Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2006 19:55:57 +0000

“The truth is that it is natural as well as necessary for every man to be a vagabond occasionally, to throw off the restraints imposed upon him by the necessities and conventionalities of civilization, and turn savage for a season, and what place is left for such transformation, save these northern forests?”
~ S. H. Hammond, ‘The Vagabond Spirit’.

Hey y’all.

A lot has happened since last we spoke. For one thing, I’ve walked a second trail - a 170-mile diversion from the AT to the Canadian border. This is quite a tale, so you might want to fix yourself a drink, turn off ‘Big Brother’ and shove a pillow or something under your corpulent, citified posterior.

But first, apologies for the long absence from your computer screens - or didn’t anybody notice? I write these words at the Dartmouth Outing Club, located on the Ivy League college campus here in Hanover, New Hampshire. Another state down, and only two to go; we are about 440 miles shy of the finish line. That sounds like a daunting haul, because it is, though covering four times that distance to make it here should render it almost negligible. Should, but for the little matters of the White Mountains and the marshy wastes of Maine between us and that finish line. We crossed the Connecticut River this morning, posed for pictures on the border-bridge, and headed for the bakery feeling good yet melancholy at departing Vermont, our favourite Trail state to date.

Vermont was so good to us, we couldn’t understand the indifference of so many hikers to its charms. Apart from its gentle grades (although see below!) and pleasing scenery, we have been absolutely inundated with Trail Magic in the Green Mountain State. People bitch about the mud and mosquitos - ‘Vermud’, the register jokes call it - but people can be awfully tiresome. I mean, Jesus, would you rather be at work? Thanks, but we’ll take our chances with the mosquitos.

The ‘we’? ‘Firefly’ and I. We have been hiking together for almost a month, and getting on famously. He’s a lapsed seminary student from Birmingham, AL, and I like to think that his time in my company has caused him to lapse just that little bit more. FF is a good deal younger than myself, a good-looking, softly-spoken, fast-hiking Southerner who used to ‘work’ as a river raft guide on the Pigeon River, TN. I met him properly at a southern-VT shelter called Story Spring. He had previously been ‘hiking with’ a very pretty Georgian hiker called F______. They ‘hiked together’ for 1,000 miles before she quit the Trail with foot trouble, and he seemed a little lost or down. He needed a new mission to distract him, a twist in the Trail, and it was at a shelter called Story Spring that our mission began to take shape.

I’ll never forget the genesis of that mission. As I slumped into the clearing in front of the hut, a red-faced, white-haired  gentleman hollered from the platform edge, “HERE COMES ANOTHER ONE!” I paused, uncertain whether to stay or move on to the next shelter; he was plainly intoxicated, and his chubby, smiling friend was having a fry-up on the table outside. Night was closing in, but I’d lately endured a plague of lost old men sitting alone in shelters with a radio playing, chain-smoking as they stared out at the rain, declaring inevitably that they didn’t hike in such conditions, as though any who did were plainly inexperienced or insane. I mean, what about those mosquitos, all that mud?

“DO YOU DRINK WHISKY?” this latest one bawled in cheerfully florid rage.

“Well…yes. But lately only the Canadian variety.”

“WELL, GET YOUR CUP! POUR YOURSELF SOME OF THIS! MORE! MORE! MORRRRRRE, DAMN YOU! THERE! HOW’S THAT FEEL?”

My throat constricted, dragging my eyeballs back into my skull. “Ye-es. Oh God, yes.”

Frank, 63, and his younger colleague, Dean, were from Connecticut, up for a weekend ‘maintaining’ their adopted section of Trail. But the only evidence of maintenance I witnessed that evening was of the level of beverages slopping from their cups. In addition to the Jack Daniels, they had packed in a flask of Jim Beam, another of red wine, and a cooler still brimming with ice and Budweisers. And Frank was wielding a pipe, a beautiful thing of ivory and burnished wood that might once have been employed in the captain’s quarters of a Nantucket whaler. He was equally generous with this splendid instrument - “MORE! MORE! FILL IT UP, FOR GOD’S SAKE!” - and I knew I would hike no further that day. I was pretty well-maintained myself at this point, and was devouring their bacon and eggs when Firefly entered the scene.

“AND HERE COMES ANOTHER ONE!” Frank bellowed at the hills, scattering beaver into dam, moose and hillbilly into hollow.

Dean shook his head; he’d plainly seen it all before. FF hesitated as I had, bewildered, wary, leaning onto his sticks, taking it all in.

“DO YOU LIKE WHISKY, BOY?”

“We-ull…”

“GIVE ME YOUR CUP!”

“My…uh…?” His eyes found mine, now bulging with insistence. You walk all day and the woods are enough. Then out of the blue you are reminded of something you left behind. Sometimes it’s something awful - a burnt-out relationship, something you shouldn’t have said or done.

