The Coffin and the Spear Sunday, Nov 12 2006

The wayward high and the wayward low
Believing that anyway is the only way to go…
~ Giant Sand, ‘Punishing Sun’

I called it the Nylon Coffin, the lightweight green structure, less tent than oversized toothpaste tube, I’d brought back from a holiday break in Australia to enable longer stints in the mountains I loved. It was light alright, but with the savings in weight came a claustrophobic trade-off in comfort and space. From a knee-high doorway as inviting as a wombat burrow, the Coffin quickly tapered to a tunnel barely greater in circumference than my down bag. You were snug, crimped into the thing - you were out of the rain. Just forget about sitting up, storing your pack or even writing in your journal. And you’d better sleep, literally, like a log, utterly still, because if you roll an inch or two in either direction you’ll wake up soaked in condensation.

Tonight, however, this long and dreadful night, I had far worse possibilities to contemplete. Tonight the Coffin was pegged, all too tenuously, onto a steep slope of brittle rock, high in the Japanese North Alps, in only hypothetical proximity to a mountain I hoped like a bastard was where I thought it was, metres from a precipitous drop to certain death. Tonight, with sleep out of the question, I had the leisure to contemplate the awful pertinence of my shelter’s nickname.

That missing mountain, Yari Ga Take (’Spear Peak’), 3,180 metres high, ‘Japan’s Matterhorn’ and fourth-highest mountain, a black and battered talon of stone as eerily beautiful as it is menacing, looms at a confluence of reptilian ridges seemingly more suited for rope and piton than pack and trekking pole. These mountains are, by Japanese standards, unusually high (though the South Alps abutting Fuji-San are higher and less travelled) - four of Japan’s 10 highest peaks tower above the pristine rivers and wild, dense forest surrounding the resort town of Kamikochi. Yet a network of trails cobwebs the high ridges and valleys; temples, shrines and sanso (mountain huts), their roofs sometimes anchored beneath a bed of stones against the prising winds, huddle into the hollows and cols. Yari was first climbed by the Buddhist monk Banryu in 1826, after several attempts; many decades later the North Alps were to become, in the words of one writer, “the birthplace of Japanese Alpinism”.

They might have started late, but as with so many of the pastimes they adopt and adapt from the west, the Japanese took to mountain walking with dizzying zest, panache and an eye-burning array of expensive and hyper-stylish neon-bright duds. Purple and pink are popular choices; accessories dangle from bright and well-trimmed packs, and bear bells continue to jingle years after every self-respecting bear has fled to safer, more sedate locales. Tozan, or hiking, in Japan attracts a different demographic from the west - in three years of walking there I would guess that over 75% of those I encountered on high trails were retirees - but a finer, trimmer cut of retiree than in the west (in Australia at least you are far more likely to encounter a pensioner on a lawn bowls green than a summit). More accessible peaks are frequently overrun, if your timing is off, by manic batallions of indefatigable if undeniably cute schoolkids. In fact I was only once unnerved by the proximity of a bear in the hills of Japan, but brooding, chain-smoking salaryman loners, chattering gaggles of pink-and-purple-clad sixty-somethings or freedom-crazed throngs of schoolies clutching Hello Kitty lunchboxes and butterfly nets were recurrent hazards.

I hope I don’t sound too smug, because if there was anything I shared with the hordes, it was an appreciation for the healing benefits both of altitude and bright, shiny GEAR. I’ll admit it: I was a gearhead. You see, those were trying times for me. Tokyo is not the place for quiet introspection. English conversation schools are the killing floors of delicate dispositions. And there was a woman, well-practised in the ancient Japanese art of driving a man to the very brink. With my sanity battered anew each day as a rocky headland is battered inexorably by the surf, I had begun to depend upon the solace of trail, forest, peak and way-overpriced outfitter store. I accumulated gear the way many over-indulged English teachers in Japan accumulate girlfriends, electronic toys and extra chins. And now I had my own latest toy to play with. Leaving the bus in Kamikochi following an overnight ride north-west from Tokyo into the mountain-rumpled crook of the main island of Honshu, the pack I hauled onto my shoulders was a bright-red monolith, a ludicrously capacious Gregory ‘Denali’ jammed to the lid with ass-dragging indulgences. No bear bell, but I looked like I had a fire engine strapped to my back.

I was hiking by 6:30am. Striding out of Kamikochi into the woods, I was at first oblivious to the weight strapped to my back. I was free, alone, alive. The sky was bright and blue - you rarely see the sky in Tokyo - and the Azusa-gawa shone crystal-clear over its bed of polished stones. I followed the path that followed the river. Occasionally the canopy opened and there they were, the vertiginous walls of green topped by crumbling grey crags I would come down on my return leg: Okuhotaka-Dake, third-highest dake in Japan, and her attentive siblings, so broad and steep it made you queasy to regard them. A few hours of walking had taken me past a handful of handsome but near-deserted lodges and sanso. As I rested at one, a boyish figure bearing a pack barely shorter than he was had approached, smiling. ‘He’ turned out to be a plucky, diminutive woman with short-cropped hair and a toothy grin. I’d be seeing more of her.

The trail left the woods and the Azusa and I began to climb the valley of the Yarisawa, a river stream that was still, in early summer, a frozen trickle that soon disappeared beneath the snow. Snow. A valley full of the stuff. A shroud of dark cloud had settled over the mountains and it began to rain. I stopped to dig out my rainjacket, gloves and crampons, nervous but excited. I was suddenly aware of how small I was, of the vast dimensions of the landscape that engulfed me. This valley was the long, narrow approach ramp to Yari, buried somewhere above and ahead in the grey cloud. My experience with snow was limited and unpleasant, but that ice axe felt good in my hand, the crunch of the crampons was novel. I flushed with gearhead delight as I moved on, but my speed had dropped and I was starting to feel that weight. There were no markers (This is a popular track and you shouldn’t get lost: my guidebook) and I assumed I had just to follow the valley upward. Up ahead was a tiny dot that grew into a human figure as I gained on it. The rain persisted and the snow turned to slush. The valley steepened.

Where were the bloody markers? I caught up to the figure, a dour young guy in an expensive purple rainsuit and glasses struggling uphill with two poles (I was still using a single Leki stick). He turned and looked at me without expression or sound.

“Konnichiwa,” I said as I stopped.

He looked at me. Then he looked beyond me, at the arresting backdrop of green peaks smeared in their higher pockets with snow. Jeez, I’d almost forgotten how high I was. The woman was a hundred metres behind, progressing slowly but efficiently without sticks, gaining. She looked like a small child piggybacking a larger one.

I wished him Ganbatte (”Hang in there”) as I passed; he didn’t even grunt and anger seeped into my belly. Freak - I’ll bet he’s a chain-smoker too. I lifted my speed to widen the gap. When I next looked back, the woman had overtaken him and was close behind. The ‘trail’ had steepened; I’d begun to slip and slide. She caught me as I dug my ice axe, an impulse-purchase with which I was utterly unfamiliar, out of the Fire Engine. The woman paused while I acquainted myself with the thing - she had some basic English which, combined with my pre-school Japanese, enable us to manufacture a simple conversation. She was from Osaka, a rock-climber. I felt foolish and inadequate, but put on what I hoped was a brave face. It began to rain harder.

Clawing my way upward a step at a time, clasping the axe by the ‘head’, alternating stabs into the frothy snow with axe and stick, I felt like a very badly adapted arachnid seeking escape from a vast white shower drain. It was early afternoon, alarm was building in my gut, and I still hadn’t seen Yari, somewhere ahead in the gloom. The alarm was tinged with a depressing sense of futility, but I was an idiot, too stupid to even consider turning back, even after repeatedly finding myself sliding several metres to a primitive and instinctive self-arrest. The Fire Engine was determined to retreat and did its best to topple me backwards. When the woman caught me again she looked worried, and I gallantly offered her my stick.

“I don’t need it,” I said. “I have this.” Gearhead pride.

