Out of the Whites (and Into the Red) Saturday, Oct 28 2006

Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:38:31 +0000

Hello, y’all.

Thank you everyone who has sent me emails recently. I regret that I am unable to respond to them personally at this time, or even send a proper bulletin, because these unholy bastards in the library at Gorham NH charge $1 per half-hour to use their computers! So much for the lie of free computer access for all in the peoples’ libraries I seem to recall from the giddy dawn of the I.T. revolution… This is wrong, wrong, wrong. I mean, isn’t it? Whatever happened to the NH state motto, ‘Live Free Or Die’? In this friggin’ library it might as well be ‘Give Fee Or ‘Bye’.

Anyway, I will go out in the woods soon and scream my rage at the moose and poor old Firefly. Meantime, my location of course is Gorham; we came down out of the White Mountains yesterday after a week or so of adventures above treeline, jumping from one 4,000-footer to the next, getting our Trail-withered arses almost blown off the top of Mt Madison in the Presidential Range, and generally dodging the $100-per night accommodations in the huts by either doing work-for-stays, sleeping on tables after the fee-payers had retired, or stealth-camping in places where the signs said ‘NO CAMPING’.

The Whites were gorgeous, sometimes intimidating, occasionally utterly bloody enervating, but there were days when we hiked to perfection. We managed to strip our food bags to the bare minimum and top up our calories with bottomless soup bowls or chocolate-coated cornbread in the huts. I am still not sure about the hut system - the Whites are over-trampled by hiker traffic and do need protection, but I resent having to suck up to a bunch of Ivy League kids for the priviledge of a roof for the night. Some of the hut staff have been wonderful; some have been arrogant shits. And the insecurity of never knowing where you’ll be ‘throwing down’ (as FF puts it) that night forces you to compete with your fellows for that rare handful of possible bunks. Also, I’ve heard stories of older, less robust hikers being told to move on with night approaching and no legitimate alternatives within coo-ee.

Anyway, it’s hard for me to be objective right now. I have lost my credit card and am totally cash-less; I never wish to experience again that sickening heave in my guts when I pulled out the ziplock that serves as my wallet and realised that little strip of plastic was missing and I was utterly penniless and a long, long way from home. I’ve squandered my afternoon in town dealing with the MORONS at Mastercard, trying to line up a replacement at Stratton. Firefly has lent me some cash, but life is much, much simpler in the hobo woods, and I can’t wait to get back in there where money means nothing but extra pack weight.

I have now done 1,876 miles on the AT plus the 170 of the LT. More news as it comes to hand.

mg   x

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Savage for a Season: The Long Way to Maine Friday, Oct 27 2006

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

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Trail Magic on the Big Four-Two Tuesday, Oct 24 2006

Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 17:26:41 +0000

DAY: 42
PRESENT LOCATION: Bennington, Vermont
DISTANCE WALKED,2006: 417.2 miles
DISTANCE WALKED,TOTAL: 1,596.7 miles
DISTANCE REMAINING TO KATAHDIN: 578.9 miles

Hey y’all.

Well, I suppose it’s all up to me, since this whole thing is about self-reliance: Happy Birthday to me! I turned 42 today, which puts me in the enviable position of having celebrated two birthdays on the Trail. Two years ago I hit life’s official halfway point (if I’m lucky) near Catawba, Virginia. That night was memorable both for the disturbing juxtaposition of Krispy Kreme donuts and Yuengling Lager and for it being one of the most miserable nights ever spent by anyone on the AT. I had the misfortune that time of staying at a hostel called ‘Four Pines’, where the owner’s delinquent teenage son and a retarded neighbour boy spent the whole day and most of the night terrorising the resident hikers by tearing around the place like rabid hillbillies astride ATVs, (4-wheeled motorcycles), storming right up to the door of the garage where several tormented travellers lay ’sleeping’, merely to rev their machines with obvious backwoods glee. The homicidal fantasies that plagued me while S_____ (sigh) and I shared a backyard birthday bowl kinda spoiled the mood - all the while, teenage motor-psychobillies, their vile chariots piled high with firewood, swooped around the paddock hell-bent on constructing a hilltop bonfire; those two hellions are now lying in shallow graves behind the outhouse. This is my confession,and may God have mercy on my soul…

Celebrations this time are looking tamer but better. I entered Vermont yesterday; only three states to go, but they’re all pretty big ones. My last night in Massachussetts was spent in the backyard of an outfitter called (yes) The Mountain Goat, in Williamstown, a college town with the twin delights of cute college girls and some great art museums. I did a ‘nero’ that day (nearly a zero) as I’d just left camp when a sharp pain stabbed through my left knee and quickly faded. Far-off warning bells gently chimed. I did three miles down to the road and turned west to the Shop’n'Stop for some re-supply, then decided to check out the college art museum for a culture hit (books are heavy). I also felt like some time to myself. Trail friends are good to find but I’d aimed to hike alone as far as practicable this time - the one big lesson of ‘04 - and had been bemused to find just how quickly an incipient group was taking shape along my portion of the Trail.

