A Limp in the Woods (Day 32)

An Appalachian Trail Tale
Day 32: Thursday, April 25th, 2013
Hampton Trail/AT Junction to a mile past Abingdon Gap Shelter = 39 miles
Miles to date: 458

He Lived Alone; He Suffered Alone; He Died Alone

In 2006 I hiked the PCT a second time, because I wanted to experience something new. Also, I’ll try anything twice. The notion seems off, but a single path is plenty enough for new experiences. No two hikes are alike. A bored philosopher once tweeted as much. “No man steps onto the same path twice. The path has changed, and so has he.” Earlier this year I deliberated taking a stab at the PCT a third time since the third time’s a charm, not unlike the first or second.

But it was time for something new from top to bottom. Or from bottom to top(1). I didn’t want to do something comfortable, something familiar. I wished to step outside my comfort zone, onto a new path and a new walk of life. One month in and I’m glad I have. I think.

The AT is challenging. Each day I’ve been tested on multiple levels, with the notable omission of any mental lifting, save for this journal. There are rewards, but not to the degree a veteran PCTer might desire. In spite of this, I rise from the dead each morning eager to see what the day will bring, and what’s around the next bend. This relentless curiosity is what keeps me going, always. Hang in there, there’s no need to hang yourself yet, I mumble to my lonesome. But by mid-afternoon, when I pine to be supine, my thoughts drift back to the malicious, the morose.

What’s the point in this? All I do is walk and stare at the ground. Screw it; there’s nothing else to see otherwise. The script never changes. I should just end it all before it’s all over.

No matter how nasty the nosh (hunger, that best sauce), mealtime alleviates the most destructive of these thoughts. So too does the trail’s social scene. As does, from time to time, the nightly standstill. But the cycle commences again ten or twelve hours later. 

Like a harebrained hamster hurrying on its never-ending wheel, you’d think I might figure it all out eventually--what’s causing the squeaking. Perhaps then I might head for a real change of pace somewhere. I’ve got the time, the means and the mindset, but no: I just walk and ponder why it is I believe the next curve in the path will change everything. I ponder why I cling limpet-like to the hope that maybe, just maybe, it will provide the catalyst for some sort of powerful, empowering transformation, ala Cheryl Strayed in Wild. It never does. Or it hasn’t yet. I envy Strayed (a pseudonymous surname; née Nyland). I keep hoping for an epiphany, but I think for me the walking is the epiphany. And so I soldier on.

William: “Oi sir, what are you doing?”

Chaucer: “Uh... trudging. You know, trudging?” [pause]

Chaucer: “To trudge: the slow, weary, depressing yet determined walk of a man who has nothing left in life except the impulse to simply soldier on.”

~From the flick A Knight’s Tale

The trail is a good substitute for happiness. Let’s hope they got it wrong when they wrote that happiness cannot be pursued--that it must ensue. Who are they anyway? Any old fool knows you can’t buy happiness. But you can pick yourself up a backpack, and that’s close.

The walking was ridiculous from the onset. More on that in a minute. It’d poured all night and I had to reposition my tent twice, to escape the tributary traveling through it. When I moved the second time, another widow-maker crepitated and crashed to Earth. It was the fifth suicidal tree of this hike. Another reminder why I need to better scrutinize each night’s digs. But I forgot about potential river beds. “Take me to the river, drop me in the water,” sang a band I love. They didn’t know the river comes to you.

The trail itself was a river (no one warned me the AT requires a PFD). But a grueling seventeen-hundred-foot climb up Pond Mountain helped generate needed heat. There was no other point to the ascent, since it looped back close to Hampton at US Highway 321 six trail miles later. Nor did it offer any vistas, just a feeling of fatigue and an alleged sense of accomplishment.

When in Hampton yesterday I watched hikers skip the circuitous mudfest. (Skip, as in avoid, not gambol.) They headed up the highway to the AT junction near the impounded water of Lake Watauga, snipping four miles from their hikes, and missing all the tree-cloaked clambering. They were wise. Others hitchhiked (what thru-hikers call “yellow-blazing”). Their loyalty lies not to the trail, but to the end of the trail. I can’t say I blame ‘em.

When I neared the pointless peak, at the Pond Flats camping area, I heard a dog in the woods. He(2) was barking frantically and sounded like the exact opposite of an emotional support animal. A mastiff or a wolf, no doubt. I hoped he wasn’t a cadaver dog searching for me. It was clear the pooch was alone and in a panic; there were no houses nearby. He seemed to be darting in all directions. The forest was too dense and the area too boggy for a human or a large-footed primate to be moving as quickly. I called out and tried to locate him (“come Cujo!”), but decided it was best not to get eaten alive, by hound or ground.

A long descent led me to the aforementioned highway via Shook Branch Road. I made like a chicken--the chicken--and crossed the road--damn, cars move fast!--before benching my butt beside the lucent lake. I draped my belongings and enjoyed a snack. Everything had been soaked last night, but it was sunny and dry now. For that I was appreciative.

Easy E, the twenty-ish year-old, soon arrived and did the same. Our crap was scattered everywhere--on trees, benches, dumpsters, fencing, and on the ground itself, a freshly fertilized lawn. (Who the fuck fertilizes beside a lake?!) We’d stripped to our rain pants, so all else could dry. Right then a Highway Patrol car pulled up, but fled the scene after one glimpse. No nod, no niceties, no nothing.