And sometimes…

Firefly dug out his cup.

“AND WHAT’S YOUR NAME, BOY?”

“Fah-flah.”

“FAR-FLUNG?”

“FAH-FLAH.”

“WELL, FAR-FLUNG, I WAS JUST ASKING MOUNTAIN GAY HERE…”

“Mountaingoat.”

“MOUNTAIN GOD? GUY?”

“Goat.” What was it about that single little syllable? Something in my accent rendered it incomprehensible to virtually every American I met. I had lately begun to dread introductions. I mean, even more than usual.

“I WAS ASKING MOUNTAIN GAY HERE FOR HIS OPINION OF THE SECTION YOU BOYS WALKED TODAY. HOW’D IT LOOK TO YOU?”

“We-ull…nice. You guys have done a good job.”

“IT’D BE BETTER IF THEY’D LET US CUT IN A FEW VIEWS, BUT THE GODDAMNED VISTA ENGINEERS WOULD BE ALL OVER OUR ASSES IN A HEARTBEAT IF WE CUT DOWN A FEW TREES.”

“There was one blowdown back there you have to walk around…”

“ARRROOOWWWWWWWWW!” Frank tilted his head back and howled something pure and beautiful - rage, joy, frustration? - into the dusk.

“Wow,” said Firefly.

“Wow,” I repeated.

We took another drink. Frank grinned and shook his head. “Anyone want some more bacon?”

“Is there water nearby?” said Firefly.

“FAR-FLUNG, REMIND ME AGAIN: WHAT IS THE NAME OF THIS SHELTER?”

“Story Spring.”

“AND DOES NOT THE WORD ‘SPRING’ SUGGEST TO YOU THE POSSIBILITY THAT THERE MAY WELL BE A WATER SOURCE IN THE VICINITY?”

“We-ull…”

“BACK THERE ABOUT 20 YARDS. PUREST, SWEETEST WATER ON THE TRAIL. FORGET YOUR IODINE; YOU CAN DRINK THIS STUFF STRAIGHT.”

And he wasn’t kidding. It poured right out of the ground and over the rocks, clear as glass, so cold that holding your hands and feet in it for more than a few seconds was actually painful. I splashed it on my knees and ankles, enjoying the numbness. An owl hooted from the woods. For the first time on the Trail, I drank the stuff down untreated. Nothing that clear and cold could be harmful. I felt so good; almost laughed out loud to myself. I’d been working on a song all day while I walked. Suddenly, humming it to myself, beat in the sweetest sense of the word, it sounded perfect, like it belonged to somebody else.

Well, over the increasingly erratic course of the evening, FF and I discussed his latest plan. He was as reluctant as I to end our journey prematurely and return to the horrors of salaried servitude, and he’d been thinking of doing a side-trip up the Long Trail to Canada when we hit the junction. You’ll remember that for the first hundred miles of Vermont, the AT shares the path with the Long Trail, America’s first long-distance hiking trail and site of the original white blazes used to mark the passage through the woods. Then, near Rutland VT the LT splits at Maine Junction to direct its pilgrims another 170 miles north over the gnarled spine of the Green Mountains to the Quebec border; the AT veers eastward towards New Hampshire and beyond. It was a cunning plan - we never met another AT thru-hiker who’d done it en-route to Maine. By this point, in fact, all too many hikers have had enough; they long for completion and a return to normality: showers, TV, ‘American Idol’, newspapers, beds, telephones, electricity, flushing toilets, wives - all the things we were fleeing. “I just want to get this thing done,” the register entries would whine. Pussies. They infuriated FF, and he’d broached the topic more than once. I’d decided it should wait till after Katahdin; I didn’t think I should lose focus and risk further injuries before ‘ATII’ was complete. These trips cost me a bloody fortune.

Well, you know the outcome. We talked it over that evening, and the more maintained we got, the more sense FF’s lunatic proposal made  -Frank even offered to drive us up to the border so we could hike south from Canada and keep right on walking. But in the morning his offer had evaporated from his memory and we were too shy to bring it up. We staggered woozily from camp and when five days later we found ourselves in the faux-Irish interior of the Inn at Long Trail, near Maine Junction, things came together. This is the oldest ski lodge in America, with a bar serving Guiness and Long Trail Ale on tap. We were hunched over hamburgers and beverages with ‘Cedar Moe’ and ‘Fast Layne’ when a staff  member had us raise our arms; he produced a bottle of ‘Febreeze’ (?) furniture deodoriser and sprayed it under our armpits. “Don’t take offense,” he counselled. We laughed - a job well done - and reluctant to don my stinking pack and boots and trudge off into the darkness to stealth-camp, I attempted to talk FF into sharing a room. Alright, he said - if I would commit to doing the Long Trail in the morning.

