A Limp in the Woods...or not (Day 122)

An Appalachian Trail Tale
Day 122: Wednesday, July 24th, 2013
Rutland, Vermont Zero Day #2 = 0 miles
Miles to date: 1,680

Asian Pears and Adam’s Apples

Preamble: As it always goes, my temerity had a way of humiliating me. Yesterday, I lost every Scrabble game I played, no matter the challenger. (Challenger implies they were challenged. Not so; not during the game, and not at any other time. We know who’s challenged.)

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Nonamble: Today, I awoke at an unethical hour--challenging though it was. I then managed more painting. (That is: I managed others while they painted.) I tried too to bounce back from all the Scrabble trounces. Dress the wounds. Nurse the ego. Start anew. Get out of this rut(land). Time for ol’ Funnybone to bone up on two-letter words. (Ugh is three letters.) Time to work on words longer than two letters. There’s a whole dictionary’s worth, I tell ya. And ya, ya is a word, that piquant pear.

After watching the paint dry, a cadre of us participated in a protracted sally to a not-so-local organic farm. Basin Farm is run by the same nutters who own the Yellow Deli, a spiritual ilk respectful enough not to shove their beliefs (or their food) down your throat. This was more work-for-stay stuff, but not a lot. More like play-for-stay. Our attendance turned it into a funny farm.

We raked and hoed underfed fields before reaping raspberries. When our superiors weren’t superioring, we’d reap berries straight into our yawning maws. “Oops,” we’d repeat, giggling like children. After reaching our fill, we gathered for a more organized feast. Then more cultivating. The fields were dusty plots scattered with rocks. None of us knew what was being grown, or what had been grown. Bigger rocks, perhaps. Someone joked, “they raise ‘em to set ‘em on the AT.”

I worked on a haiku while someone sang: “Raking rocks in the...hot sun…I fought the trail and the...trail won.”

The haiku: 

I can’t seem to think

Of a befitting haiku 

I would be proud of

Is that a haiku? I don’t get the whole thing with haikus. But I balk at bashing Bashō; we’re both on a narrow road to the deep north.

I hope to bring one of these things on a future hike

After the tilling and the filling, something scrumptious for the gumptious, I was chosen to feed those of the bovine persuasion. (Cattle also eat a lot.) Then the farm’s foreman/factotum, a short handsome man whose name was something or other (I didn’t hear, because I wasn’t listening; I hardly ever tune in to good-looking guys, unless when in front of a mirror) took us under his wings. He taught us the noble art of passing the time*. It is a lesson all thru-hikers could use, especially those with missile toes.

(* Catch today’s bonus track by clicking on the link!)

He had a hip, hippie name, now that I think about it. Atlas or Anders or Aloe Vera or Anthrax. Something like that.

When done doing diddly, we disregarded the One-Hour rule and went for a flop in the adjacent river, just upstream from a wide but untraveled automobile bridge. Our hippie host demonstrated how to launch from a fifteen-foot perch into the river. Or how he’d launch.

Most of us chickened out, including Chickadee (proving that chickadees can metamorphose into chickens when undue anxiousness is incurred, and that neither bird can fly). But Tugboat, ever the daredevil, would impress just as he had atop the trampoline at Bill and Amy’s July Fourth bash. Despite the staid, subdued exterior, the dude is full of surprises. He hikes not just with ambition, but with passion. He consistently illustrates that our first obligation is to live. To live!

The guy possesses all the curiosity and wonder of a child, yet he’s some years removed. Most of all, though, he’s ballsy. At least until he hit the frigid water. No man is ballsy after that. Once swollen and chafed, mine were now near my Adam’s Apple as I swam against the stream, trying not to get carried away. Malcolm Forbes once said, “People who never get carried away should be,” but I don’t think he meant by current.

If I had to orchestrate the ideal estrangement from the thin, tilted, muddy swathe, this was it. A difficult day of swimming and cloud tracking. A day of undone deeds and little more. A good, grand thing--for how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

Trying to work out this whole work thing