Drying the tent out

The trail skirted the man-made lake in a chain of mud bogs. I’d successfully avoided all mud with some acrobatics and some pole-vaulting--plant the poles and spring vanward farther than without. At one point the way briefly divided for an alternate, official High Water Route, but I failed to notice the junction. I was forced to slog straight through shin-deep mud, toward the lake’s dam, past the well-concealed Lake Watauga Shelter. As luck would have it, it was the last of the sodden trail, and my shoes, which had remained relatively dry to that point, were now saturated. From the knees down I looked as though I was made of mud.

Like all things concrete, the dam was a deformity, a defacement, a disgrace. But it offered as much wide-scale scenery as I’d witnessed in a while, so I partook in another break atop it, to slurp some of the vistas up, as well as to air-out my shoes and socks. I would also take advantage of a porta-potty intended for maintenance workers, shoplifting some of its treasured TP.

By now the temperature was warm and welcoming. Easy E was already long gone, pedal to the floor, to the fore. There, the trail looked a nefarious affair, so any and all respite was alright by me. If I was still Easy’s age, I’d attack the trail with the same intensity and fervor, but I’m twice as old now and a little less keen (due to the certain--yet uncertain--effects of any and all ill-provoked eagerness). As always, on the AT or anywhere else, it’s a case of HIKE IT FORWARD, one small step at a time. With enough of them, progress continues. If not progress, amateurgress.

Progress continued until the Nick Grindstaff gravestone (1851-1923) on Iron Mountain, where I sat down and watched a flawlessly round moon crawl up behind the serrated skyline. I was alongside others: Mountain Goat (mid-twenties, sweet beard, New Hampshire); his girl Tiny Klutz (late twenties, no beard, NH); Backstreet (early twenties, Orlando, FL, no facial fuzz); and a buddy of his whose trailname I forgot upon hearing. The epitaph on the chimney-shaped monument read: “He lived alone, he suffered alone, he died alone.” Nick had been a hermit par excellence, not a Thoreauvian counterfeit-loner, but a full-fledged recluse. No doubt, he picked a good spot to live. And to die.

It was the ideal evening to pay homage to the hermit: the circular pink moon, an armada of reflective gray-silver clouds swirling around, bats flittering frantically above, a slight mist lingering, and an overall eerie ambiance. We had to wonder if Nick ever found himself frightened up here, far above the uninhabited vales below. Such pronounced solitude would terrorize most souls. But then he wasn’t like most souls.

Orphaned at three by the death of his ma and pa, Nick and his siblings remained with relatives until adulthood, whereupon the family farm was dispersed amongst them. Grindstaff tilled the land for five years before selling his portion and ranging west. He soon swapped rings, but would lose his wife to an early demise. He retreated east and would eventually lose everything else he had--accounts differ as to why; some say he drank his money away; others claim he was robbed of everything. In any case, he then repaired to the hills, backtracking to civilization just once every six months for the next forty years, for supplies and the occasional haircut.

The quartet had an Indian fire going; had there been enough flat land nearby I’d have called it a day. Instead, I decided to enjoy a full moon hike and carry on into the velvet night. I felt better and better as the day unwound and had looked forward to a full moon hike. One never knows when he’ll encounter a big, fat moon on this trail. Tides of clouds smothered the first one and could well enshroud the next three or four. You take ‘em when you can get ‘em.

Trail Magic! A box full of soft drinks and snacks!

An England-style stile

I forgot one thing. On the AT trees negate the celestial bodies above, creating an eclipse of the universe(3). All I could distinguish was a deep, dark, rather uninviting forest. Regrettably, I had to have my headlamp on almost the whole time. Trees cast their spooky shadows everywhere. Stumbling blocks lurked in those shadows. I’d end up carrying on farther than I had during daylight hours, past TN Highway 91 and the only officially-designated wheelchair accessible section of the AT (no trees!), through some cultivated plots. I went up and over a few English-styled stiles, past the Double Springs Shelter, past US Highway 421 at Low Gap, past the Abingdon Gap Shelter, and past the point of coherence.

Dead man walking

It’s now a whisker past midnight. The moon is straight overhead and bright enough to read a book by. I’m nesting atop a bed of brown, crunchy leaves, too tired to eat or pitch my writing studio. No writing studio, no more writing.

The trail is just feet away, so I’ve hung a conspicuous DO NOT DISTURB sign on a head-high tree branch between me and it. This way I might sleep in tomorrow, which is now officially today. (It seems it’s always today.) I’m slipping in and out of consciousness; it’s likely I won’t finish this journal entry the way I hope to, with something witty or

"Foot"note 1: 'GAME' is the name of the game: GA-ME, Georgia to Maine. 'MEGA' is the southbounder's ellipsis for ME-GA. Mega Game is a yo-yo hike from Maine back to Maine via Georgia. A few have actually done this.

"Foot"note 2: I didn't know the canine's gender but figured it a male, since the dog sounded loaded with testosterone and anger.

"Foot"note 3: There was an actual, de facto lunar eclipse going on this evening, a penumbral one, but it was not visible on the AT, and not just because of the vegetation. All the other continents were treated to the show, alas. Just not Americanis Norte.