She smiled and shook her head. “Unnn! I change…plan. No go Yari today.”

She pointed vaguely up and to right, toward the ridge smothered in cloud that formed one wall of the valley. “I go different hutte.” Hut-te, a word presumably borrowed, like shurafu (sleeping bag), from the Germans, was another name for mountain lodge. She smiled. “You…come?”

I repeat: I’m an idiot. Before long I was cutting steps into the slope, aiming at an outcrop in the wide white sea, anchoring myself with the stick while I swung the axe. The labour kept me absorbed and another half-hour passed. As I neared the rock I noted a nasty gash in the snow, and the ice beneath it, on its downhill side. I edged around, made it to the island and ate some chocolate as the rock-climber approached. I pointed out the crevasse and she stopped on the far side. “Your sanso?” I said, pointing at the hut I’d spied as the cloud briefly lifted.

She nodded. “I make…traverse?”

“Yes.”

“You come?” she asked again, and I could see the concern in her elfin face.

“Nah. I’m going this way.” I pointed to the other side. The base of the left-hand ridge was much closer, and I’d had enough of this bloody snow. I wanted to feel some good hard rock under my feet - a trail was an optional extra.

Now she looked really worried. “This way…no way. No…?”

“Path? Michi?”

She nodded hard.

“It’s okay. I will find a michi up there. Your way is too far. I hate snow.” She looked at me blankly. “I…do…not…like…snow.” I took a tentative step onto the slope. “Good luck - ganbatte.”

We turned to watch the purple figure, far below, pause to crane his neck, watching us with his mouth open. Even at that distance you could sense the apprehension. “Ganbatte,” the climber said, and we parted.

My own traverse was only 20 or 30 metres, but it would have been impossible without the axe. The snow was mushy, the slope very steep. Occasionally I would allow myself some quiet introspection - What the fuck am I DOING? - but I still hadn’t considered retreat. Intrepid - I was fucking insanely intrepid. I moved sideways across it, cutting a step, lunging crabwise into it, hugging the snow, reaching across with the axe to cut another - a tense and tedious business - and when I finally reached the rock and shrubs another half-hour had passed. The rain had eased but a little voice whined Getting late as I started up the side.

Holy shit. This was not good. Holy fucking shit. That ‘rock’ that had seemed such a sweet, solid alternative to the snow was just a new, improved variety of treacherous. It crumbled, chunks broke loose or were just loosely stacked upon each other, the wall steepened till it was almost vertical, and the branches and roots of stunted pine-like shrubs I used as handholds were frequently rotten and would snap off as I hauled myself upward. I was climbing a fucking topiary - I was fucking climbing. I began to curse myself, the Japanese, the idiots who’d written my guidebook. There were periodic calls from below as the woman tried to hail me or the purple guy or the mountain gods. Whenever I’d reached the relative safety of a ledge I would look back and down. She was a dot moving imperceptibly towards the far side of the valley. Sometimes I would spot the hut on the far side and curse myself anew for disdaining its tantalisingly close refuge. I was moving as much sideways as up, step by tentative step, testing each foot and hand placement, with the Fire Engine doing its best to send me arcing back-wards toward the snow.

I was a one-man environmental disaster, tearing out handfuls of shrub, kicking footholds, dislodging rocks. One of these, a shoebox-sized missile of lethal potential, went bouncing and bounding down onto the snow, picking up speed as it headed down the slope. Shit - hope I don’t kill that guy. But he was absorbed in his own struggle, and as I watched with an almost morbid detachment, he slipped, rolled, and went sailing 30 or 40 metres down the slope, losing a stick on the way, till he stopped, sat dazed and spreadeagled a minute, and resumed his miserable ascent. “You poor bugger,” I muttered, and returned to my own ordeal.

Thank God for all those workouts in the gym. My very life depended on the straining muscles of my forearms, probing for purchase, attaching, wrenching myself upward. There was a sickening SLAP as my Platypus waterbag slipped loose from its pocket and landed on a ledge below. Shit. Shit. The little voice said Leave it but my only other water was mixed with energy drink, useless for cooking, and night was sure to be cold. God-fucking-dammit. I got the Fire Engine off, secured it, removed my gloves and backtracked, retrieved the thing and climbed back up. Day was dying. I could smell the sweat and fear on me. I felt the stirrings of panic but slammed the door on them and kept climbing. Too late to turn back now anyway.

The final leg was a nerve-wracking business, each foot and finger exploring for reliable holds, and suddenly I was standing on an incline of roughly stacked, head-sized rocks, devoid of plant cover, loose and noisy underfoot. I was moving now, bounding like my namesake ungulate, and then - Oh joy! - a gift from those ever-generous mountain gods: a rusted coffee can lying on the rocks like a beacon of hope. Soon I was sprinting along a series of crudely painted circles on the rocks, the Japanese version of the blazed trail. I was convinced that my insane gamble had paid off. At last I startled a pair of raicho (ptarmigans), the plump slow-witted birds that symbolise the North Alps, and stood upon a signposted summit - signposted of course in kanji, or Chinese characters. I pulled out my map and decided I was standing on Naka (’Inner’) Dake; another sign pointed in the general direction of Yari, still concealed by cloud and the gloom of approaching night. My chest swelled in triumph, a fool’s triumph, and I actually paused, with every second crucial, to find my Discman, load it with Mercury Rev, and dig out some date biscuits, before I forced my cold-retarded fingers back into the gloves and began rock-hopping down the trail. My sunglasses fell down a crack in the rocks - “Good riddance!” - and I rushed onward, cramming chunks of biscuit into my mouth, with one earpiece or the other trailing from an ear; I dropped the Platypus again, splitting the plastic near the mouth, cursed myself for five kinds of fool, climbed again, had one chilling glimpse of the crooked shaft of Yari as the sky cleared and as quickly clouded over, and my last stores of adrenalin carried me up to another summit, snow-capped, rounded, smaller than the room in which I write, signposted ____  ____ Dake. I recognised in the last gasps of daylight the first character as O or Dai, meaning ‘great’ or ‘big’,but that didn’t help. The mountain wasn’t marked on my map, and there was no This Way To Yari signpost here. I was in Great Big Trouble. Gusts of angry wind buffeted the summit. The western sky, purple and orange, should have been a beautiful sight, but for me it signalled crisis. I mean, a new crisis, or the continuing evolution of the old one.

I could make out no clear path down from the top, but I’d had enough of snow for one day. I put on my headlamp and lunged over the top, approximating north, down a steep rocky gully that quickly became steeper and rockier, till the gravel was sliding under my soles and you could tell one slip would launch you on an unstoppable roll. The rock here was not of the “solid as…” variety. “I’m fucked,” I muttered, sweeping my headlamp from left to right, searching vainly for somewhere halfway-flat I could spend the night. “I am fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fucked.” I slowed, and crouched, and inched downward over the crumbly rock, but the way ahead only got steeper and the beam disappeared in the blackness, insinuating a lethal denouement if I continued. No way. No way out but back up to the snow and the wind.

I was fucked.

I was fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fucked.

I’ve had more pleasant campsites. I dumped the Fire Engine against a low hedgelike wall of the ubiquitous dwarf pine that clung to the windward rim of the gully. There was a tiny spread of soft green groundcover here, gut-churningly steep but at least protected from the wind. I put on every bit of clothing I had, spread out a space blanket, rolled myself in it, lay head-up at about a 50-degree angle, anchored myself to the slope with my feet against a twisted branch, rested my head on the pack and prepared for a long cold night. Within a half-hour I was shivering, and it was barely eight o’clock. It was going to get a lot colder.

“Idiot!” I dragged the coffin from the pack. “You stupid, stupid idiot!” I spread the tent on the slope, appraised the terrain in another desperate headlamp sweep: very, very steep, rock and scree for a floor. Nowhere soft enough to hold a tent stake. Impossible conditions for a tent. Aren’t they? I was shaking violently, my teeth clattered like a typewriter, my breath in the headlamp beam was a plume of white smoke. I grabbed a rock and began bashing and bending my aluminium stakes. Somehow I hammered three of them into cracks at the upper end, threw in my Thermarest, got my feet into my sleeping bag, and slid into my coffin.

