A Limp in the Woods (Day 41)

An Appalachian Trail Tale
Day 41: Saturday, May 4th, 2013
Lick Creek to Laurel Creek/VA 615 = 19 miles
Miles to date: 580

Dreaming with my Feet

FOR SALE: pair of shoes. Used. Buy one shoe, get one free. (The small print: no returns, no exchanges, no guarantees you won’t contract foot fungus.)

I had been dreaming with my feet again. The above thought/wish kept skittering through my skull before waking. Long-distance backpacking trips are dreaming with your feet, but the dreams are usually nightmares. To this juncture I’ve endured forty days and forty nights of ‘em. The others remind me that dreams are liars, and that I’m the one with the gun to my head, so I’m not allowed to bellyache. Still, my cohorts join me in a chorus of death-threats directed to the trail builders (professional name: Satan).

In all truth, or most truth, I’m as content as I’ve been in a while. As happy as I can be. (Read into that, if you will.) Long-distance backpacking boils life down to its simplest, most gratifying form. Strips the superfluous. Eliminates the excess. Cuts to the core. Emily Dickinson (“I dwell in Possibility”) wrote of doing without as a means of going within, the ultimate odyssey. It is astounding to those of us out here that so few individuals set out to hike the Appalachian Trail each year. Why aren’t there more of us? Why are we considered the freaks of society? The freaks of nature?

Maybe I’ve mentioned it, but each spring about four thousand freaks say “I do,” taking a shot at hiking the whole AT. Most those who dive in feet first are Green Tunnel greenhorns--almost the entirety of whom come from the one-and-done crowd, hoping to check the AT off their hit list; the ol’ been there, done that mentality. A few, like Daypack, are repeat offenders, an even nuttier bunch. “The deeper I go into this tunnel, the more I begin to see,” he says. Hmmm. I feel like if I squinted I could imagine myself in a cave.

The Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) calculates that just four hundred of these folks will complete the journey(1). For those of us mathematically challenged, this means the AT has a NINETY PERCENT FAILURE RATE. (There’s a calculator on this tablet thing here.) Most thru-hike attempts are just that. Most taking a crack at it…crack.

Some of those who end the marriage do so because of injury. More reach the realization that the trail ain’t what it’s cracked up to be--what they thought it would be--or what others had led them to believe it was. Others become bored, jumping before they’re pushed. Some run out of time, as many thru-hikers are forced to abide by a timetable, apart from the path’s prevailing one (i.e., beat winter!). Obligations like jobs or school or family linger. Lastly, a litany of hopefuls suffer from nostomania. They become homesick,* deciding to pack it in. Park rangers have a special code for these types. “Code W.” Wimps. Rangers don’t always get it.

(*Note to self: homelessness has its perks. Then again, there’s no such thing as a homeless snail. Snails, incidentally, are Nature’s original backpacker. We should thus love them.)

Though I know of superior spots (the Sierra, the Himalaya, the Alps, the Andes, the ghetto), I have nowhere better to be. This is also why I cannot possibly suffer out here. After all, no one suffers by choice, or else it ain’t suffering. Struggle, maybe. But suffer, nah.

Thru-hiking is a masochistic delectation. Suffering may be a byproduct of the goal, and at times it’s sure to occur. Injury pops to mind. But usually it’s just deep discomfort, not suffering. I learned long ago that the thru-hiker who cherishes comfort might not be fit enough to be deemed a thru-hiker. He or she is better off taking up something soft and stupid, like golf.

Still. As painful as the trail may be physically, it’s almost entirely an inner experience. In that, I’ve often struggled. And suffered. 

Struggling to find my rhythm (one I never lost; it takes rhythm to lose rhythm), I stumble on…and not onto it. The others seem to tolerate my companionship, but when walking we each settle into our own pace--it’s not easy to hike at any other--and go our own ways. The same way, yes, but different ways of achieving it. Then, when it’s time to rest, we each pick the same pace, my personal favorite. Going nowhere slow.

Not long after we started north, the weather turned south, so to speak. It was in fact in our faces, but might’ve been made tolerable if it were a spring storm. Instead, we somehow strode straight back into what meteorologists call a polar vortex, what the rest of us know as that cruel codger, Old Man Winter. I had to walk backwards for a stint--the protection of the other direction--to ease the nip, a wind chill that would’ve made a Siberian husky shiver.

A thru-hike is predominantly a slow, serene affair, but the tranquility can at any moment disintegrate into an episode of grim peril. Our paces were much quicker because of this, especially as we climbed toward Burkes Garden, an oval-shaped bowl of more than twenty thousand acres that is said to look like a gigantic volcanic crater. A low-lying low-flying miasmic mist wouldn’t allow us to see it, so we’d have to take the guidebook’s word, the book for which we have some of our own words.

Chestnut Knob Shelter

Gator moving in

In spite of the limited visibility we’d set our sights on the 4,409-foot-high Chestnut Knob Shelter. The structure is a rare four-sided stone hovel more suitably situated in the Alps. On this day we all knew the enclosure belonged here too, just as we belonged in it. Of this we were adamant.

