A Limp in the Woods (Day 132)

An Appalachian Trail Tale

Day 132: Saturday, August 3rd, 2013
Eliza Brook Shelter to Franconia Notch = 9 miles

Miles to date: 1,813

A Traveling Travesty

There are moments in life, moments like hubs around which our very existence spins, when time stalls, when memories are built, and when peace befalls our bloodstream. This wasn’t one of them.

I was slogging up a ludicrous slope near South Kinsman Mountain’s top. (But not near enough.) I was questioning my existence, pondering my purpose, and reconsidering the reason for this hike. Is it flight? Is it pursuit? What am I trying to escape? What am I after? I concluded there’ll never be a conclusion. Not till death does the deed. No, I am to suffer and overthink. (I overthink, therefore I am…still thinking.) I’m to face it, embrace it, and continually retrace it. And what better way than head-on? But what, exactly, is it? 

That Walden wisenheimer went to the woods (a whopping mile or so from mommy’s house), because he wished to live deliberately. I went to the woods because I keep deliberating.

What am I doing with my life? What else should I be doing? What else do I love this much? Do I really love this?

Ruminate. Hesitate. Debate. Mediate.

Recreate. Heart rate. Hot plate. Soul mate.

Meditate.

Busy feet are happy feet, but not everyone who hikes the AT is on vacation. The thoughts are ongoing, and then go on. Recurring and endless. Until life begins its final act. Then what?

Ignoring others is easy; ignoring ourselves is not. Our poor rootless, rudderless minds, devouring us alive, one thought at a time. I’m tired of the shapeless thoughts that steer me, tired of the ghosts that haunt the human mind. No one can inflict pain on us as we do to ourselves.

They’re just thoughts. Purely provisional. Keep moving, plow forth.

How I wish I could believe in epiphanies! I need just one. Unfortunately, I am the same me I was a hundred and thirty-two days ago. I’m afraid I will always be.