That mattress didn’t help much, sliding downward on the tent floor, too thin to protect my back, buttocks and legs from the sharp rocks beneath the shelter. It was only by jamming a heel against a large rock at the lower end that I was able to arrest a lethal slide into the foot of the coffin, and that took so much energy and concentration that sleep was out of the question. The plus was, I had the luxury of a long quiet evening to indulge a burning and ferocious self-loathing, and I marvelled anew at my rock-solid track record when it came to fashioning manageable crisis into utter catastrophe. You thought you were so bloody cool - now look at you - wasn’t ME that marked this pathetic excuse for a trail - nobody but yourself to blame - nobody knows where you are - you don’t even know where you are - your maps are in Japanese, and your Japanese is crap, and you set out wilfully into shit weather like the moron you are… I ate trail mix to keep warm and tried to distract myself with music, but my selection - Nick Cave - was ill-suited for distraction from morbid contemplation, and the Discman soon joined the steadily increasing accumulation of ballast at my feet. All my weight was on that one heel; when pins and needles began I would switch feet, when one hip pained me I would carefully roll onto the other. Then I remembered it was my birthday.

Well, I half-laughed, unzipped the doorway, dragged the pack closer and reached in for the package from my parents. I’d intended to open it at the sanso as a reward for a hard day’s work. Now it would prove a welcome distraction from my hard day’s night. I tore it open, read the card, allowed myself a minute or two of self-pity and laughed again as the gift was revealed: a pair of thick, warm socks (How do mothers always know?) and a copy of Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang. Happy birthday to me. I slipped the socks over my others and let Carey do his best to transport me back to the sun-blasted Antipodes. But I was too worried to read - the cold, the snow, the coming morning, not to mention that abyss beneath my feet - and the paperback joined the ballast in the bottom.

I dozed at last in fitful bliss, and when I woke I was even closer to that abyss - I had slid into the lower half of the tent and I felt nothing under my feet but space. I yelped in horror, clawed my way back to the top and forbade myself to look at my watch. Outside it was quiet. Then I heard, and felt, a POP! as my weight plucked a stake from the rock. I jammed both feet against that rock and held on.

It was 3:30 when I next permitted myself to check. I remembered that dawn on Fuji-San, a week earlier, had begun at around 4:00. That’s it - I can’t do this another minute, I have to move. I crawled out of the Coffin into dark pre-dawn, twisted my body almost upright and regarded a campsite that looked like an avalanche had hit it. Grabbing shrubs again, I hauled myself to the rim and peered over. Far below was a hut, and the headlamp speckles of a party of hikers rising for a dawn climb of Yari. And there, to the left, the awesome silhouette of the Spear herself, with the sprawling, beautiful complex of Yari-Dake Sanso nestled into the col at the the base of the shaft. Godammit, I was going to make it.

Half an hour later, after sprinting from the summit down a snow-blanketed ridge in the most beautiful dawn of my life, I was gulping down a hot can of coffee while one of the staff gave me the crossed-hands ‘X’ sign that meant “no” or “forbidden” - he informed me that camping on O-Bame-Dake, as my night’s campsite was named, was “illegal”.

“Illegal?” Again, the half-laugh of incredulity. “Camping? I had to. I was lost. I think I nearly died.”

“Yes. It is very easy for getting lost here.”

I made the 20-minute climb, assisted by rusting ladders and bars, to the summit that had possessed me since I first saw its picture, that had haunted me and cost me so much. I could easily make out the white crown of O-Bame, the ragged green hedge angling down to my lonesome campsite. Far beyond, imposing Oku-Ho, which could wait for another time, a braver or more sensible me. Below the col, the valley of the Yarisawa where tomorrow I would locate the sparse, slender bamboo sticks I’d missed yesterday, with their sad red ribbons marking the route down to the river. But for now, the sun, the light. The space and the quiet joy of being alive. I climbed back up in the late afternoon with my stove, the Discman, some food and my journal. Sitting alone after my corn soup and soba noodles, after the pink-and-purples and sullen loners had departed for the hut, warm and comfortable in my three shirts, rain jacket, two bandanas, beanie, longjohns, hiking pants and rain pants, I wrote a simple entry in my book.

6:42. Finished dinner. Still plenty of light up here. Bevis Frond playing, perfect. Can’t believe where I am - how lucky I am, here on the 4th-highest point in Japan. I’m in another world, I’m seeing things so ancient, forces at work as they’ve worked for millennia, as though for the first time. Look at those narrow bands of cloud streaking past the peaks. Look at that eternity of cloud. The thin band of light between the cloud and the dark sky. Iced-up river valleys far beneath me. Humans cling in fragile structures to the rare nooks they’re allowed. How brutal this world can be (as I found out last night). How awesome a place it is.

I packed up and lowered myself carefully from the summit. A few drinkers and smokers were still up at the sanso, but most of the hikers had already retired. I went down to the tenting area, to my sweet little home on its perfectly level terrace carved into the shoulder of Yari, stooped and zipped myself into the Coffin.

No Responses »

 

The Maine Course Saturday, Nov 4 2006

Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 15:01:33 +0000

I was burned out from exhaustion

Buried in the hail

Poisoned in the bushes

And blown out on the trail…

~ Bob Dylan, ‘Shelter From the Storm’

 There are times that one treasures for all one’s life, and such times are burned clearly and sharply on the material of total recall. ~ John Steinbeck, ‘Travels With Charlie’

There had never been a freedom like it. ~ James Dickey, ‘Deliverance’

Hello, y’all, and welcome to possibly the final (chorus of relieved sighs) bulletin. Yes, I am alive, if not exactly ‘well’. Though I feel alright, I am utterly rundown and require two or three naps per day. My knees hurt when ascending or descending even a few stairs. There is a constant gnawing ache in my shins. I have ankles like Eddie Murphy’s in ‘The Nutty Professor’: flabby bulges of prosthetic rubber. First steps each morning are rewarded with the stabbing of a million pins and needles into the soles of both feet. And all sensation has departed both big toes, the effect of prolonged pounding of toe against boot leather. I hope these symptoms are transitory; if not, so be it. It was all worth it.

I am recuperating at the home of friends Snatchy & Monk (AT 2004) in beautiful Charleston, SC. I arrived here after my trademark hellish Greyhound ride from Bangor, Maine: 33 hours of torture in the company of what Tinkerbell charitably calls “the salt of the earth”. What he means is that the hapless passenger automatically scopes out his fellow travellers and tries to position himself furthest from those he deems “most likely to stab me en route”. Most of the scenery of the journey occurs on the inside of the coach windows. Black youths in oversized tees adorned with the murderous visages of oversized rap thugs gyrate in their seats to the headphone bleed of boom-chikka-boom. Black women of a certain size rant to anyone who cares to listen, and anyone who doesn’t, about the (admittedly wretched) service. Drivers, bleary-eyed, dreary-tongued, squeeze into their seats like hard- boiled eggs into bottlenecks, snap and sneer at their passengers with the sarcasm and contempt they deserve. Rest stops are devoid of rest. Food and service in the stations are awful. White youths in sideways caps and monster-truck tees strut like caged panthers, hand on hip, sucking angrily on Marlboros; blacks argue and shout and blabber. Buses stop and sit or are exchanged, after interminable delays, for new buses. Passengers curse and complain, close to mutiny.

For a brand name as inextricably connected to its product as Greyhound’s to deliver such consistently, jaw-droppingly atrocious service is beyond perlexing - it’s depressing. There is, for example, a non-scheduled two-hour delay on my journey when the bus driver decides we need a bigger bus. I know I am in the New York City station when the vibe changes from harmless stupidity to wanton hate and menace. The toilet begins to stink; I am sitting next to it, as far as possible from potential stabbers. A guy who owns two bars and a boat (he says) decides we are Brothers of the Road (perhaps we are); he proceeds to describe his adventures hitch-hiking and freight-hopping every state except Nebraska, then as we are at last delivered mercifully into Charleston he outlines (”I’ll admit it: I had been drinking”) his encounter with two “flying discs” spinning like dragonflies over the water and back into space. “I know what you’re thinking: This guy’s crazy. But dude, I know what I saw. I mean, this is fucking ‘Star Trek’ shit, man!”

