A Limp in the Woods (Day 108)

An Appalachian Trail Tale
Day 108: Wednesday, July 10th, 2013
Garden Center near Hwy 7 to the Tom Leonard Shelter = 6 miles
Miles to date: 1,524

Quietus

I’m determined to commit suicide or die trying.

This AT affair has been so ferocious of late--and equivalently so heretofore--that I’ve started a suicide note (a lifetime achievement award), lest the barbarity linger. Southbounders say it will, so I’m preparing accordingly. (Unlike the religious zealots who believe death isn’t a place to stop, but a place to start, I’m of the mindset it wraps up our existence, barring some everlasting minerals left behind.) I’ve yet to finish the treatise--a fine whine takes time--but the thought process has begun. And as we all know, it’s the thought that counts. By the way, this is not necessarily a distress signal, but it could be. We’ll see. I am pro-life and pro-death, because I am pro-choice. I have the Suicide Prevention digits dialed-in on speed-dial. “Please hold,” they tell me. Nobody cares when fossils finish themselves.

Regarding My Pulitzer Prize Winning Suicide Note

If I were to write a suicide note I’d spend a lifetime perfecting the particulars of what I wished to say before signing off. It wouldn’t come across hasty or incoherent, and it would be hand-written on fine stationery (which I am not yet carrying out here). Typing it would mean having a typewriter--which I’m also not carrying--and it would remove the human element, making it less personal and poignant. Also, the right paper is imperative. A poor choice could distract from the artistic impression, preventing it from display in museums and malls. Of course there’d be no misspellings or grammatical gaffes. The aim would be to avoid misinterpretation.