I admired a few great Jackson Pollocks and a wonderful Grant Wood (’Death on the Ridge Road’) in the museum, and when I was leaving, whoosh, another stab of pain. That was it; my legs were telling me something and I may be slow but I sure ain’t stoopid. The staff at the Mountain Goat let me camp out in their backyard, right on the banks of a rushing river carving chutes and channels in the rock. I soaked my limbs in the icy waters, perved at gals in the college coffe shop and next day, yesterday, my leg felt fine. I did 14 miles, crossed into Vermont and I’m now on both the Long and Appalachian Trails, which share a path for the first 100 miles of VT. Hopefully the knee pain was just a warning to SLOW DOWN.

Vermont has been hilly, green and muddy so far, and yesterday I was almost driven insane by these god-awful gnats that dive-bomb yer eyes till they find a way in and render you temporarily blind. The worst thing is their strategy of hovering just out of swat-range, waiting, biding their time, and then…We’re In! Man, the woods were resounding with my foul-mouthed curses - lucky the Newlyweds were out of earshot.

A hiker came into the shelter last night having just seen a bull moose. I was so envious! There are ponds and lakes and muddy swamps and beaver dams everywhere - I have seen a beaver (no jokes please) but if I don’t enhance my wilderness experience soon with a moose sighting, I’ll be seeking a refund.

This morning I woke, realised it was my birthday, sighed, thanked the nature spirits for getting me to another one, sheltered a while from the rain and then walked on to Highway 9. Some kids from the local high school ski team, out doing some Trail maintenance, offered me a ride into Bennington, 5 miles west. I had recently devised a little rule of thumb I call ‘OSI’ - Obey Spontaneous Impulses - and I was soon heading to their car while they broke into a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday Mr Mountaingoat’. Suddenly a birthday to remember was falling into place, and Bennington is now one of my favourite Trail towns. I got a free shower at the rec club, had a sauna (you sweat like yer hiking but without any effort!) and washed my shirt in the sink (this is like winning the lottery). Had a long, nude conversation with an old man who was fascinated by my stories. He asked my name and when I told him, he said, “Well, Mr Mountaingoat, buy yourself something nice,” and pressed $15 into my sweaty hand. I protested, half-heartedly. “God’s been good to me,” he insisted. And if you think there’s something creepy about accepting money from a naked old man in a sauna, then…I guess I see your point.

I have a free ride back to the Trail in an hour, courtesy of the local outfitter guy. It’s been an excellent birthday: coffee, soap, hot water, a sauna, and hot wet cash. It’s been positively raining Trail Magic, and I feel really, really good. I may only do 1.5 miles to the next shelter, or perhaps 8.5 to the one after. I may just bed down under a tree. I have two cans of Miller High Life beer in my pack, several days’ food, plus a half-bottle of Yukon Jack, the finest thing, after curling, to ever come out of Canada. High Times indeed in the old shelter tonight.

Hope your own lives are as jam-packed with simple pleasures.

Mountaingoat   x

PS I did finally manage to meet Paparazzi. He drove me for half an hour each way to a backwoods restaurant in Charlemont MA, with a stop at a lake where I washed myself and dozens of dead fish floated instantly to the surface. His instructions were, “Eat as much as you want. It’s my treat.” I complied. (He also asked me to define the meaning of the AT in one word. I suggested ‘freedom’; his own offering was ‘adventure’. Both’ll do me).

PPS If anyone would like to send me a letter, postcard, money,light-but-delicious foodstuffs, nude photos (Alex, Id, Phil, Robbie, Marc, consider yerselves exempted from the latter), you could do so to the address below. It’s 137 miles north, so it should take me 10 days or so to get there. Australians, etc, I think 5 or 6 days would be enough. I would really appreciate anything to add some colour to my next post office visit. Write all the following on the envelope:

I___ F_______
GENERAL DELIVERY,
HANOVER, NH 03755
USA

HOLD FOR A.T. HIKER,
ARRIVING APPROX JULY 3

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Garages of New England Monday, Oct 23 2006

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

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One More Cup of Coffee for the Road Sunday, Oct 22 2006

Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 13:31:27 +0000

Hey y’all.