Salt of the goddamned earth.

But the good news. On August 23 at approximately 9:30am, I summited Katahdin, just over 100 days after leaving Pennsylvania 501 Shelter more than a thousand miles south, and concluded the greatest adventure of my life. It was over. Wasn’t it? We had at last run out of white blazes. A dead end, high above those glorious lakes and woods, atop perhaps the greatest, most beautiful peak on the entire Trail. Now what? How can you walk anywhere without those guiding strips of white paint? And how do I feel? What do I feel? Cold as hell, but otherwise empty, detached. Now what? Where is the elation, the triumph? You feel a distant signal to cry, but the message is frozen mid-synapse; you smile for your summit photo-souvenir but - Is it just me? - the smile is forced. I don’t want it to finish. I don’t want to go back. I am not ready to cross this damned finish line.

My body feels differently. Even another few miles would be utterly out of the question. Something would snap, or start to bleed, or crumble into dust. When the pain is keeping you awake at night, it’s time to (Trail Cliche # 109) “listen to your body”. My body says, “Love me or leave me.” I hate my damned body. Treacherous bastard, you have failed me again. Why can’t I be the super-athlete of the woods I imagine myself to be?

My last report, from Monson, was infused with weary pessimism (you might have noticed). I was beaten down, sleepless, hurting. I am happy to say that things improved immensely thereafter. Though unable to catch Firefly, my zero there allowed some old-new friends to enter the scene and share those last precious days in the 100-Mile Wilderness. We formed a unit of five and had a blast. There were ‘Gumby’ and ‘Coyote Bec’, from Lafayette, Louisianna, a married couple of about my age whom I had first met in Hanover, NH. They own an outfitter’s store and are two of the finest people I have met on the Trail. They were hiking with ‘Tinkerbell’, from Tupelo, Mississippi (yes - home town of one Elvis Aaron Presley!) a lanky kilt-wearing geologist who had lost 50 pounds on the journey (Gumby had once described him as “the fattest skinny person on the Trail”). Another of those constantly entertaining Southerners whose company I always enjoy, I’d first met him down near the Vermont-New Hampshire border. And there was ‘ESP’, a smart young woman from Massachussets with a redhead’s cutting wit who was hiking from Harper’s Ferry north, then flip-flopping from Harper’s down to Georgia. I was promised a ride out of the remote corner of Maine in which our journey would conclude if I could match their meticulously mapped-out schedule and summit date - a couple of days earlier than my original plan. So I upped the speed again and never regretted it.

The Wilderness was the perfect final stage of the adventure - beautiful, green, quiet - but as we came quickly to realise, too easy, too infested with section hikers and weekenders to really qualify as ‘wilderness’. And the awe-infused language so often used to describe the area was a frequent source of mocking bemusement within our group. It was presented as tough, even scary; a sign on the northern edge of the Wilderness warns hikers not to underestimate its perils, to carry food for 10 days, etc - such warnings are unnecessary on the southern approach as hardened thru-hikers have already encountered far worse. We met, for example, a group of overweight South-bounders who bemoaned the mess of mud and roots stretching to the next shelter that they had just taken eight hours to traverse; we skipped daintily through in less than half that time, praising the ease of travel. We did the 114 miles to the base of Katahdin in six days, with daily mileages of something like 19,17,19, 14, 20 and 22 (I know: I’m a hiker, not a mathematician). I recall the joy a few days in when we summited, early in the day, the toughest mountain of the Wilderness, White Cap, and toasted with water bottles the realisation that all the hard climbs were now behind us (except of course for the Big K).

The daily erosion of the once-daunting reputation of the Wilderness began to grate on Tinkerbell - he felt cheated. “They call this a wilderness?!” he would twang in one of his frequent rants. “This oughtta be called the 100-Mile Turnpike! These sissy section-hikers oughtta try the first hundred miles of Maine if they wanna see real wilderness! That’d whip their asses!” (As it had ours). His derision reached such depths of sneering contempt, we had to warn him that he was in danger of becoming a ‘Trail a-hole’. But we agreed that the Wilderness was less the penultimate trial than it was the verdant and rewarding cream on the great cake of Katahdin.

Meanwhile, we marched ahead, with Coyote Bec walking point at an unwavering pace. Often we moved in silence, in a melancholic appreciation that the end was near, but there were also frequent diversions to entertain us. ESP, who struggled at first to maintain our rigorous pace, soon excelled, though she was a regular victim of Tink’s savage wit and his clumsy attempts at marriage proposals. A mounting excitement had planted its seed in us; it took root most spectacularly in the ever-indefatigable Tink. I saw it dented just once, when a slide off one of those treacherous bogboards left him planted horizonally in the mud. Accusing ESP of laughing, he sulked for a few minutes but was soon back to normal. He chattered incessantly and would at intervals shout his joy into the woods:

“There is no tomorrow!” (Let’s live in the moment - the Zen Tink).

“I was born to hike, and to hike well!” (I’m a Trail a-hole).

“We gotta lotta wood to chop!” (Long haul ahead) or “We chopped a lotta wood today!” (We did well).

Or “Turn the page!” (New mountain to climb).

And of course his no-nonsense redneck exhortation to…

“Git R done!”

..which became our unit’s unofficial motto.

Meanwhile, after all our good-natured slagging of lowly section- hikers, I was shocked one day to realise that - technically - I was one, near the end of my second thousand-mile section. I was aghast, like a proud Nazi who’d suddenly found out his grandma was a Jew. My comrades however, assured me that to them I was a true thru-hiker - Turn the page, Mountaingoat - or at least smelled like one, and I felt accepted. My own contribution to group morale as we marched was my frequent historical addresses on the evolution of rock’n'roll. There was one on The Origins of Punk Rock, 1953-1975, another on The British Invasion and the Birth of American Garage Rock, and on the last day, ‘A Tale of Two Johnnies: How Thunders was Usurped by Rotten’. Perhaps my most enthusuastically received was the lecture I delivered as we surmounted White Cap: If Every Gal Slept With Every Guy Who Wanted That Gal to Sleep With Him, There Would Be No Rock’N'Roll. Tink was impressed enough to proclaim on our last night that, though he had never actually heard any punk rock, he could honestly say that from now on it was in fact his favourite style of music.

Other highlights were White House Landing, the only place you can resupply in the Wilderness, where you sound an air horn at the edge of Lake Pemadumcook and a gruff Mainer speeds over in a boat to ferry you to a splendid log camp, totally powered by propane, where he and his wife serve pizzas and one-pound hamburgers and beer, plus a splendid spread of pancakes in the morning. I was ecstatic at breakfast to spy my first moose, a placid cow browsing on the far shore, unperturbed by the boat returning us to the sodden, muddy woods. And a campsite on our second-last night at Rainbow Spring when I persuaded my comrades to accompany me down to the lake’s edge from which we’d had our first glimpse of the crown of Katahdin that afternoon, and we gathered in the darkness to watch the crystalline spray of a million stars reflected in the lake, and loons cried mournfully like lost souls trying to find each other in the blackness.

There came inevitably the day when we walked out of the Wilderness, descended voraciously upon the camp store, and slumped into the Birches Campsite, the only shelter on the whole AT reserved solely for thru-hikers. We would summit in the morning. Our group and our other Trail companions - ‘Sundancer’, ‘Right Side’, ‘Mr Breeze’, ‘Skunk’ and ‘Hind’s Feet’, plus a section-hiker we had adopted called ‘Flashback’ (about to complete his final section) - gathered that night around a campfire and compared highlights: Best Hostel, Best Breakfast, Worst 24-Hour Period, Favourite State, Weirdest Hostel Guy. I drank a few Schlitz beers and glowed with the joy of what we had shared. It rained, we fled to the shelters; the rain stopped and we resumed our final corroboree.

