A Limp in the Woods (Day 106)

An Appalachian Trail Tale
Day 106: Monday, July 8th, 2013
Sharon Mountain Campsite to Brassie Brook Shelter = 19 miles
Miles to date: 1,501

Poking the Bearbell

~~~~~~~~~~

TO THE FEISTY CRITIC who complained I haven’t described enough of the AT’s biota, let it be noted: you are free, presumably, to walk the way and see it for yourself. You impudent, audacious, anonymous mouse. I never knew I’d be tested on my experiences. And I’d hoped my observations would be taken in the spirit in which they’ve been presented. But no.

This is my journey and my journal. I admit I am no forest whisperer. I’m no scientist. (I did author this key science paper.) Obviously I love the natural world, but I am no naturalist. (I am an unnaturalist.) Nor am I an ecologist or dendrologist, or any other ~ologist. I lack the eye for the nuances of form or color (green notwithstanding). I cannot translate into words the reality and scope of Nature. Only a fool fails to recognize something so real and tremendous exceeds representation; describing Nature is a fool’s exercise. Nature cannot even describe itself! It can only be experienced and celebrated and understood in person.

You’ll be glad to know it’s easier to walk the Appalachian Trail than it is to write about it. Put yourself through its paces!

There’ll be no sweat off my back, besides what’s already dripping, if you refrain from perusing this blog. Please, discerning reader, return when you have something nice to say, which I suspect will be on the 24th of NEVER. Meanwhile, take your vitriol and be on your way; the path awaits.

May your trails extend to no end, may the forest be with you. Good manners certainly aren’t. Lastly, if you think this blog is bad, wait ‘til you see the movie. Oh, and lastly-er, I am my sole critic (get it? SOLE critic?! Whew, I kill me!), who no other detractor can match.

 “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.”
~Monsieur Muir

PS: Here’s some motivation for you, courtesy of Peter Bingen.

Some time back a thru-hiker colleague, Easy E as I recall, joked or suggested or insisted that there ought to be a reality TV show chronicling the life and times of AT thru-hikers--their interaction (if any), their nutrition (if any), their bathing habits (if any), their thoughts (if any).

“I don’t think people--or whatever ya call TV viewers--would find our reality too compelling,” I replied. I asked him about the most exciting thing he’s experienced on the trail.

“You know, I don’t know,” before pausing. “I guess you’re right.”

“Drama is what television viewers desire, and drama ain’t what exists on the trail. And the kind that does, well, ain’t too entirely dramatic, not when beamed onto a screen. That’s reality.”

“Damn, he replied, “at the time, it sounded like a good idea. But I can see it wouldn’t be--”

He stopped himself. “We walk too much.”

By now, fifteen hundred miles in, the trail’s leading reality is monotony. Muh. Not. Tuh. Nee. To edge toward any semblance of reality--whatever that is--such a TV show would need to be broadcast in black and white (with a greenish tint), no matter how it’s filmed. It’d also be aired almost entirely without sound. A reality show of AT thru-hikers would be akin to watching golf, without a final score.

Today’s score--today’s monotony--was rhythmic and meditative. No one thru-hikes for excitement, insofar as any thrill tends to ebb after the first few days, save maybe for the sporadic thunderstorm or hitchhike. This isn’t to say thru-hiking is boring. No true challenge bores. For my part it’s not about fun; it’s about therapy, about perspicacity, about connectivity. Fire up the old spirit; work up a cleansing sweat; work through some thoughts; attempt to gain some understanding; connect to the land; connect to others. Not a bad way to live, really. Really, as in reality. We each create our own reality.

I like to think it’s about finding time enough to be diligently idle in this crazed world--to paraphrase Keats. We live in a world where doing nothing is synonymous with being nothing. Yet most of us know, on some level, we’re happiest when relaxing with loved ones, especially in historically natural settings, and that the ant-like human microcosm is a strange, strange place in which we feel we might not fully belong. It’s part of the reason why recreating--re-creating--is such big business. Because it’s understood that almost every one of us needs to step away, or at least get away, from time to time. Else, insanity is assured. 

When half the day had gone I met Bearbell, a French-speaker. Bearbell worked for BMW for the past six years, in one of the Carolinas. A Frenchman building German cars with Japanese parts in the United States. He said he designed dashboards on cars he could never afford. Weird world; the company you work for doesn’t pay you enough to buy the products the company makes. He too was thru-hiking for therapeutic reasons. His fiancé left him not long ago. We joined forces, brothers in arms. Brothers in stride. Cohorts with broken hearts.

