A Limp in the Woods (Day 117)

An Appalachian Trail Tale
Day 117: Friday, July 19th, 2013
Kid Gore Shelter to Spruce Peak Shelter = 23 miles
Miles to date: 1,645

Terrapeutic

It was bad enough my tent was already impervious to everything except wind, rain and heavy dew, but last night its zipper sustained an ill-timed death. Ill-timed implies unexpected, but this wasn’t the case. I’d been neglecting it ever since the mosquitoes started showing, zipping it recklessly after diving in the minimum-security prison. I was now paying the piper--the zipper piper. Try as I might, but with light might, it simply Would. Not. Work. The mozzies recognized this as the chance of a lifetime--a brief lifetime. They filed in in succession, eager to wreak havoc. “Mercy, mercy!” I cried.

I needed a locksmith. But thanks to the European packrat and the roll of duct tape he carts, “juste au cas où,” I was able to McGyver the broken home, cobbling the mesh panels together. The fix-affix let me immure myself and circumvent complete bombardment. Homeland Security. My house was back up to code. My partner’s scarcity mindset saved my minimalist butt.

I thanked Bearbell profusely. “Merci, merci,” I cried. 

But tape doesn’t stick well in humid conditions, not to mosquito netting. Every hour the entrance would spring open, like a crack in a dam, welcoming another wave of winged wreakers. Eternally on the brink, I slept not a wink. The day began with the utmost reluctance. Most mine do, but this one more so.

Surprisingly, the diurnal ritual was unaffected. I felt good! After decades of predicting how I might soon feel, or when it is I might feel a specific way, I’ve concluded I have no clue. My body reacts according to its own arrhythmic rhythms, regardless of stimuli. A fitful night could easily leave me for dead or absolutely prepared for a frabjous day of humping it. The mind-body connection, in my case, is a misnomer. And anyway, I only like making predictions about the past. Not to brag or nothing, but when doing so, I’m correct almost fifty percent of the time. I can predict like there’s no tomorrow. But there will be a tomorrow. I think.

Bearbell also felt strong. Bar-bell! He was no longer a member of the tenderfoot tribe. I watched him grow more powerful by the day, a minister of outside affairs. He was steadily stripping his fleshy cage, and his euro-step was long and strong. Meantime, I was dealing with that deep-fatigue-gorge that marching for months gives rise to. A rising canyon.

My energy levels, thus my performances, have become hit-or-miss. Mostly miss. Sometimes hit--as in hit rock bottom. And again: entirely unpredictable. But for the first half of this day we rocketed along without slowing or interruption. The bugs were few, the views were plenty, and the hiking as enjoyable as the act gets. Every day is good for something; today was good for walking. How something so simple can be so wonderful is beyond my ken. I’m just happy not everyone has figured it out, that out is in--as in à la mode--or I’d need an escape elsewhere. The salty seas perhaps. I’m not much the mariner, I get seasick when I see the sea, but I relate to those who sail to get away from it all. No chance of crowding and few visible scars upon the water.

Midday, Bearbell and I passed the rudimentary Story Spring Shelter. We did so without so much as a glance. (Ever since Pennsylvania, shelters have fallen in value and, with few exceptions, into disrepair. Of course when another savage storm moves in, we savages value them like never before; luckily there was no such squall on this July day, even though I’d predicted one.)

We were in full flight toward Stratton Mountain, settling into a sweaty silence. As we ascended I pulled ahead. I told Bearbell I’d wait at the top. But then every few minutes I’d hold up, stopping for polite conversation with a succession--no, a procession--of southbounders. We were in the thick of things now; they heading toward the Equator, we toward the North Pole. One smiley fellow introduced himself as Bond, pausing ala James Bond. Only instead of ‘James,’ he uttered, “Bond, Vaga…bond.” I tried to chuckle.

When there was no more uphill left Frenchie and I dropped our packs and investigated the forested summit. “I zink to zis point I could count on one hand ze number of treeless summitz,” Bearbell said. A small white clapboard cabin--no bigger than Thoreau’s or Kaczynski’s--sat in a clearing not far from a 1934 Aermotor fire tower. Its wooden cab was held aloft by fifty-five feet of steel and an assortment of nuts and bolts. Both structures were in good nick despite their age, nearly ninety years in the case of the cabin. No one was manning (nor womanning) the place, but there were recent notes thanking its custodians for “the snacks.”