“Fah-Flah,” I slobbered, “It would be a shame to pass so close to Canada, a mere 170 miles north, and not at least head up for a look-see. The decision has already been made.” We left our room the next day looking like it had hosted a composters’ convention, backtracked to the junction and were almost immediately in the jungle. The AT by comparison is like a hiker highway; the Long Trail climbs 48 mountains on its way to Canada, a 170-mile foot-powered roller-coaster. Blazes are frequently rare or non-existent, underbrush smothers the path so that you have to feel for it with your boots; there are numerous perilous climbs or descents of sloping shelves of smooth, wet rock. It’s surely the place where moss was invented, where mud comes to hang out with other like-minded mud, where ribbon snakes slither underfoot and legs, arms and other exposed flesh is soon impaled by mosquito, gnat, no-see-’um or the Scurge of Canada, the blackfly. You feel them scurrying about on your arm; you stub them into extinction and a trickle of fresh warm blood oozes out of you. The Long Trail has a way of bringing all your fluids to the surface.

We loved it.

Gawd, did we love it. It was a rare day when we didn’t infect each other with our incredulous joy at being so alive, so awake, so free. We would quite literally start laughing as we bent into another crippling climb. You would crawl into your bag at night utterly exhausted, beaten down, and leap from the thing in the morning hungry for more. How did people go on living without this intoxicating torrent of adventure gushing through their chests? How in Gawd’s name could we resume life without it?

“Firefly,” I’d say, “How do we feel about the Long Trail?”

And he’d bust out one of his killer grins. “Love the Long Trail, Mountaingoat!”

Our diversion from the AT cost us two extra weeks and ground my kneecaps into cartilaginous dust. Views from Mt Mansfield (VT’s highest), Mt Abraham and the Camel’s Hump, among others, were spectacular. Canada and the far-off Whites of the AT could be spied. Hiker traffic was rare. We figured that a 15-mile day on the LT would equate to 25 on the AT. Our appetites exploded with the constant demands of the journey so that four days’ food would be gone in two. We had brought no guidebooks and relied only on maps and word of mouth, never really knowing what was ahead. This was part of the adventure - you read so much about the AT that much of the surprise is diminished. And the Trail Magic - man! In the town of Johnson we had three offers of accommodation, finally taking up the Long Trail Tavern owner’s offer of a cabin on his property for the night. Two gay guys bought us pints of Rock Art ‘Ridgerunner’ (a local micro-brew with over 7% alcohol),  shots of Jameson’s and a Bud. Barflies offered use of their houses. Next day, twice,  young women pulled over and offered us rides we didn’t even need. Another woman stopped, picked us up and wanted to take us rock-climbing. “I’ve never climbed,” I said, “and I’m drunk, but sure, let’s do it.” Regretably her partner had had enough of climbing with ‘randoms’ and we were returned to the Tavern. On our way back to the Trail with leaden food bags, the hippy couple that gave us a ride handed us a nice, cold 24-ounce beer, right before we hit the woods. The story of my subsequent Trailside collapse with a crippling hangover that searing afternoon is too  embarrassing to recall here. Suffice to say that our planned 18-miler was readjusted to a kinder 3.6.

The end came far too soon, and included a festive ‘Secede from the Union’-themed July 4 parade in the hippy village of Warren, and a layover in Burlington (college town on the shores of Lake Champlain) with our friend ‘Heidi’, who drove us down from the border, with socks and underwear and shirts and shoes rotting from our fetid bodies, back to Burlington for victory celebrations. There was drama on the second-last day when a woman we had met fell on the rocks ahead of us and was badly hurt; we lugged her pack out to the road, two miles away, and passed the rescue team coming in with a stretcher. That delay meant that our 22-mile day (compensation for the 3.6) concluded at 10:30pm after a treacherous night hike without headlamps (FF’s batteries were dead; mine was a tiny keychain light; weight, you know) over mossy rocks to a shelter jammed with Boy Scouts.

It was one of the hardest days of my life, and it was great.

We were sad at first to be back on the AT - strange! - but we still seem to be just ahead of the pack, and the Trail has been quiet. In recent days we have received yet more Trail Magic: sodas, fruit, and water, and just today some free muffins and a bag of donuts in the bakery, plus stealth-showers in a $100 hotel room. FF swears that I bring good luck, a phenomenon of which I have never been accused. I calculate that I have consumed around 30 pints of ice-cream (Ben & Jerry’s is based in VT) in two months, so with all that calcium, further stress fractures in my much-abused leg bones seem unlikely.

We will see if the luck continues. We can’t afford to stay in this overpriced but friendly town, so will be heading back into the woods tonight after a celebratory ale or two, and will shortly encounter Mt Moosilauke and the mythic Whites. Everybody tells us the good stuff is about to begin. But the good stuff truly began nearly 2,000 miles south.

Hope the good stuff is flowing as sweet and pure for y’all.

mg   x