A Limp in the Woods (Day 98)

An Appalachian Trail Tale
Day 98: Sunday, June 30th, 2013
Mile 1386-ish to Hemlock Springs Campsite = 16-ish miles
Miles to date: 1,402

NYC

Weird dream last night. Nonsexual for once. But vivid. I rounded a corner in the trail. (The AT is all corners. A long, slippery game of Twister. A 2,200-mile turn lane. Turn, turn, turn.) Around that corner I came face-to-face with a southbounder, only he wasn’t a hiker, just a guy using the AT to avoid complete homelessness, like myself. But we weren’t blood brothers or about to exchange friendship bracelets. He wore a cowboy hat, greasy denim and flannel, and he seemed to secrete a violent temperament. I’m a fuming man--in more ways than one--but this dude was downright deadly. Don’t ask why; I could just tell. A mercurial, twitchy type, evoking terror. Neck tattoos. A wandering eye. Scars aplenty. It only took a few seconds, when he asked if I had any supplies he could “use.”

“What sort of supplies?”

“Food, mostly.”

I laughed. “Let me get this straight. You want to use my food, but not have it?”

“Yeah.”

He was straight-faced, and two-faced. (Both faces were made for radio.)

“Well, why don’t I just give you everything I have?” I replied, facetiously.

This he didn’t take well. He told me I shouldn’t be a dickhead.

“I was just joking, buddy.”

“I ain’t your buddy.”

“And I’m not yours,” I answered. “But we’re cool.”

“You ain’t,” Mr. Erratic retorted.

“Look, man. I’ll just be on my way, if you’ll just let me by. I don’t have much to offer you, I’m afraid.”

“I think you do,” he rasped, pulling out a large serrated buck knife from its embossed leather sheath. Its thick blade was gleaming and sharp-looking (not sharp as in smart, but as in sharp) and was no less than ten-inches long, or roughly twice as long as the diameter of my neck. “And you should be afraid.”

“Look, man, you don’t want to mess with me,” I said. “I know karaoke. And karate.”

“Big fuck,” he replied. “And I know someone about to get disemboweled.”

“That’s a big word,” I sighed. “But it’s your funeral.”
“No it ain’t,” he replied, “‘cause I’m uh gonna kill you till you’re dead.”

Still somehow sleeping, I could feel myself beginning to sweat. I turned and rolled over, adjusting my pillow (aka: food bag).

Luckily, the nightmare ended when, drawing on my superior command of the martial arts, I turned and hightailed it. Play it cool, or play it safe: suffice it to say I stuck with safety. I quickly lost the dude, and would soon wonder why dreams lose their way.

I awoke to twitching legs, relieved it was nothing more than a dreadful dream. Consciousness allowed a much safer truth to set in. I quickly melted back into a more peaceful existence, happily assembling my gear and fortifying my feet for another day’s extended toddle. They, being of unsound body and mind, require a lengthy preheat, or this dream becomes a taunt. Without a warm-up, I can barely stand up.

Having taken care of both duties and the caffeinated crap, I headed in to the water park for the day. Gnawing on indestructible meatless jerky, I began plumbing the depths of my soul. I came to a standstill soon, to take a photo of a psychedelic fungal growth at the base of a dying tree. (Below is photographic proof it wasn’t my fungal growth.) Overhead, a woodpecker repeatedly poleaxed its head into the widow-maker, in an apparent effort to send it crashing down that much sooner. I walked on and thought about such peculiar behavior, endlessly hammering away at something, knowing you’ll probably never finish. What a birdbrain. The bird, too.

It wasn’t long when I’d strode up to the stone William Brien Memorial Shelter. A lone hiker, Balls Layin’ Low, sat listening to Jake Bugg on his phone’s speaker, the smartest use of a “smart”phone I’d seen or heard yet. The goateed guy lacked the usual social polish--rough not only around the edges but in the middle too. Every other word was a curse word and every few seconds he lifted an ass cheek to fart. I liked him at once.