I'm not 100%

~~~~~~~~~~

After overcoming another case of rigor mortis, and/or the rigors of mortis, I was up and at it. It meant what it always means: walking. Or something similar. Galumphing, perhaps. The campaign to Maine rolls on. It was near noon. The others had long vamoosed our nightly roost, uneasy taking it easy. (If AT shelters had couches I’d never leave. I’m happy having it easy.) Bearbell was the second-to-last to get going, two hours prior. As he left I told him, “the early worm gets screwed.” I then wormed my way deeper into my putrefied sleeping cocoon. I’d wait till readiness reared.

It never did. Hours elapsed. Sleep is a strong seducer. I take everything lying down.

Luckily, on the AT, time is a flexible concept. Well, for me it is. It’s surprising how many thru-hikers bring schedules and spreadsheets and calculators and rigidly-clinical mindsets. Their self-styled adventure is awfully strategized and micromanaged. You know the type: over-organized, nerdly, middlescent to old-aged men with professional backgrounds in engineering or information technology. These immutable, ossifying gents will never learn to loaf, and I’ll never learn to appreciate their presence; I too am impossible to change. Hard-headed and open-minded! With enough thru-hikes beneath your hip-belt you’re taught that the most pivotal thing to manage--and protect--is energy, not time. We learn with our feet; not our brains.

Like a newborn deer, I struggled to stand, before stretching my calves and groin (never ask a man the size of his spread) and easing into the day. Or trying to ease in. The wall one must scale after departing the Eliza Brook Shelter allows no easing in. And so began the Rumination, the only nation to which I belong. (I’d already visited Urination and was clearly bordering Procrastination; I also habitually tour Damnation and Condemnation and pray one day I make it to Rejuvenation, and then eventually to Reincarnation.) I pushed on so I might draw level to Bearbell, whose affiliation tends to prevent contemplation. Mindless meandering, courtesy of my festive French friend. But oh how we laugh! And though it may not exactly be captivating mental floss, the mirth mollifies the mood atop this path of destruction.

For whatever reason I was a walking train wreck today. A complete calamity, tripping over anything in my path and some not in my path. Thwack-packing. Setback-packing. (A path of destruction, indeed--the AT isn’t full of obstacles; it is the obstacle.) The trail is rough in these parts, but no worse than it’s been. All that was required was the usual--lift the feet and shift ‘em forward--but the assignment was as tough as it’s been in months. An ordeal with which I could hardly deal.

A longer-than-normal breakfast helped and I was soon back to my customary level of limp. (I tend to eat a mile or two into each day’s amble, though there’s no real rationale behind it; if it is anything at all, it is what it is.) I soon caught Frenchie. He too was fraught and dealing with rigor mortis, or what he called deadlock. “Zis trail,” he bemoaned, peeling his face from a rock. “I am glad zey haz nuhzing like it back in Fraunze. It vould deztroy ze country.”

“Don’t forget to drink water,” I reminded him. “Because it’s important to be hydrated while you suffer.”

Rising above the lassitude, we’d work upwards to the top of Kinsman, a 4,358-foot prominence that allowed enormous views in all directions. Except when it’s foggy. 

It was foggy.

Just as it’d been atop Mount Moosilauke, the conditions came and went, then came again--multiple orgasms, all in a matter of seconds. They prompted us to come and go just as hastily. “Blink and ze weather changez,” said the beatnik Bearbell. “Mother Nature’z off her medz.”

On the AT it seems sitting and savoring a summit is not feasible. Never mind it’s a deciduous world atop most peaks, but there’s also fog or other hikers or tears obstructing the views. Wind whipping furiously, rain saturating, cold snacking on your bones…all of it is too common. The fruits of your labor are oft spoiled.

By the time we reached the Kinsman Pond Shelter things improved, but not so much as to permit a dip in the pond. The shelter allegedly required eight bucks for each of those who stop and spend the night. There is no on this house in this house.

We moved on. (Our guidebooks proclaimed the cost, though there was no caretaker or fee box in sight.) Interestingly, whereas most shelters along the AT have long since given up the ghost, this one was strong and spotless. Virtually immaculate. I guess that’s what money does, but I knock on (hard) wood that the AT forever remains free of charge. I have serious misgivings, however; white blazes and red tape may readily merge.

An hour past the shelter my sidekick and I reached another pricey accommodation, the semi-yurt-shaped Lonesome Lake Hut. It was the first of what we hoped would be many more AMC huts. Snug, but satisfactory. Five star rustic. A handwritten sign on the wall said, NO SMOKING ALOUD. Even after I explained the blunder, Bearbell didn’t understand. The guy’s got a motor mouth, but an idle brain. Good thing he’s not a smoker, like so many Europeans.

AMC is short form for the Appalachian Mountain Club, one of the oldest outdoor guilds in the United States. Founded in 1876 to “preserve and explore the White Mountains,” the group has since let its belt-line out, with lodges in New Jersey and Maine. It has one hundred and fifty thousand members.