My unit rose at 5:00 the next morning and were hiking at 6:00. Sundancer had been stricken in the night with food poisoning and had to postpone his summit climb. It was a beautiful ascent, one of the best in America - the Trail takes you up a rugged, exposed ridge, with frequent boulder hops and incredible views of the glacier-moulded mountainscape below and surrounding us. It grew windy, and clouds rolled over, smothering the mountain in whiteout. At last we were on the Tableland, a gently sloping field of stone navigated via cairns toward Baxter Peak. We had stopped talking; the realisation that we were almost there was stunning. Excitement mounted again as we saw, perfectly silhouetted, the outline of that scarred, weather- beaten sign atop the peak ahead: ‘KATAHDIN’. ‘Greatest Mountain’ to the indiginous Indians.

And we were there. We took turns kissing the sign, posing for pictures. I smoked a Backwoods cigar and thought of Firefly, all those shared adventures, all those miles. It was searingly cold; the wind tried to prise us from the peak. We huddled behind rocks, feasted; Skunk’s boyfriend, who’d joined her for the last day, proposed to her. Mr Breeze and Gumby bravely stripped down to underwear for their summit shots; I posed with Ed Abbey, the stuffed mountain goat I’d lugged north from Williamstown, MA. And then we dispersed.

Tink, ESP and I elected to descend via the Knife’s Edge, a brutally gnarled and exposed ridge, prolonging the adventure. We spent the night at a guesthouse in Millinocket, feasted at a restaurant, breakfasted like kings and queens at the Appalachian Trail Cafe. That afternoon I was on the bus among the salt of the earth, my poor knees protesting their confinement until placated with their daily dose of Aleve.

Anyway, I hope soon to understand more deeply what I have done and how I feel about it. I can say with certainty that the Appalachian Trail is my favourite place on earth, all 2,175 miles of it, that my time upon it was by far the hardest and most rewarding experience of my life, and that the friends I have made there will stay my comrades forever. I feel a bond with everyone I shared Trail or camp or shelter with. I know the meaning of hard work. I am more confident in my abilities and I have tasted the very limits - and beyond - of my endurance. When people complain about pain I will mock them mercilessly; I will gloat on my acquaintance with agony. My faith in the virtue of self-reliance is tempered only by my appreciation of the rewards of community. I have seen the America of which all Americans can be proud, the America that has perplexed and rewarded me on three prolonged immersions in its secret delights. My wonder at the immense power and beauty of Nature is undiminished.

We hiked, and we hiked well.

Before I sign off, I would like to thank, again, those among my readership who have personally assisted me on my travels, either with accommodation, packages, meals, transport etc:

Don Youngblood

Akiko Suwa

The family of ‘Tinkerbell’ Maharrey

Shawn P. Kelly

June Welch

Utah Mike

Snatchy & Monk

Philthy Phil

The ACE team (I continue to believe your package will arrive someday soon!)

Elise/’Heidi’

Paparazzi

And of course my Trail companions the Newlyweds, Dreamer, Firefly, Gumby & Coyote Bec, Tinkerbell, ESP and Mark With the Backwards ‘R’. Those wishing to read Gumby’s moving and vivid account of our final day on the Trail should check out his Trail Journals entry at:

http://trailjournals.com/entry.cfm?id=153966

There is also a nice picture of our little summit group atop Katahdin  at ESP’s Trail Journals entry:

http://www.trailjournals.com/photos.cfm?id=175915

Bye now.

Mountaingoat x

7 Responses »

 

The Enemy Within Friday, Nov 3 2006

Wednesday, 16 August 2006 7:40:01 PM

Hey, y’all.

A weary and necessarily brief hello from the library in Monson, ME, last Trail town of my journey. The usual 30-minute time limit applies here, and the sign on the door prohibits entry to folks wearing perfume or ‘fly dope’; my Eau de Trail seems to have been deemed acceptable. I have now walked 2,060 miles since leaving Georgia on some long-lost sunny, optimistic morning, with only 114 miles remaining before the terminus atop Mount Katahdin. I got in yesterday and am taking another zero today in this tiny town by the shores of Lake Hebron. Tomorrow I enter the 100-Mile Wilderness and expect to summit Katahdin around August 23-25, depending on my energy levels in the Wilderness. And right now, the mere act of typing feels like it’s draining the last of my stores.

As you might have guessed, I’m feeling pretty run-down. I suppose all the walking has something to do with it. Also, I hike, as ever, alone. After missing Firefly by an hour in Stratton, I followed his progress in the shelter registers between there and Monson, and would periodically receive verbal reports from Southbounders who’d passed him. But he continued to move fast, and the gap widened a little. Turns out he’d waited here for a few days but finally left the day before I limped into town. Anyway, there’s little chance now of doing the Wilderness and Katahdin together.

But I doubt I would have been much company for him. I tried to get into town in one 31-mile marathon - it would have been my longest day yet. Well, it was long alright, but I quit after 22, and let the three young speedsters I was walking/running with - ‘Nifty’, ‘Masterplan’ and ‘Bill E. Goat’ (no relation) - sprint ahead. The day started early with a tough haul from Pleasant Pond Lean-To straight up the mountain of the same name; I got to the top exhausted, perplexed at having my arse kicked so early, so thoroughly and so easily. I had to dig out my stove and fix myself a double-strength brew, which restored some enthusiasm to the enterprise - but I was still 29.7 miles short of my destination. I raced on pretty well, but within a couple of shelters two of my companions had caught and overtaken me, and finally Bill E. came in as I lay prostrate on the shelter floor at Horseshoe Canyon, rested a few minutes, spread some peanut butter over a block of raw ramen, crunched through a few mouthfuls, and thus renourished, continued, with night falling, the nine miles to Monson. A near-empty food bag is a terrific motivator. My own supper was similarly drear, and Bill E. had tried to get me up and moving, but the idea was laughable, or cry-able. I was used up.

Why am I doing this? I’d been asking myself throughout that long, hot afternoon. It’s not worth the pain. Hadn’t I made a pledge to myself to walk at my own pace, in my own style, and not get dragged into the slipstream of the pack? And I was plainly not myself. A month or less earlier I would have danced along such an easy stretch of Trail. Now I was utterly enervated, but night offered little in the way of rest, and I lay in the solemn darkness of the shelter, cursing, rubbing my legs, waiting. Waiting for dawn and the next day’s walking. Luckily I found two coolers in the woods in the morning, courtesy of some backwoods Samaritans, with enough caffeinated sodas therein to get me to Monson.

I think I’ve mentioned my battle with insomnia on the Trail. I don’t even sleep too well at home, but something is so perversely wrong with my wiring that even utter exhaustion fails to extinguish the sparks of analysis and recall and anticipation in my screwed-up control centre. Well, lately it’s gotten so bad I am more awake than asleep each night. And believe me, a dark shelter floor or tarp groundsheet is no place to while away the hours till pre-dawn and the new day’s walking. Naturally this takes a certain toll on my subsequent hiking performance. It got so bad, today I began a total caffeine fast. No coffee at breakfast - oh, misery - and no sodas, and worst of all, no products containing cocoa or chocolate when I resupplied for the Wilderness. In other words, no Snickers bars! I am reduced to granola bars and nothing to start the brain in the mornings. In the long run it should help. And I can still enjoy such treats as Little Debbie Fruit Pies (4.5 grams of trans fat per pie) and Hostess Fruit Pies (Contains Real Fruit! Or what was once Real Fruit!), each of which would add about three inches to the waistline of a non-hiking mortal, not to mention the damage to artery and heart.