Apart from that which plunged (sideways) from the sky, there was no water at the shelter, or it may have been our quarters for the remainder of the day. Nighttime too. Regardless of looming thirst, we were in no rush to make a move. The conditions were growing fiercer by the minute when Bulldog, who’d stayed in the hotel room back in Atkins, burst into the place.

“JESUS FUCKIN’ CHRIST! IT BE’S COLDER THAN A WITCH’S TIT OUT THERE!”

We all exploded into laughter. Mountain Goat mentioned that the Georgian’s outburst (or his in-burst) was made even funnier by the fact he didn’t even know who the hell might’ve been inside. We joked that it could’ve been a bunch of Boy Scouts or perhaps an association of backpacking nuns (The Appalachia Sisters of No Mercy), but it didn’t matter to Bulldog or anyone else. It was splenetic enough to sound--and gladly receive--that barbaric yawp.

When it was time to flee the aegis of the hut and the warmth-induced paralysis it provoked, we bundled up and sped off. While it never quite reached that time, we knew we couldn’t just remain shut-ins and attempt to elude every tempest tempting us to. “Damn AT don’t come easy,” Bulldog reminded us after his in-burst. A hiker’s got to be headstrong, put his or her head down, and head straight into its wicked nucleus. Aim for its heart, heartless though it may be. No matter the truculence, you’ve got two choices: to keep on truckin’ or to truckle. We chose not to topple. At least just yet.

Only the wind is not pictured

TK and I fell behind the others. Again. The wind was howling like truth, the cold creeping into every pore.

Icy grip
Wind whip
Nose drip
Into lip

Klutz’s small size belies her strength--though she be but little, she is fierce. She seemed to have an easier time of it than me. Women have a lower center of gravity than men, and they are stronger, sturdier creatures. If I needed a reminder of this all I had to do was look at her pack. At forty pounds, it’s twice what mine weighs. In fact, it’s thirty-nine percent of her own weight. (Today’s test kids: how much does TK weigh?) The woman is tougher than a Waffle House steak, as Bulldog would say.

We’d eventually escape the soupy mess and descend to less atrocious conditions, but I was still only ever able to snap a handful of photos due to the drizzle. At the gravel, leaf-covered VA 623 a fifty-something year-old gal with a warm smile and Ohio license plates offered some trail magic, in the form of cookies, crackers and colas. Naturally, we obliged. Her name was Sweet Tooth. Married to a retired dentist named Molar Man, who’s attempting a thru-hike, she’s running support for him and those around him. I hadn’t met the man yet, even though we’d apparently been leap-frogging for a week or more.  

The leap-frogging was, in my case, limp-frogging. By late afternoon I proceeded with a pronounced hobble. My left Achilles tendon was swollen and sore. It reminded me of its whereabouts with every step. An achy AT on the AT, how appropriate. “Time wounds all heels,” someone once said.

I paused to tend to the tender tendon. I massaged it then iced it in a cold streamlet near the Jenkins Shelter, but was offered no relief. (The guidebook called the creek “unreliable.”) My tears were no anodyne. Ever the optimist, I veered straight to worst-case scenarios. Surgery. A cast. Crutches. A wheelchair. Costly physical therapy. Amputation. Worst of all: inactivity. I worried I might not be cut out for this trail. Or for walking with whippersnappers.

The open-air privy at the Jenkins Shelter; a loo with a view

One of the underlying tenets of a long-distance, multi-month hike is to HYOH: Hike Your Own Hike. I felt I had been Hiking My Own Hike all along, but maybe I wasn’t any longer. Maybe the young guns--loaded or not--were just a little too fast for me. They never seemed to mind the lengthy rests that allowed me to catch up, but maybe our little cohesive group was just me being adhesive. 

When a tall, sturdily-built German über-hiker named NBC flew by, I was at my worst. The verge of breakdown. I didn’t dare speed up to keep up; I continued to ease up and pondered giving up. Am I going to be one of the ninety percent?

At closing time I’d staggered into a conspicuous encampment at Laurel Creek, where the others were stationed. They had a modest fire going and their meals prepared. I pitched my pain cave and went for forwent dinner. (The menu called for Honey Buns and jerky topped with nut butter and gnats, so it was no great forfeiture.) 

Then, after ingesting a million milligrams of Vitamin I (aka ibuprofen), I drown my buggered appendage in the frigid water, hoping for a complete turnaround by morning. Even a partial turnaround would do, if such a thing exists. Maybe a V-turn instead of a U-turn.

Backstreet being one with Nature

TK turned in early. I probably should’ve. Instead, I basked blaze-side beside the boys, laughing well into the night. Laughter, after all, is the best medicine. Whether it works on an Achilles tendon, we shall see.

"Foot"note 1: The ATC bases their statistics on the first trail register at Amicolola Falls, the sign-in album at their Harpers Ferry, West Virginia headquarters, and from the final register at the Baxter State Park Ranger Station, at the base of Mount Katahdin.