Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 17:20:19 +0000 

See, I come from Boston,

I’m gonna tell you about how I love New England,

It’s my favourite place,

I’ve been all around the world, but I love New England best,

I might be prejudiced,

But it’s true, I love New England best. ~ Jonathon Richman, N.E. native, punk pioneer and all-round romantic guy.

It’s not the hiking that’ll kill ya, it’s the stops. ~ Some shelter register wit. 

I don’t understand why a hiker would ever waste his time eating vegetables on the Trail. ~ ‘Tank’, young hiker with a limitless appetite for MEAT. 

Well, folks, it appears I’m back in the land of libraries - another reason to love N.E. – and after finding out that nobody back home is dead or anything, I tend to hike more cheerfully, it’s true. But let’s not forget the benefits to you, my beloved readership, of more frequent missives from the deep, dark woods.

I’m about to leave Dalton, Massachusetts, a small Trail town of decent, generous people – except for the post office and library staff (but this seems a pervasively American phenomenon). Yesterday I took a zero here to rest my legs and feet, which had been telegraphing sporadic signals that they would appreciate a break before things got broke. I listen to my appendages nowadays, and I advise you to do likewise. I am about 375.5 miles into this year’s stroll, having entered MA a few days back following an enjoyable stint in CT. Now I am truly in New England and apart from the higher cost of living here – my junk food budget is through the roof – it’s a very good place to be. 

Dalton, by the way, is the river town where the paper used in American currency, the mighty Greenback, is produced. The locals I’ve met on the streets, many of whom are employed in the town’s paper mill, have been interested in my adventure, despite having no doubt seen the comings and goings of thousands of filthy transients over the years. But the best part about Dalton has been ‘The Birdcage’. 

I heard about the place some distance south: a hiker hostel run from the home of one Rob Bird, a non-hiking but genuinely nice man. He doesn’t advertise the place in the guidebooks as he doesn’t want it to be too well-known, ’cause then he’d have to turn some hikers away. He seems to just get a bizarre kick out of letting hikers stay in his place as long as they want – some stay days or even weeks – shower and do laundry etc, for free. He picks them up at the gas station he runs and drives them up to his modest house with its vast display of Native American-themed collectable plates. There’s a big dog there called Tinker that loves to lick the sweat off hikers’ feet, one of those win-win situations. 

I spent yesterday resting in the Cage, me and Dreamer, the Newlyweds, Tank and one of those longwinded Trail perennials who never stop talking about their pack weight, every component of their gear, their projected mileages for each day of the next several weeks. But that’s the hostel-lottery for you. The night before, Rob took us to an all-you-can-eat buffet. AYCEs, perverse feedlots of the damned in the off-Trail world, await like glorious Simpsonian playgrounds in the imaginations of many a gorp-jaded hiker. I swear the staff started to tremble when they saw hikers walk into the place. And man, did we ever leave a trail of destruction. I downed single-handedly three plates of hi-fat, lo-guilt American fodder: BBQ ribs (I eat meat in towns now), potatoes, peas, corn, mini-corn dogs (don’t ask), beans, cornbread etc, plus at least four desserts. But it was Tank who stretched his dining dollar furthest. After several plates of bird and mammal, he returned to our table with a new assemblage. Within it were some fries, a cinnamon roll, a piece of steak and another cinnamon roll perched atop the steak, so that the frosting melted into the gravy. Cameras were produced; mothers covered the eyes of their innocent charges. In the kitchen, cooks could be heard sobbing, their culinary artistry reduced to cheap delicious spectacle. 

But the truly eye-opening thing about the Old Country Buffet was that almost every one of the customers except the hikers was morbidly obese. EVEN THE CHILDREN. And we could easily out-eat them all and still wake up skinny and hungry and guilt-free in the morning. Walking to the car was a chore afterwards, though. I needed to be helped into the van and was given a nice flat spot on the floor where I could lie down.

As the Trail joke goes, “I’m an eater with a hiking disorder.”

Soon it’ll be back to Lipton’s instant meals and Hostess Fruit Pies (like a pie, deep-fried in the fat-vats of Hell). But there’s still time for one last real meal. ‘Paparazzi’ should be meeting me tonight 9 miles north in Cheshire for another restaurant raid. Finding a hiker on the Trail is not always easy. He tried valiantly to locate me a few days back, managing to run into just about everybody else immediately north and south. Here’s a snatch from his email about what he went through: 

Yesterday, I arrived in the Berkshire Mountains late morning, and left some messages for you at road crossings. The messages stated that I’d meet up with you late afternoon at Route 7. Then I hiked into the The Hemlocks shelter, left another note, and began hiking southbound in search of you. I went over Mount Everett, over Race Mountain, and over to Bear Rocks Falls. At that point, I began walking toward one last spot, Laurel Ridge Campsite. I walked twenty five yards, then stopped and mulled the situation. It was 3:30 PM, and it would require well over an hour to bushwhack out and drive to Route 7. Would you be waiting for me there, give up, and hike on? I decided the practical decision would be to head out. So I turned around and began bushwhacking. It was a fateful decision. It meant that I was 475 yards away from your camp site and not going there. Imagine that? Although it was a disappointment not meeting up with you, it was still a nice day to get out and hike. 