Perhaps I sound down but I am actually looking forward to the Wilderness. I decided to take my time with it and enjoy myself, my last taste of freedom before my return to the horrors of everyday life. By all accounts it’s a beautiful area and the grades are relatively merciful. I don’t want to be like the guy in the famous poster of the AT, collapsed on the summit sign on Katahdin, sobbing onto his rainjacket, as though all the horror and suffering of 5 or 6 months is at last being released. And I have absolutely no idea what to do once I reach Katahdin. I will probably hitch to Millinocket, and make my way from there somehow to Bangor and a plane, train, bus or automobile to some other as-yet-unchosen locale in this vast land. It would be good to meet up with Firefly but I don’t know how or where. And then of course, I must find my way, perhaps via Utah, to San Fransissy and the plane across the Pacific.

Anyway, things will work out. The Trail Will Provide. Shaw’s Boarding House, where I am staying, a haven for hikers since the ’70s, is clean and peaceful and pleasant - the proprietors of a certain hostel south of here could really learn a thing about housekeeping from these people (they use this thing called a ‘vacuum cleaner’ here). (And no dogs!) Those present include ‘Hind’s Feet’, ‘Skunk’, ‘ESP’, ‘Gumby’ and ‘Coyote Bec’, ‘Tinkerbell’, Sundancer’, ‘Right Side’ and ‘Mr Breeze’. Tonight I intend to get myself, again, intoxicated enough to kill the omnipresent pain that plagues my shins and knees. I am experimenting with a different painkiller, Aleve. At least two of the other hikers in the place are as burntout as me. People are relieved but drained. The boardinghouse resembles some Civil War field hospital, with wounded, shell-shocked survivors slumped all over the porch and bunks, some incapable of any but the most rudimentary communication.

But hey! That’s the price of freedom, baby.

LIVE FREE OR DIE!

(Mr) Mountaingoat

No Responses »

 

The Power of Zero Sunday, Oct 29 2006

Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2006 10:51:52 +0000

You have to be very strong
‘Cause you’re starting from zero
Over and over again
~ Lou Reed, ‘Magic and Loss’

Harvesting…harvesting…HARVESTING!
POP! Blossom!
Total satisfaction, four seconds left…
~ Firefly, shelter poetry 2006

Hey there, y’all.

It’s Day 90 and this chilly morning finds me trying to navigate my way around the keyboard in near-darkness, here in the living room of a hiker hostel in Stratton, ME, a place that looks like it’s seen better days but probably hasn’t. The darkness - can’t find a damn light switch and there probably isn’t one - is merciful. It hides the frat-house squalor, the dog toys chewed to dust and left to litter the carpet, the beer bottles and pizza boxes and unwashed dishes that tend to accumulate rapidly about most of these college grad bachelor boys whenever they hit a town.

“What trail you gonna do next, bro?”

“I’m thinkin’ ’bout the Trail of Destruction.”

“Right on, bro.”

It’s not such a bad place - the three college kids who got in after me yesterday with packs about 500% too heavy are respectful and inquisitive, if disturbingly naive, and I mean, at $20 a night the price at least is right - but unfortunately the guy who runs the place (and, I hear, at least one other in the region) has two big ugly dogs that he allows to share the premises with the paying guests. These damned mutts wrestle on the floor in front of the TV, they hog the couch and coat it with their mangy hair, and are so goddamned neurotic and over-indulged that they rush to the window every few minutes to check whether their beloved master is approaching, knocking everything floorwards with their manic dumbass tails. And whenever he enters the room, this huge guy with his military-style buzzcut has to give his boys a big slap on the belly, a vigourous full-body rubdown right there in front of the TV, all the while cooing and gushing all over his prized pets: “Hey there, Buddy! Whatcha doin’, Buddy? Have you bin a good boy? Have you? Have you, Buddy? That’s my boy! That’s my good boy, Buddy!” - etc etc. The TV is retarded - form and content - and I think I blocked the bathroom sink shaving my head. Stairs, beds and floorboards creak even louder than my bones and joints.

I know what you’re thinking: Ungrateful bastard. The guy helped you out with the credit card thing - show some appreciation. Or maybe: The guy’s been sleeping on the GROUND. He goes WEEKS without a shower, and now he’s bitching about a couple of skanky mutts and a dirty kitchen. Guilty as charged. I’m not saying he ain’t a decent bloke. It’s just that the filth I exist in in the woods is my filth. If I don’t want to hang out with you on the Trail (or vice-versa), it’s a simple matter to speed up or slow down. Maybe too much freedom has eroded my sense of give and take. All I know is, my Idiocy Threshold seems to shrink in inverse proportion to the length of time I stay away from normal society.

I took a much-needed zero here yesterday after a ride into town the morning before with a friendly gentleman-sailor who wanted to talk Captain Bligh even after we’d pulled up at the motel. The hiking since Andover has been fantastic, and at last I have begun inevitably to fall in love with Maine. This is the splendour I have been told about for so long, the wild forests and lakes and ponds, the stone-capped mountaintops stretching towards Canada. The weather after Andover turned beautiful, warm but with a cool revitalising breeze; the nights have begun to chill and I need once again to wear all my gear, including rain jacket, to stay comfortable in my 40-degree (F) bag.

And I am hiking alone once more. First afternoon out of Andover, as we refilled at a stream, Firefly told me he was itching to do some big miles for a while; he’d had to modify his urge for speed during the first thousand miles with his lady friend, and now, as I interpreted it, he’d been slowing down for the several hundred miles he’d shared with me. He wanted to really move; despite his desire to prolong the trip he felt, paradoxically, Katahdin’s spell drawing him northward, and he wanted to test his limits, see if he could squeeze out multiple 20-milers and just GO.

I was really disappointed. I have tested my own limits, and they took me to a dark dank place to which I have no desire to return. And hiking with Firefly was fun. We looked out for each other and despite our vastly different backgrounds shared that ‘Beat’ thirst for experience, an appreciation of the fragile brevity of life that demanded action and a certain risk. Put plainly, we seemed able to hike together without pissing each other off.

But you gotta do what you gotta do. I knew he was capable, at around 15 years my junior, of knocking off a lot more big-milers than I was delivering. So I said sure man, just keep in touch in the registers. We agreed to meet in Monson, last Trail town before Katahdin, and do the 100-Mile Wilderness and hopefully summit Katahdin together.

And the next day he took off as planned. Melancholy at first, I soon warmed to my newfound solitude and have been enjoying myself since. I can take my time, stop and pick the blueberries that are ripening by the millions wherever the Trail crests one of those stony peaks and the sunshine and the rock can warm the bushes. I sit on lonesome summits and just stare, and think, and try not to think. The Trail feels emptier again, as though the pack has been thinned once more; by this stage, any Northbounders still walking are almost certainly going to make it, but numerous casualties have culled the herd somewhat (I heard about three Nobos getting evacuated from the 100-Mile Wilderness with food poisoning) and the hikers I encounter are mostly new faces. The surge of Southbounders has subsided to a trickle - it’s fun to be the expert, the veteran, answering their earnest queries, secretly chuckling at their thin pubescent beards, the huge dimensions of their packs, the tangible scent of inexperience. The women, when there are women, look fresh and eager, their legs delightfully uncorrupted by insect bites and general filth, their hair still fragrant and clean, their clothing bright and new. And another thing about the women: maybe I’ve been out here too long, but they just get cuter the closer I get to Katahdin. The scenery has definitely improved.

So many great days lately; here’s an example of one. I come down off Bemis Peak the other morning feeling great. The sunshine and blue skies, and all those blueberries (you can pick in 10 minutes a bunch of these nutritious beauties that would sell for $5 back home, and totally organic) have me whistling and enjoying the views, zigzagging across the bare stone following the blazes painted right on the rock, the stone cairns you can spot from afar, and just before I reach the road I come to a plastic bag dangling from a tree, filled with still-cold sodas and Ritz crackers. I down a Coke and a Gatorade, pocket two packets of peanut butter crackers, and reach the road already buzzing. A bunch of cars are pulled over up the rise; I detect the opportunity for some serious ‘yogi’-ing and hightail it up there. They are families and bikers enjoying the splendid panorama of Lake Mooselookmeguntic, where a single sailboat sits unmoving on a vast stretch of blue water. Within seconds a lady approaches.