The caretakers are Jeanne and Hugh Joudry, a dynamic duo who’d long ago attained LEGEND status on the AT. They’ve watched over the mountaintop for forty-five summers, taking up residence in the cabin. (And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack!) Neither the AT nor the Long Trail crossed the summit when they began. But our two smoke detectors were absentees today, so Bearbell and I were limited to the snacks on hand: snacks in hand. 

These were not-so-good goodies we’d grown tired of, so we swapped what we could--that which seemed a fair trade. We made our way up the lookout’s near-vertical stairs, chewing our food as we climbed. There was no way anyone could scale the stairs without a death-grip on its handrails, a task made touch-and-go when carrying snacks.

It was atop this mound both the Long Trail and the AT were conceived, the former in 1909 by walking man James Taylor (not that James Taylor), the latter in 1937 by Benton MacKaye. It was easy to see why the men were stirred as such; views were endless in every direction. They’d enthrall even the most hardened of hikers. Through the tower’s windows we stared mostly to the north, gazing at our goal. Up. Bigger mountains, the Whites of New Hampshire, loom. And invite.

I grew dizzy from the thought. Or maybe from our height.

“Do you know what defenestrate means?” I asked Bearbell.
“No.”
“Good.”

Beneath us a clandestine figure crawled into the scene, shadowed by trees. Utterly exhausted, he was dragging his hiking poles. Both were bent and looked like italicized question marks. They didn’t come this way; the AT made them this way.

“Who goes there?” we inquired without success. He dropped his poles and his pack--shaking the tower in the process--and clambered up to join us. A young SOBOer, he looked as though he’d been through a multi-year war. Blood stains soaked his see-through, once-white shirt, below where his nipples had been. The pointy ends of his moobs were covered with Band-Aids, to stop further chafing. He also looked to have a poison ivy rash. We didn’t utter a word of it. We knew it could just as easily happen to us. It’s funny, but I had just been thinking the nice thing about the AT is that it can’t get much worse, but this guy’s appearance told me, “Oh yes it can. And it will.”

“All I can say is good luck ahead,” he sighed, head down. “I’m hoping for more of this easy terrain.” Easy? This? Bearbell and I thanked him for the warning, but we didn’t mean it. He descended the stairs and disappeared as he had arrived, a dead man speeding, inadvertently scaring encroaching chipmunks as he went. We never caught his name.

Bearbell and I remained stationary. Chickadee and Tugboat soon took the dead man’s place. The certified mileage-makers arrived on the scene in their usual blur. Each of them looked livelier than any other two hikers we’d met, given their youth; Chickadee is twenty, Tugboat: twenty-three. But Chickadee had taken a cue from me and told me her limbs were clocking out early. She’d been staggering with a pronounced limp. (It takes one to know one.) It’s been said that she who limps is still walking, but Chickadee looked ready to throw in the towel (or, more likely, the bandana). To abscond this self-inflicted torture chamber.

One of her feet (she has two) was killing her. Feet are a danger zone on long walks. Bearbell offered to French tickle the both of them, which was kindly and which she kindly--astutely--refused. I took the more pragmatic, less perverted approach and told her she should slow down and soak in every creek crossing, for the curative effect.

“You can’t force your body to accept its fate; you have to persuade it to. And sometimes you’ve got to hold back to keep moving forward. The cold water’ll do no harm. It might help set back any setbacks.”

“Besides,” I added, “Tugboat’s no ordinary tugboat; he’s a turbo tugboat. A cheetah trapped inside a person’s body. Lean and lithe, lungs with legs. A mean, mean stride. His pace is breakneck, but it’ll be your neck that breaks. You gotsta listen to your body or the dude’ll destroy you!” (When others tag Tugboat as dashing, it’s not just his looks they’re referring to.)

Though he knows how to rest and is in no hurry, the indefatigable brown-haired Maine~iac hikes at four-plus miles an hour, except on the steepest of slopes, when he goes five miles an hour. He and Mountain Goat, it sure seems anyway, were naturally selected to cover great distances on foot, with their long strides, their endless lung capacity and their imperviousness to punishment. They each appear to have an invisible intravenous coffee drip going on. Incredibly, they each move with the grace of a dancer. Sure-fire, sure-footed. Oddly, neither of the two are athletes in their normal lives. Just stalwart dudes trying to forge their path in life. The crystal ball shows more long trails in their future.

“Even in my most caffeinated tirade, I could never lasso him in,” I told the tattoo-splattered Chickadee, who hails from the Peachy State.

A limerick...