That’s Paparazzi – always looking for the silver lining. Actually, it was all my fault. I emerged half-delirious from the mosquito-infested swamps just before the road – squadrons of demonic blood-suckers, each with a metallic fuselage almost impervious to my frenzied bitch-slapping, had laid waste to my forearms and neck – and waited there 3 1/2 hours, sheltering under my tarp when a light rain began. The Newlyweds emerged from the swampy hell, chewed the fat, eyed the darkening sky, moved on. When Paparazzi didn’t show, I reluctantly resumed the trek, past a monument to a post-Revolutionary War battle called Shay’s Rebellion, and into the dark woods with the crackling of gunfire (a nearby rifle range) adding an eerie soundtrack to my increasingly despondent musings…

The haul to the night’s shelter was long and hard and wet and cheerless. I started to think I was going mad – surely I should have been there by now. I arrived in the dark at a shelter full of dozing bodies, set up the tarp and collapsed, too far gone for any supper prep more complex than the unscrewing of the Yukon Jack bottle. I found out later I’d spent the afternoon waiting at the wrong road, leaving me a few miles behind schedule. Where I come from, they call people like me ‘idiots’.

The day after the Paparazzi debacle, however, I enjoyed one of my greatest mornings on the whole Trail. Splitting camp early, I raced two miles to the road crossing. I was low on food, and needed to walk or hitch 4 miles into Great Barrington, then walk/hitch back. I wasn’t looking forward to this; hitching can be a real drag. But two minutes into my walk, the third car stopped. A nice guy drove me in and bought me a coffee at the local cafe. While there, I started talking to a guy who’d just done 10 days in Maine, where one river was so flooded he had to retreat – the Trail goes right across it – and it took him two hours to hike a single mile. He offered to drive me back to the woods after my resupply. Over coffee, we talked nature. He couldn’t stop talking about mountains, animals, the outdoors. I asked, finally, “what he did”. He seemed relaxed and in no hurry on this midweek morning. 

“I paint. Animals, mostly. Watercolours. But I’m lucky in that my stuff sells now and I make a pretty good living. I’m able to live here while my agent organises the shows in New York, San Francisco…” 

Damn. I was envious. He had his shit together. Great Barrington is a beautiful town, with a long history and a sizeable alternative scene. The Appalachians are waiting right there on the outskirts. Walton – his name is Walton Ford – had split NYC with his family to set up home and studio here in the lovely Berkshires. I was lucky – right now I only had to walk. But a lot of poor bastards have to work. 

Well, I ended up in the controlled chaos of his warehouse studio drinking in the sketches and studies, the gloriously vivid monkeys, buffalo and parrots, while he cranked out some Stooges and hunted down some alcohol for my stove, and I was soon being treated to a personal tour of the really old Berkshire hill farms. We talked art, and Bush, and rock’n’roll, and mountains. He and his wife were home-schooling their daughters because he didn’t want them to “end up as cannon fodder.” He stopped to show me a beaver dam, his pretty farmhouse, an ancient ma-and-pa store with personalised coffee mugs for all their customers. While we drove through the hills, guitar rock wah-wahed from his stereo. 

“What are we listening to?”

“Brian Jonestown Massacre.”

“Cool guitar sound.”

“A lot of these kids nowadays, all the cool white kids in town listening to this hip-hop and whatever, wishing they were black and badass – it doesn’t move me at all.”

“I hear you. Don’t own a single rap record. But I’m more obsessed with rock’n’roll now than I’ve ever been.”  

“How old are you?”

“41.”

“So you’re from my generation. 48. Something about this sound just hits you, if you understand it. It’s so irrational, it’s just instant.”

“It never goes away.”

“White, middle-class, three-chord garage rock is my language.”

“Yes. Yes.“

My heart was thumping when we got back to the trailhead. Walton had met Lou Reed, Thurston Moore,(A really cool guy - and Kim Gordon, what a fox, eh?), Richard Hell (I passed him in the street, said out loud, “One of my all-time heroes.”  He just smiled and kept walking. You could tell he wished I was a girl, but he was pretty happy all the same.), Deborah Harry - the punk pioneers of a scene impossibly urban and remote. Now he painted parrots in the Berkshire Hills, listened to garage rock, bailed when he could to the hills and forests that inspired his work. Talk about balance. Talk about living. 

I tell you, I danced up the next mountain, and it was only partly due to the caffeine. 

Until next time. Mountaingoat   x