dusk I am the proud father of two bouncing baby boys. Both sport natty gray hair down to their bare butts, courtesy of the local brand of Spanish moss heretofore hanging from some Carolina coastal jungle tree. And they are armed. Or armored, I should say. Each sports a calcium carbonate equivalent of Kevlar, a bulletproof vest of oyster and every other imaginable seashell. My boys are seashell mosaic and wild-haired beasts. They are my creations, and soon they will land in the hands of nephews Matty and Jake. May they love them, and be loved.

The moon rises tonight dark as a wet dagger’s shine. It sits not two fingers-width above the horizon at arm’s length. She is a lone blood orange in a Parisian black market night sky begging for the memory of Benedict Emerieu, my lost lover and friend. She is the moon, and Pierre de Joinville is the ink on my hip bone, and ever only I can guess they are lost. Not even Google has unearthed them, and thus said is this my greatest fear, that somewhere, mon frere du tatouage et mort. Bad French notwithstanding, I want all my friends accounted for. I want them here with me again, wherever I am.

And the last beach night wanes, and I grow tired. I had so much more to say. C’est la Vie. C’est la Vie.

-RSM

Updated note on upcoming mail drops:

Thanks to a wonderful escape to the beaches of North Carolina
with friends Jess & Eric and family, I am going to be getting into
Waynesboro and Harper's Ferry a little later than planned. Thus, I have
extended the due dates for mail to those drops. Look forward to hearing
you!

Rick Mckinney C/O General Delivery

June 10: Waynesboro VA 22980

June 17: Harpers Ferry WV 25425

If I miss a drop to which you mailed or it comes late,
if you sent it Priority, the USPS will forward it on to
my next stop free of charge. Always address it to Richard
McKinney, even if you put one of my fun names first, like
Jester or Duke, and write on package: HOLD FOR AT THRUHIKER

Harper's Ferry marks nearly the midway point on the trail at 1000
miles! It is home to the AT Conference, the Foundation that coordinates
all trail maintenance and events, and records thruhikes. There I will sign
my name, be photographed and become part of the history of the Appalachian Trail.
-Reeko Suave Jester Duke Lord Flabberjabberwalky Trail Wonkey Tonkey Doo

ooops! there's more!

Borders-ing Madness in Shoppingville

In the kitchen of the O Family home, I crack open my pint of Franziskaner Hefe-Weisse, a gift from Eric, pour, and taste. Ahh. There are few finer tastes in the world. I can think of but one. But every source of that sweet sodden-panty wine has left me, or I her, leaving me out here in the Appalachian parallel world of abstinence, cock roots, poison ivy vines and vaginal-wounded trees, celibate by default, and thirsty by God.

Today was "waste-a-day" day whilst we wait for Eric's pop to pilot us back to the very dirt doorstep where we got off-trail, some obscure roadside portal in Troutville, VA. From there it will be back through the magic wardrobe and into the forests of Aslan again. Aslan, poor old Jesus-freak lion, I hope he'll forgive us our departure from our regal duties in that land. The beach called, and I, hungry water dog and lover of forward flips into waves and diving pelicans and faceplants in the sand just because I can and salt on my lips and in my nose and full moon's rising oer the Atlantic, mmm. Just couldn't resist.

Did the full-immersion into consumer reality today, just for the shock of it, just for the buzz of fear & loathing a major shopping mall sprawl affords a modern day barkeating, Prozac-snortin' Edward Abbey-esque child of capitalistic doom like me. Love it. Give me Regal Cinemas with 400 theaters and 87 bathrooms and a labyrinth of tunnels to lose my inflated ego in, to lose my mind and melt my bipolar ice caps and bring on The Day After Tomorrow with all its pat plot pseudo-emotions and too-fast progression to the end of the world. But Oh! Wow! What fan-fuckin-tastic CG waves and freezing people and all that shit. Loved it. Just what I needed before stepping back into the forest to walk more (statistically) every day than the average American walks in a month to and fro car and through the aisles of Wally World, etc. Just the thing.

The real bummer came after the movie when I found myself milling through a Borders books getting ever-more depressed (me without my meds now several days thanks to failings in the mailings of so much and many supplies from California) awaiting Eric and Jess and Eric's trippy sister Karen O (whom I've tried like hell in ten days to get to warm up to me, to no avail). They'd gone to see the third Harry Potter and all its dark teen-Harry villainy and I woulda gone too just to see Gary Oldman put his freak on the goofy Potter scene but that I JUST HAD TO SEE the new apocalyptic flick on the big screen and was sure it'd be gone from theaters a month or so from now when next I'd be out of the Woods and in the shopping world again.

So I'm milling around a bookstore, a place that, by now in my so-called career, should be
a place of pride and celebration for writer me, but isn't. And as usual I gotta necromance my failure-filled past, so I plug my name into the AUTHOR search on the Border's catalogue computer and voila! There I am, author of the supposedly "out of print" novel "Catcher in the Sky" and all because the fraudulent swine father-son team atop Northwest Publishing, my first and last publisher, did manage at least to register my book with the Library of Congress, thank you very little. Ugh.

And in come Jess & Eric and Karen O. Jess comes up to me first where I stand poised between the "Automotive" and "Nature" sections, both reading a book on edible plants and guarding THE BOOK, Harrod's baby "Art Cars: etc, etc" which I was quite pleased to find in stock here at Borders Books, Wherever Suburb, Charlotte, North Carolina, thank you very much. I had mentioned to J&E that should they wish to see me in a book, this is where they might look.