I’d take my time writing it and rewriting it, outlining an outline, scrutinizing it for fluidity and form and persuasion, and ending with a masterpiece. A massive missive. It would be so well written that the Pulitzer Prize commission would have to consider awarding me. Posthumously, naturally. Never before has a suicide note claimed the Pulitzer, but never before has the world seen one composed by the likes of me, one that would take an entire lifetime to scribe.

~~~~~~~~~~

But as history has shown, I’m slow to get anything done; I’ll likely reach Katahdin before the letter is sealed.

There’s also the whole matter of termination technique. How does the writer become a write-off? (Never mind suicide’s prime dilemmas: will I know when it’s time to die? And how will I know?) Anyway, I have no idea how to go about it all. Like most animals, I’m averse to pain. This is the whole point of performing the act. (A suicide attempt is not harming one’s self. It is the hope to end the harm--the one hope that hasn’t died.) Slit the wrists? My knife’s too small, and I start seeing red when I see blood. Jump off a cliff? What if I don’t jump far enough and only end up hurting myself or end up in a wheelchair? Carbon monoxide poisoning? In what? Overdose? On what, Honey Buns?! Helium inhalation? Point the business end of a gun at the mind I cannot tame?

I suppose it best to use that mind and postpone postmortem--save death for last, and try to make it to the end of my life without dying first. Let time and natural order take care of matters. For when the time comes, and all signs of aging finally disappear, I’m sure death won’t need my help: Nature’ll be there to assist. And anyway, suicide seems such a strange way in which to spend your life. Life isn’t worth dying over! We must endure it, even if it kills us! Rage, rage against the dying of the light!

For the time being(1).

Weird thought, that: time being. Being what?

Ugh.

In life I’m stuck.

Anyhow, I’d walk a few hundred strides before an executive decision was made--hitch into Great Barrington, birthplace of babies, one named W.E.B. Du Bois. In French his surname means of the Forest, Bearbell later informed me. The mosquitoes were also of the forest. And they were already on fire. The only viable response in dealing with them would be, well, suicide. I didn’t have the means, nor the intestinal fortitude, so I went with the other viable solution: bailing to Barrington. I brandished my sunburnt thumb and advertised my wishes to passing motorists.

Passing, all right. One by one they passed, viewing me and the rest of the world through a screen. Many stared at their phone screens while looking through their windscreens; two screens screening them from the world. One guy slowed and raised my hopes, only to yell, “GET A JOB, HIPPIE!” He must’ve known me. I stood there half the morning--with lots of mourning of my own--before I started to walk the three miles, mindful of unmindful motorists who might meander toward me. I kept my thumb aloft, ever hopeful.

The mosquitoes saw this as an opportunity. They kept attacking my hand--my only exposed part. No wonder no one’s stopping, you bonehead Funnybone! Who’n his right mind would pick up a hitchhiker in a mosquito headnet?

I removed the black veil, donned an insincere smile, and was promptly scooped up. By a guy operating, of all things, a forklift.

Of all my lifts, hundreds, not once had I been plucked up by a forklift. Nor a sporklift. The operator was a hard-hat-wearing, garrulous guy named Gus or Russ, possibly Pus. (I couldn’t hear; like most forklifts, this one was open-air, and we were moving astonishingly fast.) I told him if I ever saw a forklift in the road, I was to take it. I sat on the floorboard facing perpendicular to our direction of travel and enjoyed the break from the bloodsuckers. Motorists honked and waved as they went around.

“I’d like to see a forklift lift a crate of forks. It’d be so damn literal!

You’re using that machine to its exact purpose!” ~Mitch Hedberg

Despite my backseat driving, Gus/Russ/Pus got me where I was going, Guido’s Grocer. Onlookers laughed at the spectacle, a forklift carting a backpacker. “That must be one heavy pack,” one chucklehead said. I grinned and thanked my driver for his generosity.

After resupply I ran into Bearbell. He was entering Guido’s. I recounted my ride story. “That iz hilariouz!” We each had errands to run (i.e., walk) and agreed to reunite in two hours, so we could hitch as a unit back to the backcountry. Hitchhiking teamwork means less danger and more mirth. It also fosters chances of catching a ride, at least along long trails. At interstate truck stops, probably not.

After the tiresome tasks (post office, library, blah, blah), we regrouped and departed town. This time we caught a ride in a school bus! Another first. The driver, a smiley middle-aged woman, saw us a little too late, so she doubled back to pick us up from the opposite side of the road. As the bus slowed, an arm appeared and waved us over. I ran across the road and yelled back at my ursine friend, “SHOTGUN!” Our skipper said she was skipping town but “couldn’t stop in time what with these dumb-ass tailgaters,” so she flipped a U-turn. 

She assured us her and her husband owned the company that owned the bus. Thus, they could do whatever they wanted with it--pimp it out, pick up hitchhikers, take rafters upstream, or rent it to pornography producers. They’d done all this, she told us. “We mostly run ‘em for summer camps. Lots of ‘em goin’ on right now. The kids hike the AT, but in small doses.” Death in small doses!

We continued into Great Barrington once more, picking up another two hikers, Wolfman and Grey Cloud, both Tennessean. (“Hillbilly Heaven,” they called it.) We then returned to the trail, laughing all the way to the bank. The riverbank. Most my school bus memories aren’t like this.

The fun finished the instant we hit the ground. The bloodsuckers were acting jointly, and this was no comedy act. They were livid. And ravenous. We put on our rain gear and began running. Running is like walking, but faster. I felt like an overdressed wrestler trying to sweat it out before weigh-in. The next few miles along the Housatonic River were unreal. Or we wished they were unreal.

They were real, all right, both the miles and the mosquitoes. Clouds of them smothered our headnets, to the point it was hard to see. Wolfman and Grey Cloud were quaffing beer and whiskey as they walked, hoping alcohol poisoning might ease the pain. Boozeless, Bearbell and I had no choice but to hie thee elsewhere. DEET and permethrin did nothing to stop the offensive. Nor did our pleading for a ceasefire or a forest fire. Offensive colloquialisms fluttered from our mouths. The two of us would run and sweat and cuss for six miles, the entire way to the Tom Leonard Shelter. We met Coolie McJetPack there and listened to his narrative from inside our tents: Youthful Oversights by a Moronic Jew. Or so he implied.

In short form: he’d met a lass in town and hoped to score. The two partied for hours, when she asked if he’d walk her to her boyfriend’s place. (“Which was a bummer,” Coolie sighed.) Rather than be a party-pooper, he figured he’d go. “I mean, why not? It’s all part of the adventure.” The girl and her boy invited him in and were soon snorting cocaine. Coolie grew uneasy. He left the scene. He had no idea where he was. “What kind of kids can afford coke? The kind that’re clearly spoiled,” he replied, answering his own question, “like all kids in Barrington.”

“Spoiled?” I returned. “More like stupid. A special kind of stupid.”

It was 3am. Coolie wandered around the burg in search of where he’d been staying, on the floor of two other thru-hikers: a sociable Minnesotan named Crush(1) and a less sympathetic German thru-hiker named Ice T. Ice T didn’t take to Coolie’s antics too fondly. He booted him when he’d arrived.

“I’m such an ass,” he mumbled. “I mean, here I was mooching, then pull a stunt like that. All for a chick with some dick.” He paused. “I had to walk back to the trail at 3:30am.”

“You need tu write a note tu zem apologizing,” Bearbell said.

“And then again in subsequent trail registers,” I added. “It’s about all you can do. That or suicide.”

“I’m such an imbecile,” he sighed. “A complete halfwit. A self-made loser.”

“Well,” Bearbell responded. “You’re in good company with Funny-bonerz here.”

The Frenchman had a point.

"End"note 1: As it is for more and more humans, suicide is my retirement plan. Many retirees focus on a 401K--no way I’m running that far--I’m training for the ol’ .357 method. Premeditated, pre-medicated. Hollow point, so I don’t miss the point. One grows tired of the struggle to exist in this race of rodents and robots. And that we live, the mountains don’t care. I’m but a transient life-form, awaiting absorption by other ephemeral forms. Death knows its purpose is to give life. And anyway, as the Kinks said, “If I live too long I’m afraid I’ll die.” I, for one, am tired of being afraid. For now, I’m walking myself to death. Once I’m dead broke, I’m dead.

"Foot"note 2: Crush is one of two hikers I’ve named (the other, another Minnesotan, ‘Emperor’). At the time, I dubbed him ‘Orange Crush’ for his attire--orange--and because he crushed the miles. Both attire and pace appear to have since mellowed.