As a skilled discerner of language and the subtle differences in dialect, I asked him what part of Eastern Canada he was from.

“I’m not,” my fellow wayfarer answered. “I am from Fraunze.” A polyglot polywog!

Forgiving him of this fact, I replied, “that’s what I thought. Nobody’s perfect.”

“Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything!”

~Steve Martin

I was sure his mother tongue was more fun and colorful and literate and elaborate and poetic than his poor global English, but he told me, in a language almost resembling my own, that he’d started hiking north from Harpers Ferry. The thirty-three year-old was hoping to trek to Katahdin before making his way by car back down to Harpers. From there he planned to resume walking south, all the way to Springer Mountain. “After zat I can kiss zis trail and zis country goodbye.”

“Will that be a French kiss?” I asked.

Hikers call this style of thru-hiking a flip-flop. There’s a phalanx of flip-floppers on trail. It’s good use of the seasons and the only way Bearbell could complete an AT thru-hike, since his job didn’t end till most this year’s thru-hiking crop had already passed the halfway point. He knew starting in Georgia in June would’ve been anything but peachy. Same for Maine, being that it is unduly rugged, on even the hardest of men and women. Bearbell is neither the hardest man nor, far as I could tell, the hardest woman.

Bearbell and pack

The Frenchman’s body is concealed by a coating of Whoopee Cushion. Body by Ben & Jerry. A pudge. Embonpoint, them Eastern Canadians call it. Ahn-Bwan-PWAN. He breathes heavily, laboring beneath a pack that’s more than pudgy. (Think OVERSIZE LOAD AHEAD; man has gone to the moon and back with less.) And he’s as white as bleached toilet paper, but with hair stuck to it, to him. But he’s able to entertain himself, and this is absolutely key on the trail, and perhaps in life. I’d come to learn, sooner than later, he’s also outspoken. (But only by a few.) I’ve got a new friend.

Bearbell got his trail ID because of a bothersome bell dangling from his pack. He placed it there under the impression it would ward off any murderous bears. I told him that in Alaska that’s how they identify what bears eat, through thorough examination of their scat. “Leaves, berries, roots, salmon bones, deer bones, small amounts of fur, traces of pepper spray, and small metal bells. You think bears get that big on berries alone?” He didn’t laugh, confiding in me the beast is the only thing he was afraid of along this threadlike trail. He fears being part of a bearskin rug. “We do not haz bears in ze north of Fraunze.”

“But you do have secondhand smoke, and that’s scary,” I said. Secondhand smoke is France’s chief export.

“Good point.”

“Nah, bears are also the only thing I fear out here,” I added. “Along with Lyme Disease, toppling trees, lightning, wild boars, scary right wing ex-vet dudes, and venomous snakes. Oh, and premature suicide.”

He went on to tell me he’s terror-stricken by brown bears; black bears; grizzly bears; bi-polar bears; panda bears; koala bears; teddy bears; Care Bears; Fozzie Bear; gummy bears; the Chicago Bears; the Riverside Elementary School Bears in Newport News, VA; and even Yogi Bear. Yogi’s animated friend Boo-Boo also strikes fear. “I don’t even trust zat finger-pointing Smokey ze Bear.”

He made no mention of Bear Bryant or Bear Grylls. But he did assure me if he were attacked by any type of ursa, Winnie the Pooh included, he would not have to play dead. (It is a bit silly; we’re to rely on our acting skills if attacked!)

“I’m a cub; bear with me.”

~Bearbell the Beginner, unawares his wordplay

I told him not to stress. “We’ll hike together; bears like to have options.”

“Plus I have my Made-in-China Swiss-like Army knife, Classic model. With its one-inch blade, its fingernail file, its screwdriver, its micro-scissors, and its tweezers, no self-respecting bear is gonna mess with us. And anyway, if you were attacked, you’d probably survive. But you’d have to be patched up. Really, it’s ursas versus nurses.” 

He did not laugh.

The guy’s been path-bound a month and is already versed in its draconian perils. He avers if he could just stay out of his own way, away from the bearanoia, he’ll finish what he started. “You’ll defiantly make it, Funny-bonez. You’re a lean machine and you don’t zweat.”