The typical thru-hiker is unenthusiastic about the club and its huts. (There’re eight huts flanking New Hampshire’s AT.) This is because they’re confined on space and charge oodles for what space there is. They even charge to camp near the huts. (Note: the typical thru-hiker hikes because it’s all he can afford. Thru-hiker = thru-broke.) Of course, the huts weren’t created for wayworn thru-hikers, but rather for club members and affluent guests. The AMC welcomes thru-hikers, so long as they--the hikers--shell out the bucks. (Reservations are usually required.) Thru-hikers can also partake in a work-for-stay when work is available. I hope to do this at some point. Just not today. It’s work enough just staying on this trail.

Frenchie and I flipped through some Backpacker Magazines lying about. (Lying about lots of things.) He’d never seen the publication. 

“I’ll tell ya right now,” I revealed while sifting through the ads for actual content matter, “I wouldn’t even wash my crotch with this rag.” The magazine caters to the uninformed, but does little to inform. It consists mostly of gear reviews--to appease advertisers--and terribly constructed editorials disguised as writing. As it is with travel magazines, the editors plaster phrases like ‘BEST HIDDEN GETAWAYS!’ on their covers. That way their 350,000 subscribers can pile into their gas guzzlers and get away to those getaways. A postal carrier pal accurately identifies the periodical as junk mail.

After the skimming, Bearbell and I decided to play chess. We thought of trying one of the puzzles lying about, but were puzzled enough with one another. While fishing around for a mislaid pawn we gathered insider information--leering at all the hygienic, affluent but time-crunched people, talking smack about ‘em. Smack-packing. So many confabulating clients, all so clean, and all so hurried to relax! An overindulgence of jewelry, perfume, makeup, deodorant, and expensive outdoorsy attire. We also got hints of that powerful placebo Bengay. The thru-hiker is seldom a safe enough distance from society. “I feel out of place in this place,” I said to my cerebrally-challenged friend. 

“Moi aussi,” he replied. Me too.

“Let’s leave the second I win,” I suggested, putting my pieces in victory formation. The gloves were off. (It’s hard to play chess with gloves on.)

“You meanz ztay here forever?” Bearbell joked. “We could du zat.”

He thought me a man of questionable intelligence. I assured him there was a time I knew even less. The battle of wits had begun. Dim-wits

“Did you know chess is one of the only games that leaves nothing to chance? Therefore, it is my métier.” Métier is a word I knew the Frenchman would understand, despite him wearing stupidity like an extra layer of skin. I went on. “Luck plays no part, except to be lucky enough to have inherited an intellect as vast as mine.” My so-called challenger wouldn’t exactly require any undivided (or unsubtracted) attention.

It’d take three minutes and my adversaire had his Czech mate in checkmate. A chokehold. The foreign matter seemed more joyed that I’d lost than he was for winning. A true champion. “Do not donate your brain to science,” he told me in rare perfect English. “It is not worth studying.”

It appears I can’t think my way out of a wet tent. I tapped out and put the pieces back in their rightful places--white to the right--before we uprighted ourselves. We (victor and victim/winner and whiner) were grateful for the breather. I didn’t actually whine; losing is okay when it’s easy.

An hour beyond the hut, after another unforgiving descent, we came to the trail’s northernmost interstate, I-93 at Franconia Notch. Although we’d done just nine miles on the day, we’d passed hundreds of weekend hikers. We had dropped nearly three thousand feet since Kinsman and it was getting dark (black-packing). It was time to unwind.

A thru-hike is often about breaking free from that cage we’re duped in to staying in--society. Yet when it comes time to unwind during a thru-hike, it’s there, straight back into that strange little world of humans, we head. “Where do forest rangers go to get away from it all?” posed George Carlin. Well, I can’t speak for them, but we thru-hiking forest dwellers know where.

For us it meant a return to Lincoln, a six-mile hitch. There we took care of the same old, same old: ridding wrappers (our daily use of plastic and other landfillables is disgusting; I’d also been carrying more canned food); visiting the library (paperback-packing); people watching; and eating. Well, we call it eating. Onlookers call it inhaling. There are wild animals with better table manners.

We’d visited a long-familiar franchise where fast food is served by slow workers, some who nearly speak English. This was food that’d been carefully engineered to entice the tastebuds, so we each inhaled three or four thousand calories. In my case: four Big Macs with extra mayo (BigMac-packing); two frozen/reheated apple turnovers; two large chocolate milkshakes; and, soon after, one serious stomach battle. I felt like a giant tumor. Do the potential detriments of eating such food negate the joys?

After waddling away, my favorite pain in the ass and I hitched back to the AT crossing, where we’re settling in for the night beneath the interstate underpass. We’re camped beside Captain Planet and a feral Detroit native named Hangman, who’s also thru-hiking. It’s noisy as all get out, what with the traffic and our belching and farting. But as the rain kicks in, we’re happy for the coverage overhead. Prime real estate, given the conditions.