Smash Cut to me in the passenger seat of Eric's car, Eric driving, girls in the back. We're driving back to the O Family Estate at Aero Plantation, a bigass brick castle, modest, homey, a little museumy in the front rooms but fulla love and damn nice people his parents. Aero Plantation, the one and only upscale community development I've ever walked around with leg muscles to spare, wild eyes and cranked-up racehorse-on-speed kinda energy, walking and shaking my head in amazement as I pass home after regal home with, not garages, but HANGERS! Every house a little airplane hanger with airplanes ready to go! Amazing.

Smash Cut. Smash my ego and squish it on the floor. Radiohead on the CD player playing that song that sings "..this is not happening" the song I made love to Alice to as it played on random repeat again and again for hours as we rocked that rickety old Idyllwild house for one glorious night last summer, the crescendo on a week or month, whatever, of pure good lovin' some of the only lovin' I've had in years, a great fuckin' memory locked inside a great song. But now I'm sittin' in a car just shaking my head (internally of course so as not to worry the others in the car with suspicious head-bobblings), sad, sad as the greatest dreamer at the death of another dream. It's all about the Art Car book, I'm ashamed to say. I just expected more.

I mean, if you were my friend, even a new friend, and you'd pulled me aside in a bookstore and said, "Hey, check it out. This is me in this book. See?" Even if I was totally unimpressed and unthrilled and the book was about plumbing or dental extractions or rectal sores, I STILL woulda made a big show of saying, "WOW! That's YOU in that book! That's far fuckin' out!" I woulda called people from all around, called over the name-tag-wearin' wanna-be writer bookstore employee types and gloated at my protégée, saying, "Look! This guy's IN THIS BOOK!" I mean, come on. How many people are IN books? How many people in that store that day could pull a book off the shelf and say, "This is me! These are my friends!" Zzz-ERO!

Not so for J & E & KO. If they were even a modicum impressed, they sure hid it well. KO may as well have just been informed that she'd been impregnated by aliens for chissakes and had switched off and gone straight into denial. Oh, dammit. I know it's wrong to expect ANYTHING from ANYONE but ugh ugh ugh! It was sure as hell depressing. My first feeling: I hate my life. And next: Kill me now. And last (a smidgen more sane and recently employed toward laudable self-adjustment): Get me back to the F$%#-ing Trail! I mean, forget for a second that I'm wearing this self-sewn cloak of shame and am chock fulla irony over the fact that after fifteen years of writing books & plays & essay & poems, my car has an agent and I STILL DON'T. Forget that J & E & KO didn't know any of that shit. My display of the Art Car book by Lark Press and the ever-beautiful and majestic Mr. Harrod Blank, still went over like the proverbial fart in church.

Fuck it.

And fuck Jack Kerouac. Goddamnit I love that guy, but dammit dammit dammit I just don't want be like him. I don't wanna live like him and I don't wanna die like him. But whammo bingo! I read Dharma Bums this week and what do you know? His path reads like a roadmap of my own half-mad wanderings, his words and poems and spiritual meanderings a mirror to my own. I love him. I hate him. But if hate him, it's not really him I hate but comparisons made between me and him.

I want to be Old Money rich fat and happy and have the problems of the rich to deal with instead of mine. I don't cherish this golden yolk of freedom called poverty and nothing-left-to-lose. I hate it. I despise my obscurity in a world where fame is everything and yet I don't NEED fame. I need the financial security that fame might-oughta bring, but whatever. I love you, Jack. But don't, as I bade S.Plath not do, don't put your dead poet ju-ju on me. You are dead and I am living. And I wanna live a long life, "longevity has its place."

If I could fly, I just might this night walk down the street and commandeer one of the neighbors little planes and fly outa here. I am antsy for the trail. My whole countenance this past few days has been one of extreme self-control, waiting, waiting for the ride back to my beloved trail. I loved the beach. I loved Papa O's delicious gourmet meals day in and day out for daze and sunny salt-sprayed sand & surf & wine & re-lax-ation daze, but I am ready now. And had I my California BMW here or the money for bus or the guts to hitch a hundred small hitches outa the burbs and upstate into Virginia and to the Trail, I would be gone now. Ten days is half a dozen days too many. But I knew that when I climbed into Eric's sister's car. I knew it might be a sketchy-sketch too long, but… I signed on for the whole trip. And it was glorious. But I'm pounding the beers now to drown my fears, and there's that last of Crown Royal from Mary to whack down so I can fill the jug with denatured alcohol for my new cat food can-stove. I drink alone, and I dissipate evermore by the hour. God Almighty get me back to the woods.

Amen.

-RSM
Yayzeus Christoos Jester Jalopy who was once a Lord and a Duke

[Postscript: A funny thought occurred to me just now, upon finishing this rant, this blog, this post, whatever. I have come across several passages in Dharma Bums that I wanted to quote in these pages, but likely never will, because tomorrow I'll be back on the trail and not at all savvy to luggin' another x-amount of ounces of book pages with me in my carefully calculated, algorithmically postulated and desegregated slimmed down and vastly-lightened backpack. So.. just READ THE BOOK YOURSELF! I highly recommend it, though it be ever-so-full of hopelessly hopeful Buddhist happy bullshit, it has its merits, and they are many. Read it. Until then, there's one passage that touched my irony button in a most sensually pleasant way.

Kerouac is at a party. There is a poet tacking off a list of all the great poets of their time, all the Beats, where they are, what they are doing, and what he reckons are their chances for success and immortality. He places himself high in the ranking for the latter. When he finishes his list, someone asks about Kerouac, in the character of Ray Smith:
"What about Smith?"
"Well I guess he's a Bodhisattva in its frightful aspect, that's about all I can say." (Aside sneering: "He's too drrrronk all the time.")

What poet comes first to mind when you think "Beat Generation?"

I rest my case..

..all 24 bottles.

This is me, June 1st, trying like hell to get Karen O to warm up to me, and then, giving up, opting instead to throw her in the Atlantic. Happy 20th Birthday, Karen O!