Balls was built like a brick shed, the kind no self-respecting big, bad wolf would ever endeavor to blow down. For a second I worried he might be the nutcase from my nightmare. I began huffing and puffing, a premonition of demolition. But he was too quick-witted and didn’t have a knife, nor any neck tattoos.

We shared a puff of his smokable petri dish, a glass contrivance he called, “The Magic Drag.” I then headed to the steadily-flowing “unreliable” spring. I drank up and tried to tank up. One pint would have to do; I’d’ve collected another for safety sake, but was forced to flee. The local blood-sucker tribe was on fire, and reinforcements were arriving in droves: biting flies, midges, gnats, and no-see-ums (I can’t be sure though--I never saw ‘um). Even some ground troops started showing, those ticked-off ticks. Had I had a flamethrower I might’ve stuck around some. Fight fire with fire and quelled my thirst a little more.

Threats aside, H2O accessibility has been a no-brainer all year; the next source is seldom more than two hours away. The lengthiest waterless stretch so far has been a rather trifling fifteen or sixteen miles, a skip and a hop by western US trail standards, where I’ve previously been schooled. This and frequent food resupply (i.e., towns) are the prime considerations that help make the AT relatively easy to swallow, unlike the meatless jerky I was still trying to work over. I couldn’t dare imagine what life would be like if the Appalachians were waterless. Many a hiker would perish, no doubt. Make no bones about it: funnybones would be cracking.

In its own hushed style the guidebook showed there’d be little to lose sleep over for miles to come. It failed to mention the mosquitoes. That’s the tradeoff, of course. Water everywhere = mosquitoes everywhere. I’m not sure a drought would be such a bad thing. But then I love the svelte load on my spine, as well as not being forced to endlessly chug or lug liquids just to reach the next supply line. This year, that source has been everywhere and often straight overhead, seeping from the sky.

That same guidebook promised views of New York City’s skyline. The concrete wasteland was just thirty miles east. But a chunky summer haze, like lemony mustard gas, smothered the Erector Set gone mad. (I’ve yet to visit to a city that’s not in its own way. But smog means jobs and money, honey.) Airports aside, I’ve never been to the Big Inorganically-Grown Apple. It seems to me an uninhabitable urban cage, even for a visitor. And so the bustling cesspool remains sight unseen. It probably doesn’t exist.

No matter. I didn’t hike the AT to examine the social organism, the megamachine, the huge labor camps, the ant farm, the spiritless subservient urban zombies. Few of us do. (I used to hate cities; I still do, but I used to too.) I moved on. Sooty ol’ NYC and its sirens will probably reach me before I reach it.

I have a brother who lives in the city. That city. (It seems more people have been there than I have.) Haven’t seen him since ‘91. That was at my sister’s wedding in another tumescent pit, one called Sacratomato. It was the last time I saw any of my siblings in person or in costume, and the last most them saw one another. Family die-namics.

The brother in mention and I were never friends. We tried. I thought about him here, wondering why we never got on, or why we wished to. The Stanford-trained scholar is now a prostitute, or so his website advertises. I always wanted to be a prostitute--might get me laid once in a while--so you’d think he and I’d relate. But he’s of the gay varietal, and that I do not wish for. Statistically speaking, one of us five children was bound to be gay. Or cancerous.

My female sister once told me he primarily fucks stealthy military men, all the way up to colonels and whatnot. But he’s also paid to perform by (and on) priests, professors, politicos, policemen, pilots and other distinguished pawns. Society’s influencers, movers and shakers. From time to time the fop even screws normal and normally gay men, or is screwed by them. Society’s low end of the totem pole. Caged animals, all.

I set my gaze that way and bade him well, wondering how many couples, gay or ungay, were currently enjoying hanky panky in that town of transplants. That fucking city. Some people are so poor all they know is the city.