Just a note while I have the unexpected bonus of a free computer (the coffee shop guy seemed impressed when I said I’d walked here from Georgia - I will travel for good coffee - and charity ensued, utterly un-yogi-ed. I just strolled 5 miles into Salisbury, CT, from Limestone Spring Lean-To (the shelters in CT are called ‘lean-to’s), past a cemetery crammed with Revolutionary War-era gravestones, for another good breakfast and a few supplies.

I’ve walked 305-odd miles and while much of the Trail has provided the requisite ‘wilderness’ experience (illusory or otherwise - it’s wild enough, don’t you bloody worry), I’ve been enjoying the journey lately as much for its cultural rewards as its encounters with the natural. The towns in this part of America (they all have ‘British’ names: Salisbury, Cornwall Bridge, Great Barrington, Kent) are postcard-worthy - little white churches, ’package’ (liquor) stores, lots of dry-stone walls etc - so no wonder the yuppies and NYC refugees are infecting the region. They must come, also, for the views. There was one just out from camp today that almost brought tears to my jaded eyes (or maybe it was the mosquitos): just gorgeous, wooded ridges and mountains looming above patchwork fields, a great antidote for eyeballs sandblasted by the grit-and-grimace of urban life. It’s wonderful to find that even here, so close to the most densely populated regions of one of the world’s most heavily settled western countries, so much wild forest and mountain and river remain intact.

The Trail here in CT is always clean, the shelters neat and tidy, but they could certainly learn a thing or two about blazing - every day I lose valuable minutes back-tracking or reconning ahead at junctions because they haven’t been properly double-blazed. But that’s a minor quibble. My friend Utah Mike calls CT “the snootiest state in the U.S.”; another friend, Dreamer, said, “Where I come from (PA), we call Connecticut ‘high-ass’”. And it’s true that the lean-tos always come with a broom and a rake hung neatly from their own hooks; it’s true that the ‘privy’ you’ve enjoyed since Georgia has overnight evolved into a ‘toilet’, for God’s sake. And in Kent, at least, where you could smell the money flowing like well-aged brandy through the streets, an unwashed itinierent like myself plainly was not from around here. But nobody shot at me or anything, and not fitting in is part of the joy of travel. I love the way the AT lets you experience so much bio-regional diversity as you slog your way north. Accents, attitudes, beliefs, food, architecture: it’s not just the flora and fauna that vary.

And even in ’snooty’ Kent, most of the locals were friendly. While in the outfitter, one of them approached and asked if those were our packs outside. “I’m ‘Moosie,’ he said, “AT ‘03. I’d like to be your Trail Angel for the day. Is there anything you need?” We were soon at his house, making good use of his washing machine while our tarp and tent dried off in his backyard (wet night camped behind the town church where we enjoyed the hospitality of another friendly native: the local religious practitioner).

Anyway, I’ll be in Massachussetts tomorrow and, according to some, that’s where New England truly begins. I’m looking forward to meeting ‘Paparazzi’, a Trail friend from ‘04, at the Route 7 road crossing tomorrow. He lives in the area and wants to take me to a restaurant, an offer too good to refuse. I also have an offer from Utah Mike to meet up somewhere in Maine when he’s up there on vacation. My snake count has reached 10, with my first rattlesnake of this trip a couple of days ago - a fat, beautiful thing, with a big bulge in his/her belly where some unfortunate rodent was contemplating where it all had gone wrong.

We’re in deer-tick country and every day I have to dig a couple out of my skin - they can transmit Lyme Disease, so prompt attention is vital. My heel blister healed up and every week I have to pull my belt a little tighter. My beard is down almost to my navel - all that testosterone - and I now sleep under a simple rectangular tarp. No real ‘walls’, no floor or zippers or insect netting, so it’s incredibly light and you feel no separation from the woods and the things crawling around in them. Mind you, when you hear tales of bad-ass bears coming right up to the shelter, as I did the other night, you sometimes wish there was some kind of separation.

But then I muse: so a misguided bear rips your face off. There are worse ways to die.

Actually, let me think about that one.

In the meantime, time for a cinnamon roll and another coffee. There are definitely worse ways to die.

mg   x

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