“Excuse me, are you an AT hiker?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Can I get you a Diet Pepsi or something?”

“You sure can, ma’am.”

I would never touch that crap at home, but out here you feel at least like you’ve earned it. I down the stuff and answer the usual Q & A about the Trail, and am off. Watch out Firefly, I am so damned caffeinated (also had two coffees at breakfast) I will be snapping at your heels before you know it. I come to a pond with a white sandy ‘beach’ where a young Trail couple, ‘Y____’ and ‘O____’, frolic happily in the water. Ah, Trail love. To give the lucky bastards some privacy I move on to another pond near a shelter. Firefly has spent the night there, and his register entry is sincere: Hiking to my limits is fun but it sure isn’t as enjoyable as hiking with you, Mr Mountaingoat. That is good to read - he’s a good cat. I return to the pond and eat lunch, venture into the waters for a swim. The thing about Maine’s ponds however: they’re treacherous, with mossy submerged rocks and snags, and clouds of sediment as you walk and trip, and then there are those leeches - it’s no accident King has set some memorable horrors in such locales.

The young couple joins me - she is something else, let me tell you - and share with me a third hit of Trail Magic. We pass the bowl, sitting on the rocks, staring at the water. Bliss, awful bliss. Some of these ponds have the odd cabin, a canoe or two, but this one is just as nature intended.  I move on at high speed, before I get busted perving at this splendid creature - and if I perform well today despite the multiple buzzes, it is principally due to the nice level terrain - but find my night’s campsite overrun with a huge group of babbling French-Canadians - the girls just walk around their tents in their underwear - and have to do another two miles to yet another lake where I stealth-camp and am kept awake all night by the call-and-response of resident frogs and toads.

Next morning I do two miles to the road and by 6:30am am in a pick-up truck going into Rangely, a hunting-fishing town on the edge of yet another lake. I resupply there and a lady comes up to me as I pack.

“Can I give you a ride somewhere?”

“Yes, ma’am,” - and in minutes I’m back on the Trail. And they say Mainers are aloof!

Anyways, life continues to be good, but the chill in the air contains also a hint of sadness. Katahdin is less than 200 miles north, a couple of weeks or so, and there’s a feeling of an approaching limit to my freedom. It’s bittersweet alright, but maybe it’s good news for my body. I got here yesterday to learn I’d missed FF by a half-hour. I took my first day off  since Vermont because my legs hurt constantly nowadays, a dull, persistent ache, and there’s a sore spot above my left ankle that has me concerned. Also, I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in 90 days - even after 15 miles of hard walking I will toss and turn and wake 20 times or more, longing for dawn. I’ve come to suspect it is the aching legs that keep me from deep sleep. But I doubt anything will stop me from finishing this thing. I’ve endured a lot worse. I’ve tested my limits and failed.

Well, the mutts are back on the couch, the sun is glinting off the empty bottles and the diner across the road does a good cheap American breakfast. I will probably get one more chance to email when I get to Monson. What I’m doing after Katahdin I can’t say, but it will hopefully involve a lakeside cabin in Tennessee, a possible stopover in PA and another in Utah, before I get to SF and catch up with my old friend Andy.

The stairs are creaking; here come the college kids. They have no chance of making even NH, but I’m trying to give them enough tips to help them at least make the next town - then they can call their mothers to come and get them if things are looking especially grim. They were Soutbounding when they ran into Firefly somewhere north of here.

“Are you Australian?” they asked me when they got in.

“Yup.”

“Are you Mountaingoat?”

“Yup.”

“We got a message for you from Firefly.” They shared a chuckle. “He says, Live Free or Die.“

“Thank you, I intend to. One of the two.” We were talking about hitching across the country after this thing - that or canoeing back to the South, somehow. But I have to catch him first.

One adventure at a time.

mg
 

No Responses »

 

Maine-Lining Sunday, Oct 29 2006

Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2006 17:46:14 +0000

“To refute the solipsist or the metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head; if he ducks he is a liar.”
~ Edward Abbey, ‘Desert Solitaire’

Hey, y’all.

Greetings from Andover, ME.

Well, I suppose I owe you all an apology for my gruff tone last time - I know, so out of character. Anyway, I have been too tired and sore to maintain the rage, and the mellowing effects of wood and peak have worked their magic. Also, there is Firefly to exploit for cash in town stops such as this - my tab so far has already passed US $100. But I did the same for him when he lost his card earlier in the thing; that’s the Code of the Trail. I was finally, before exiting Gorham, able to get Moron #3 at Mastercard to set up a 3-way phone link with the guy who runs the hiker hostel in Stratton, and his response when I explained my predicament was, “Oh, the same thing happened to me a few years back. Sure, I’ll sign for the card when it is delivered.”

Man, it’s tough being a transient in this nation, but like I always say, The Trail Will Provide. FF, who south-bounded Maine and NH last year (his Trail name has its origins in a stove-fire incident in the 100-Mile Wilderness which left him with severe burns and his unfortunate shelter-mate with a torched sleeping bag), tells me the guy, an ex-Marine, is a good bloke. So all bodes well. Anyway, I won’t let the stench of poverty bother me out here where there are far more important concerns, such as my own stench, and how (not) to keep my gear dry in a deluge, and how to ascend a near-vertical waterfall moonlighting as a Trail without deadly
consequence.

Anyway, Maine. Maine? Maine! Home of Stephen King, land of the still-invisible moose and about a million misty lakes and ponds squriming with leeches the length of your forearm; a vast under-peopled primitive stretch of wilderness that seems anachronistic in this human-infested, over-indulged, king-sized-with-fries country. That’s the good side; the other side is that this state has totally kicked me in the arse for the last few days. All along the Trail, people talk about the Whites as though they are the climax of the whole adventure, like the hard stuff is over once that fearsome range is surmounted. Wrong! Leaving Gorham, glum but relieved after yet another ride in the back of a pick-up, I quickly found that things were only getting tougher. It was like being back on the northern half of the Long Trail: constant up-down-up-down; mud; sloping shelves of slippery stone (try saying that 5 times fast); bare-assed mountain tops; bogs; descents that have your knees bawling like babies. “All that good stuff, maaaan,” as ‘Quarters’, a young red-bearded Southerner I met in Gorham, is so fond of saying.

Trouble was, we would have taken our time but we had commitments here in Andover: while in Gorham I managed at last to line up a rendezvous with Utah Mike, my friend from AT 2004. He was holidaying in a cabin in Maine for a few days and was keen to meet, and we arranged to meet him yesterday here in this tiny town (think ‘Northern Exposure’, or maybe a David Lynch ‘Shitload of Peaks’-type place) 8 miles off-Trail. Ordinarily I’d walk a mile to avoid a commitment, but Mike was worth the effort. We got to the road crossing yesterday only about 7 minutes late after a squelching 8-miler in driving rain. Quarters and his dog were in his tent halfway down the mountain, waiting it out; the rain was getting to him and he wished “I had my shotgun, maaaan, so I could shoot some shit up,” to break the monotony. We couldn’t help him with that, and raced on, and were soon in Mike’s truck looking for a cabin to rent for the night. We ended up getting a room in a laidback B & B, with only two other hikers in the place (unfortunately a rare pair of hikers we don’t like at all), and Mike paid for nearly everything. Thanks, mate, latest in a long line of Trail Angels. Regretably that charity extended to Maine micro-brew beer, and we came over here last night to this other guesthouse to drink some more with the hikers here, so today FF and I are experiencing extreme mental and physical discomfort. The rain has stopped and the sun is blasting. We will only do 6 miles when we hitch back to the woods, but they will certainly hurt.

Maine - you want me dead tired, or just plain dead. An example. Coming out of Gorham the other day - didn’t start hiking till 5:30pm after all the credit card hassle - we came to a nice bare-rock overlook with a vista of river and the lights of some human settlement far below. Night approached; we looked in vain for somewhere flat in the trees to erect our shelters. Finally I said, “Firefly, I’m gonna attempt to set up my tarp right here on this bare rock.”