As I crossed a noisy gray road and approached the Perkins Memorial Tower, in the Bear Mountain State Park, I’d caught Pfeiffer, the thirty-something year-old thru-hiker. She and I walked and talked past throngs of perfumed people. (Read: Sunday, in a park, not far from one of the US’s largest metropolitan areas.) A young couple stopped us, asking if we were thru-hikers. “We are,” Pfeiffer replied. The enthusiasm they radiated piqued our interest.

“Have you done the trail before?” I asked.

“Yes,” responded the smiley gal, “just back in 2011, though it already feels as far back ago as 1911.”

Had a floor been around we’d’ve been floored. To be sure (flouting my usual modus operandi), she did not look the type. Much too attractive and adorned with some wide, weighted hips. Corn fed, Montana misogynists might mutter. I just couldn’t picture her surviving this trail.

But she had!

It was awesome. The two pulled out a sizable spread for Pfeiffer and I to enjoy, before they left us to it. And that we did. They’d offered a veritable picnic of sandwiches, juice, cookies, and chopped veggies, so much so I had to cart some of it away in a doggie bag. I am not proud to cop to this, as leftovers are nothing short of a criminal act to the true thru-hiker.

It’s interesting, this gal’s comportment. It seems after their adventures, so many thru-hikers pay it forward. Usually to the very next crop of thru-hikers, or those behind them in the current class. All the generosity they’d received. All the colas, all the rides, all the edibles, and all the free places to sleep. And none of it is forgotten or under-appreciated. Indeed, each time I’ve motorcycled past a National Scenic Trail, I’ve meandered a ways up trail and left what I could--a six pack of beer or cola, snacks, a note of encouragement, the promise of a ride. Much of the thru-hiking community is like this.

 

 

By and large, I don’t hike to be part of a community. The pictures above, all taken on today’s trek, illustrate the community I prefer being a part of. I hike to avoid humanity. Or its hordes anyhow, of which I’m absolutely averse.

But I have to confess: whenever I find myself reminiscing about prior thru-hiking experiences, it is the people and their kindness that come to the fore. I may have forgotten some names and some faces (a good thing in some cases), but I never fail to remember their kind. Or their kindness. That’s real community, that.

Ah, hell. I’m just here to meet women.

By afternoon, Pfeiffer and I passed a string of notable landmarks, including a zoo. (It’s true: the AT cuts through a zoo!)(1). At an elevation of one hundred and sixty-three feet, the animal penitentiary happens to be the lowest spot of the entire trail. The nadir is immediately beside a bear cage, curiously enough. Signs warned us--DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS! Overflowing garbage cans told us it was fine to feed the landfills.

After the zoo we crossed an oil-lacquered, coffee-colored Hudson River, forty-four miles upstream, and fewer than thirty miles as the crowbar flies, from that Big Festering Worm-ridden Apple, industrialism’s finest frenzy. The corporate world, with its voguish gated communities and surveillance cameras and clamor. That addled, aimless mess.

We spoke of how neither of us knew the AT was this accessible. An AT hiker could’ve felt those planes hit.

By last call we’d set up shop at Hemlocks Springs Campsite, ostensibly remote (or remotely ostensible) but within earshot of a clamorous NY Hwy 9D. Not far from the river. Our makeshift campsite was invented by previous hikers, likely exploited by generations since. It was perched just beyond a thin, coruscant creek, which promised a body wash.

Pfeiffer’s friend Lentil, a reserved young male thru-hiker, less hairy than most, would ultimately disembark from AT Boulevard, pitching his personal prison alongside ours. After the Spartan sponge down, I called Ruth on my little pay-as-you-go-broke flip-phone, keeping her abreast on events. But she, like most other women, is already keeping a breast.

Two, in fact.

"Fur"note 1: This is perhaps to illustrate to paying patrons what true-to-life undomesticated human beings look, and smell, like. "Stand back kids!" says the overprotective dad. "They're untamed animals and they might bite."