A Limp in the Woods (Day XLVI)

An Appalachian Trail Tale
Day 46 (XLVI): Thursday, May 9th, 2013
Pearisburg to Mile 644 = 13-ish miles
Miles to date: 644

The Best Seat in the House

Most places are worth visiting at least once. Not Pearisburg. I had little choice. My skin needed dehydrating, my blisters begged for a break, and my stomach needed civilization (civil-i-satiation). A trip to civilization wasn’t available, so Pearisburg would have to do. A gentleman of quality breeding--debonair, sophisticated, suave--I would normally avoid any such poorly place, unless it was one of the demands made by men who kidnapped my firstborn pet rock.

After nursing foot carnage, I gave my teeth a nice, long coffee bath. (Regarding the podiatry, hard-earned calluses had softened and sloughed off in the wet weather. This formed a line of minced meat across the balls of my feet and underneath each toe; they looked like a mix of pickled ginger and sushi.) I then killed the early hours with a prolonged excursion across the street, first to the grocer and then to that pseudo “non-profit” known as “Good”will (a money-driven corporation in every sense, as its CEO’s salary attests).

Leery of the verity of the charity, I bought nada from the thrift store, but I purchased everything at the grocer. I failed to abide by the thru-hiker’s law: BASKET―NO PUSH CART! With scads of grocery bags in each hand, I retreated to the Holiday Lodge. There I caught up on emails and journaling and honing my social skills. Social skills in this case meant speaking with other hikers, so it doesn’t count. Such a crowd isn’t remotely indicative of society on the whole--it imposes only the aptitude to listen to or tell crude jokes. And to fart or burp or speak of bodily functions. And to endlessly chat about food. My kind of crowd.

One of my emails included the word of the day, from a dictionary site I subscribe to. Tons of ads, one word. The word: mysophobia.

     mysophobia [mahy-suh-foh-bee-uh] (noun): Psychiatry: a dread of dirt or filth.

Oh, the relevancy! Anyone suffering from mysophobia would surely detest the Appalachian Trail. Even more so, he or she would undergo outright terror in the Holiday Motor Lodge. Morning cast a better light on the room I’d slept in; it was damn near bloodcurdling. Forensic lighting was not needed. Ah, to hell with it, I thought, I’ve lived to tell the tale. I gathered everything that’d been draped throughout the room, shook off the mice and the lice, the bugs and the slugs, the germs and the worms, the mud and the crud, and carefully placed it all in my pack, using the highly-regarded Cram Method. Despite my efforts, not all of it fit, so the rest was leashed to the pack’s exterior. I look like an overloaded tyro each time I depart a town and a deprived hobo each time I arrive.

After going postal--a post office outing--it was time for the mountain adventure to continue.

The weather was stable and gentlemanly, the path comparatively dry. The route north of town was somewhat of a clusterfart. Escorting hikers along a highway, past a melancholic, malodorous, prison-esque factory manufacturing cigarette filters, then across the highway, it finally veered back to where it belongs: in them thar’ hills. I got the feeling few locals value the trail for anything but the influx--income--it fetches. The ATC hopes to reroute the path in these parts, and hikers hope they do. Private property needs acquiring and the funds to do so are predictably difficult to come by. Hiking the AT is hard; protecting it, harder yet.

Leaving Pearisburg on an ill-favored strand of "trail"

The entire trail corridor has been set aside and secured “for those,” the AT Conservancy touts, “who seek fellowship with the wilderness.” But there are places like this where purgatory would be more pleasant. Any reroute would be welcomed. (Welcomed by wilderness-seeking hikers; local government; starry-eyed environmentalists; corporate plant owners; motorists; and locals.) The thru-hiker needs to seek fellowship not just with the wilderness, but with everything the trail brings, cigarette filter factories and all. Only time will tell if a quieter configuration will replace the existing mess. I find no fault with the factory; if I were one, I’d also want to be positioned beside a National Scenic Trail. Especially if I were manufacturing Honey Buns or blister kits.

On soil above the noxious plant (among more enticing plants), the beaten path dished its stock beating. A backpacking shellacking, the AT. A series of drainages, with abrupt inclines exiting each, made for some slow going. I pulled alongside a husband and wife (and dog) team from Austin, Texas: M-80, Trooper and Willow. Otherwise known as Brett and Pattie (and Willow) Hessenius when not on trail. They were going only marginally slower than I.

The canine is currently young and cute. Some dogs are like that. They like being cute. They just know how to be cute. It’s still very much a puppy, yet unusually polite, thus likely well-trained or just an old soul. M-80 is an old soul. He’s not currently young or cute. But he’s well-trained in kindheartedness and humor. Trooper’s my age but looks much younger--probably because she isn’t worried all the time. She’s wafer-thin, prepossessing, and outgoing. I was in love with another man’s wife. His dog too.