“But what about that thunder?” he responded nervously, with another desperate headlamp sweep of the undergrowth.

“Don’t be a sissy. I always wanted to camp on bare rock. And look at that view.” It took me an hour to set up a complicated array of hiking poles, ropes and tent stakes driven into cracks and tied onto boulders and distant fir trees - more like climbing than camping; FF squeezed into some secret lair and we were just about to begin cooking, already anticipating our post-supper cigars, when the first drops fell.

FF split for the tree cover as the deluge began, I dived under the tarp and spent most of the night with one finger extended vertically at the heavens, vainly attempting to keep sodden roof from conjoining with increasingly saturated down sleeping bag. It poured. All night. On me.

“God damn you, Firefly!” He didn’t hear. “You smug bastard!” But even under the trees he was fighting a running battle  - hey, nice pun - with the swamp forming in the end of his tent. Dawn found us sleepless, skulking miserably from that accursed place, and descending now into yet another mire of mud and muck and mosquito. “Great to be back on the LT,” we quipped mechanically. I began tired but that didn’t last - I was soon exhausted. We stopped at a shelter where I immediately fell into sweet beautiful sleep on the floor; FF gave me some time and finally decided to move on ahead.

“Hey, Mountaingoat, you want the good news or the bad?”

“Gimme the bad.”

“A slight miscalculation. Instead of 5 more miles, we have to do another 10.”

“You bastard. And the good?”

“That will mean a shorter day when we do Mahoosuc Notch tomorrow…and…er…we’ll be meeting your buddy soon and going to a cabin. It’ll be so sweet.”

“I hate you, Firefly.”

There followed one of the hardest and most interminable afternoons of my life. Tired, hot, sweating, stinking, pack freshly crammed with ass-dragging foodstuffs, I moved slow, so slow, barely scraping 2 miles per hour. On and on I trudged, one goddamned hell-heap of a mountain after another. This is the dark side of long-distance walking. When it’s good, it’s great. When it sucks…oh, mercy. You crest one peak only to encounter the next, and you know the sadistic Trail engineers have deliberately laid the path right over that next bastard, just to add to your misery - I mean, your ‘experience’. You vaguely register the beauty around and beneath you - Miles of nothing…no people…no houses…no aeroplanes…lakes…fucking mountains… goddamned trees… sonofabitch mud puddles…bloody indefatigable Firefly… bastard…what am I doing here?…is this really fun?…what am I trying to prove?…here comes a Sobo - just duck and let the bastard pass… fucking mountains…” - but all you crave is stillness, a hard floor, a solid roof…and water. I was packing less and less to save weight; had just downed a litre in one hit and thought, Must be close…I can wait.

I crossed the border into Maine. The hand-painted sign nailed to a tree proclaimed that Maine was “The Way Life Should Be”. I stared dumbly at this mockery, this outrage, and trudged on. Sleep…need sleep…need water. Need to murder Firefly. There was water everywhere but I could wait. The final insult was Goose Eye Mountain at 3,790 feet. I got up on the thing at last and looked down along a magestic spine of ridge creased with Trail and wooden bog-boards. Far along it I thought I could make out the slanted roof of the shelter (I now believe it was merely a hallucination). The sign said it was 2.7 miles further; the sun was going down. I picked up the pace and trotted down onto the ridge, hopped along the bog boards and over the bare rock, almost delirious with anticipation.

On. On. And on. I looked back: a half-moon hovered above Goose Eye; I could actually observe its passage far higher into the night. On. Mounting alarm spawned an idiotic recklessness; I dropped far too casually down perilous walls of slick rock, risking life and bones in blind lunges downward onto my sticks, their tips seeking tenuous purchase in crack, crevice, ledge. Roots and boulders. Moss and muddy water. I grab onto a tree that is dead; it tilts maniacally and bashes me in the side of the head. That clarifies things for me - pain is a great clarifier. I think, I’ve gone too far - must have missed the turn-off. I’m an idiot. IDIOT! How could I miss the sign? I swear like a sailor, spin around and backtrack into the near-darkness, back up that wall of wet rock, back over those roots and goddamned boulders and lethal bog-boards freshly smeared with Vaseline by those sumbitch Trail maintainers. The moon is high overhead as I double back almost to the base of Goose Eye.

God damn it! I didn’t miss the turn-off! I was right all along! I’m an idiot! IDIOT!

I’m also severely dehydrated and very tired. And very, very alone. Spying a thin trickle of brown water oozing out of a bog, I collect it into my bottle, add a shot of iodine and count off the 20 minutes before it will be drinkable, doubling back again towards the shelter. It’s night; I race along by headlamp light. I reach a high point and stare in mute horror at the northern skies: splashes of pink and orange ripple through the skies. Lightning. Lots of lightning. But no thunder. Screw it, I will camp right here next to the Trail, right on the fucking mud, first flat spot I find. Fuck the lightning. Screw Firefly. God damn these stupid mountains.

The thunder begins.

Back down that awful rocky wall, so reckless, so fast, I don’t know how I reach bottom with bones intact. Another rise, a ridge, more black sky riven by sheet lightning and a writhing coil of electricity. It’s beautiful, it sickens me to the stomach.

The rain begins.

Then I see it: a light high in the sky - a house? Don’t be stupid - another headlamp! Firefly! He’s looking for me! The shelter must be up on the ridge. I wave my hand back and forth across my beam, signalling; he flashes back. YES! All thought of camping out vanishes - I’m almost there! I race on and am soon back in the night-within-night of the woods. On and on. Once or twice I spy brief flashes of light through the trees; I shout out “FIREFLY!”, I coo-ee like a bastard: no response.

Suddenly I’m climbing a crude wooden ladder and am stranding at the shelter. Firefly is inside within the netting walls of his tent (hates bugs). Two forms lie beside him, one snoring as a moose must snore.

“Was that you signalling me back there?” I whisper.

“Huh? No. I was getting worried though.”

“Not you?”

“Been right here, waiting.”

“Holy shit…how weird… I swear somebody was signalling me. I was about to stealth out but I saw your light and knew I must be close. I’ve done an extra mile on top of the goddamn 16.5. What the…?”

I described my evening’s predicament, too hyped to sleep or even eat. Dinner was a shot of Jack Daniels and two ibuprofen. I am not a religious man, or even a spiritual one, or even an imaginative one, but that light beaming at me from the faraway dark, that eerie signal in the night… This will haunt me forever.

Just then I spring upright.

“Holy shit.”

Another light in the woods - gone - back - sweeping again, coming up. A Southbounder climbs another ladder and approaches uncertainly. He turns off his light.

“Was that you with the light back there?” I ask.

“Yeah - that was you?” He’s a young guy, as lost and confused-looking as I must have been.

“Yeah…yeah!”

“I saw you signal.”

“That was awesome! You got me here tonight, man!”

As he settled into his bag I crept over with the bottle.

“You like JD?”

“Sure.” He half-drained it in a single swig, and I passed it to Firefly. The old guy at the end was still snoring like a wild thing. I lay back, rubbing my knees and shins, an automatic process nowadays, soothing them with caresses and soft words, promises of hot baths, respite, scented oils on the lithe fingertips of attentive young maidens. I lie to them and caress them and cajole them and feed them anti-inflammatories. I demand good service and reward it with more lies and threats and hollow promises.

In the morning the Sobo leaves, and I realise I didn’t even get his name. We descend and spend a few hours negotiating the tunnels and boulders and caverns and winds cooled with subterranean ice: Mahoosuc Notch, “the most enjoyable mile on the whole Trail”. We take our time and enjoy every step, every lunge and swing and haul. Then we climb another hard-arsed mountain: Mahoosuc Arm. It nearly kills me afresh.

The AT, where you live and die anew each day.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I love mountains.

mg

No Responses »