He hikes with the speed of a gazelle
As though he’s headin’ through hell
   But to him it’s so sedate
   As though he lacks all weight
And wait he won’t as you begin to yell

We’d mosey from the mountain as a set, but before long every one went his or her own way (yet the same way, as trails mandate). Tugboat strode elsewhere ahead and Frenchie strode elsewhere behind. I settled somewhere between, trying to talk more sense into the bronzed Chickadee. Her limp was more pronounced with each mile, yet she walked ahead of me, pushing the pace.

At my urging, we stopped each time we crossed a creek, to look after our feet. Bearbell came and went; the French Press was on. “If I stopz again, I will be toast,” he blurted in passing. “French toast.” Momentum is an important matter along the AT; it’s not so much a case of, ‘a body in motion tends to stay in motion,’ but rather, ‘a body not in motion tends to stay there.’ And there won’t get you there.

Not getting anywhere, Chickadee and I sat under a slanting sun next to, and in, an unnamed beck. Its water was clear and bone cold, maybe too frigid for a therapeutic reaction. (Interesting that: the trail is therapeutic--terrapeutic--but often requires therapy.) The brook denoted the AT’s 3/4 mark for we north-bounders, though at the time neither of us had noticed. Three-quarters done!

As we waited for numbness to arrive, wiggling our toes and feeding our faces, Chickadee asked about my trailname.

“It’s a long story,” I answered.

It’s not. I just didn’t care to share it with the young woman--that on a previous thru-hike it involved a lot of boozing and a certain anatomical feature of mine doing the helicopter. So I lied.

“I don’t know. Others named me on my first PCT hike. Maybe ‘cause they figured I was funny.”

“You’ve hiked the PCT?”

Evasion achieved.

“Yeah. In ‘02 and ‘06.”

“Twice? Was it nice?”

“Naturally.”

“Do you think you’ll hike the AT again?”

“No.” (Could there be a better answer?)

“A one-and-done?”

“A one-and-well done. As in overcooked.”

“I’d rather do the CDT or something a little more rugged than this trail,” she confessed. “Somewhere where you can go days without seeing others, where you can walk without being enslaved to blazes. There’s not much adventure here.”

This took me aback. I hadn’t expected it of Chickadee. Though she was frequently umbilical-corded to her phone, it was clear she was more of a thinker, more of an adventurer, than I’d thought. 

She paused and added, “I want to be where animals outnumber people.”

Spot on! Adventure on a long trail is a bit of a euphemism, a misnomer, a façade. Adventure exists when life isn’t so banal and predictable, and hiking the same stretch over and over--through the woods and not really even in the woods--is anything but erratic or chaotic. That line of thinking, of sticking atop a line, is hardly adventuresome. The weather and interaction with others are the only unpredictable elements. Wildlife sightings and tree-falls might fit the criteria, but they’re so seldom they hardly qualify as adventure. The potential for adventure isn’t adventure.

Fully foot-numb, we delicately returned our shoes and socks to their rightful (and leftful) places before walking on. As a fresh supply of blood slowly returned to our lower extremities we picked up the pace.

What WAS keeping us here? Why NOT leave for the CDT or the Hayduke Trail? Why NOT go blaze our own routes? Why not leave this and go do a fun-sized trail? We both knew we were thinking such thoughts, but neither of us vocalized them. A more authoritarian force, the inexorable goal of being done perhaps--THE WHITE-BLAZED BEHEMOTH--kept us moving in silence. Pressing us, obsessing us, oppressing us, blessing us. For thru-hikers, continuity is the point.

Later we came to another limpid rivulet. Its water could’ve been mistaken for moving ice. The mini glacier was the ideal temperature for another sanative soak, so we fabricated a stopgap. The dam created a deep enough pool for more than just our feet. A polar plunge portrayal. We watched the ripples--microwaves--change size and rhythm but never leave the stream.

Nearby, another orange salamander meandered in search of food or a mate or of nothing at all. Who’s to say? The thing looked so out of place, like it was dropped here from another planet. I’d witnessed the attractive little creature in every state but Georgia, where, at the time, it was still winter, and only the witless vertebrates were out. Unique among the back-boned, the salamander is capable of regenerating lost or damaged limbs with new ones. If ever Chickadee or I shared a wish out here, this was assuredly it.

When we’d all regrouped at the inmate-built Spruce Peak Shelter, we retired to our lairs, too tired to think. This is one of the wonderful aspects of walking all day. The mind becomes a blank canvas by day’s end, encompassing an almost virginal void, and all that’s left to do is slip into yet another somnolent stupor. Call it The Call of the Mild. No doubt the long, hard physical motion helps apply the brakes to the mental mayhem. For that we are beyond grateful. Or I am, anyway.

Bearbell burning incense to ward off the stench