“Oh, I’m no machine; I can identify all the stoplights in the photos. And I sweat all right. It’s just hard to see under this damn rain-gear.”

“May I azk: why do you wear it?”

“Why do you think? The frickin’ mosquitoes.”

“Why not just uze ze chemicalz?”

“I’m afraid of long-term effects, like having no skin left.”

Bedecked in our headnets, Bearbell and I would hike much of the day together, into and out of the one-horse outpost town of Falls Village. (Note: there are no outposts in the east, at least not until Maine.) We passed the clamorous falls the village was named for, then passed Giants Thumb, before reaching another small town, Salisbury (pop: 4K). The previous stop offered little more than a post office and some sightseeing, so we had high hopes for Salisbury. We pulled off our mosquito mesh as we pulled in.

A former mining town--back before the American Revolution--Salisbury is today the most unsullied town the AT veers near. We got the impression its denizens wished the trail weren’t so close by. In spite of our best efforts, no one smiled. It mattered not. The place was too sterile, too plastic, too expensive, and filled with uptight types. We didn’t stay long. A quick stop at La Bonne’s grocer and we were back in business, retreating to better treatment in the hills. Mosquitoes suck, but there’s nothing so infuriating as unkind, unwelcoming humans. I thought of taking a dump in the town center, for good measure.

I’m glad I hadn’t. Halfway back to AT I was forced to double-back. I’d been charged fourteen bucks for a bag of cheese puffs. I assumed this wasn’t La Bonne’s normal pricing or operating methodology, but I wasn’t certain. Still, I had to be sure, and the additional mile wasn’t going to kill me. (The cars flying by could have.) It was good I returned. The cheese puffs were only three bucks and, when there, I realized I’d forgotten batteries the first time around. Though filled with thousands of images, my camera was depleted.

Back to our vagarious ways, and mostly upright, Bearbell and I traipsed lightly. There were tiny tree frogs everywhere--not just in trees, but everywhere: the ground, the puddles, the air--and it was hard not to step on them or swallow them as they jumped. The skies had darkened all afternoon. Beneath the trees visibility was nil, and the poor froggies were not only small, but also a hard-to-see gray or black. Of all the critters I hate harming, frogs and salamanders top the list. I don’t care to hurt or kill any of Earth’s animals, save maybe mosquitoes and the citizens of Salisbury, Connecticut. But for some reason I especially abhor inflicting upon the amphibious. Their struggle for survival is tough enough in such a mammalian, man-made world. Some people are humanitarians; I am an animalitarian.

The French Frog and I somehow missed the Riga Shelter, enduring an off-trail rigmarole shortly after the Lion’s Head Viewpoint. Our guidebooks said it was there, but from our vantage, it was elsewhere. “Perhaps it got zick of ze view and left,” Bearbell joked. I did not laugh. A serious storm was sweeping in, with lightning and hail and a giant pail--Nature being Nature--so we bailed on finding the structure and hurried on to the next one, the Brassie Brook Shelter. 

That roof was just a mile up-trail. We went the extra mile. Unfortunately the extra mile was uphill, where lightning preys. We prayed that the storm would delay itself or become distracted, and that the shelter ahead wasn’t already packed, despite knowing prayer was a waste of time. We had the time.

Heroes are made in such times and we’d make it just outside the nick of time, just as voltage started pounding the ground. Further luck was with us; the joint was empty. I dove in. Bearbell taxied in, what with the space shuttle on his spine. We swiftly set up our escape rooms, for defense against the vampires; the lightning seemed to electrify them. We then watched as electricity fell from the sky (and climbed from the ground), splitting atoms like an A-bomb, blowing the silence to smithereens. Who said we go without electricity out here?

Bluish-white bolts violently walloped all in their path, sometimes hitting within meters of our little tinder box. We couldn’t hear one another, not just during the chaos, but for minutes after each strike. Our ear drums rang, our bodies reverberated. We could literally feel each rod’s heat: fifty-three thousand, five hundred and forty degrees of global-warming destruction. That’s five times the sun’s surface temperature, they say. God’s static? 

I jammed my dirty fingers into my dirty ears and crouched on my foam sleep pad, away from any nails or attracting metal. My hair, greasy and heavy though it is, stands on end. A direct strike and it would, no doubt, ignite. I’m riled. Bearbell smiles.

The storm lasted the rest of the night, give or take a week.