Few forty-something year-old women hike the trail, and next to no single ones do. (Few forty-something year-old men hike the AT(1), but they are of no interest to me.) If I’m ever to meet the woman of my wet dreams, a readily available one, it’s all but certain it isn’t going to happen on a long trail. The single gals out here are almost all inchoate--early to mid twenties, generally--or simply unattractive. Simply resistible.

I too am unattractive--except to flees, flies and mosquitoes, few of which have reared their hideous heads yet, mercifully. But I do my best to avoid seeing my reflection so I can keep my standards unrealistically high. (And being single keeps hopes high.) I’m hoping my facial hair fills in enough to camouflage most the unpleasantness. Maybe improve my chances and allow me to terminate the nightly ménage à un and this godforsaken loner of a boner. Revolting females don’t have such a luxury, though they can attempt to cover it up in their make-up…so long as they’re not also ugly inside.

You’re ugly inside

You try to hide

You cover it up

In your make-up

As for M-80’s and Trooper’s tag-along, well, he’s not your run of the mill mutt. He’s why dogs are my favorite people. I know not my breeds, but he’s a good brand. A floppy-eared type, not your typical pointy-eared killer. The dappled, knee-high creature is in fact an OFFICIAL service animal. (Not the more-common unofficial type littering long-trails everywhere.) He’s not merely for emotional support; he’s trained to recognize when M-80 is in trouble with low blood sugar levels. M-80 has the first type of diabetes. He wears an insulin pump 24/7. But there are times (e.g., nighttime) when the catheter might be knocked out, potentially knocking him out. (Type 1 becomes Type Done.) Willow detects when M-80 is in a bit of bother and notifies him or Trooper to the impending hazard. How he alerts him, I didn’t ask, but it would not surprise me if the dog spoke fluent English. I felt for M-80, his very survival dependent on mutt and modern machinery. How free I felt.

Willow the piebald pooch

The four of us walked as one for much of the remainder of the day, dipping in and out of West Virginia for a stint, our fifth state. Willow never strayed farther than a few steps from his master. I joked that he better get a move on since, in dog miles, the AT is more than fifteen thousand miles. Only the dog didn’t laugh.

Our conversations ran the gamut. (Not the ga-mutt; Willow never did speak much. Perhaps it’s no coincidence man’s best friend cannot talk.) We covered such fine topics as blister care; the scenery and lack thereof; how dogs can come to familiar terms with low blood sugar (they recognize a specific scent); driving to the AT (the trio drove to Georgia from Austin, Tejas and paid a monstrous five dollareenies to park their old Ford Bronco at Amicalola Falls State Park for the season!); and of course, food. Specifically: what a diabetic should ingest when hiking ten to twelve hours a day. (Honey Buns, it turns out.)

The couple spent their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary together on the trail, although at the time M-80 had been waylaid and laid up by the norovirus. As a man, I knew that few things in life are as horrific as a man cold, so I empathized with the gray beard, even though I’d managed to avert the violent virus. Anyway, conversation was never forced with the two and we seemed to have bypassed the usual small talk that humans feel the need to engage in. I don’t believe I’d ever met two persons of such fine character; the hours flew by, despite the sluggish unfurling of the landscape.

By late afternoon Backstreet, Mountain Goat and TK had overtaken us and I slowly drifted apart from Willow and crew. Then, a while later, four-fifths of The Fanny Pack appeared and I left Goat and gang. It wasn’t a display of un-dog-like disloyalty, just an instinctive compliance to go at one’s own rhythm. No matter, I’d laugh with every one I was fortunate enough to walk with. I don’t always get the plot, but my hike, and indeed my life, has had a darn good supporting cast.

It was time to turn in when evening turned up. We’d all rejoined and decided to camp on a knoll overlooking the world, the best seat in the house. Wealthy people build their castles and are served the same view every day. Those of us out here--dirtbag rich--enjoy a revolving door of grandeur, one wonderful moment after the next.

PaddyCakes with the best seat in the house

The view from my veranda

"Foot"note 1: This is purely personal observation, replete with subjectivity and inaccuracy, but the average age of an AT thru-hiker looks to be forty to forty-five. Yet few forty to forty-five year-olds are seen. Most thrubies are just beyond college age, or are retirees suffering from a severe case of middle age (also known as: advanced middle age). My guess is the younger crowd outnumbers the older one 5 to 1. But the old are eminently old. Oops, I mean advanced. So…the average age is somewhere between (mathematically speaking). The oldest AT thru-hiker was seventy-nine (but happened to be eighty-one during his hike; proof dinosaurs still roam the Earth); the youngest was just six, a child by profession. (Parents take note: what a great way to tire your kids out!)